Small Business
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Background: When people go out to restaurants in groups, it can be hard for a waiter to keep their order straight: there might be a dozen people at a table, all with slightly-different (yet easily confused) orders. The Issue: Normally, it’s easy to fix a dish that was given to the wrong person—just swap it…
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Background: One popular animal-training technique is to give the animal (such as the killer whale in Fig. 1) a small reward immediately after it accomplishes a task. Proposal: Strangely, this approach—frequently-dispensed minor rewards—has rarely been attempted for humans. But with the increasing rate of remote work and the implementation of the dystopian surveillance state from…
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The Issue: Commuters often spend an hour or more in traffic every day. There are many chores in life that would be nice to handle in this hour, but it’s hard to (say) visit an optometrist while you’re in a car. Proposal: Until now, that is! This proposal is so simple, you’ll wonder why it…
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Background: Sometimes, office workers who are retired (or unemployed, or even on vacation) miss certain elements of the office environment. Much of this is probably rose-tinted nostalgia, but maybe we can capitalize on it anyway in order to create a valuable service. Proposal: There are three elements to this system, which we will call the…
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Background: One popular method of organizing items that need to be done is the “Kanban board” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board) (e.g. the web site Trello). Conceptually, this resembles a to-do list with categories as columns. Each item to be done a single sticky note (Figure 1). The issue: Unfortunately, it’s often hard to get motivated to do items…
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Background: In many situations, such as political debates, the first day at a new school, or the first day on a job, making a good first impression is extremely important. The issue: Unfortunately, it’s hard for a newcomer to reliably make a great first impression if other people aren’t already predisposed to like them. Proposal:…
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Background: In many cities, there is no substantial funding for public transit. This results in extremely poor service (routes with minimal coverage of the city and few buses). This leads to a “death spiral” where people stop taking the (terrible) public transit, the service gets even worse, and so on. These problems can, in theory,…
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Background: In the post-online-shopping world, there are now nearly innumerable purchasing options for every style of item. If a person wanted to buy a particular style of baseball cap in the pre-Internet world, they would have the following option: Go to a store Purchase one of the, say, 4 or 5 suitable caps that are…
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TITLE: Vastly improve your whale watching tourism business with this new “guaranteed whale appearance” whale jail, A.K.A. the “cetacean cube.” Never disappoint a demanding and entitled tourist again! Background: Tourists in certain countries are willing to pay money to embark on a short boat trip in search of some sort of evidence of whales existing…
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The issue: Sometimes, a college lecture or work presentation goes far over the allotted time (Figure 1). Frequently, the presenter doesn’t even realize that they are over time. One simple way to prevent a presentation from going over time would be to just have the power outlets turn off at exactly the designated end-of-presentation…
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