Today’s invention is a way to make e-commerce more interesting.

Products on display on a website would be capable of repricing themselves in realtime.

Each product entry would monitor the prices of its competitors. If lots were being sold of A’s competitor B, then A’s price would automatically reduce itself.

If stocks of B were running low, then its unit price would rise. Put some B in your shopping basket and A’s price might drop a little to get you to change your mind. 3 A’s in your basket and you might see a price drop of A on the shelf to encourage you to buy another.

Within set limits, this would introduce some interesting price-based jostling and add interactivity to a rather jaded shopping experience.

When I’m making changes to a document, I want to be able to select individual characters (for deletion or substitution).

Dragging across them with the cursor is nigh-on impossible (and in OpenOffice usually results in moving a large chunk of text to an entirely unexpected location).

Today’s invention is the ability to click in a word processed document thus:

This would be easy to remember and stays, just about, within the brain’s limits on instantaneous counting.

Today’s invention is a small way to reduce a child’s distress, having sustained a plaster-worthy cut.

Each plaster would have an outer surface capable of retaining pen marks.

This would allow the injured party to do a little drawing of the incident which caused their wound, so that when asked “how did you do that?” they could simply brandish the evidence of the whole grisly event .

Crowdsourcing product design is pretty much flavour of the month…or it will be as soon as manufacturers start taking it seriously. Similarly the urge to own personalised products is increasing.

I watched my daughter selecting mobile phone designs at the weekend…not only must the touch and feel of the interface be crisp, the colour striking but not ridiculous, she wants the whole thing to be unlike anyone else’s device.

Today’s invention is a website for the most ardent customers for tech products on which they can specify such wants/ innovations.

If their idea gets adopted, a small CV file of theirs is embedded in the device, indicating what they contributed and thus providing them with a small claim to fame and access to many new potential business partners/clients who need to access such creativity.

These buyers also get the added value of knowing a little more backstory in connection with their new design classic.

I was reading about this uninspired piece of robot research, when it occurred to me that there is an opportunity in the no-holds-barred business of advertising.

You have probably seen that old prank in which a person stares into the sky, at nothing, yet who then gathers a crowd staring in the same way. Well, today’s invention is based on a similar approach.

A webpage, or electronic billboard, has simulated pairs of eyes peppered around it between the content items. Advertisers can pay to have the pairs of eyes appear to move so as to look at their ad (drawing the attention of viewers).

Pay more and the eyes spend more time moving towards your advert.

(For a conventional hoarding, you might have robot mannikins in a nearby shop window shift their gaze towards them).

Today’s invention is a new paintbrush.

This contains a detachable handle (orange), which allows a range of different ‘profilers’ to be inserted (blue).

This forces the bristles (grey) to adopt a profile ideally suited to the painting task of the moment -ie from broad brush to very fine detail

It can be swapped quickly when eg up a ladder without having to carry multiple, paint-covered brushes.

I’ve heard numerous e-book readers complain that their new fangled electronic devices suffer from the absence of the traditional smell of a well-thumbed paperback’s pages from a fusty library.

I’m unclear why the smell is so important. Can people differentiate between Moby Dick and Dracula by their olfactory properties ? (I guess not).

Today’s invention is a plastic sleeve which fits in the case behind one’s e-reader. This accommodates a page from an old book which you no longer need but which smells of a suitably literary study.

On opening the case, the (hidden) page is exposed to the air and one’s reading experience is thereby enhanced (especially as the e-book device warms up).

The advice when one’s dog is attacked by another dog is ‘simply’ to let it run away to safety.

This has a couple of associated difficulties.

First, if you let the lead go, the dog may well trip over it or get itself tangled as it scrambles away. Second, if you try to release the lead from the collar, you risk bending down and putting your face between two fighting dogs…usually considered a bad idea.

Today’s invention is therefore a lead which can be detached from a dog’s collar whilst the animal is straining to escape from its far end.

This would be achieved by running a Bowden-type cable from the lead handle/loop to the catch where collar meets lead. Press on a recessed button and the normal lead-collar catch is opened, freeing fido.

A twin-blade razor extends the stubble hairs with the leading blade so that the trailing blade can cut it even shorter.

A similar approach is employed in today’s invention: a new carpet cleaning head for a vacuum cleaner.

The leading suction branch pulls the carpet fibres to one side, making it easier for the following branch to extract dirt particles from within the depth of the pile.

Drinking Pimm’s in a friend’s garden today it emerged that there are several versions in addition to Pimm’s No1.

Pimm’s No2 is based on Whisky, for example.

Today’s invention is to create non-integer mixes of the Pimm’s base variants eg a 30:70 mix of 1 and 2 would be Pimm’s No1.3