Category: Ideas

This is such a great idea it must already be happening and I haven’t seen it yet.  Did you know that it is against the law in California to throw used batteries in the trash?  You are supposed to recycle them.  It makes sense, they contain acid and who knows what else.  But how are we supposed to recycle them?  This idea helps to answer that question and to make it much more easy to recycle.

Battery companies or battery recycling companies could distribute printed ziplock bags.  Maybe to school kids maybe as a handout where batteries are sold.  The bags would have contact information for finding a recycler in your area and would make it convenient to do so.  Here is a mockup:

Some benefits that would accrue to the company that does this first are:

1. Positive publicity, lots of it.
2. Corporate pride for doing the right thing.
3. Enviro stuff to point at to keep the regulators at bay.
4. An advertisement in peoples homes to help increase sales.

I am so green I look like a tree.

This has happened to almost everybody.  You walk into a market or other big store and take a cart.

About ten steps from the door the cart starts to exhibit bad cart behaviors.  Like pulling to the left or a banging wheel or hard to push.  You can go back and change carts or you can just tough it out.  What you can’t do is pull the cart out of the inventory and make sure that no one else has to suffer with it.  Now you can because I have invented the bad cart tag.

This is just an illustration the final product will be made like one of those hospital bracelets that you need tools to remove.  The tags will be available at the checkout register.
Soon a retailer, like Home Depot (this is for illustration purposes only) will implement a bad cart program, shoppers will like always getting a good cart, they will, in the margin, shop more at Home Depot and the increased profits and goodwill will pay for the extremely low cost of the program.
If you know someone who runs a retail store with carts or someone in the tag business please forward them this idea.  They can make some money with this little idea and we can all benefit.
Some people see a problem and complain.  Some people see the opportunity that the problem creates and prosper.

My brother Tom has been staying with us for a few days while on a business trip to Southern California.

Nurit and Tom 

I told him about the idea of a Heavy Machinery Fantasy Camp and he said that something like it already exists in the UK: Diggerland.

Diggerland 

The web site is worth a visit just for the lovely song.  It is run by the heavy equipment manufacturer JCB hopefully as a profit making division.  The question is: does anything like Diggerland exist in the USA?

Here is an idea I’ve been tossing around for years and never did anything with.  I mentioned it to my friend Ken G. a few days ago and he liked it so much he thought I should test it.  So here it is: a one week camp for upper middle class men who have always wanted to drive bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks.

The camp would be near a nice resort and would be modeled on the sports fantasy camps that are quite popular today.  It would have instructors named Al and Bud and lunch would be served in real lunch pails.  Swearing would be encouraged. After receiving instruction everybody would be able to operate all of the equipment.  There might be a simulator for training.

The cost would be high probably in the $3000 per week range but the video you bring home of you operating a Caterpillar D9 would make it worthwhile.  A trip with the guys to fullfill a childhood dream.  More macho than golf, fishing or diving.

If this sounds like a good idea to you send me a comment in the area below.  If it gets enough positive feedback Ken G. or somebody else might run with the idea.

Here is an idea for anyone who has ever rented a vacation home or condominium.

Part of the reason for renting a condo rather than staying at a hotel is so that you can have the convenience and economy of doing some of the cooking. So when you arrive you go to the local market and stock up. It then becomes extremely irritating to have to buy a 16oz bottle of cooking oil or a 12oz ketchup because you know that you will use only a tiny portion of them. Somebody needs to put together and market, in Hawaii, Aspen and places between, a “Condo Condiments Pack.” It would include oil, salt, pepper, ketchup, mayonaise, mustard and something like Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. All in small sizes. The target price would be about ten to twelve dollars. Maybe some rental agents would supply it free as a builder of good will. Maybe someone like Lawry’s would take on the marketing.

Thanks to Cathe D. my barber (hair stylist?) for this idea.

Traffic Congestion is one of the banes of living in modern urban areas.  This idea could help.  I was looking around for a market solution to the problem of congestion on the freeways after spending an hour in bad traffic in the San Fernando Valley last Thursday.  The restricted zone idea used by Singapore and London would not work because the zone that needs restricting is all of the freeways.  Charging to get on the freeway even during congested times would be extremely unpopular and a political non-starter.  But what if we went a different way and distributed ownership rights to freeway access and allowed these rights to be sold on a secondary market.
Imagine that by 2010 all of the automobiles in Southern California had been equipped with a fast pass type transponder.  During that year freeway access rights (FARs) would be distributed to all vehicle owners, business’s with fleets and residents.  About 600 FARs would be given for each car and perhaps a 120 for each non-car owner.  Beginning in January of 2011 one FAR would be deducted from the account of each vehicle each time it went on the freeway.  FARs would be good for one year and would expire.  People who didn’t use all of there FARs could sell them on the secondary market.  New FARs would be issued to the owners of shares each year.  When Caltrans increased road capacity they could sell new rights.  Rights could be transferred from vehicle to vehicle.  When a person stopped driving on the freeway they could sell their FARs.
There are lots of details that need to be worked out and almost everybody will find something that they don’t like about the plan.  But market forces can be used to allocate this scarce resource much better than any other political solution.

Your objections overcome:
What about visitors?  Day, week and month passes could be sold to out of area cars at convenience stores.
What about commercial vehicles?  FARs will not be needed to get on the freeway between 10pm and 6am.  Commercial fleet operators can purchase extra FARS on the secondary market.
Won’t it stop the purchase of new cars?  Not for replacement cars, but it will marginally increase the cost of having more cars on the road.  But without some restrictions driving will become so onerous that car sales will self restrict.
What about poor people?  In this system people without cars will have 10 FARs each month to sell.  People who never go on the freeway will also be able to sell their rights.

No pictures.  The Flickr link to my blog site doesn’t seem to be working at this time.

This idea came to me one morning while I was making a cup of tea.

I though about how Lipton is now advertising the new fancy tea bags made of an open weave material that is heat sealed into a pyramid.  The technology has been around for a number of years in the high-end tea business but now it has gone mainstream.  There is a machinery manufacturer somewhere who just bought a new car.
So then I thought what else could improve the making of a cup of tea?  And I saw the dish that Nurit uses to put her finished (infused?) bag into and I had an epiphany.  What about designing a material that swells up and closes the bag after a few minutes in hot water.  It could be called an “infusion control bag”?  Is it possible? It could make the same strength cup of tea every time and no mess.

The tea marketers who were differentiating themselves with the pyramid bag will now be looking for a new idea so the time is right.

Do you have electric windows in your car?

Do you have electric windows in your house?

Why not?  Perhaps because they are not yet readily available.

This sounds like a business opportunity.  Electric windows in a house would be environmentally sound, save fossil fuel and make life a little bit easier especially for people with disabilities.

Electric windows in a house could be set to open and close based on temperature differences between the indoors and the outdoors saving electricity.  They could be hooked into the air conditioning unit so that the a/c couldn’t turn on until the windows were closed saving even more electricity.  The system could even have a storm override so that the windows would close automatically in bad weather whether anyone is at home or not.  It could all be operated from one switch per room, a whole house master switch or a remote master.  A remote master would allow people with disabilities to open and close windows with relative ease.

After the electric window systems are in mass production the increased cost of installation will be easily paid back by the energy saving on heating and cooling.  The convenience will be a bonus.

Still not a believer: consider that even many inexpensive cars now come with electric windows.  Why, because the cost differential between hand crank windows and electric windows is so low that it barely affects the cost of the car.  The cost in homes will be relatively more because of the cost of wiring but this is a knowable cost in new construction and manageable cost in the replacement window market.  The benefits will be tremendous including helping to fight “global warming”

What about safety?  My newish Acura has windows that go up and down automatically but that stop when they meet resistance.

Who will make this product?  Ideally it would be Pella Windows or one of the other high window manufacturers in cooperation with one of the big utilities like SCE.  In reality it will be a small company that makes high-end windows for rich peoples custom homes.  The design and testing costs will be high but within ten years this will be a multi billion-dollar market in new construction and even more in the replacement market.