I welcome the gradual shift from styrofoam peanuts to little bags of air cushioning my various mail ordered products. And though a one-size fits all product allowing them to just toss in more or less of the bags, it still seems like an incomplete patentable journey.
Thereby I came up with the idea for the box bladder. This would we a product jointly developed by the powerful Cardboard Box Cartel and the
Huffers & Puffers Union. Each box would have an uninflected air-bag like bladder inside when sent to Amazon or Cactus.com. There, items are placed in the box and after being taped, the person or robot packing the box hooks up an air hose to the valve recessed on the box side and fill up the bladder, snugly wrapping the contents in the box. The consumer, on the far end of the supply chain, could simply release the air valve (like a bike tire, inner tube or sex doll) and the bladder would deflate.
Okay, get cracking!
As I think about the progression of things towards “free”, I keep running into instances where “if only they added another” becomes ever more likely/practical.
I was trying to take a good photo of my baby girl as she sat in my lap today. I was using my iPhone and everyone knows how hard that can be to take a good shot with. An earlier piece pointed out how eventually, which the ever cheaper price of displays, that they’d have displays on both sides of the phone and in this instance, I would have been able to see what I had in the viewfinder. But I couldn’t.
The photo didn’t come out all that great, but as I emailed it to my wife back at home, I thought for a moment that not only did the photo show little of my daughter and I, but it didn’t show much of what was around us. So my wife had no way of knowing where we were.
So I almost took a picture of what we had been looking towards at the time of the photo, which happened to be Treasure Island here on San Francisco Bay. But when I stopped myself from doing that, I realized that with the decreasing price of camera lenses, why doesn’t the phone just do it by itself?
The new iPhones have cameras on both sides, so that should be trivial, right? Just a software thing. But what about other cameras? SLRs? Doesn’t have to be the same high-end lense/photo, but why not just add a bunch of smartphone cameras to all sides of the camera? That way you could get context for your photos. The camera could somehow store them in a way that software on my computer could connect the two. Just as they have GPS coordinates embedded in photos, why not photos of what was on either side or behind me?
Never know what you’ll see as things move closer to free.
The world is growing with devices that sense and respond to data available on the interweb or the real world. And with the fact that we’re now closely connected to people we couldn’t be further apart from, we’ll need more and more ways to show how we’re feeling at any one point in time with people who can’t always see or hear us.
Short of going online and ordering a physical gift to be shipped in a physical truck by a physical person to their door, how about some way to solidify the virtual?
How about a physical entity you sit on your desk at home. Maybe a cute, colorful plastic “flower” arrangement that I can connect to my computer and select for it to bloom with daisies. Every morning the flowers would open, at night they’d close up to sleep.
So that’s still just me and my expensive flowers that never need to be refreshed or rebought. What about the virtual shenanigans? Well, have a friend send a tweet, click on a link, post their feelings on Facebook, whatever and voila, they could change those daisies to roses (to show their love).
Little plastic petals extending and retracting to show you a physical manifestation of their remote and virtual feelings.
Possible names:
- Pokesies
- iBouquet
- ForgetMeNots
Possible other products:
- A smiley face orb with changing facial expressions
- a little flag pole where different flags get raised
- a lamp where friends can adjust the brightness and color