What if X-Plane, the FAA approved flight simulator available on Linux, Mac and PC, had built in support for the fantastic online service LiveATC.net [it streams live feeds from air traffic control towers from around the world].

Currently the simulator has random and continuous radio chatter to add to realism of in-cockpit sounds. And for real ATC communication it uses rather plastic voice synthesis.

If users could plug in the feed from the real airport they were flying to in the simulator and be able to control it from within the actual application, they would get a much better sense of realism – especially if the simulator was set to download real weather data from the Web as well.

What is there was a mobile phone application that could help travellers find out if their taxi drivers were cheating? You would simply add your starting point, your destination and then the app would sound an alarm when the chosen route deviates much from the shortest possible route. This would be especially useful to users who are in cities they are unfamiliar with – or where cabbies are known to take you for a ride.

A nice idea for a company that operates in the media industry, is to add file extensions to the business cards of their employees. Almost like academic qualifications, these could show which packages the employee can author media in.

Imagine:

John Wayne – copywriter
.txt .doc

or

Sue Banksy – art director
.psd .ai .idd

and

Clifford Nothnagel – Web designer
.fla .psd .php

What if we could paint augmented reality boxes on sports fields in the way we put sponsor logos on the pitch?

Spectators could use smartphones to get live video content on their devices by just pointing their cameras at the box. This content could include action replays, commercials or even promotions.

A coffeetable book of photography, documenting Hong Kong storefronts could be unique. Hong Kong is the biggest small city in the world, with loads of tiny, interesting little shops, filled with anything from radio-controlled helicopters to turtle-filled fishtanks, standing shoulder to shoulder to compete for attention. Their shopfronts are often complex, tiny and well lit.

Hashtags have proven to be extremely useful in twitter. It has the ability to convert noise to signal in the cacophony of the millions of 140 character packets that fly around the planet everyday.

What if we can spread the same meme and apply hashtags to that other noisy medium: email. If we were disciplined to add hashtags to subject headers, we could make it very easy for recipients to organise and respond to our missives. Perhaps email clients of the future could have built-in capabilities for dealing with hashtags?

Emails with subject headers like “re: hi” are terribly obtuse and confusing. Imagine a world in which your inbox consists of the likes of:

• #approve #project_x #budget
• #party #alex – you are invited
• #fyi #design

etc.

What if you could have a way of turning all those countless little USB thumb drives into a mass, useful storage device?

I’m imagining a wire, similar to fairy lights or a Christmas tree lights, that have a number of USB ports dangling off it. You simply stick a thumb drive into each one and add as you gain more. This way you build a bigger storage device. If you run out of ports, you just add another wire to a spare port.

The downside is you’ll end up with a big bunch of wires, but perhaps, with clever design, it can be pretty and tasteful – and a low cost backup device.

What if trains could disconnect in motion?

Imagine a subway line with x number of stops. Now imagine trains in that line had equal number of cars. Each car was labelled with a different stop on that line, in sequence, with the first stop being the last car.

As the train speeds across the line the cars disconnect from behind in sequence with their own braking system to stop at the stop of their designation.

This means every passenger has only one stop per line greatly speeding up their journey.

What if there was a Web service similar to plusplusbot.com that could collate car registration numbers in the context of good or bad driving. If you spotted a bad driver you can tweet their registration number with x hashtag (possibly including location) and a positive or negative modifier that would then classify that number.

If critical mass is achieved you could have a very useful resource that could help law enforcement in finding bad drivers and encourage good drivers through promotions.

Potentially insurance companies can use this as well to find out if potential clients are good or bad bets.

What businesses could buy sets of meeting candles. They could come in various sizes and be burned to dictate when a meeting should end.