5 Ideas of Notable Interest

The first two ideas are ones I've had clunking around in my brain for some time now. The others are fairly new and are out of necessity for this class.

1. A universal product database that can be edited by registered users. If you've ever had to do data input for a retail company, you know how tedious adding new products to a system can be. I remember writing descriptions for items being sold online, little sales pitches to convince the readers they should buy this product, and then clipping the good pictures out of the PDF catalog. How many people have done this before, and for the exact same product? Most retail items have unique barcodes and product numbers, what if we could link those product numbers to pictures and sales descriptions that others have already written? When a new product is encountered then you submit your work to the system. It's basically a wikipedia for products. With the right software you just scan a barcode and all the product information is loaded into your system from the internet.

2. A coffee shop that can make you feel like you're anywhere in the world. The concept is to have a building with one wall in a giant half-circle. Projectors or another video technology cause a seamless panorama to paint the walls. These panoramas can move because it's video technology. Imagine you go in for your morning cup of coffee and find you're in the middle of the rainforest after a fresh morning rain, perhaps you'll sit and enjoy your coffee here.

3. All over the world there are amazing things happening, things you'll never see or experience. With the advent of MMO games we've seen an amazing demand for escapism. What if you could merge that escapism with a webcam. The idea is to put high-def webcams all over the world (or at least some neat places). These cameras will actually be multiple cameras in a cluster that allow for a complete 360 degree live image of the surroundings. This style of image could allow the user to look around in interesting places with a typical monitor, or could be coupled with more advanced monitors such as the coffee shop in idea 2.

4. A cubicle for those that don't want to be in a crowded office. This would probably be seen more in private settings or LAN centers. The idea is for the cubicle to be a large cylinder. The inside of the cylinder/cubicle would be a screen. Incorporated with something like idea 3, the cubicle would make you feel like you're workspace lay in the sky or in another country in the sky.

5. A craigslist crawler. The program would analyze blog posts between the want adds and the for sale posts and connect ones of similar interest. For instance if Jane was looking for personal watercraft, Joe was selling a jet ski or trading it for magic cards, and bill had a ton of magic cards for sale then the program would group those three together. The program could work for Jane, say she bought the magic cards for cheap and traded them to Joe for his jet ski. It could also work for myself, allowing me to make money just by being the middle man on the social networking site. I could buy and sell with a markup in between.