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Ideas by Category: Jesus Christ Superstar Sing-Along Benefit Date: 2003-07-12 Category: Culture / Event Price: Free Target Audience: Large urban repertory-house movie theaters Description: Händel's Messiah sing-alongs are a lovely tradition for the dressed-up Holiday season, but when springtime comes around, people want to rock. And they can do it for a good cause at a Jesus Christ Superstar Sing-Along benefit screening. The formula is simple: Show the 1973 movie version of JCS at a large theater, publicize it as a costume-friendly, sing-along event, and charge $10-15 dollars, with proceeds going to some charity organization that Jesus would have liked (I believe there are many). For added interest, prepend a live introduction by relevant local speakers or performers. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, for example, would be a nice choice for such a benefit held at San Francisco's Castro Theater, although another choice might work better in Peoria. Underwater Cave Demolition Date: 2003-07-12 Category: Business / Tourism and Hospitality Price: Free Target Audience: Extreme sports enthusiasts, eco-relaxed third world tourism boards Description: BASE jumping, helicopter snowboarding, and street luging are all pretty great, but nothing kicks ass like underwater cave demolition, the action-adventure addict's ultimate wet dream. The principle is simple: you scuba dive into an ancient underwater cavern and plant a timed charge deep inside. Then you navigate your way back out just as the charge detonates, and ride the explosion's wake back into the open sea. What a rush! The narrower the cave entrance, the more intense your ride-- and the more dangerous your escape. As an added bonus, most of the small island countries that have spectacular marine caverns and permit this awesome sport also happen to be incredible places to party! The Light Jockey Handbook Date: 2003-07-07 Category: Culture / Books Price: 200 Target Audience: Book publishers Description: DJ'ing is great, but running a club's lighting and video is an equally interesting assignment, despite the fact that the field lacks Turntablism's vocabulary and established cultural lineage. The Light Jockey Handbook fills this void, providing both historical context and practical instructions for running a designed gathering's visuals. The first chapter charts the light show's evolution from the all-analog pioneers of the Sixties, with their dye emulsions and color wheels, through the laser era, up to today, where easy downloading, capturing, and editing wares allow laptop-wielding jockeys to assemble fresh, dazzling evening commentaries on the political events and cultural hot-buttons of the previous day. Succeeding chapters explain various technologies, one by one, in both practical and artistic terms: analog "psychedelic" color effects, slide projectors, lights, lighting controllers, lasers, mirror balls, fog machines, video projectors, capture tools, and image and video editing software. Concluding the Handbook is a Glossary of Terms and an Appendix that explains theatrical lighting notation, augmented for use by LJ's who want to script their performances. The book's Foreword is by Stewart Brand, who in 1966 San Francisco produced the historic Trips Festival, a light-show heavy event that was billed as a "non-drug re-creation of a psychedelic experience." (Today, Brand and others in his circle are still devoted to blowing people's minds-- although the minds involved now belong to decision-makers in offices as well as to kids off the street. This is a good thing.) Segway B (Bulletproof) with ERS Date: 2003-07-01 Category: Technology / Transportation Price: 200 Target Audience: Segway LLC, Jerry Bruckheimer Description: The Segway HT might rival the automobile as a local transportation device, but it does nothing to address the car's no-less-important function as urban armor. The Segway B fills this gap. Based on the HT's chassis, the Plexiglas-enclosed, bulletproof vehicle lets you navigate the mean streets (and sidewalks) quickly and safely, while a double-door compartment in front allows cash and small parcels to be passed freely in and out. Whether you're taking a face-to-face meeting with a rival crime boss, traversing a tough neighborhood to score some heroin, or even simply touring an unstable capital to monitor an election, the Segway B offers protection and peace of mind. And for even more safety, Segway B owners can subcribe to the Emergency Rescue Service. With ERS, if you run into trouble in any of 50 major U.S. cities, all you need to do is find some open ground and hit the Rescue button. An extra layer of Kevlar shielding immediately deploys behind the Plexiglas, while a helicopter gunship from Segway ERS's private fleet is dispatched to your current location to swoop down, connect to the ERS dock on the vehicle's roof, and airlift you away to safety. What could be more convenient? The Caesar Rendering Date: 2003-06-30 Category: Culture / Politics Price: Free Target Audience: Street servers like London's Street Sensation or San Francisco's Seamless City. Description: Most goggle-based Augmented Reality networks are developed by institutions, such as the Army helping soldiers navigate the battlefield, or tourism boards annotating destination cities with travel-guide recommendations. The Caesar Rendering, in contrast, is a grassroots, open-source AR channel that allows ordinary citizens to augment the world with verifiable, Mark 12:16-friendly identifications of the unpublicized money behind the artifacts being observed. Looking at a newly-built skyscraper? The Caesar Rendering flashes your heads-up display with who owns the building, who else has financial interests, and who approved its construction. Passing a billboard? The channel shows you the agency responsible, their client, and the size of the account. Waiting for a movie to start? The channel details the amounts paid for the promotional trivia questions flashed on the screen. Wherever anything is placed in public view as a result of money changing hands, the Caesar Rendering reveals the sources and amounts of these funds. The information is researched and contributed by interested individuals who obtain it from local news sources and public records. American Plywood Projects: A Design Retrospective Date: 2003-06-20 Category: Culture / Art / Exhibition Price: Free Target Audience: Cooper-Hewett, MOMA, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, San Francisco International Airport, other good U.S. museums that feature design. Description: The plywood project is one of our culture's purest and most well-developed design disciplines. Based on the standard 4x8-foot plywood panel, it combines the material economy of origami with the open space and personal dream-building potential of suburbia. Classic "weekend" plywood projects, refined for generations in the pages of magazines such as Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Woodworking, all begin the same way: with one or two sheets of 5/8- or 3/4- inch thick plywood, a table saw, and (usually) a jigsaw. But they yield tools, toys, recreational equipment, and all varieties of furniture. In addition, these clever designs offer traditional male head-of-households a means of expressing love for their families, declaring their aesthetic and cultural values, and displaying their status and competence as nest-builders. American Plywood Projects: A Design Retrospective is an exhibit that traces the history of the form, beginning with plywood's origins in the late 19th century and focusing on its 1960-1980 design heyday, when the new availability of inexpensive Douglas Fir / phenolic resin plywood coincided with the North American population's flight to the suburbs. Exhibited works include drawings, plans, and constructed samples from leading professional designers as well as contest-winning amateurs. PoliticalCapital.org Date: 2003-06-17 Category: Culture / Politics Price: 200 Target Audience: MoveOn.org, Project Vote Smart Description: Want to influence an upcoming congressional vote on a particular bill? Forget phone calls, letter-writing, and petitions, and speak with a far stronger voice: Money. PoliticalCapital.org lists and summarizes the most important resolutions scheduled to come before Congress during the next few weeks, and solicits small contributions (under $10) from citizens who support or oppose the proposed legislation. Before the vote, contributions for each side are collected via PayPal and pooled together. After the vote, they're divided evenly and donated as soft-money "issue advocacy" contributions towards the campaign funds of all the legislators' who took that side. For example, if you PayPal $3 to oppose a House Resolution that is defeated by 300 votes, each representative who voted against it gets one penny of your contribution. And if 99,999 other citizens made the same donation, PoliticalCapital.org transfers $1,000 to each representative who voted the way you wanted. Each upcoming resolution listed on the website shows a continuously-updated Contribution Meter, which aids legislators in their decision-making by displaying exactly how much money is currently attached to each side. Meanwhile, legal language makes it clear that the monies contributed are donated after the fact of the votes in question, in support of like-minded legislators, rather than as a bribe beforehand-- in case this is illegal, which it may not be. (Alternatively, a site such as this could be run as advocacy, collecting contributions on just one side of certain bills rather than both.) Note that PoliticalCapital.org merely recordkeeps and routes contributions from individuals; it makes no contributions of its own, and is therefore not subject to McCain-Feingold restrictions. Brainwash Systems Date: 2003-06-16 Category: Business / Marketing Price: 200 Target Audience: Service station industry entrepreneurs. Description: You're sitting in the drive-thru carwash again, bored out of your skull. Kids may gleefully watch the sudsy dance of scrubbers and rollers, but you've seen it before, and would rather focus on something more relevant. Brainwash Systems has the answer. At minimal cost to carwash or service station owners, they'll install a ruggedized, large-format video screen inside the carwash structure. The "captive audience" inside will enjoy WashVision™, a soundless mix of sponsored automotive-related video that ranges from thrilling action shots of the latest cars and SUVs speeding through mountains and deserts to sensual close-ups of dashboards and gleaming emblems. Each month, service station owners receive a new 90-minute WashVision™ DVD, which plays on a code-secured, dedicated player, also provided by Brainwash. This double-secure system prevents troublemaking service station employees from offending carwash patrons by playing pornographic or other unauthorized video material on WashVision™ screens. Israel/Palestine Roadmap for Peace Date: 2003-06-12 Category: Culture / Politics Price: Free Target Audience: UN and US State Dep't negotiators Description: Present each side with two-states treaty based pre-1967 borders. Add the following language, to get Israel to agree: "It is hereby universally acknowledged that Israelis are stronger, smarter, more resourceful, better-looking, truer to God, and have suffered more than the Palestinians." When Palestine then refuses to sign, reverse the wording so that it reads, "It is hereby universally acknowledged that Palestinians are stronger, smarter, more resourceful, better-looking, truer to God, and have suffered more than the Israelis." Israel will sign anyway, to be practical, and Palestine will agree to sign again, appreciating the respect. Caff-Stix Date: 2003-06-12 Category: Technology / Biomedical Price: Make offer Target Audience: Pharmaceutical companies Description: Is your decaf really decaf? Unwrap a Caff-Stix and find out. Each disposable plastic stirrer has a nontoxic receptor-test panel, which changes color depending on your brew's caffeine concentration. Match the shade below to the printed colors above, and you'll see how many milligrams of the stimulant you're ingesting per 8-ounce cup. Caff-Stix works for tea, yerba maté, and sodas as well-- but remember that if you're assaying a Big Gulp, you'll need to multiply by four. Beamer Date: 2003-06-11 Category: Durable / Toy and Novelty Price: 50.00 Target Audience: Symbol Technologies, laser pointer companies Description: Laser pointers are getting fancier, tracing patterns as well as just dots, but Beamer brings it to the next level by projecting short messages. Compose your text on the BlackBerry-like panel, turn on the juice, and shine your new sentiment on surfaces up to 300 yards away. A micromirror traces the laser through your script, while the image is steadied a la camcorder. A small dial adjusts its spread so it can appear the proper size. Below the bright red, helium-neon script runs an underscore line that connects up to each letter, letting the laser trace from one letter to the next while also indicating at distances which side goes downward. (The next model will switch the laser so characters can appear detached from one another.) The message "Tags" themselves run on one line, up to 32 characters in length, allowing communiqués to range from a short, sweet, "HEY BABE" to a more detailed, "USE TURN SIGNALS, YOU ASSHOLE!!!" Floradisk Date: 2003-06-09 Category: Business / Software Distribution Price: 200.00 Target Audience: FTD, in conjunction with leading Internet software companies. Description: You've got a new computer, and you're installing your files and shrink-wrap software. But what about all those massive free download apps-- the browsers, readers, players, runtime environments, and accessories? They take a while to download via broadband, and if you're dialing up, forget about it! Save time by calling your local FTD-affiliated florist and ordering Floradisk, a CD collection of popular, free, bandwidth-busting installer files. Rush delivery brings it to your door in two hours or less. And if you have a loved one in another city whose computer just died, call FTD to have the special Floradisk Bouquet package delivered to them-- a Floradisk, a dozen gladiolas, and a condolence card. Hydration Pack Level Gauge Date: 2003-06-09 Category: Durable / Outdoor Price: 3% gross sales + two free units Target Audience: Camelbak, Platypus, other hydration pack companies, military, sports outfitters. Description: Hydration backpacks are great, but they don't show how much water's left, so it's easy to run out-- especially when they're toting more weight than just water. The Hydration Pack Level Gauge avoids this parching nightmare. A small totalizing flow meter, a micro version of ones used in agriculture, logs how much aqua you've sucked down so far, and displays the amount left. A button resets the level to capacity when you refill your pack. To install the device, just cut the hose near the mouthpiece and insert one of the two tubes in each end. Or wait until the new packs come out where this feature is already built in. God's Earth Date: 2003-06-09 Category: Culture / Games Price: 150.00 Target Audience: Religious publishers and entertainment companies Description: "Progressive" educators praise simulation games such as Sim City and Sim Earth, but what they don't tell you is that they're also insidious forms of indoctrination. Through their mass of detail and internal-logic rules, these compelling and realistic-seeming games convey a view of the world that is essentially godless, where prayer does not exist, and where liberal social and environmental policies triumph. God's Earth paints a more accurate logical picture of the way things work: Sins are punished, prayers are answered, souls are saved, God guides the faithful, and the Devil inspires the prideful to create secular humanist simulation games that destroy people's souls. Petrarch's Tarot Date: 2003-06-09 Category: Culture / Books Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Chronicle Books and other design-y gift book publishers Description: In 1956, librarian Gertrude Moakley published a revolutionary article arguing that what we now call the Tarot deck was originally created not as a divination tool, but as illustrations representing 15th-century Milanese carnival processions, which were in turn based on Petrarch's then-bestselling romantic allegorical poem The Triumphs (I Trionfi). Tarot buffs have been arguing about Moakley's thesis ever since, just as Italian Lit scholars continue to study Petrarch and artists continue to create beautiful new decks. Petrarch's Tarot brings it all back together in one precious volume: A new translation of Petrarch's classic renaissance love poem with gorgeous, full-color Tarot card illustrations painted by some hip Wicca-friendly artist babe. The book's Foreword, by a genuine professor somewhere, appreciates Moakley and examines her life as well as her influence on the still-marginal, deserves-more-respect field of Tarot scholarship. Truth-O-Mat Date: 2003-05-23 Category: Technology / Video Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Description: Want someone to give you the real story? Take 'em to the nearest Truth-O-Mat. Built like a high-tech confessional booth, the Truth-O-Mat takes continuous video of the subject sitting in the "hot seat" and feeds it through a Microexpression Analysis Engine (MAE). This yields a real-time readout of their apparent honesty-level, which is visible to the person sitting on the other side. Under the hood, the state-of-the-art MAE technology combines the precision of Paul Ekman's Facial Action Coding System (developed at UCSF) with the automation of Zuhair Bandar's "Silent Talker" system (Manchester Metropolitan University). Unlike traditional (and largely-discredited) polygraph tests, the MAE requires no complicated setup and no human interpretation-- and it gives far more consistent and accurate results. Just swipe your credit card and the booth is ready to use, for just a few dollars per 15-minute increment. Modular design and a single-pallet shipping configuration allow Truth-O-Mat to be installed almost anywhere-- in malls, airports, or even bars! "Desert Island Blocks" Date: 2003-05-21 Category: Culture / Magazine and Newspaper Price: 200.00 Target Audience: City magazines and large metro newspaper magazine/lifestyle sections Description: Ask a mix of local notables: If you were banished to a desert island and could bring only one city block along with you, which one would it be, and why? (This is like the "Desert Island Discs" concept that Tower Records Pulse! used to run.) After giving the block ("Valencia between 16th and 17th Streets"), the subject would then run down an appreciation of all the stores, restaurants, bars, etc. that that particular block has to offer, and explain how they would enhance life on the island. This could work as a regular, front-of-the-book bit with different subjects each time, or else do it feature-length with a bunch of people all at once. Eyes-Only Bold Extended Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Technology / Typography Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Adobe, Emigre, Hoefler, with-it type foundries Description: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is constantly improving, but let's face it: sometimes you don't want a document you've printed to be scanned, OCR'd, and spread around online. The Eyes Only font solves the problem: people can read it, but a computer can't. It's a pointillist, fuzzy, soft-edged rendering of old German Fraktur-style script - most letters consist of thick vertical lines, with small differences in connecting strokes and serifs. Shading is governed by a randomized "seed," making each letter slightly different. The human eye hardly notices, but it fools software every time. Rideshare.com Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Service / Personal Price: 100.00 Target Audience: State and local transit authorities, in conjunction with wireless carriers. Description: Designed for both web browsers and handheld wireless devices, Rideshare.com helps drivers and carpool passengers find each other any time, on a moment's notice. Registered users – who have credit cards, are traceable, and hopefully aren't axe murderers – enter their departure location, departure time, and destination, whether it's a quick hop across town in a few minutes, or a long road trip in a few months. The system optimally matches drivers to passengers and identifies each to one another by license plate and ID card numbers. Passengers also receive a trip code, which they give to the driver after they arrive at their destination. When the driver enters the trip code, the system debits the passenger's account and credits the driver's account at an agreed-upon mileage rate, like ten cents per mile (mileage rates are set during the match search, based on the lowest and highest numbers users are willing to accept). Rideshare.com takes a cut of each fee transacted, and makes additional money off of grants from traffic reduction and clean-air funds, both public and private. Smart Alarm Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Durable / Electronic Price: Free Target Audience: Sony or other electronics/media company or partnership. Description: Smart Alarm is a beautifully built, Internet radio alarm clock at an irresistable price: Free. Just register online, and it's yours. The secret, naturally, is advertising: studies show that the first two minutes of audio programming people hear upon waking have more impact than anything they experience for the rest of the day. For a few precious moments, the brain's quasi-dream state inhibits its filtering of sensory impressions - giving Smart Alarm sponsors the opportunity to inject words and jingles directly into the targeted user's mind, where they echo and re-play for hours. Advertising via Smart Alarm is expensive, but it's the most powerful way to push your message through the clutter. Meta Mirror Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Durable / Electronic Price: 100.00 Target Audience: Description: Mirrors are fine for your face, but lacking if you want to closely examine, say, the back of your head or your nether regions. Meta Mirror solves this frustrating problem by bringing Remote Presence (RP) technology into your own home. Mount the compact apparatus on your bathroom wall and move the flexible armature around your person, pointing the zoom-lens assembly anywhere, at any angle. The CMOS-based digital imaging system captures high-res video from wherever you visit - whether the sun shines there or not - and feeds it to the 13-inch color LCD screen. With the Meta Mirror Plus model, your hands also fit into two force-feedback data gloves underneath the screen, which correspond to robotic hands that operate on the armature, below the lens. This intuitive arrangement lets you perform hitherto-difficult grooming maneuvers such as shaving the back of your own neck, extracting comedones from your own back, or getting a good, close look at your own bald spot. Future Beliefs Fund Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Service / Financial Price: 200.00 Target Audience: Fidelity, Merrill-Lynch, other big investment houses. Description: Mutual funds meet personalization in the Future Beliefs Fund. The mutual fund consists of two hundred high quality investments – but instead of fund managers picking the proportions behind closed doors, they assign weights that correlate each investment's anticipated performance to a set of easy-to-understand predictions, such as "Interest rates will rise/hold/fall," "Iraq will prosper/decline," "U.S. consumers will embrace/reject genetically modified foods." Each fund shareholder then becomes their own fund manager: as they fill out their predictions on an online form, a Bayesian network calculates the optimal investment mix, given their beliefs about the future, and offers it for approval, or review and modification. Investors can change their belief/investment mix at will, tweak transaction orders directly to override the results, and access an array of graphical tools that explain how their beliefs translated into portfolio percentages. The Buy Light Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Durable / Electronic Price: 200.00 Target Audience: Symbol, Sony Description: These days, prices are increasingly fluid and complicated, but with the Buy Light, you need never tax your brain with another number again. Scan the barcode or say the name of any product from soda pop to speedboats, and the voice- and wireless-enabled handheld device figures out how easily you can afford it. A green light means go ahead and buy, yellow means use caution, red advises against, and flashing red means you literally cannot cover the cost. A sophisticated algorithm assesses the type of product, how much you need it, your income, target budget, available assets, and other personal factors. Meanwhile, buying- agent software surveys the net to find the lowest possible price, sometimes bidding at auction or collaborating with others for a discount group purchase. If waiting until later would fetch a better price, the Buy Light asks you whether it should go ahead immediately, or take more time. Clicking the "Why?" button displays the full-detail explanation of the reasoning behind each determination, but in beta tests, most users stop questioning and start automatically accepting the Buy Light's judgement within two to three weeks. The device comes in an array of colors and styles. The Tiki God, for example, is an open-mouthed Polynesian-style fetish that speaks its answers in addition to shining its low-power, color LED lights. Happytime Document Destruction Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Service / Office / Document Destruction Price: Free Target Audience: Description: In our imperfect world, you may find it necessary some day to destroy a quantity of business documents -- and as the Enron/Andersen scandal has shown, the task must be accomplished correctly. Other professionals listed the Yellow Pages under "Documents, Destruction" promise fast service, will come to your location, and will let you look on as they feed their paper-powdering shredders. But their tight-lipped, all-business approach neglects an enterprise's need for positive morale during trying times. Happytime Document Destruction takes a more humanistic approach. They come to your offices wearing full clown regalia, pushing their high-speed shredders in on oversize baby carriages. Available by appointment or at a moment's notice, they can greet your entire grateful staff during business hours, or make a special visit to a few of you late at night. Once the shredding's done, Happytime doesn't just cart away the fluffy bags of ground paper. They take them into your parking lot, douse them with gas, and torch them sky-high, in a cathartic ritual that sends your cares into the air. Happytime Document Destruction -- they're on your side. Talk-Show Guest Genetic Library Date: 2003-03-14 Category: Technology / Biomedical Price: Free Target Audience: Television studio hair stylists Description: Hair stylists for talk shows have a goldmine on their hands. At the root of each strand of hair they touch, live skin cells hold complete genetic information for the celebrity they're coiffing. The technology to extract and read this information doesn't exist yet, but it probably will within ten years. The Talk-Show Guest Genetic Library looks forward to this time. In its low-temperature vault are contained individually-labelled strands of hair plucked by stylists from guests on the major talk shows -- the genes of the stars. We might not know yet how people will be able and legally permitted to use this information, but it's a good bet that it will be valuable.
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