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 …
they should make it
They Should Make It: Cheap Smartphones, Free Service
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.
Google makes money by selling targeted …
They Should Make It: Big City Tourist Chairlifts
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 by cab, even …
They Should Make It: HP Slate Dual Booting Win7 and WebOS
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 …
They Should Make It: Buy Stuff With a Tollbooth Transponder
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.
I propose that the interconnected network of …
They Should Make It: Netflix for Purses
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 their homes for the sole
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They Should Make It: Google AdWords For Digital Billboards
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?
If you do a search on Google, the ads you see on the right-hand side of the search results pages are AdWords advertisements. People and companies …
They Should Make It: Connected Self Replenishing Refrigerator
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 of certain containers and, when …
They Should Make It: Finger Gun Button For Email Messages
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?
Sometimes we get messages thanking us or maybe saying something like, “Sounds great. We’ll get started right away. Talk
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They Should Make It: Silent Car Horns That Jolt Other Drivers
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.
Why?
For starters, it would make the streets a lot quieter. Let’s face it, most of the time …
They Should Make It: Individual Rotating Dinner Plate
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.
There I was with a plate full of various delicious
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They Should Make It: Online Census Form Submission
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.
This week’s topic was a dead simple …
