Big Ideas #14

I had the opportunity to go to New Orleans recently with my wife and daughter. While we were walking around on Decatur Street, my daughter notice a little girl that had her shoes on the wrong feet. I remarked that it would be cool to have shoes that looked like they were on the wrong feet but fit properly or even better to have shoes that were both left footed or right footed like the character from "Best in Show". My wife and my daughter both thought that I was crazy but we'll see who's crazy when someone comes out with a line like that.

Big Ideas #13

I've been very interested in these little Roomba robots. The idea that you can turn them on and they'll sweep and mop your floors while you sleep is awesome. My next door neighbor worked for the Weedeater company when they were testing a prototype of a robotic lawnmower. It looked like a big green turtle, was solar powered and would continually cut the grass by following an algorithm. Definately the coolest thing since sliced cheese. It had one serious drawback that the Roomba robots have as well. It could't get into corners and you still had to trim around trees and bushes. The Roomba's brushes that scrub or pickup are in the middle of the machine and since the machine is round like the grass cutting robot, they can't get into corners either. My idea is to make it square or rectangular and move the brushes to the front so that they extend a bit outside the edge of the robot. Then the scrubbing or sweeping motion will also involve not only rotation of the brushes but a sort of orbital motion like that of a palm sander to get all the dirt. Anyone interested in pursuing this, let me know.

Big Ideas #12

With the summer heat right around the corner, my mind has been focusing on air conditioning. For those of you that live where the summers are mild enough that you don't need it, you won't understand how important it is when the temperature is 95 degrees and the humidity is above 75%. I had an idea that a good way to control the high cost associated with air conditioning would be to direct the air conditioning only where it was needed. What I thought would be cool would be to have individual air conditioning units for each room so that only the rooms that needed it would get it. "Wait a minute", you say, "Don't window air-conditioners do that?" Yes, but they're ugly, and not very efficient because they don't usually have a thermostat. What I'm talking about is a unit that would fit in the space above the room and would exhaust the cool air through existing air-conditioning registers. It would, of course, have to be connected to a main compressor (or two) . The compressor(s) would run at a variable rate depending on how many of the individual units were on at the same time and the return air would be fed back to be cooled through a very small aperture rather than the large, single return that you find in current systems. The same system could be used for forced air heating only you'd want the air to come out closer to the floor so that it would heat the room as it rose. It's been proven time and time again that point of use systems save money and are more responsive. Look at point of use water heaters. They product hot water instantly and you don't have a big tank of hot water that you have to keep hot whether you need it or not.
You could even take this to the next level and use an entirely new sort of refrigeration by utilizing Peltier cooling. The technology involved applies current to a coated plate and because of the circuitry involved, the plate has a cold side and a hot side. Blow air past the cold side and you have air conditioning, the hot side, heating.

Big Ideas #11

This time of year where I live, the temperature can vary greatly from day to day and even during the course of the day. It's not uncommon for the high temp to be 75 or 80 with the lows in the 40's. You've got to run the airconditioner during the day because of the humidity and then if you don't remember to reset the thermostat when you go to bed, you'll wake up in the middle of the night, freezing. I had the brilliant idea this morning that thermostats ought to have temperature and humidity sensors outside so that when the outside temperature and humidity reached a predetermined level, the Heating/Air-conditioning unit would respond appropriately. Very often, the temperature will be high but the humidity won't and the airconditioner works overtime trying to get the nearly non-existant humidity out of the air. I know this would be a very simple technical issue and could be implemented with some integrated circuits or even simple computer chip.

Big Ideas #10

My latest idea came about after my wife and a friend of hers went out for a walk last week. The next day the both complained about their allergies and my wife joke that they would have to wear surgical masks when they went out for a walk next time. The little light bulb went off over my head. Why couldn't something like a swimmer's nose plug with filters in them work to keep allergens out of your nose? Even if you breathed through your mouth, I don't think that would be a problem because the allergic reaction is in your nose. I suppose the real challenge would be to make them small enough to fit in your nose without being seen while being large enough not to be inhaled. Also, with atheletes, their nasal cavities expand and you would want one of those things in your lungs. I'll bet there are some people out there in the bio-medical field that can overcome those problems without any trouble at all.

Big Ideas #9

Here's one I don't think anyone's thought of yet. With online ads becoming such a treasure trove for Google, web designers and owners, I think it will be a matter of time before Google or someone else will figure out that if you give (for free) someone a computer and the browser has a toolbar with contextual adds built into it, you could recoup your investment in no time flat. My little website generates about $2.00 per day from Google ads and I don't get that many hits (although I'd love to see that change). That's over $700 per year. It wouldn't take much to make sure the investment was paid for if you got someone's credit card number as security. I don't think many people would have a problem with that. If someone's surfing went below a predetermined amount, you could charge their card for $5.00 per day for every day below that amount. If the charge bounced, you could warn the person that the machine would be disabled if they didn't take care of the problem. Obviously, the system would have to be locked to prevent people from installing another browser although many people who would take this deal wouldn't do that anyway.

Big Ideas #8

I've got a couple of Big Ideas I've been toying with lately. One of them involves food and the other music. Throw in some wine and women and you've got a party. The one about food has come to me over the last couple of weeks as a consequence of eating hamburgers at fast food restaurants that all basically taste the same. I think what people are looking for is something along the same lines Popeye's did with chicken. Burgers need to be jazzed up. I've been experimenting with some seasoning blends and other ingredients and I'm very close. It turns out that less is more, though. The original batch I made was great and I pretty much just winged it. I figured with my culinary skills (I've been in the foodservice industry since I was in college), I would be able to improve upon the original recipe. Well, it turns out, the mixture I'm working on just needs a bit of salt and a touch of pepper(I'm not telling whether it's black, red, white or purple) to bring the flavors together. I'm going to make another batch this weekend when we go to Lafayette and see how it goes. I feel really good about this one.
The music idea actually came to me sometime ago and is more just putting a few things together that already exist to create a portal for musician's to get feedback on their music. There is one company that will rate songs in a objective manner using mathematical formulas and compare them against actual hit songs. They claim 100% success for their corporate clients. What I want to do is buy ratings in bulk (at a discount) and then offer them to independent artists individually at a smaller discount than the company's published rate. Then if one of the submissees actually has a song that rates highly, I could broker a deal for them with a publisher, producer, or record company. The entire site would be similar to MP3.com but the songs would be categorized by genre and then ranked by their empirical rating. This is going to take sometime to develop so stay tuned

Big Ideas #7

OK, I know you are probably going to say that any a..hole can say they had the idea for something after it becomes a reality but honest to goodness, cross my heart and hope to die, I really did think of this (you can ask my wife). Shreveport, Louisiana is the town I live in. My birthplace is Alexandria, LA and I call Lafayette, LA my home. About 10 years ago, when they finished I-49 between Lafayette and Shreveport, it opened up access to areas that previously were practically unknown. At the very first exit south of Shreveport, there was ( and still is) a large amount of undeveloped real estate. Seeing that it is only about 10 minutes south of town, I thought it would make an excellent residential development but with a bit of a twist (for this area, anyway). Since there were no retail services there at all, I thought it would be cool to have a planned community where people could walk to the video rental store or dry cleaners,etc. The houses would be no larger than a certain size which would keep people from building mansions and would insure that the people who bought the houses would be middle class. I hate it that the really cool residential developments like River Ranch in Lafayette are geared toward upper income families and individuals. The rents for apartments are not much less than NYC rents and the houses are priced in the same stratosphere as Los Angeles or San Fran. So, what is everyone talking about today when I get to work? Some developer managed to get an interstate exit built about 5 miles closer to Shreveport and is building a residential development with restaurants, etc. I'm sure it's going to be more along the same lines as the one in Lafayette because everything else out there is beaucoup dinero. I guess my idea is still valid and original because it addresses a different socio-economic class but I hate that I don't have the resources to do things like this. I guess I need to find a money man.

Big Ideas #6

This one really isn't one of my big ideas - It's one of my wife's. She for the longest has taken the regular Tootsie rolls and twisted them together with the flavored ones like strawberry and so on. I was after her for years to contact Tootsie Roll and when she finally did, they told her that they didn't take suggestions from outside the company. Well, I don't know how difficult it would be to do, but I'll bet some enterprising person could manufacture a Tootsie-like product and twist them together to make all kinds of combinations, Chocolate and cherry, orange and pineapple, vanilla and cherry, etc. You get the idea. I suppose that part of it is a big idea of mine. The other day I had what I thought was an epiphany. I'm a Musician's Friend affiliate and I thought I could sell guitars on ebay for about 3% less that they did, collect the commission and everybody wins. The only problem is that ebay charges more than I would make on the commission from Musician's Friend. I might look into setting up a Yahoo Store since it's like $30 a month and 1.5% of the sale. I could break even after selling about $1200 worth of merchandise. The problem is that people have to find you in order to buy from you on Yahoo and I don't know if I have to time to do that.

Big Ideas #5

I've noticed that a bunch of computer geeks have been modifying their computer cases to reflect their personalities and while some of them are pretty cool, I think these guys have way too much time on their hands. The other day it occured to me that I could mount a motherboard, power supply, etc. on the underside of a end table I have and then get a wireless keyboard with a touchpad build into it and a small LCD monitor. After thinking about it a while, I decided the LCD would have to be on some sort of arm that would allow it to fold up under the table out of sight. My boss at my day job does a lot of woodworking and is a bit of computer nerd so I told him about it. He seemed interested so we'll see where this goes. I think there are tons of people that wouldn't mind having a computer in their living room if it didn't look like a computer. I'm going to try to experiment with another identical table I have to see if I can make it work.