Category Archives: Free Idea Friday

Apps for Healthier Kids – Free Idea Friday

Posted on by
Reply

Check out http://www.appsforhealthykids.com is a contest in part by the First Lady’s Let’s Move It campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.  Since I probably won’t have time to work on it, I thought it might be fun to at least brainstorm ideas for mobile apps for kids (obese kids shouldn’t really be sitting at a computer to get healthy).  I think a good way to address the problem is to teach the kids/parents about how many calories things are.  Here are a handful of ideas:

virtual pet – teach kids about health through a game.  the more the kids feed the pet, the fatter it gets till it gets sick.  have the pet require the kid to move the phone in patterns to give the pet exercise to burn of calories from the food the pet eats.

guilt trip – let the parents enter in how much what’ their feeding their kids.  tell them the life span of their kid if they continued to feed the kid the same thing for X years.

location based gaming -  have the kids enter what they ate – they’re given a total # of calories they’ve consumed for the day.  based on the calories they’ve consumed, the kids need to perform location based tasks that force them to check in at several places in a very short amount of time… leading to some calorie loss.  the fewer calories they eat, the fewer places they need to check in to.

that was fun!  im not sure any of these are actually good ideas or not, but it was fun to brainstorm!  if anyone has comments on them, please leave them in the comments so we can discuss!

Developing New Startup Ideas

Posted on by
Reply

Chris Dixon posts on his blog about sharing ideas to people so that you can work on improving your own selection process.  That was pretty much what I was thinking when I started my Free Idea Friday campaign on this blog.  I’m not sure if other entrepreneurs have this problem, but my mind is always trying to find solutions to problems.  This started in college when a good friend of mine and I wanted to start a business coming out of school.  We tasked ourselves with thinking of one idea a day and bouncing that idea off each other.  Somewhere along the line he lost steam and eventually we stopped talking about it.  However, even though he stopped thinking of ideas, I continued.  Now anytime I have an issue with something, my brain starts to go and I start brainstorming solutions.  At the end of every week, I typically have about 7 – 8 ideas on my iPhone’s notepad and voice recorder.

Some people may think it’s a horrible idea to just give out your ideas, but from what I’ve seen in the last 4 – 5 years, I’ve realized that it’s typically not the idea that matters, but it’s execution.  You may think your idea is great, but it’s the little tweaks and adjustments to the idea through the execution that seems to make the difference.  Mind you, I haven’t had a success yet, so this is just theory.

So please feel free to critique any of my sites, my blogs, or my ideas on Free Idea Friday.  I love talking and thinking about solutions, so any feedback would be great!

Free Idea Friday!!!!

Posted on by
Reply

It’s Free Idea Friday!  So, today’s inspiration is my doctor’s visit this morning.  I thought it’d be fun to “futurize” my visit today.

Check-in:  So my doctor’s office is pretty advanced in that they have a automated call that calls me in the day before to see if I’m still going.  I have a feeling that, it’s probably an arm and a leg for this service.  A much better approach would be an integrated online Internet based appointment service for doctors (and anybody actually), that would hook into Google Health and use Twilio to call the user before the appointment.  It would also be great if it stored all the user’s cc info and knew my – info, so I wouldn’t even have to bother filling out the payment info, and I could just come and go, and I would get auto-billed.

Doctors Info:  I love my doc, but she’s probably overwhelmed and not always aware of everything that’s going on with me.  I’d love an integrated iPad application that would load all my information from Google Health, run some magical AI against it and some collected data of other users, to early warn me of signs of any diseases.

Blood Tests:  I feel like blood tests are the core date measure of my health.  However, it’s near impossible to get a weekly blood test.  So why not offer a service that monitors your blood test by providing a weekly (maybe too much)/ monthly test.  I’d believe that health and data freaks would really be interested to know what is going on in their body on a up-to-date basis.  this integrated with info above may provide some more data points for health analysis.

Urine Tests:  This is probably a little gross, but i wonder if its possible to make toilets smarter, by applying some technology to toilets to allow them to sample/test urine after I go to the bathroom.  Just a thought…

Applications/Integration with Google Health:  I think this is a huge area where we could improve.  Currently there’s no way for me to know what my health situation was, say 7 years ago.  I don’t even remember the doctor that operated on my bad knee, nor can I find out his name with out calling my previous health insurance provider.  There’s also no guarantee that my previous insurance provider has kept that information.  Ideally I’d like to link my health insurance companies with Google Health so that I can always have an up-to-date record of what has happened to me.  If that can’t happen I’d like a service which would intercept all my health data, and log it for me.  This way I’d know what had happened to me, who operated on me, what was going on at the time and what if anything needs to be done in the future.

Boring Doctor’s offices: iPad gaming – based on health questions. iPad’s that you can take to watch videos/read magazines.  Locations based ads that would show up to inform you of sales/free samples of things in the area where doctors could be affiliates and make ad revenue from.

that was fun!  thoughts?  comments?

Free Idea Friday

Posted on by
Reply

Every week I’ll blurt out (really that’s what it is, a blurt) some product ideas I have for a specific technology.  This week it’ll be the iPad.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPad, especially after reading Paul Bucheit’s thoughts on it.  I was pretty excited to hear about the iPad when it was first announced and after reading his thoughts, I’m much more excited about it.  What he says is true, there are no other devices that are lightweight enough to carry around.  Most of the PCs we’ve seen so far to do this have been big fat and really clunky.  I don’t think that the iPad will be a huge success however. I just don’t think many people are thinking about the product for future uses.  I think like Paul has said, most people are comparing the product against current technologies.

Regardless here are a couple of ideas that I came up with this morning:

1)  The first thought that came to my mind was a recipe flipper for when I’m cooking.  I’ve always found it frustrating to have to print out a recipe or carry a book with me into the kitchen.  the book always ends up being in the way or all the way on the other side of the room, and I have to run back and forth to read it.

2)  Student notebook.  I remember in school i had to carry around my notebook, i think kids of the future will most likely be carrying these things.  I think the iPad is a perfect replacement for the notebook as we see it today.

3)  Menus or Order taking devices – take orders, find out who your customers are.  see who is checking into your restaurant via Foursquare/Gowalla.

4)  Sales devices – i think this is most likely where it will have a huge enterprise impact.  most sales reps in the drug industry need to carry around laptops everywhere.  It’s heavy and a pain in the ass to carry around.  This would be their new demo device.

4.5) No more doctors forms – hand out a light weight device that people can fill out medical forms with (or login to Google Health and auto update your form with that)

5)  Here’s a simple product – an iPad upright tray that you stick anywhere (kitchen cabinets so i can scroll through recipes… :) ).  I suspect most people will want to hang their iPad upright and use it as a display of some sort.

I’d love to hear what other ideas people have!

-d