Wednesday, November 19, 2014

X for Y: Z


  1. Crowdfunding for lawsuits: you present your case to the Internet, people seed your legal struggles and potentially get a small cut back if you win.
  2. Tinder for music: you're thrown into a song, you listen as long as you'd like, you swipe left/right and the next song starts playing. Playlists are automatically made from the songs you like.
  3. Snapchat for emails: flip the inbox management paradigm upside down -- you're always at Inbox Zero, unless you don't want to be.
  4. GitHub for painting: record and track your strokes, play back the making of a masterpiece, fork off digital copies for trying new things, and accept pull requests.
  5. Duolingo for practical skills: learn how to weld, build computers, work on an engine, etc any time you have a few spare moments in the day.
  6. 3D printing for food: microwaves are just black boxes that sit on your counter and cook food for you. It wouldn't be weird to imagine the next generation adding one more counter black box that they occasionally refill with food materials.
  7. Siri for writing: ask questions like, "How old is Bob?" and "Where did Alice and Carol meet?" to get quick answers for continuity's sake while you write.
  8. Pandora for cooking: oh, you like these kinds of food? You might also like these.
  9. Easybake Ovens for making your own bread: because who doesn't want to easily make fresh bread?

Bonus: Bacon for cinnamon rolls. 'nuff said.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

A Late Night Idea Splurge


  1. A drink mixing robot that allows people to order a drink by mixing it on their phone.
  2. A 3d camera based scanner that will give metrics and possibly the identity of someone coming to your front door.
  3. A service that delivers plant nutrients for your house plants.
  4. A service that lets parents rent/buy a backpack for their children when going on long trips. The backpacks will contain toys and other items tailored to the specific trip.
  5. A company that buys old notebooks and creates fertilizer infused paper plant food.
  6. Create a bystander help network for every day tasks.
  7. Create a gas tank that has a gauge that goes down on a linear scale so it is easier to predict when you're out of gas.
  8. A thin inflatable insulation that can fill cracks in windows or doors for the winter.
  9. A mat that will slowly allow salt like chemicals seep from it during the winter to keep drive ways defrosted and prevent salt buildup and corrosion.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Improving Quora Pt. 2


  1. You could one-click download stuff for offline consumption using local storage. Or just make sure the current Read Later list is always available offline.
  2. An optional content-only mode could hide all social network graph stuff (who wrote answers, who upvoted them, 
  3. You should be able to filter things in/out of your feed by status: unanswered questions, written today, trending (?), etc. would all be useful.
  4. Badges, of course.
  5. A third-party service/extension pair could allow anonymous commenting on answers, questions, etc with throwaway accounts.
  6. That same extension could also sell extra upvotes/downvotes as microtransactions.
  7. Favoriting/bookmarking answers.
  8. Quora should offer a bound book of your questions/answers over the year(s) for a cost, and give you a small cut if someone else buys it.
  9. Boards should be reworked into blogs and completely rethought as a writing platform Medium-style to get people actually using it.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

How Snapchat could be improved


  1. I really want to be able to send money to my friends really, really easily
  2. Hahahaha
  3. hahahahaha hahahahaha
  4. Hahaha haha hahaha
  5. Hahahahahaha hahahahahaha
  6. Hahahaha
  7. Ha
  8. Haha hahahaha hahaha
  9. Hahaha hahahaha

Improving Quora


  1. Search sucks. Rip it out and replace it (or at the very least augment it) with a site:quora.com Google search. Split questions/answers/people/blogs/topics/etc out into individual SERPs to browse.
  2. Main feed should be augmented Circles-style with topic-group feeds. Let users create their own feeds of topics they follow (e.g. Sports including their sports teams, football, etc) or create them for them (Technology, Current Events, etc).
  3. Users should be able to filter out (or temporarily mute) specific topics or question series ("What's the best restaurant in X?") to clean up their feed.
  4. There's plenty of room to turn Quora into a two-column feed, with your regular stream on the left and question/answer pages you open on the right.
  5. Hovering over a user should show their question/answer/edit counts, a truncated (expandable) bio, their TW status over the years, and their recent top answers. A tab for following them or sending them a quick private message would be rad, too.
  6. The followers/following pages are absolutely horrendous and would benefit from a more grid-based layout with hovercards.
  7. Answers to questions should be able to be sorted by upvotes, comments, recency, length, or the standard sort order.
  8. I should be able to anonymously follow questions or upvote answers from my feed, probably with a tiny (optional) dropdown on the respective buttons.
  9. The notifications shade is a tiny dropdown that always has to scroll. Really? Beef that sucker up.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Improving Biking

Here are my nine for today.
  1. Use the Uber API to overlay a network of drivers that provide bike racks, extra space for moving, or special cars/trucks to aid in moving stuff other than people.
  2. Artificial Intelligence based online concierge. 
  3. Leverage Google Glass and other Android Wear devices to aid with bike curriers.
  4. Develop a service that leverages bike curriers in a city to provide more convenient currier service.
  5. Work on a device that detects when someone is riding a bike and automatically records their ride and uploads to some cloud service, much like a dashboard camera.
  6. Work on a audio receiver that can use your phone to automatically adjust channel levels to give the most equal sound possible.
  7. Build a bike helmet that automatically turns on and off built in lights based on the current ambient light, similar to automatic car headlights.
  8. Build a small 3d mapping device and embed it into a climbing helmet in order to map climbing routes around the world accurately.
  9. A service where people can auction off their ideas to people. 

Friday, November 14, 2014

Spreading art everywhere

  1. You could make pillows with cool, physical designs that give you what amounts to a temporary tattoo on your face all day for sleeping on them. Ditto for body pillows. Might be able to do intentionally cool stuff with hair with pillows, too.
  2. It'd be really cool to gamify daily vocabulary with words of the day, probably with some kind of always-listening wearable that could give you points or some kind of reward for successfully working in new words to your vocabulary.
  3. Hyperlocal "radio stations" could probably skirt FCC regulations by planting low-range transmitters in popular areas like parks and buildings to allow average people to crowdsource playlists Plug.dj-style to share with people nearby. Could lead to impromptu silent dance parties when more people wear things like Moto Hints/Glass/BT earbuds, etc.
  4. Picture frames that double as home security cameras and detect when you're having fun (playing DDR, cooking, whatever) and take photos automatically; send push notifications to your phone with suggested photos that you can select and have displayed in the frame until something new / more fun comes along. Can also have networked bluetooth speakers for easy surround sound setup.
  5. Toothbrushes should play the radio / morning playlists while brushing.
  6. Something like a guided 3D-printing pen could actually take a pre-selected design and point the pen in the direction you need to draw for you so you could just follow the direction it's pointing and make really cool pre-made designs.
  7. You could probably programmatically analyze poetry to determine line lengths, accents, enjambments, pauses, refrains, etc. An automated scansion with the proper metadata could probably make music a more accessible medium for poets looking to put music to their work.
  8. With ubiquitous projection capabilities, you could probably sell software jewelry, accessories, and clothing and just guarantee necklaces and things projected onto your body when you choose to wear it that day wherever you go. A digital marketplace for this would make amateur clothing and accessories lines more accessible to most people interested in designing/selling them.
  9. Professional sculpting could probably be revolutionized with malleable 3D projections that can be sculpted traditionally or digitally manipulated and then printed in whole or in less fragile parts with a 3D printer.