Fake productivity.

People don’t have time anymore. If you try to make an appointment, they open their agenda and all you see is coloured blocks taking up all possible time slots up to three weeks in the future. If you try to agree upon a deadline, they sigh and say they don’t know when they can do it. If you’re unlucky, they will try to re-arrange their agenda and three hours later come back that it should be possible now. And still, you can be pretty sure that they will contact you a little later to do the same with your newly stated agreement. These people stress out but only get moving when the deadline has passed. But they’re so nice and kind to assure you that they added your questions or task to their never-ending to do lists.

It’s frustrating, not only for you, it’s also for them. Setting priorities, committing to deadlines, reserving time to handle unexpected things, … It almost seems that these people don’t want to have time. In my opinion, people grew a societal conscious that busy-ness is acceptable and appropriate behaviour… It became a strategy for people that want to feel important but in fact have little self-control and respect.

This kind of fake productivity kills more than you think apart from the fact that it annoys most of us. So let’s help them a bit.

There is a simple life hack that helps people to get their things done. It requires a little planning, some focus and most importantly no excuses. It’s called ‘Eat That Frog’, introduced by Brian Tracy. It focusses on doing stuff and the energy one gets out of it.

• Firstly map what do you want/need to do? Use the important/unimportant metric to set priorities. And most importantly set the hardest task on top (eat that frog first and you will get energy. If you don’t, it will drain you).
• Secondly, make it actionable. What needs to happen to achieve that goal? Do you prefer to take small steps (split up) or a big leap (block enough time) to finish a task at once?
• Thirdly; Set deadlines for everything but don’t overload your planning with this type of work alone. Plan time for varia, relaxation, social connections, …
• And lastly; just do it.

Run it through at the end of every day. In your sleep your mind does halve of the work so it takes less long when actually executing tasks with focus.

It helps if you look at it with three goggles; With the first goggles you focus on the next day solely. With the second one you focus on the next week upto ten days. With the third one, you look at your long term goals and planning.

Feedback is welcome. Feel free to share this with all procrastinators and fake productivity people you know. And if you’re not one, just like it 😉

The stuck-in-the-elevator minibar.

Yesterday a colleague of mine got stuck in the elevator. It’s great there is a phone so you can alarm the dispatching. But it would be even nicer that they can unlock a minibar so the time you spend stuck in an elevator would be nicer…

The one idea per day calendar

The one idea per day calendar has the 335 best ideas of last year’s edition and 30 empty sheets for next edition. #eenideeperdag

Notification scrambler app.

Sometimes you see to much on your phone what you don’t want the people around you to see. For text messages on iphone it’s possible to amend that but for most apps, you don’t control it. The notification scrambling app enables you to define whether you want to see the type of message, the sender and/or not the contents.

Virtualisation of phone numbers.

This idea started out as a Home phone redirect app.I  don’t want to have a home phone anymore but sometimes there are some advantages you can’t ignore. I call for free with my home number but I don’t have a phone to call with it. What would be nice is a home phone number that i can control via a dedicated app. It could turn on when I enter my house, and send me subtle notifications when I’m out of home.

It would be the start for accumulating all your phone numbers. Your office phone, your fax, your skype, your google hangouts, your home phone etc would be centralised in the app and with strict rules you control what number one can access between certain times, locations etc.

App controlled coffee machine.

 

Control the whole coffee machine with a simple smartphone app, whether you want an espresso, a latte or fine grained beans.

The Together Gardening Initiative.

The Together Gardening Initiative is an initiative where gardening tools and machines are bought and stored central so everyone can start gardening without owning the tools needed. Everyone who’s a member of the TGI initiative can rent out these tools for the time they need. Via the convenient app and website, you can check whether the tooling you need is available. That is done with sensors on each tooling. The price for renting out tooling and machines is simple; When it leaves the storage space area, the time starts. When you return the tooling to the storage space, your time stops and gets translated in a digital invoice. By offering the winnings of your gardening efforts to other TGI members, you receive discounts up to the point where you can use the tools and machines for free. This idea is especially thought of in the light of city gardens or social gardening areas but can also be used by people in rural areas who just don’t want to buy stuff that they only use once per year.

ToyDoctor.com

You know that feeling you get as a parent when your child’s toy is broken? Not only the toy itself if broken, but the child’s heart and yours, by consequence, get some cracks too.
Well, this idea is a solution to that. Whether the toy is technological, from pluche, or something else that got broken, you can send it to the toy doctor. An online service where the kind can order a package to send his toy to the toy doctor, who diagnoses, repairs and sends it back, all in complete storytelling mode so the child is offered an online experience around his/her favorite toy.

Coache.rs – Mentoring coaches for a better life/work style.

Coache.rs is a site where you can subscribe to and get personalised coaching techniques recommendations, based on your personal preferences, whether it’s sport, literature, business articles, music, nature walks, games etc. For every program, made after an interview with you, you can reach out to a coach whenever you need to. You get invoiced by the minute you are in speaking with one of the coache.rs facilitators on the website. The programs themselves are free.

Translator mediator app.

Today, I had a pretty nice encounter with two Portuguese sales girls of the Phone House. They didn’t understand me at all. I just wanted a data sim card so I could post a one idea a day. But they wanted to sell me a mifi, a bundle and a sim card. The language barrier made me laugh more than once but I also spend almost halve a hour there.
The Translator Mediator app connects you instantly with professional translators so any question for information and sales answers are quickly understood. After you have called upon the translator mediator service, you receive a full transcript of the original conversation, together with an invoice based on the characters used.

IRACO: International Radio Comparison.

 

When abroad, one looks for the radiostation that matches his or her taste. It’s not always easy because wherever you go, there are like hundreds of radio stations. This website’s goals is to provide you with international/online comparisons of radio stations based on musical tastes.

A range of smart (bluetooth) speakers.

A mobile phone offers playback music but the quality isn’t that great. I was thinking about a range of smart speakers that are integrated in ordinary objects. For instance, a key chain, a watch, glasses. They idea is to offer a listening experience not-through-headphones. It’s better for the ears, certainly compared to the in-ear and all-ear headphones.

Abomob.com & Billsaver.com

Abomob & Billsaver are services to compare and close contracts for services via your mobile/online. These are websites made out a wizard search. You state what you need or want, and you get the ideal service provider solution proposed to you. Imagine you want to change mobile operator; You state what’s most important; network or price. You say how much you voice, sms and data you will need, and the best formule is calculated automatically. By signing up to a service, Abomob or Billsaver gets a acquisition fee from the services who gains a customer through them.

ParkEasy: the social parking community.

It looks parking gets a lot of attention on my blog. This idea is all about helping others to find an easy parking spot. It works a bit like Uber but for future available (parking) space. When you are a member of the ParkEasy community,  you check in your car wherever you park and notify ParkEasy when you will approximately be leaving your parking spot again. Another member of the ParkEasy community that looks for a parking spot in a certain area at a particular time gets notifications of the available ParkEasy spot that become free within a 15 mins timeframe. He can give a heads up that he will be arriving to take your place via the app.

It’s by code of the ParkEasy community that you only give our your parking spot to other members of the community. When the parking spot changes, ParkEasy community members both get rewarded with some transaction points. With those transaction points, you raise your profile within the community. Being a member of ParkEasy will become payable over time and when it is, any valuable member of the community will have raised enough transaction points to prolong their membership for free. The new ones start with a small registration fee to start and gain transaction points.

Innovation Co-working Corners.

Every company that owns or hires an office building has space that isn’t used. I would suggest to offer it a new destination. A co-working space for innovation, Innovation Co-working Corners, I’d call them. The goals is to find people within the firm, extended with freelancers and external consultants, to collaborate on solutions that the company is benefitting from. The idea would be that people from outside the company spend one hour a day to discuss and explore the resident (corporate innovation) co-workers. In return they can use a desk, the wifi, toilet, meeting rooms, … to build or work on their own business. Assuring the influx of new ideas, something nice could come out of these innovation co-working corners.

thebetterscheduler.com

You know those days packed with meetings, work assignments, etc? For me they are a harsh reality.

Any time scheduler/planning tool lacks intelligence. With this idea, I want to create a better scheduler, an intelligent planner that takes into account travel times, previous encounters with the same persons (analytics of the time planned and spent both from my perspective as for the other) and anticipates changes. Planning meetings, or time in general, is something that is theoretically right. Once you start your day, it rarely happens that you can keep up with all your good intentions. Thebetterscheduler is an agenda 2.0, a helpful tool that synchronises reality in real time with your planning, while with an add-on you can track time effectively and invoice accordingly. The better scheduler – plan you life better.

Prison Entrepreneurship Program.

Thugs and thieves are some kind of entrepreneurs. I am a firm believer of people taking the faith in their own hands and creating a future for themselves. That’s why I think it’s not such a bad idea to start prison entrepreneurship programs. Dealers and healers appear to be great salesmen, others have a talent for organising logistics and distribution channels, and some others do miracles with finances… It seems to me that if these people want to get a decent chance in society after they are released and regained freedom, the best way is to take matter into own hands. No job interviews where they will be refused because of their criminal record… As founders of a company, their past doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the things they are going to do. They can prepare and start their business from prison. Maybe a prison VC fund can support this…

Wallpaper printing service.

I come from a family where my granddad and uncle were painters and wallpaper decorators. I helped a summer with one but it wasn’t really for me. I do like collecting nice images and cartoons. So i was thinking of creating a webapp where I could upload image collections into and create an unique wall paper mosaic texture. For the toilet, I would definitely do something with cartoons. For the bedroom, something with black-white erotic pictures. For the hall, something more experimental. For the bathroom, a cloud and sky collage.

Workplace Change Agents.

Workplace Change Agents is a dedicated team of workplace interior designers and change managers who create the perfect working environment for enterprises and startups that reflect the (desired) corporate culture of the company. They do this by entering the firm for a three-six months analysis period and recommend both improvements in the structure, processes and people needed to be more effective and productive using all the current (and state-of-the-art) technologies and best practices. They don’t just deliver, they participate and make things better in close collaboration with the people and always in respect with the current context.

Hyperpersonalised pills platform.

With extreme personalised diagnostics and the current evolutions in e-health, I thought generic drugs don’t make much sense anymore. Or you get to much of a certain substance, or too little. Or it is combined with something someone is allergic too.

My idea is to create a platform in which doctors can create hyperpersonalised pills for patients based solely on the substances the patient needs. The platform offers statistics on the dosages used for treatments so a benchmark is set and can be compared. By making the data anonymous but not the doktors, responsibility is with a new breed of doktors/scientists who perfect drugs to the patient conditions. For fun’s sake, patients can choose the color of the pills.

Underground bottle parking for all kind of vehicles.

 

The idea is to create a bottle parking principle in which you don’t need much space above but only beneath the ground. This bottle parking principle with elevators makes more sense as it saves space and is much safer as the risk on theft and vandalism gets reduced to (almost) zero. It can also be used for bicycles. Imagine the places where you can’t get through anymore because the bike parkings are just so crowded. Another nice advantage is that you never have to look for you bike again.

How would it work?

You go to the ‘Bottled Parking Spot’ entrance, you drive in your vehicle, create a code and your vehicle gets stored to or retreived from the underground.

One headlight car design.

I simply don’t like how cars look like nowadays. The front is plain boring and i was thinking up the design of a car could be so much nice if they didn’t put 2 lightpositions which overlap.

The Wallflowers to the rescue! One Headlight!

What if we could have 1 centralised position with a phare that shines wide. In support you could have the original fog lamps on the original position or lower and two more at the side of the car (a bit like tuned cars) for a better night view of the surroundings. Starting with one light, one could create and design a complete different car and I am pretty sure the outcome will be a lot nicer (except you handle it like the p50, see image…). I don’t know why the logo is more important than the lighting or the total design of the car…

Think different, car manufacturers! Come up with some design innovation in your car designs!

Historic LinkedIn.

A LinkedIn for famous and historical people. I found professional resumes interesting and certainly of people who made a real difference. It’s always cool to found out that one worked in Pizza Hut before founding a company that changed the world, or an actor that did an awfully painful commercial before his big break-through, or that Dave Grohl was in fact a timberman… (not true!) The paths of what people did in their professional lives is gathered in this historic LinkedIn idea.

Elevator motion detector

I saw this movie recently and i found it very amusing. But what I don’t understand is that elevators mostly are in separate hallways and still we need to push a button before it comes to our floor. Just put some detection sensor so it anticipates any person’s presence in front of an elevator with actually ordering one to come down or up and pick me up.

Glass lenses: Extend your brain with video archives.

What if the world you see would be filmed 24/7? What if you could recheck any situation for your own use? That would be totally awesome!

How many times do I want to recheck something. Whether it’s a professional meeting, deal closing, an argument or beautiful personal memory moment.

Every voice is a vote: democracy 2.0

I’m watching House of Cards and I’m really enjoying it. Kevin Spacey is brilliant. The script and story lines are just… they have no mercy at all. I think I enjoy it so much as I tend to believe that I’m not like that. But in reality I might taken over some of the asshole tactics because they just work. Anyway, I use it for the better so don’t shoot me 🙂

Everyone that has an opinion about politics and politicians wants to share their thoughts. Why not directly? Every voice is a vote is the platform, powered by the government where direct democracy gets executed. Everyone can log in with their e-ID and get access to the legislation texts, amendments, reports of parliament, etc. and participate in the discussions.

So everyone is a potential influencer of what society could be. When participating in the discussions, you get a vote. Hence through letting to hear your voice, you get a vote, literally and figuratively spoken.

OEM in-flight entertainment systems

I still don’t understand why in-flight entertainment systems are still so very rubbish. They look like they’ve made in the nineties. The touchscreen doesn’t work nearly as tactile as we are used to nowadays, the games copyright ranged from 2002-2009, so why bother? And for a media server… well, that does it pretty well but the whole system as such is pretty slow.

So what do I expect? That it works like our phones, tablets and computers. That we have a media entertainment center at our fingertips that we can also use to research we’re going to. Multitasking, switching between the different things I want to do: Music, movies, TV, learning opportunities, tourism guides and planners, some games for the kids. I’m not even talking full internet connection. Yet. 🙂 It should be possible to link the devices with your smartphone or tablet so the information is not lost.

How hard can it be to put in a decent tablet in any airplane chair (so I can take it on my lap), have a server streaming and update all apps in one push when in airports? It’s been on my reserve list for my One Idea Per Day project, but it’s so very necessary so here it is.

Create a small OEM ecosystem for in-flight systems that can be reused in cars and busses.

Ask any ‘type of person’ ‘your question’ exchange plugin.

Forums always have been big. It the online enabler for platform communication. I tend to believe that all great things online started out as fora. When it succeeded to build communication and a community around it, the potential was huge. Off course the ask-answer platforms evolved over time. From obscure topical forums over blogs to the Quora‘s of today. I don’t think this idea is revolutionary but could work additionally to the existing question/answers communities with a separate business model.

When you have people with questions, they look for answers. What if you provide answers in case one doesn’t want to search. Or the question is too difficult to be found in the myriad of the web? Any person can just ask their question while paying two cents. Any person that answers the question, and its answer gets approved receives 1ct. One can cash out at 1 euro, use it to post their questions or change them into miles and more.

The challenge is in the profiling of the people so the API will plug into existing networks like LinkedIn. By positioning itself as a plugin (cfr. Disqus), it connects human knowledge and facilitates a human p2p network on top of existing networks and services.

 

Platefinder.com: a reverse restaurant market place.

The concept is really simple. Restaurants share their menu’s and people can use the search of the site to find the exact dish they want to eat. Menu plate finder restaurant website is basically a reverse marketplace for food. So imagine you want a spaghetti bolognaise, lobster or eggs Benedicte, Platefinder tells you where you can go to eat it.

Facade facelift with walldecals for houses.

I don’t know if you know this but Belgium is a country with a lot ugly houses. Throughout the years everyone could do pretty much what he wanted with his house. And even today, this is still a reality where a myriad of styles are being planted at an alarming rate. When seeing all those ugly houses with their ugly facades, also old buildings in decay, i was thinking on how we could improve their sight at low cost.

Facade wall decals could be definitely a great option. I believe house owners, commercial entities and the government could drastically change the outlook of their houses, industrial buildings and even whole parts of a city. A wall decal can be made by anyone. You upload a picture of the house, add the exact measures of your facade and you create you own custom design via the wizard where you choose between existing templates or create one based on pictures you upload yourself. When done, you order the wall stickers in one go.

Wall decals can be placed by people themselves but the site also facilitates a partner network of professionals who are trained facade wall decal contractors. The practical side of things is something to investigate but I believe this is a really well thought out idea that could potentially disrupt the market of house facading.

Trusted animal farms and fokkers portal.

We’re bought three chickens but it was damn hard to find a good place to get them. I also remember researching a lot when we were considering a dog. There is no general portal available where you can find trusted animal farms and fokkers. It would be nice to have a single point of information where you can see who breeds animals and what the experience is with the animals they provide. This combined with an extensive database on the differences between breeds and tools to find the perfect animal match.

A certificate can be gained for the animal farmers when they have receive positive feedback from their clients. The revenue in this business model mostly comes from advertising but an e-shop with animal food and toys compliments the concept.

P-Health service checks your health.

With all those products and services monitoring your health nowadays, people become obsessed with the state of their personal health. P-Health stands for personal health service. It’s a service that aggregates all product and service feeds (health data) you have and use, analyses its reports and gives you feedback on a regular basis. A dedicated team of doctors and coaches is at your disposal to answer any question and makes recommendations to improve your health status. It saves time and buys expertise you don’t have and no tool can ever give. The objective is better health, the goal for P-Health is to make it happen with you in a unique, personal way.

The business model is subscription fee based for the monitoring with personal chats and (training) programs on a consultancy basis.

Enhancing the Oculus Rift experience.

The Oculus company recently got acquired by Facebook, after it was one of the first giant Kickstarter crowdfunding successes. It a genius piece of hardware which opens the world to a whole new reality as a platform. But its main product, the Oculus Rift, is just to trick your eyes. What it lacks is an environment experience for the body. Therefor I hereby invent the Oculus moving mat, a round rubber mat in the form of a disk that works like a tank track but in a 360 degrees kinda way. This moving floor area anticipates your movement in space to enable you to physically participate in a dreamworld, sports game or action drama. At first, it comes with a suit filled with sensors that calculates your distance from the walls so the moving mat knows where you’re heading (or where you should be heading) at what speed, but over time you can equip your dedicated room with camera’s so the suit becomes obsolete.

I can imagine people reserving part of their homes for their escaping ventures in Oculus realities.

SweetWalls: get candy out of the wall.

Two friends of mine started a business ‘Zoet‘, an e-commerce venture in candy with a physical shop. It’s their dream as they both adore sweets and have good teeth 🙂

When I was younger, sweets were offered everywhere in those red candy machines at the exits of supermarkets, in shopping areas and other public places. When I was behaving really well, I could sometimes convince my parents to give me a dime and buy candy or a little, worthless present that they also held.

Today with so many people addicted to sugar, I want to jump right in and establish a chain of walls with high quality sweets pretty much everywhere. I believe that for each fitness a country counts, a sweet tooth wall makes sense. Compare it with croquettes walls in the Netherlands. With some retro branding and the accompanying smell of sweets, this will prove a hit again.

Square plastic bottles and cans.

It’s amazing how much space bottles and cans take up so today’s idea is to reduce the lost space that bottles and cans provide.

Square perfectly fitting bottles and cans uses optimal storage space. At the bottom there is a indent that fits the shoulder of the bottle or the can so the volume space is used for 100% (piling the bottles and cans) both in height as in width.

(Google) Talking Thoughts

Dunno whether Google is the right organisation for this idea but they’re certainly crazy enough to create it and put it in some kind of alpha experiment.

Talking Thoughts is an idea in which everything you say out loud gets recorded so you can make plans, resumés, to do lists, meeting minutes, appointments,… anytime, anywhere, on the go and on purpose, via voice commands (start now, last ten minutes,…). It can be build as an extension of current technologies such as google glass or the smartwatch, or it can be launched as a stand-alone connected device (pin, badge) that seamlessly works with a web service accessible via mobile and desktop.

The goal of Talking Thoughts is to facilitate thoughts into concrete actions by simply expressing them.

A Twitter feature: Read later to specific list functionality

Today, Twitter added a new feature to it great service; four photo’s to one tweet and tagging people (who than get a notification). It was Sofie Geyskens tweet that brought it to my attention and they seems also to be experimenting with a share functionality. But it’s not what I neccesarily want from twitter. The one I miss most is a simple read later to list functionality. I follow a lot of people who are sharing interesting content but I check twitter mostly on the go, meaning I don’t have much attention or time to read these interesting articles they post. Mostly, I favorite interesting content but I never go back to these to check them when I have more time…

The simple add to list functionality could be a fourth icon in the series of reply, retweet and favorite that opens a choice to add it to specific read later list.

So Twitter, follow me in this request, pleeeeaaaasse! 🙂

OpenOn dot com: What can I do now?

It’s a site in which, every service and shop listed its, opening hours define the query you want to execute. You can say what you are looking for, and based on location, date and time, it will give you an extensive list of everything that’s open. You can finetune your findings even further based on thematic categories (sports, kids, gifts, shopping, culture,…), location (travel time included), date and time ranges, etc. A nice extra feature is the planning modus in which you can create (holidays and day)plannings upfront.

iWILLvault.

What happens with your digital self after you die? It’s a very valid question. I have thousands of online services I use(d once) and I have no idea what will happen with those after I die. Therefor an idea that will solve that.

iWILLvault’s goal is to provide a safe haven for your will, all your online identities, services and passwords. In your will, you can state what needs to happen with this after you die. The service needs to be accessed periodically to remain active until the people you assigned your iWILLvault open will receive a message from you in heaven and can read what to do with everything when you’re dead.

An obvious partnership with lastpass or 1password can enlarge the potential of the iWILLvault service. There is a very small fee per month to keep on using the iWILLvault service.

LinkedIn swiping app for recruiters.

Recruitment is big business. I invented a search&find plugin while I was working for Across that gave you the possible results of a combined query and all of its reciprocally relations (instead of direct results). The visual browser was intuitive, lightning fast, and the query was easily adjustable. Wim Deboel connected it through LinkedIn’s API. I would improve it nowadays by creating a B2B swiping app to explore candidates for recruiters to make recruiting a bit more fun:

• Swipe left – keep for further referencing and next.
• Swipe right –  to contact immediately and next. keep for further referencing but not the (job) skills I was looking for immediately.
• Swipe down – keep for further referencing but not the (job) skills I was looking for immediately.
• Swipe up – not to be included in next up queries.

You can find Mindtagger (that’s what it was called) by its (not so new and fresh but) current name Profeshion.

Modular floor furniture.

I was thinking about the Ireland rocks my dad and sister showed me after they had visited some whisky farms. I find it fascinating how erosion got to make this one giant rock shape so beautifully.

This idea is a dedicated furniture concept for Quinze and Milan where one of my palls is currently working. It’s a moving floor structure like the piles of this rock which forms  the furniture you want. The material used should be firm, but soft (like QM Foam?) so it can the furnitures piles can form chairs, tables, sofa’s, a bar,… By rising from the floor, the elementary piles give support to each other.

With a dedicated app you can select what composition the room you want to have. A dining room? A living room? One living area can suddenly be turned in a different setup for multiple purposes. Also for events, a giant cube with top floor compositions is a guaranteed eyecatcher that everyone wants to visit.

I’d like to see this happen… So Bram, what are you waiting for? 😉

 

Programmable paint.

My ‘Glow in the dark’ paint blogpost is one of the most popular on this blog. If you believe in WordPress statistics… But this blogpost will prove to be even better. 😉

Programmable paint is paint that puts a network of sensors on any surface so you can program its color. By adding it wall per wall, you can identify and create collections of programmable wall paint. But it can also be used on furniture. Turning a white rack to funky red and back to black, the possibilities are endless. If you like interior changes, try changing colors. You can use programmable paint pretty passively; program it once and leave if for years. But you can also use one of standard programs that changes the color during the day/night or to its place in the collection. A bit like the works of Pieter Vermeersch who creates emotion and sentiments by coloring rooms, such as I saw at ‘Happy Birthday, Galerie Perrotin’ at Museum Tripostal in Lille some time ago.

So whether you want it a piece of furniture in some bright or just sober color, a wall that behave to your quickly changing interior moods, programmable paint is the way forward.

This programmable paint can also be connected to a mindreader – a device that is connected to your head and transforms brain signals into wall or table colors that can be linked to the emotions you feel. Could be interesting in therapy to faster discover the sentiment of people or when applied in interrogations with suspects.

WebSkinners.com

All those websites we use everyday are not always as nice to look at and to say the least, not so very easy to use. Although not as they could be. The idea of Website Skinners is to set up a website in which people can both add new web designs for common and less common used services. Ideally, websites with great webservices can and will be revamped when people think they’re better than the actual design.

Website skinners offers a website skin  for commons websites and webservices such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. People can choose between different lay-outs, minimal, selected or maximum functionality. Website skinners helps to improve the user interface and user experience of existing services.

Better Mornings coffee machine.

That feeling in the morning when you put on the coffee machine but it lacks beans so you first have to fill it up again. Or the water container needs a refill. Or just then, you have to empty the dripping coffee drops tank. It happens to everyone. These are things I don’t mind doing after having enjoyed some espresso’s, whether it is morning, afternoon or evening but only then.

The Better Mornings espresso machine gives you insight. It’s learning as you use the machine and it hints you when you can do best what, in counts of cups of coffee to optimize your morning ritual. How difficult can it be to add a simple display telling you in how many cups time you have to perform one of the actions you just don’t want to do in the morning?

The intelligent motor helmet.

The intelligent motor helmet is a motorcycle helmet that has an earphone, microphone and a google glass-like visor that you can control with your voice and simple controls at the moto steering wheel. The first app i can think off is a clever GPS that boths combines itineraries planning, itineraries and speeding traps announcements. For the rest, it’s has some entertainment center functionality included (music, social media streams, …). I call it… the iHelmet. 🙂

Elevator Music Video Clip.

I was standing in the elevator towards the floor where I worked and I was singing, well humming in it. I thought immediately this would make a great music video. Both for singer-songwriters but also for bands. The scenario would be really straight-forward and simple. Someone walk in and holds still in front of the elevator. (S)He presses the button for the lift to arrive. (S)He looks around and sees something mixed with shots of the elevator shaft and what (s)he sees. The elevator arrives and (s)he steps in. There is no-one else in it. (S)He presses the top floor and starts wiggling, humming, singing, moving, dancing. It’s a long way and the only way is up. (S)He reaches the top floor, door opens, and the last repeat of the refrain or lyrics are sung well going outside, admiring a view on solitude, a city, a deserted place while walking the outro of the song.

For a traditional popsong, a ballad, an intimate hip hop or any other song this could work.

The eyes collections art project.

It’s been a while since I added an arts idea but it’s a long time favourite of me. I’m really intrigued by the eyes of people and by extension but those of animals. Everyone has different ones and they are always nice to dive into. My idea today is to set up a small portal to enable people to upload images of their and other eyes into and recycle them in various ways; in posters, in wall paper, in packaging, … All eyes are tagged with categories so you can make your own shuffled collections of eyes. Whether you want only gray ones, green ones or cat eyes, a mixture of exotic animals, or by locations, you create your own query and with the outcome you can order new products with these eyes collections.

Why?

• “The best stories are told with the eyes. You just need the patience and have to be willing to listen with your heart.”
• “The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.”
• “The eyes are window to the soul.”
• “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”, said by Plato.
• “My eyes are an ocean in which my dreams are reflected.” ~Anna M. Uhlich
• “There is more than meets the eyes.”

 

 

Collaborative brands shop.

It’s a concept shop. A collaboration between two brands in which products that are created by different brands are being sold. It can be clothing, design, electronics, … Whatever really.

E-commerce window stores.

This idea is a very viable one. The business model is to invest in brick shops in both main shopping streets and upcoming districts and fill them with goods from e-commerce stores. The goal is to create a physical presence for small-knows e-shops, create exchange points to touch, feel and see goods. Online a portal site with these trusted e-shops will be made. It increases the trust in buying online due to the trusted certificate online and physical presence offline.

The money comes from monthly fees these e-shops pay to have a presence on the portal and in these brick and mortar shops. I actually thought about it when I was thinking about the pivoting options for ZOYOKO. But the upfront investment is way too big for me.

Sensorkeys.

With nanosensortechnology, the possibilities are endless. I was pondering whether it could be used in a home or office context and I see an opportunity in creating programmable keys with this technology. If they communicate with doorlocks, you should never use it anymore. Doors would automatically open when you’re near them. In addition to it, you could also have an app for your smartphone in which a control panel displays where your keys are at any moment and what locks are closed and open. In an office context, it could be connected to a time tracking tool and agenda. Any room could be fitted with extra sensors so the keys can also take into account time spend for lunch, toilet visits, smoking breaks, meeting times, etc.

The business model is both in providing the products and creating services around it. The marketing story could be built around convenience and safety.