It’s been nearly two and a half years since Willy Yonkers introduced his iPholio concept. It’s a simple idea wherein a touchscreen smartphone—in this case, an iPhone—snaps into a netbook-size chassis right where you’d ordinarily find a trackpad. The phone would act as the computer’s trackpad and would run the phone’s operating system on a [...]
Hear me out, hear me out. I’m not just calling for cheap smartphones and free service because I’m cheap (I am cheap). Rather, I think a company like, oh, let’s use Google as an example, could provide a viable alternative to expensive phones and even more expensive cell phone plans.
I live in Boston. Charlestown, if you’re familiar with the area. The other night I was over in the North End for dinner, which is about a mile or so from my place. The North End is Boston’s preeminent Italian neighborhood and most weekend nights are jam-packed with tourists and locals looking for dinner. Getting [...]
There’s been a lot of hubbub about tablet computing, in general, with most of the criticism for Windows-based tablets stemming from the fact that Windows on a tablet results in an underpowered computing experience with short battery life. So on the flipside of that coin, we’ve got mobile-centric operating systems like Android and WebOS to [...]
The tollbooth transponder that I have on my car’s windshield is slick city, my main man. So slick, in fact, that it makes taking my wallet out of my back pocket to pay for gas, curbside pickup, and fast food seem like the most un-American waste of my very important time in recent memory.
My wife and I live on a somewhat modest income—she’s a teacher, I’m a world-famous blogger—and she still owns well over 1,000 purses. I haven’t counted them all by hand, so my math may be off. Whatever the case, I can only imagine that people in higher economic classes than us have entire rooms in [...]
Digital billboards exist, yes, but why not make some of them connected billboards that anybody could use to run custom advertising campaigns similar to how Google’s AdWords platform works?
The home of the future will be insanely connected–everything talking to everything else. And while I don’t really care if my toaster is able to network with my coffee maker just yet, one of the things that intrigues me the most is the concept of a refrigerator that would be able to sense volume levels [...]
They say that in the interest of email productivity you should never reply to a message unless there’s a direct action that needs to take place. But what happens when you get an email that falls in a gray area?
Okay, so my idea for this week’s They Should Make It column is a system of car horns that, instead of making noise, jolt the driver in front of you with a little buzz that comes from a mechanism built into all cars’ driver’s seats.
This is “They Should Make It.” It’ll appear here every Tuesday and will contain some really mind-bending ideas for products and services that don’t yet exist—but should! You may not agree with my ideas, and that’s okay. It’s not like we’re taking a road trip together or anything.
