Mobile service providers don’t really need any clever techniques to encourage the use of their services. There is, nonetheless, a certain amount of interest in providing people with mobile, collaborative, socialisation games. Today’s invention is a new approach.

A group of people register their mobile numbers. When they meet at a designated time, probably in the pub, they all receive a picture message (which might even autodelete after a short time).

Each picture is a different fragment of a larger image. The original has been automatically ‘cut’ into the number of pieces corresponding to the friends in a group. This image might be a message or an image of a landmark. The point is that it’s only retrievable if nearly all the group members are present and if they can work out a way to quickly arrange their mobile screens in order to make the message visible. There is therefore a strong incentive for everyone in a group to turn up and play what amounts to an updated version of ‘twister’.

This might even be used by people in a corporate team building context or by unacquainted patrons of a singles bar.

Once the message has been deciphered, the group could follow instructions in order to win a prize or race against another group receiving the same message. A game might consist of a sequence of such messages with a sizeable prize at the end.

Dripping taps make me mad: both because of their incessant noise and because of the difficulty of cracking open the tap mechanism to fit 5p-worth of replacement rubber washer. Then you strip some threads and it becomes a £200 plumber call-out (cheaper just to sue the tap manufacturer).

When you repeatedly squeeze a rubber washer (especially one in contact with a flow of warm water) it gradually becomes less elastic. This means that people are encouraged to turn the tap further to achieve a seal. Keep this process up and eventually they will graunch an almost inelastic washer between two hard surfaces -and the tap will no longer form a seal. The result will be an incessant drip that you can’t avoid hearing two floors away.

Today’s invention is a mechanical hard stop which prevents a tap being turned closed so far that the washer is compressed more than required to make a seal. It could be supplied as a simple bolt-on attachment to existing taps (although making it aesthetically pleasing might be a challenge).

This would limit the damage that occurs to washers in this context and prolong their working life. The only downside would be that once a leak does eventually begin (due to degradation of the washer material over time, rather than over-compression) there is no way to just close the tap a bit harder using the absurd mechanical advantage most tap designs provide. It’s then simply time to fit a new washer.

Is the secret service really spying on people by encouraging printers to spatter coded yellow dots all over their documents? I must say I find it implausible.

For the determinedly paranoid amongst us, today’s invention provides an answer. Rather than scanning every document you print with a blue light (how’s that going to help exactly?) just arrange for your paperwork to contain lots of extra full stops. These would take the place of every space on a page and be printed in a very low-saturation yellow.

Your identity can thus be protected by the old techique of hiding in plain sight.

Walking along a high-altitude path the other day, clad in about ten layers of thermogorexlactylite, I met a family who had decided to take their kids up the same mountain wearing flipflops and summer dresses.

When you’re standing at the bottom of a big hill, on a beautiful sunny morning, it’s very easy to think that a stroll to the top would be a fun, spur-of-the-moment thing to do for an hour or two. Four hours later, you can easily find yourselves soaked, lost in the mist and with chattering teeth in a wind-chill of -10. The mountain rescue services cost a huge amount to launch -and they may not get to you in time.

Today’s invention is a way to help people to imagine what conditions on the way to the top can be like (I once worked on a naval firefighting simulation project with the aim of making the unimaginable real). This takes the form of an extra portaloo shell (many popular walks supply these facilities at the carpark anyway). This would have an entrance and an exit and be built into a fence so that the only easy way onto the mountain would be via this portal.

On opening the entrance door, showers inside would be activated, together with a powerful fan, in an attempt to create the worst thermal environment experienced on the mountain within, say the last month. Inside it would be kept dark.

Ill-equipped people would thus be made aware of the potential unpleasantness of their impromptu trip and either get correctly kitted -or dissuaded.

Better dissuaded than deceased.

Whenever I try to grab hold of one of those plastic cups at the water cooler, it’s impossible. I mean it’s nigh-on impossible to get just one: about 85% of the time I end up with two or more extracted simultaneously. There is no hygienic way to shove the extras back in the tube from which they’ve just come, of course.

The reason is that these thin, flexible cups are so tightly nested together that air has difficulty flowing in between them when one is being pulled out. This results in a low pressure region between cups that serves to hold them even more tightly together. If you sense this resistance, you are likely to grip the end cup tightly enough to be also holding its internal neighbours and so more than one eventually emerges.

The cost of these cups is only a fraction of a penny each, but we still end up throwing away twice as many as we really need to.

Today’s invention is simply a delivery chute in the form of a gentle curve along the direction in which the cups are fed. The curve has the effect of opening up a gap between adjacent ones and thus allowing air to flow in more freely. One cup at a time can therefore be extracted.

The curved chute could be wrapped around the outer cylindrical surface of the water cooler carbuoy itself, for added stability.