Category: Feasible inventions

A brainstorming session should involve a competition to see who can provoke the most contributions from other people. Today’s invention is a way to recognise (and possibly reward) individuals who contribute in this way most effectively.

Everyone who attends a brainstorm would be encouraged to scribble on a shared smartboard (one at a time).

As they write up a new idea and shout it out, they also link their new idea to the one which provoked it (if any did).

The board recognises who said what by the different pens in use and can immediately calculate, and display, who has made the biggest number of fertile suggestions.

I’m so sick of IT security; but slightly less sick of that than the effects of its absence.

Today’s invention is to use passwords which consist of groups of characters on a keyboard which fall easily to hand eg 234tv bhumo.

Obviously, one would reorient the keyboard in order not to weaken the protection too much, whilst avoiding having to indulge in the usual finger stretching contortions.

The recording of music performances is nearly as much of an art form as the music itself.

Now that it’s getting harder to make money from digital media, today’s invention offers an additional route to selling music by adding some extra value.

A recording studio or auditorium would be equipped with an array of seats. Each would be occupied by a person wearing a pair of microphones near their ears. The sounds recorded would be stored as two separate channels. These data would then be downloadable by music buffs (with equipment capable of playing one channel per headphone speaker).

The quality and cachet associated with being able to choose one’s seat at a performance of this type would command a premium price. People might even choose to ‘visit’ the same classic performance in different locations and help to draw a map up of the most popular seats.

When travelling to work, using a cross-country train, there are often areas to which wireless broadband has, so far, failed to stretch (a fact which Vodafone omits to mention in their sales literature).

Today’s invention is wireless hub located in a station which knows about my journey and the blackspots I can expect to encounter (It might even correlate the tickets sold with the anticipated bandwidth requirements of the travellers’ journeys).

It then allocates those with large expected outages with massive bandwidth whilst waiting, so that their browsers can download all their tabbed sites ultra-fast before setting off. Those with small blackspots will get correspondingly lower bitrates whilst waiting.

It’s hard for people to learn visually to tie effective knots. After a while under instruction, they tend to absorb the knowledge directly into their cerebellar motor memory (can you describe how you tie a tie, or your laces, without actually executing the movements?)

Today’s invention is a way to get the right knot for a given situation taught correctly.

A transparent plastic sheet has a regular matrix of clear rods standing on its surface. The sheet is made to fit one’s laptop screen and the spacing between the rods is a bit more than the diameter of the rope to be knotted. A user would be asked to select the knot’s application details eg ‘quick, release, safety-critical’, etc. The laptop’s program would decide the best knot and load the correct instructions.

A moving arrow then appears on the screen and is visible through the sheet. This draws a snake-like pattern on the screen, gradually showing the path the rope must follow between the rods. When one end of the rope needs to go over another section, the graphical snake changes briefly to red (under–> blue) and the machine might even say “Over”.

The rope is thus pulled between the rods and around itself until a loose knot is formed and can be slipped up off the rods.

It’s just possible to imagine rods which could be made to vibrate (or a small robot tug) so that the rope is automatically transported around the correct path. Similarly, the sheets might be made with different spacings between the rods to accommodate variation in rope diameter.

As a paranoid plane passenger, it concerns me that the flight safety recorder from any crashed plane might just be irrecoverable.

Airlines seem to fit one or two of these systems to their aircraft (at the rear, where the damage sustained under impact is usually less). Why only two? Is it to save money?

Today’s invention a connected system of several such ‘black boxes’, each of which contains exactly the same data at any time when fitted into a single aircraft. This means there are simply more copies and thus more chance of discovering the data describing the causes of the problem.

One of these boxes (made to be both highly robust and buoyant) would be jettisoned automatically if it detected a sharp descent to zero altitude (thus avoiding the loss of data on the sea floor or due to fire in the fuselage during a crash on land).

I’m amazed that hotels manage to sell rooms without any assurances as to size or lighting or view.

Today’s invention is a way for luxury establishments to differentiate themselves for the purpose of boosting online bookings.

A small robot equipped with a webcam moves on each floor. When someone wants to book a particular room, footage from the webcam is made available (during room cleaning) via the hotel website.

In this way, potential guests could see that their window faced only a wall and ask for a change or a discount. Equally, this acts as a competitive weapon against hotels which are too scared to show anything other than their showcase rooms before bookings occur.

I have two separate collections of bookmarks: one I consult every day and the other once a week.

Today’s invention is a bookmarking tool which creates a folder of bookmarks and opens these for viewing as often as the average frequency with which these sites have been updated.

(I really don’t want to know every time an update has occurred, so that’s why there’s a need to match the viewing frequency to the average updating frequency).

If, for example, a website I have bookmarked has been updated about once a day for a week, it will appear in the ‘Daily’ folder. If it has been updated only once or twice a week on average, then it will be placed in the ‘Weekly’ folder. Another folder might be labeled ‘Monthly’, because its average page content is rarely changed.

In this way, sites would move occasionally from folder to folder, providing a refreshing, non-routine sample of interesting web experiences.