How about if governments tried a system of reverse lotteries as a form of taxation. Instead of everybody paying tax, everybody earning an income should play a monthly lottery. If your number comes up, you should pay all your profits into the government coffers. A centralised computer system can keep track of what is required to keep the budget balanced so will allocate “winning” numbers until each month is paid up.
What if rental car companies could install simple vehicle tracking systems that would keep calculate basic aspects of a client’s driving habits. This could be fed into a simple computer and display a car-ma score on the dashboard. The better you drive and take care of the car, the higher the score. Abuse the car and the score goes down.
This way the company could reward careful drivers with discounts or vouchers and punish bad drivers with a damage excess fee.
The idea could be extended to insurance companies who could calculate their premiums of each client by how good or bad they drive.
Airlines all over the world are working to cut back on what they load onto their airliners in order to save fuel. Lighter loads equals less fuel equals less pain at the pump, what with soaring oil prices. Less cutlery, less cups – every little bit counts.
But nobody is talking about the obvious area of saving. The main cargo bit. The passenger. Obviously passengers are all created equal, even if they are not.
Here’s an idea. How about charging bigger passengers more, but also giving them bigger seats. As somebody who himself is also a plus sized gentleman, and who take up around 2m of altitude, I for one would prefer to have a little more individual space in economy, even if that comes at a price.
Wordle.net could generate amazing covers for real-life books, if the entire text was pasted into its processor.
What if a very simple data visualiser existed that could represent any user created string of data over time?
Anything, really.
Think of it as the wikipedia of graphs. An upload/input field will accept the data and then allow for that string to be searched, selected and viewed to show up on a master graph.
It would get very interesting when seemingly unrelated strings would be visualised together.
Who knows what amazing data people have to share and what interesting things we might learn if we could start drawing comparisons.
Passengers flying long-haul flights are normally requested to fasten their seatbelts over blankets, so that crew can see that they are fastened, in case the aircraft enters turbelence after the passenger has fallen asleep. This is to prevent them from having to wake up anybody to check whether the belt has indeed been fastened.
It would be so much more convenient for the airline and comfortable for the passenger, if seats are fitted with simple illuminators that light up when the belts are fastened. So a visual inspection of the seat will reveal if the belts is fastened under the blanket or not.
The paradigm will be for apps to be created that users pay to use. What if companies could reverse the paradigm and think about apps that they would pay people to use?
Imagine a bus company creating an app for an iPhone-like device where users can give them useful information. A simple application that simply records the user’s location (using the built-in GPS), where they want to go and the time. With these three bits of information, a time, an origination point and a desired destination, the bus company will very quickly get a very good idea of how to improve their routing system.
Plus, the information is always dynamic so the routes can change with the changing needs of a city. This will undoubtedly help commuters, and importantly, help the bus company to cut out wastage and improve profitability.
Taking inspiration from The Age Project, it would be great if a Web service existed where users could upload and describe a service or product. Visiting users could then express what they think such a service would be worth.
The system would then aggregate the valuations and return the mean result which should give the user a sense of what the real value of a proposed item or service is.
This would be particularly useful for new products or services which have to be marketed at a good price point. Naturally for existing products or services, online auctions could provide market values.
