Top Ideas for January 2019

Photo by Jong Marshes on Unsplash

In 2019, I decided to become an idea machine by writing 10 ideas every day. What I’ve found is that 10 ideas is not as easy as it sounds. Especially early in the morning, when I’ve just woken up and brushed my teeth and I still have the weird crusty stuff in my eye. Especially when I’m gone for the first 3 weeks of January on a trip to India. Especially when I start making excuses in a blog post. Nevertheless, I persevered. Though I did miss a few days with the crazy hectic schedule we had (wedding shopping for my sister 24/7 in Mumbai is not conducive to finding a quiet moment to think), I am proud of myself for sticking with it for the entire month. There were some days that I only wrote one idea. There were some days that I wrote 15 or 20. The output varied, but the spirit stayed strong.

The best part about it was the fact that after a few days, I got excited to write down more ideas because my way of looking at the world had shifted. I started to examine the people around me, empathizing with the manual laborers and the shopkeepers and the stressed businessmen racing down the street. How could some process or technology ease their struggles? What is something that would help them to increase output or increase sales, and thus improve their quality of life? Rather than selfishly thinking of million-dollar ideas that I could create, I started to think about problems that I could solve and people I could help. I found myself writing down solutions to problems and realizing that I could use something similar in my own life, and that maybe me and that roadside shopkeeper in India aren’t really so different fundamentally. The most radical change I found in just one month of writing down 10 ideas a day was that I began to let go of some harder edges of my ego and feel compassion for those who are less fortunate.

That being said, plenty of the ideas were stupid as hell. Or funny. Or plain unrealistic. They spanned everything from music to apps to food to business, and spanned every stage of development from “barely comprehensible” to “I drew a diagram and a business plan for this in the last hour”. To make these easier on your eyes and easier for me to reference later, I will be subdividing them by category.

ART

• A dance concept video to “Remembering Myself” by Stephen that is based on Memento, so I would have aspects of myself tattooed on my body and over the course of the video I would learn who I am
• A dance concept video with mirrors set at all different angles and orientations so you don’t know what’s real and what just a reflection. Can play with the distances to different mirrors, etc.
• An app that knows what your friends are interested in and sends you an interesting video or link that you can instantly share with them with one button — would be good for staying in touch with people. First you would set who your top friends are and the minimum frequency with which you want to keep up with them. Then you would select a friend and it would give you an article to read, video to watch, etc. You would get notifications when the time comes around to contact someone again
• A poetry series where it’s just you talking to yourself in the mirror and the reflection talks back with a different viewpoint. Talk about different topics coming up in your life, struggles, etc.
• A music video for a rap song called “Level Up” where the 3 verses describe different stages of my life. In the video, for each verse, there is a different incarnation of myself, and in the choruses when I say “Level Up”, I evolve like a Pokemon (think of the animation used in the Pokemon games when a Pokemon evolves)
• Create a graffiti tag symbol that promotes peace and unity and take a yearlong trip spreading it all over the world and make a documentary about it (inspiration: Dumbfoundead talking to Korean graffiti artist Yoon Hyup)
• Make your MC name “Masterji” (This is what they call the designers that tailor your clothes at Indian clothing shops and I think it’s the dopest name ever)
• Raps done by two rappers where they alternate lines in 2 different languages, but couplets still rhyme
• Make a mashup of “Bold as Love” by Jimi Hendrix and “Tears In Heaven” by Eric Clapton, where after Jimi says “…just ask the axis…” you drop into the intro “Tears” riff. Mashup the rest after
• A concept album based on samples of old Indian religious songs that tells a story of ancient Indian life
• An acoustic version of “Cochise” by Audioslave. I dig the meaning and the vibe but it’s too intense for me.
• Buy an abandoned warehouse and turn it into a thriving film studio for creatives.
• Take a picture of a landscape/cityscape with a lens with a shallow DOF, with 3 different objects in focus. Superimpose these 3 and see what comes out.

TECHNOLOGY/APPS

• A credit card that is tied to your SSN or biometric data so you never have to carry cards around again
• Some kind of force field that stops you from doing anything else in your day until you have exercised — maybe glasses that blind other things out? (Like Black Mirror)
• Gloves that automatically come onto your hands like a second skin and get thicker or thinner based on the temperature
• A navigation system like GPS that uses what you need to buy to navigate you to the right stores in the shortest path, rather than charting your own agenda
• Putting imprints of all 5 sense in a particular city into some kind of machine that would let you experience it all together at once
• An app where the people you’re hanging out with are known at time of purchase (maybe through NFC?) & Venmo requests are automatically sent out when one person pays full tab
• An AI-powered lesson plan generator that scans YouTube video content and tags to create an education plan that makes sense. It could include books, PDFs, websites, etc. from around the web. It would scan top videos and comments to make a free lesson plan based on free videos, but you would pay the service a subscription to create as many lesson plans as you want.
• · A website that has alternative gifts — non-physical gifts like donating to a charity. For people who don’t want thing but have people that want to get them something — Thought: People are always saying things like “Man, I’ve been meaning to try that restaurant” or “I’ve been meaning to learn Spanish”. What if that itself was a gift you could provide someone?
• An app that calculates average “getting-ready” times for people in a house, and then sets alarms on each person’s phone individually for when to start getting ready based on the time of the event
• Shoes that are simply a balm you apply to the bottom of your feet that protects them from cuts and scratches — because walking barefoot sometimes is good
• A small, portable, private soundproof cube that people can use anywhere to meditate/take a rest
• A style of dance paired with some sort of body position detection software that generates music from your moves rather than the other way around
• An app that records a video of you learning to cook from a parent and transcribes it into a recipe. When kids want a recipe book from their parents but there are too many recipes for the parent to write down.
• A mountable, portable wall mirror with two cameras on either side that can record you dancing and people can use 360 video to see you dance
• Rather than standup meetings, have a screen at each employee’s desk that a manager can send tasks to, and the employee clicks it to mark as done — like fast food restaurant screens for people making orders, where it tells them what to make and lets them mark orders complete
• A service that will come clean your dishes once a day for a monthly subscription — or could be like Uber since it only takes like 30 minutes
• A language-learning app that records your phone conversations, transcribes them, then translates them so you know how to say things that you would actually talk about, rather than random animals and objects
• An app where you follow friends/food bloggers, and say you need a restaurant for tonight and get instant recommendations from those people (more trustworthy than Yelp reviews)
• A choose-your-own-adventure podcast app — like Bandersnatch but just audio

HEALTH & WELLNESS

• A portable IV of water that injects you with water at set intervals so you never get dehydrated — you refill your water bottle every so often; why not refill this pack instead?
• A chip that beeps whenever you’ve eaten enough to sustain your body till the next meal, to help curb obesity
• Patches like nicotine patches, but for sugar
• A pharmacy that dispenses OTC medication only in the exact quantity you need (i.e. 4 tablets of Ibuprofen, just like in India) — why do I need 100 Ibuprofen for the headache I have today?
• What if, instead of showering, you just walked into some kind of UV chamber that killed all bacteria instantly?
• Office building that rotate to face the sun so that employees get as much Vitamin D as possible
• Toilet flush buttons on the floor to prevent the spread of bacteria on hands
• Projection technology in mobile phones that would project the screen like a hologram in front of you so you don’t have to bend your neck down to look at your phone (which is very bad for spine). You would keep the device down at your side like the normal way you use your phone — you would just be seeing the screen at eye level.
• Replacing all sugar in US with jaggery so it’s not as processed
• The problem I had with standing desks was not knowing when to switch from standing to sitting and when to walk to relieve knee pain. Maybe provide a timer for this that works by detecting posture/knee strain?
• A sink that auto-sorted dishes into the dishwasher

SOCIAL GOOD

• Spend all the money that would be spent on a fancy wedding and pledge that me and my wife will take a year to volunteer full-time for a cause of our choice instead? Obviously, this would be a mutual decision between me and my wife.
• Find a way to turn produce that has been in the grocery store for an extended period of time into food for the homeless rather than throwing it out — same with restaurants
• A service that visits all chain restaurants as they’re about to close and takes their food away in a refrigerated truck and gives it to homeless shelters, thus removing liability from the companies

STORY IDEAS

• A movie about what would happen to people if the internet was suddenly a paid service — i.e. couldn’t even access it at an internet café without paying the Internet overlords
• A story about what would happen if all babies were assigned husbands/wives at birth and there was no concept of romantic attraction of one’s own volition
• A book called “Box” that’s an allegory for “thinking outside the box”. Most people live in the box and know nothing else. Some people escape and see wondrous things. Plot twist: It’s actually better in the Box.
• The Ramayana — but the animals and humans are role-reversed
• A movie about the heinous, disfiguring crimes that will take place once embeddable tech is common — if your credit cards and financial info are on a chip in your body, people would have to cut it out of you
• A game of assassin that starts out innocently until someone gains access to the group’s Find My Friends and starts actually killing them all
• A movie where the world inside the mirror is an alternate reality, and the people in this world can alter any aspect of the reflection and watch what would happen to that person with that change applied (you act as God to yourself)

FASHION

• Making long jacket-type fancy kurta coats into sports coats

Could you imagine if something like this was sewn into a sports coat? It would be sweet.

• A single shirt that you wear everyday that can change color, patterns, designs, etc. digitally so your wardrobe can always be changing. You can also design your own clothing. Technology that would enable this is being developed.
• A holographic dressing room. You would upload a 3D scan of your body, and brands would have their designs turned to 3D. It would put the clothes on you virtually to show you how clothes would look if you wore them without actually physically trying them on. Revenue: online stores would pay us a small commission on sales for every lead brought in through an affiliate link.
• Go to India for a spell of time and work with local fashion designers, embroiderers, and loom workers to give myself a mini masters in fashion. Use it to gain an understanding of fabrics and colors so that you can create a line of office clothing for men in eccentric ethnic fabrics

FOOD

• An Indian fast casual place like Chipotle that sells only Indian masala sandwiches — tandoori Paneer, Mumbai Masala, etc.
• A natural juice/food shop where everything is served in earthen pots and there is a target at a distance that people throw their pots at once they’re done. A bullseye earns a free drink.
• A service that sends weekly food deliveries from parents to their kids, without having to keep everything in the freezer for so long. Would be especially good for Indian parents who do this anyway.
• Create a business that connects empty nester moms who love to cook with people who want to buy fresh homecooked food, so they have a way of monetizing their work
• Make a dosa maker machine (like a Roti-matic) that uses a crepe maker concept to put the dosa on a pan

DISNEY PUN IDEAS

• A coffee shop called “Mochahontas” that’s Native-American themed. Sell coffee in all the colors of the wind.
• “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” — Theme song/slogan for a sex-change clinic
• A knick-knack shop that’s got “gadgets and gizmos aplenty” like Ariel
• Snow White and the Seven Giants — The Giants are thugs committing crimes with Snow White as the ringleader. Snow White sells cocaine.
• Remix “Umbrella” by Rihanna to be the theme song for “Cinderella” (ella-ella-ella)
• “Frozen 2: Global Warming” — what happens when the world starts melting
• “Beauty and the Yeast” — an educational video for young girls on feminine hygiene
• “Alice’s Underhand” — “Alice in Wonderland” flipped on its head, where Alice is a con woman is stealing from all the other characters
• “Down” — The characters from “Up” following the storyline of “Journey to the Center of the Earth”
• “Peter Man” — Peter Pan finally decides to grow and get a 9–5 office job.

TRAVEL (because I traveled a lot this month)

• What if planes boarded in rows from the side rather than down the center?
• Make planes double decker so people have more leg room — for people on bottom, carry-ons go in the floor. For people on top, they go in the top as normal.
• A forehead pillow that will let you bend forward and fall asleep on a plane using the seat in front of you as a headrest — it could be a circular pillow, with hard case in center for your glasses
• Create carbon-fiber mechanical bird wings for people that would allow individual flight
• Packing cubes that, rather than being zip up and stacked, are simply adjustable compartments that you use to divvy up your suitcase so you can access everything from the top

RANDOM

• Could you find the loyalty centers in the brain of a dog and transfer them to humans?
• What would it be like to live like Jack Reacher or any other literary character with a strange lifestyle for a year? Would I be able to survive with just a toothbrush and trash my clothes daily?
• Get a tattoo of an Om symbol with a trident through it , like a heart with an arrow through it (have the Om say “Om” in the middle like “Mom” just for kicks)
• Create a UI wire-framing system that is an overlay for a notebook. It is a rectangle with a horizontal and vertical bar that can slide across the rectangle so you can draw full-length/any length straight lines that are parallel to the box edges without constantly lifting and replacing a ruler and getting lines crooked

There you go! And that’s not even all of them — those were just some of the better/weirder ideas. Hopefully this wasn’t too overwhelming, and let me know if you have any thoughts about any of the ideas. I’m always down for a good discussion. Stay tuned for more ideas soon!