Years ago I thought it would be really neat if somebody could design “electronic paper”. Basically, a sheet of paper with ink made of charged particle – white on one side and black on the other. A small chip embedded in the paper could send current and cause the ink particles to flip in various patterns. Combined with a little computer memory, you could then store the entire contents of a book on a single sheet of paper. You could also have animated pictures on the page.
Imagine my surprise when I read last week that some guys at MIT have come up with this very same idea and are close to coming up with a production version…
Grelby, have you ever seen the infomercial for the Auto-Bike? This is a bike with automatic gear shifting using centrifugal force. I was thinking of getting one. Let us know if you ever build a better auto shifter.
The three-wheeled version was discontinued a few years ago (right before I could afford it, alas). They’ve got a four-wheeler now, which I think is a bit of overkill. The two-wheelers are still being made; I bought one last summer, but am always worried what I’ll do if the bungee cord breaks.
I had an idea like this a while back at a highway rest stop, pondering the little motion-sensor auto-flush mechanism. I was thinking “what if they put a webcam in there?” It would be like mens-urinal-video-poker-internet-porn all rolled into one!
I’ve had a couple. A few years back, I got bored and started exercising my high school French by reading through some French novels. I could do pretty well, but would miss maybe one key word out of 20. So I day-dreamed about a little hand scanner with a built-in French-English dictionary that I could use to OCR the troublesome word. Six years later, I was able to buy one on E-Bay for seventy dollars :-).
Once I had my first experience with a CD burner, before they became cheap commodities, I day-dreamed of replacing music stores with kiosks where you selected your songs and created custom CDs. Not too dissimilar from the Apple I-tunes store. Although my idea was that the elimination of stock inventories and large square footage stores would result in the lowering of prices for the consumers. That hasn’t really happened yet.
In '78, I was twelve and had my first 10-speed bike and we would ride out to local conservation areas and ride the trails there. Some of the trails were rough and very hard on our wheels. The only other bikes at the time were the BMX bikes with no gears, or banana seat 3-speed bikes and touring road bikes. What we wanted was a bike that was 10-speed, and had knobby tires like the BMX and was big enough to continue riding comfortably long distances. We wanted a hybrid of a 10-speed/BMS/touring bike. Little did we know that people we doing just that in California around that time. Years later when mountain bikes became the rage, I was very disappointed that we didn’t try to make our own TrailBike.
Way back in the day when i was playing Starcraft at my friends house, prolly like 97 or 98, i had to make an account with a name to play on, so i made some random name that came to mind first: Zoogie
about 1 year later disney came out with “ZoogDisney”
They stole the idea and made it into a gay little attraction to get more little children viewers
Good on you, Nemo. It probably would have been six kinds of hell to take him to court over it.
I had one idea, when I fancied myself a sci-fi author back in the lat eighties, of having a radio frequency transmitter in every major city in the world that broadcast the time, and would automatically reset your watch to local time without you having to do so. Read about its invention just under a year later in Omni, and then saw one at work in a coffee shop near my house in Arlington just last year.
Those infomertial spaghetti pots where the lid locks on and you can pour the water out without losing the pasta? I made one of those in my garage years ago with a spot welder and a drill press. Mine was different, but the same idea.
Also, and band I was in wrote a song that sounded JUST LIKE the Filter song “Hey man nice shot” maybe a month before that song came out. DOH.
Around two or three years ago, I thought I was brilliant in coming up with carbonated milk. (OK, I never actually made any, but I did come up with the idea, or so I thought.) “Kids like soda,” I said to myself. “Parents want them to drink something more healthful. Why not make fizzy milk?” I thought it was a million-dollar idea. It turned out it was created shortly thereafter, as a product called e-Moo. I don’t know if it was ever a big seller, though. I certainly never saw it in stores, but if I did, I’d try it.
Those shoes with the retractable rollerskate wheels
The idea of a business buying you a car in exchange for covering it in advertising. (I just found out from a recent thread that some companies were doing that at one point. Wow. I had the idea about 2 years prior to the start of the businesses though, when I was actually looking for a new car and disgusted at the prices.)
I have a fantastic idea for a bar, but someone told me there’s a similar one already in Berkeley. I’m going to find out this week (I don’t think it could possibly compare to my vision.) I think it’s brilliant but my husband insists I’m an idiot. He’s supportive like that. :rolleyes:
In the mid-nineties, as the Internet was becoming popular, I was driving around New Orleans with some friends and getting hopelessly lost. I started fantasizing about the day that cars would come with a GPS system and a computer containing all the maps of the US (or whatever country they were sold in), and the system could tell you basically where you were and show you a map of the area.
My Math Ph.D. friend pooh-poohed the idea. Way, way too much information to put on a computer, he insisted.
I wanted to start an internet cafe, but had no means to do so. Of course, I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one. Heh…
A month or two ago I was thinking about anti-lock brake systems and how they worked and theorized that the same could be done for acceleration, so you could just stomp on the accelerator and your car would accelerate as fast as possible without the wheels ever slipping and “peeling out.” I told this to a friend of mine who knows cars and he said, “They already have that - it’s called traction control.” I wasn’t terribly surprised but I was a bit disappointed.
Really? In the mid 90’s? I find that odd. It’s not like computers 7 or 8 years ago were so primitive that having a computer that fit maps on it would be out of the question. If your friend had said this in the 70’s or early 80’s, I might understand.
I just thought of another one, of which I was reminded by your comment about the internet becoming more widespread. At that time, computers were still pretty expensive (by my standards, anyway). I said that if there were a machine that did nothing more than give internet access without all the extra features (and prohibitive cost) of a computer, lots of people would buy it. A few months later they invented WebTV.