Small Business
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Background: Certain types of vending machines are capable of squeezing oranges and dispensing the freshly-squeezed orange juice right there at the machine. Generally speaking, these machines actually show you the oranges through a transparent window, so you can see the orange-juice-making process. Most of these machines proclaim that you are getting “100% Orange Juice” or…
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Background: Running a business is expensive, and employee wages are usually a huge fraction of total costs (see Figure 1). However, these jobs can’t always be eliminated: many jobs still REQUIRE a human employee, and jobs that require an on-site presence can’t be outsourced. Proposal: Some jobs require an on-site presence and are difficult to…
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The issue: Sometimes, a representative for a company causes a public relations disaster by saying something dumb on camera (Figure 1). Obviously, we’d like to avoid this. But although it’s easy to avoid interview disasters over email (just have a PR department filter the outgoing emails), this doesn’t work for real-time in-person interactions. Proposal: Fortunately,…
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Background: When giving a presentation on a large screen, there are two popular options for calling attention to specific areas of a slide deck: Physically gesture at the screen (or use a laser pointer, as seen in Figure 1). Use the laptop trackpad to move the mouse pointer / arrow around. The issue: The trackpad…
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Background: Do you own a crowded coffee shop? No? Well, you should remedy that, and then read on! The issue: In large cities, coffee shops are often entirely occupied by people doing work on their laptops. Coffee shops have come up with various strategies for dealing with the pros and cons of being a low-cost…
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Background: Famous people and events in history often have some sort of enormous stone monuments to prevent them from being forgotten. The issue: Unfortunately, this is NOT true for once-great companies and products (see example in Figure 1). These are consigned to obscurity, with no physical relics to attest to their existence in history. …
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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Background: Taxis in many cities operate under what is called a “medallion system” (Figure 1), whereby the supply of taxis is limited by a fixed quantity of tokens (“medallions”) that are issued in controlled quantities by the city. Proposal: For some reason, almost nothing else is regulated in this manner. But there are other services…
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Background: On many web sites for automotive parts (e.g. Amazon, AutoZone), you can specify the exact car that you own. Then, the web site will only show results that work with that car (Figure 1). Fig 1: You can specify the details of the cars in your “garage” and will only see car parts that…
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