Test
Whining for Ideas
(dissatisfaction yields innovation)
Reverse Google
Someone should make this:
I have a website of something I care about. I want to find other similar things like that thing. I want a "reverse google" that tells me the combination of google keywords that puts the thing I have as far up the search results as possible. Then I can just run that search and look at the other search results for the other things I'm looking for.
Go.
Why are airlines so dumb?
So I understand the checked bag fees. Oil prices, the economy. Fine. But, as we've all seen, this makes the cabin super full with carry on bags. I also understand the need for airlines to retain customers with loyalty programs. It's pretty much all they've got. Fine. But when 2/3 of a flight is "Advantage Gold" or "Priority Access", it's a bit ridiculous, no? I book my flights early. I get seats near the front of the plane so I have to deal with less riff-raff. I'm one of American's most loyal customers. I'm part of the solution. But today, when I tried to put my bag in the wide open first-class overhead bins, I was denied by the flight attendant. "Those are for first class only", even though all the business people wee already seated drinking their coffees, reading the Journal, and finishing up some deals on their Blackberrys. (As it turns out, the flight attendant thought my Bump t-shirt was cool, so, with a literal fistbump, he hooked me up). But I then witnessed 10 bags get passed back to the front of the plane to be checked, and the flight was 10 minutes late pushing back. This doesn't require a high-tech solution. Here's the solution. Airline operation managers, listen up:
1) go to Home Depot and buy a roll of yellow masking tape and a Sharpie.
2) outline the space in each overhead bin assigned to each seat. If your rule is each passenger can have one carry-on bag, mark each spot with the seat number.
3) if your plane doesn't have enough space to give each seat an overhead space, fine, just tell me that when I'm buying my seat. Sell the seats+spaces first-come, first-served. If I don't get a seat with a space, let me pay less or check my bag for free. That's it guys. I estimate you can outfit the entire fleet for about $100 per plane, including the masking tape, the labor, and the programmer's time to update your booking system. And the Sharpie. Whoever implements something like this first will get my loyalty, even if they don't label me with a precious metal or stone.
1) go to Home Depot and buy a roll of yellow masking tape and a Sharpie.
2) outline the space in each overhead bin assigned to each seat. If your rule is each passenger can have one carry-on bag, mark each spot with the seat number.
3) if your plane doesn't have enough space to give each seat an overhead space, fine, just tell me that when I'm buying my seat. Sell the seats+spaces first-come, first-served. If I don't get a seat with a space, let me pay less or check my bag for free. That's it guys. I estimate you can outfit the entire fleet for about $100 per plane, including the masking tape, the labor, and the programmer's time to update your booking system. And the Sharpie. Whoever implements something like this first will get my loyalty, even if they don't label me with a precious metal or stone.
Hand-drawn Stamps
As much as we'd like to rid the world of them, people (even high tech nerds like me) need to send physical letters sometimes. That means we need stamps. But since we don't send physical mail very often, we never have stamps laying around. This is annoying.
So some clever people created services to let you print stamps at home. Great idea. You pay for postage online, they issue you a unique 2d barcode, you print it, and tape it on your letter and you are good to go. Problem solved, yes?
No.
Only old people and companies have printers anymore. Paper is so 2000, and we are going into 2010. What does everybody have? Hands, pens, and cell phones with cameras.
Here's how it would work: I have a letter and envelope. I scribble a random doodle on the envelope. I take a photo of the envelope with my phone, and email or upload it to the Service. The Service tells me if my doodle is unique enough, and prompts me to add a few more doodles if need be. I pay the Service with my credit card and put the letter in the mail. That's it.
On the back end, the letter gets to the post office, where they scan the envelope anyway to do OCR on the zip code. The Service then looks at the doodle-stamp, matches the doodle-stamp to the pre-paid doodle that I uploaded, and on its merry way it goes.
The only problem is that the Service needs to be inside the Post Office. Which means it must work without adding any additional hardware on the Post Office side. Feasible, but I don't understand what the Post Office uses to scan envelopes for their OCR. Something to research in my spare time.
What the heck is this all about?
I complain a lot. My wife calls it whining. I call it fostering innovation.
Lots of the best ideas people have come up with over the years have been a direct result of something in their lives that just really bugged them. So I embrace my whiny side.
My current startup was conceived in exactly this way: I whined about having to type people's names and phone numbers into my phone, and we created a technology that lets two phones connect with just a bump (http://bumptechnologies.com). One of my co-founders, Jake Mintz, suggested I keep a record of all my rants, just in case another one of them might warrant further investigations. So here it is.
Please comment, discuss, shoot down, or run with any of these ideas.
