It’s impossible to do anything new in terms of business cards, right? Well here is an attempt to add some extra value to the whole exchange-of-dogeared-cardboard ceremony.

Today’s invention is a handheld labelmaker device which takes in your existing, paper business cards and prints, on the reverse side, a url specific to the meeting you are hosting. This might well allow you to print a personalised note to the recipient or remind them of a good joke someone made in the meeting. (The device might contain a high capacity digital audio recorder. This could make a recording of the meeting and automatically upload the file (or a transcript, if necessary) to the url in question).

The people you have met thus have a reason to pay more attention to your card and to follow up the event by visiting a website (on which you may also choose to present them with other relevant information).

This would allow particiants to edit and agree any meeting note, online. Once agreed by everyone who was present, this could be used as a record of decisions taken and actions arising, without the need for official minute taking and with less scope for subsequent misinterpretation.

It’s a fact that you can hear your own name being whispered, even against the background chatter of a roomful of people.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s really disruptive if a mobile starts ringing suddenly…this is particularly true if you are sitting on a bus or train with people surrounding you who are trying to catch up on sleep.

Today’s invention is an alternative ringtone.

Get someone you trust, eg your mother, to record a short message into your phone: “Patrick, I need to speak to you.” This then becomes your ringtone whenever your mother is identified as the incoming caller by your phone. You can hear her saying your name, even though the volume is turned down really low, thus avoiding the opprobrium of waking everyone else up in the business meeting train.

This of course can be extended to everyone whose number is stored on your mobile.

Handheld tools, everything from a dustpan to a screwdriver are designed for use by both left- and right-handed people. It’s a sad fact of life, though, that everything works better if it’s designed to be held in one’s dominant hand.

Suppliers are understandably reluctant to make everything right-handed, or even to manufacture numbers of products in the ratio of right to left handers within the population.

Today’s invention is a way to allow people to make optimal use of their handedness.

Whenever a new tool is made, it would be supplied with a push-on, flexible rubber handle. This would conform to the geometry of, say, a right hand when holding the implement.

If a purchaser is left handed, he or she simply removes the grip and turns it inside out before pushing it back onto the tool.

The inversion results in a mirror image rubber handle.

If I had paid £300 for a motorcycle helmet (only somebody with a £200-head economises here), I’d be reluctant to put it down on a tarmac forecourt, sopping in diesel and rainwater. Surprisingly that’s what often happens, when I’m enviously watching my two-wheeled counterparts fill their tanks.

Bikes these days often have narrow, dropped handlebars and razor thin seats, which can no longer accommodate a helmet when the rider has to go and pay (having been asked to remove it before entering the shop in order not to scare the counter staff). To preserve the beautiful multicoloured artwork or race replica stripes, the lid is set down on the underside: just right for collecting gravel, moisture etc on the soft edge of the liner/ straps and depositing it down the rider’s neck later.

Instead, I propose another product in the booming motorcycling aftermarket. A small steel plate is attached to the rear of the helmet near the neckline (using some of that thin, double sided adhesive foam). To this, a chemically resistant plastic ‘doughnut’ containing a magnet can be attached.

The doughnut can be ‘stuck’ on the plate in two positions. The first aligns it with the wake on the back of the helmet and reduces drag. The second causes a segment of the doughnut ring to lie beneath the neckline. This allows the helmet to be set down, stably, on any surface, whilst keeping the helmet substantially right-side up (in case helmet removal is unavoidable when it’s raining) and above the floor-level crud.

Product placement is centred on the idea that Tom Cruise’s use of an Apple machine on screen will encourage people to buy one (or feel better about having bought one). Cinema memorabilia, ie selling props used in films, is presumably driven by the same need which people have for glamour -even if only by association.

Today’s invention is a tool to allow people to buy products appearing in digital films.

Many frames in a movie would have the objects within them tagged. Clicking on the screen of a DVD player or laptop would cause the movie to pause and show detailed views of the item for sale, together with the price, options to bid in an auction or even lookalike merchandise versions. Viewers could then actually undertake the transaction before watching the rest of the film.

The tagging itself could be done manually or semiautomatically by image segmentation techniques (By first allowing a test audience to click on items they were interested in buying, a pattern of tag popularity could be developed. Those scenes which were tag-rich could be highlighted with a coloured dot appearing in one corner). It might even be possible to help this process by attaching a machine readable label to many props in a scene, tagging these locations and and then having the labels automatically ‘painted out’ in the final ‘print’.

Now that digital media prices are being forced down (due to the industry-wide failure to invest in security research) this provides both a way to add value to the original purchase and also extra revenue streams at different points in the value chain.