iPhone OCR

There are most likely several applications for the iPhone that already do some of what this idea covers, but probably none that can pull it all together.

With all the power of the cloud/grid/global-supercomputer available via web api's, why not tap further into it with our mobile devices?  I was thinking along these lines earlier in the shower, mulling over Amazon's announcement of the Hadoop/MapReduce service and... eureka!

The iPhone could use a nice optical character recognition system.  But something more than just basic OCR.  Most OCR systems are far from perfect.  Just like most speech-recognition systems aren't perfect.  But imagine, if you will, an application that combined the two.  If you were able to use the phone's camera as a real-time video-feed while you read along "out loud," and pushed a stripe of the video frames, audio data, and accelerometer data (as you move the phone along while reading) to the cloud, it could feasible do a very *very* nice job of text recognition.

But why leave it at that?  Since you're 70% of the way there, why not add 2D barcode processing?  And since those barcodes have embedded information (and often so does text), why not give the application some convenience features while we're at it?  If capturing a URL, it could offer to launch Safari, post it to Delicious, or tweet it via bit.ly.  Phone number handling would be obvious.  In fact any captured text snippets could be pushed to several applications on the phone (somehow?) or Web 2.0 services.   Tie in geolocation and you'd have a great idea of what people are reading where, perhaps making this monetizable (if aggregated anonymously, of course).

Facial recognition might be stretching it a bit, but not a thought that's completely unreasonable.  Tie it in to Facebook and wow...  (business card capturing, anyone?)

So there you go code monkeys.  Get to work :)  And since I'd love to see something like this, consider the idea public domain (duh, it's on a blog) and All Rights Released -- although I'd it would be dandy if you'd mention me in the credits if this inspires you to go build your own.

Energy Efficient Elevators

While not anything necessarily "groundbreaking," I think that a building with several busy elevators could see a slight drop in power usage if they tweaked the settings so that the elevator doors stayed open slightly longer when it was lighter (less full).

Restaurant Incubator

I saw a post on PSFK that reminded me of a business idea I had quite some time ago. First I'll introduce a bit of background: our area (Tri-Cities, WA) is notoriously fickle and more than a bit flaky. We constantly have new restaurants popping up here or there and unfortunately as many good ones going out of business just as fast. It was this fact coupled with remembering a joke that a friend of mine once told me once, "Do you know how to make a million dollars in the restaurant business? Start with two million," that sparked my idea.
So if the title didn't give the concept away, here it is: Restaurant Incubators. A building set up so that you could have multiple easily-reconfigured restaurants designed to share some resources (and come pre-equipped with others). I know in practice this could be tricky (too many chefs in the kitchen), so some of the things would need to be independent -- but with good planning, it just might work. This would allow places that might otherwise not exist the opportunity to establish themselves, their menus, and some clientele with lower initial risk, and then move out to their own buildings after a couple years. I think it would also cultivate many new culinary/restaurant ideas that people would otherwise be adverse to trying.

Cognoprescience

There's a running almost-joke between me and some of my friends. Like many creative people with ADHD, I'm constantly coming up with ideas. Some far fetched, some fairly down to earth, some complex, some brilliantly simple. The funny part is that without exception any ideas I come up with are patented or at least announced via a press release anywhere from 2 days to 2 years after I think them up.
I've heard of the philosophy that "there are no new ideas" -- but this has reached a level of incredulity. Every. Single. Time. The average time span between my brainstorm and someone else coming out with it seems to be about 3 months... often too short of a time for me to realistically pull any resources together and develop my idea into a product/service.
So what I really need to do, since it seems that I most likely won't have the opportunity to benefit from my ideas directly, is to find a way to benefit from the fact that I have these ideas at all -- and before they're announced. So if you're in charge of a giant think tank that wants to contract me to sole-source provide you with a head-start on what will be hitting the markets/internet, let me know :)

And until someone decides to take me up on that offer, I'm going to start throwing my ideas on this blog as I have time. So here are a few I had yesterday evening and this afternoon.

I hate unlocking my phone/PDA. It's a pain, but a necessary pain. I believe the technology and expertise exists for someone to develop a removable memory card (e.g., SD) that not only can function as a normal storage device, but also contains the circuitry necessary to communicate with a corresponding linked chip via wireless (RFID, wifi, zigbee, NFC, or proprietary) . The two chips/devices working in tandem with some software on the smartphone itself would utilize PKI techniques to ensure that my smartphone was unlocked whenever it was within range of my person, and automatically locked if it goes out of range. Simple, right? Get to work, Eye-Fi dudes :)

The idea I had this afternoon is a pretty simple idea that would be fairly tricky technically... basically I want a couple things:
I'd like the ability to set my double-home button push on the iPhone to be able to launch any application I desire. This isn't mandatory for the success of the idea, but would be very useful.
And I'd like an application that would launch another application on my iPhone by using voice recognition.
Example -- when driving, I often hear songs on the radio station which I'm unfamiliar with. The station does a lousy job (as in almost never) of announcing the artist & title, so I'm left fumbling for my iPhone so I can page through my app listings to find & launch Midomi. It'd be sweet if I could just double-tap home to launch my "voice launchpad" and then tell it, "Midomi."

There you go. Get to work, invisible code monkeys.