Manufacturers are always attempting to engage buyers with their products via social networking.
Today’s invention deals with that issue in the style-conscious world of sneaker design.
Sneakers would come with a box of flat, coloured tubes (like heat shrink material).
These would be slotted onto laces to form a colourful pattern (after being allocated a unique one from the manufacturer’s website).
People with their own pattern could then use their smartphone to image the ‘barcodes’ formed by the laces to get access to the online profiles of other wearers of this design.
This would allow people to make friends, get dates etc. Bad behaviour would be limited by the identifiability of all wearers of this design.
A six-lace, five-colour arrangement would allow about 240 million different codes.
