Category: Feasible inventions

Everyone makes purchases which are strongly influenced by something called branding…the values associated with a product that go beyond the thing you’re nominally paying for. Trademarks are one long-established way for product makers to protect the investment they have made in developing their brand.

Trademarks have a commercial value…today’s invention is a way to quantify this.

Images of products, with their normal trademarks and badges attached, would be displayed via a website to a given, statistically representative, audience (within some chosen demographic group). The same products would then be shown to a different audience but having had all such identifiers digitally airbrushed out.

People would be asked to identify, by multiple-choice box ticking, which brand corresponded to which product (the trial could be made into a contest in order to attract sufficient interest to be meaningful). The results would be compared between the two groups to determine which trademarks were most recognised and therefore valuable.

This could be extended to tests in which the wrong marks were applied to products (eg a Jaguar badge digitally applied to a Ford car…would people notice the mismatch? Does rebadging really transfer brand values?)

Instructions for maintaining the health of one’s laptop often include an exhortation not to “Place the laptop closer than 5 inches to electrical appliances that generate a strong magnetic field, i.e., motor, magnet, TV, refrigerator, or large audio speakers.”

Given that these machines are inherently mobile and that we are increasingly surrounded by some pretty strong magnets, today’s invention is a magnetic field detector embedded within portable computers. At its simplest, this might consist of a couple of small compasses and maybe an optical device for measuring the speed with which they change direction.

If you are about to move your machine next to a motor which is running say behind a partition wall, a warning would sound and an arrow appear on screen saying …”Move your machine in this directly quickly“.

I pay a daily visit to a number of websites. One of the best for content is wired.com (even though the page structure and navigation are laughably poor).

The trouble is that the content often does not update as fast as I can read and the individual items are not maintained in their original order…so I end up scouring each page for items of interest amongst a rag-bag of other stuff, some of which I have already dealt with.

Today’s invention is a browser plug-in which remembers the history of which articles I clicked on yesterday and simply doesn’t load those elements of a webpage ever again (unless I explicitly ask for this to happen).

The plug-in might also detect those items which I scrolled past without clicking and exclude those from today’s page too…if I didn’t care about them yesterday, I care less today. (This might be adopted in connection with search engine results. Those entries the browser knows I scrolled through, but didn’t click on, might be used as weighted examples of what not to look for when a button marked ‘rerun the search based on unclicked items?’ is pressed).

All this cuts down the time required to get to the good stuff (and might well expose the relative dearth of real, original, readworthy content).

I’ve often watched a movie and just avoided all that scrolling text at the end. The credits are a throwback to the era of magic lanterns -almost nobody, except casting agents, proud parents and film geeks, reads them.

Today’s invention is simply to make the credits on DVDs interactive. This would include having popups explaining what the hell a dolly grip actually does, but more importantly, if you liked the score you could click a link that would allow you to buy the music. Or, you could visit the website of some minor actor, or the art director, or whoever.

By actually sharing the credits effectively this represents an extension to the Openpay approach in which the reliance of hugely-paid stars on the teams which surround them is acknowledged. It would be almost free to implement and actually add value to the viewing experience as well.

If you have printed material which needs to be kept very secret then storing it in a lockable cabinet is of only limited use. Occasionally, for example, an embassy will need to store printed documents which, in the event of a revolution or some other storming of the building, require to be destroyed.

Forming them all into an effective bonfire is surprisingly difficult, especially at very short notice. Shredding such big volumes is just impossible. Today’s invention is a system to address this issue which can be attached inside a normal filing cabinet or cupboard.

In the event of a threatened takeover, embassy staff would press a button on the back of each cabinet which would cause the contents of a tank of solvent inside it to be sprayed into the drawers. (alcohol would be a reasonable fluid to use, although benzene or petrol might be quicker).

A tray at the bottom would collect the residue and allow it to be returned to the tank for another spray cycle. This would make all the ink run and thus be indecipherable within seconds.

So this is the era of 3-D printing; or at least it will be when the 10 or so major cost issues are overcome.

Meanwhile, today’s invention is to use this technology to allow visitors to a website to design their own items of elaborate confectionery -and have them delivered by express mail.

People could select from a palette of fillings, one of bases and one of coatings or ‘enrobings.’ The setting time for each of these would be used to optimise use of the machinery and ensure compatible combinations. Certain confections might be ruled physically (if not aesthetically) impossible. The calorie content of each design would be automatically computed.

If you really must have peanut butter and ginger chocs, on a wafer base, all covered in 2mm of white chocolate, then this is probably the only way to get them.

Users could of course specify even small numbers of such delights and also decorate the outer surfaces with personal messages/logos. There might even be a vibrant online forum for trading recipes and discussing the best techniques for remotely creating a particularly tasty morsel.

Try reading a book with gloves on (or with limited dexterity) and you will understand how difficult it is to turn pages accurately.

Today’s invention is a desktop cutter which shapes the outer edge of any book into steps, just like an old-fashioned address book (but without the alphabetical labeling). It simply involves clamping the edge of the book in place and chopping out a triangular section -so as to create a thumb-able ramp in the paper.

This makes it possible to turn the pages reliably, even with limited tactile feedback.

One of the most dangerous things a child can do (apart from being driven in a car) is go swimming in a pool.

Today’s invention is a large mat, made of tough, just-negatively buoyant, foam which covers the floor area of a deep swimming pool and which is supported by columns of the same material bonded onto the mat’s underside. The columns hold the mat off the pool floor and allow enough water depth above the mat’s surface for everyone to swim and to support their (reduced) weight when standing on it.

The reduced effective dept of the pool makes it much harder for a child to be overlooked if it’s lying on the mat’s surface (which could be made in a colour such as fluorescent green, to contrast sharply with all human skin tones).

Also, anyone recklessly diving in would avoid neck and back injuries due to being cushioned by the compressible columns collapsing beneath the foam surface.

When there’s a fire, or you need to stop a train in an emergency, you are often supposed to crack a pane of emergency glass. This can be confusing, time wasting and a possible source of injury in itself. It is also possible to activate accidentally by bumping into it.

Today’s invention is to replace all such switches with a modified drinks can ring-pull.

The top of such a can would be embedded in a backplate and an electrical ribbon pasted onto the rear surface of the metal so that when the ring is pulled, the ribbon on its back face is snapped -generating an electrical signal (to eg call the fire brigade or alert Underground platform staff).

This is an intuitive, common interface and operable by anyone without much force or required dexterity. It’s also cheap and tamper-evident. For anyone concerned about misuse, the aperture caused by pulling the ring could reveal a small networked camera lens which, by that stage, would have recorded the user’s face.