Art Hunt: Like Product Hunt, but for discovering artistic and creative talent. Musicians, photographers, writers, whatever the case may be. Unique Etsy storefronts would qualify. Ditto for unheralded Instagram accounts, little known blogs, and YouTube accounts deserving of a wider audience. Anyone and everyone with an overactive imagination and an underappreciated talent.
Robot Consumers: Forget about the Information Age. We live in the Information Overload Age. With the barriers to entry having been lowered everyone and their mother is now a content creator. There’s just one problem: if we’re all busy making content who is left to consume it? That’s where robot consumers would come in, automatically liking, sharing, and commenting on our work to help it go viral. A better, more thoughtful version of click farms.
Creative Outlet Malls: What I’m envisioning is a multi-purpose facility specifically designed to cater to the needs of the modern citizen. There would be recording studios so that you could create content for your podcast or YouTube channel. Computers that you can use to write the next great American novel as well as printers and a whole suite of editing and publishing services. Meeting rooms to brainstorm business ideas with your friends. Modular rooms that can be rearranged to fit the needs of any startup. A space for open mic nights and musical performances to give people a platform to show off their talent and art gallery space to give artists and photographers an opportunity to show what they can do.
Nexus Lexis: A museum dedicated to all things literary. A place where you can marvel at Shakespeare’s folios, view beautifully written letters to loved ones from Civil War soldiers, gawk at the work of impressive wordsmiths like famed poet Emily Dickinson and discover the inner dialogue of great thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. There would be entire wings dedicated to Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, and every other genre you can think of. Famous contemporary authors could host book readings and signings. Scholars could host events to discuss the evolution of paper from its humble beginnings in the Far East. There could even be character actors sprinkled throughout the museum, interacting with guests while doing their best Edgar Allen Poe impersonations. Quote the Raven. Nevermore.
Mental Health Fitness Tracker: It could measure your memory capacity, your spatial awareness, your powers of deduction, your reflex time, your tiredness, your general mental aptitude, etc. For instance, imagine using this information to make the potential life-saving decision to not drive home late at night because of warning signs indicating that you would be at risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. Or imagine making the decision to read a book over watching TV because your visual cortex was already dangerously overworked for the day while the logic and reasoning part of your brain wasn’t getting enough attention. Or better yet, imagine studying for a test and finding out when you could stop, because you found out that the memory stores in your brain were filled up and that studying more wouldn’t make any more of a difference.
Pages: Anyone can set up a page and use it to announce to the world what they would want to be “hired” for. Now this isn’t strictly a job platform although you could use this service for that if you really wanted to. Nor is it a dating app, although, once again, if you wanted to use it to find dates you could. Rather the point of Pages would be to find anyone you are looking for. That could be a fill-in for your softball team, a babysitter, someone to go hiking with, or someone to help you move.
For instance, my Pages profile would announce that I’m available for public speaking gigs. Someone else might announce that they’re down to fill in on your bar trivia team or to round out a golfing foursome. Others might broadcast the fact that they are a wedding singer looking for gigs or a photographer looking for work during wedding season.
The Sigmund: What if your diary or journal could write back to you? That’s the premise behind The Sigmund, a new concept for an interactive, AI-infused smart journal, named after the greatest couch therapist of all-time, Sigmund Freud.
Here’s how it would work. Rather than tell off your ex, complain about your co-workers to your spouse, or burden your friends with deep existential thoughts about the meaning of life, you can instead just express yourself within the pages of The Sigmund, the same way that millions of people have interacted with diaries and journals for millennia. But here’s where things get interesting. Instead of just writing on a static page or even in a smart journal capable of transferring your writings to the cloud, you would instead be writing inside of a journal that an AI would be actively scanning. Able to make sense of natural language this AI would take clues from your ruminations and over time serve up advice and recommendations to ease you through your troubling times.
Do Not Disturb Wearable: What if there was a way that we could let people (store clerks, guys hanging out in bars, subway strap-hangers, etc.) know that we didn’t want to be bothered at that moment. A simple on/off wearable would suffice, similar to those buttons used in all you can eat Brazilian steakhouses to let the waiters know if you want to be served or not.
Proximity Alert Wearable: People are oblivious. No one pays attention, watches where they are going, or has any spatial awareness. Wouldn’t it be great then if we invented a wearable device that would beep or somehow let you know when you are too close to someone? Think of it like the sensors that are becoming more and more standard in cars these days that alert you when you are getting close to backing into something or when you are venturing too far outside your lane. If we had those for walking maybe we wouldn’t bump into each other as much.
Social Memory App: A way to quickly and easily keep track of which of your friends share similar interests and who you’ve already told certain things to or discussed certain things with.
PlatformPass: MoviePass for TV platforms. A monthly subscription service (say $20 a month) that will get you limited access to every streaming platform that there is. If you’re a Netflix power user you’d still need to keep your Netflix subscription to ensure that you’ll be able to watch obscure documentaries to your heart’s content. But if you’re not into all that, and you only want to binge watch House of Cards or Orange is the New Black when they come out, then you’d be covered with this cross platform pass that will let you binge watch a limited number of shows per platform per month.
Spacebook: A new take on social media that would be all about learning and self-improvement. Users would be banned from posting about themselves and their daily lives.
Instead the only things that you could post would be items that were either educational or informative. The more thought provoking the better. Book and podcast recommendations. Interesting articles. Self-improvement content. News about cool new products. Conversations would naturally spring up around topics not people. You wouldn’t even have a public wall that people could post on. Instead, you’d have a private dashboard, that only you could see, that would track your progress towards becoming a better person. Monitoring your progress towards meeting your fitness and educational goals while providing you with motivational quotes to help inspire you along the way. I’d call this site Spacebook. A personal space for you to continue your development as a person.
National Park Volunteers: Similar to volunteer firefighters these would be trained “professionals” who can step up in times when there is great need like during natural disasters, government shutdowns, or other crisis. Being on hand to guide visitors, provide medical assistance, alert authorities to any issues, and keep a watchful eye over restricted areas.
Are any of these the Greatest Idea Ever?
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