Learn how to flip an omelette (no mess!)

If you’ve ever made an omelette, you know you’ve tried out and failed; the flashy omelette flip. And though you’d love to learn to do it, the fear of failure holds you back from trying to acquire this skill. Or rather, the fear of an egg-splat. Omelette flipping has a particularly messy learning curve…

Well I’ve thought of a solution that would make master omeletteers out of all of us: a fake, flexible, silicon/rubber omelette. The same size and weight as a regular
omelette, and available in assorted colours (so you can have your green eggs and ham). I haven’t thought of a way to simulate the omelette breaking though, but it shouldn’t be too hard to develop some delicate finesse when the threat of an eggsplosion is removed.

A REAL surprise birthday…

… would be if the person being surprised had no idea it was theirbirthday. What if once a year, friends and family conspired and chose a completely random day on which to celebrate a particular person? Gifts ‘n all!  Or everyone could put their heads (and resources) together to get that person a single gift that they have either been needing or wanting for a while. Does this sort of birthday appeal to you?

Smart traffic lights

The entrance to the supermarket does not alternate between being open for 5 minutes and being closed for the next 5, it opens on demand as you step on a pressure sensitive pad in front of it. Although infrastructural costs may be high, I think we should apply a similar sort of concept to our roads.

How often is it that you find yourself waiting at a red light with not another car in sight? This is not only a waste of your time, but a waste of fuel. If traffic lights were smart, they would be sensitive to the environment and adjust accordingly. If there was something like an infrared beam to detect the presence of a vehicle, you could be on your way without delay. During peak hour traffic it would make more sense to use timers, but in quieter areas or just at quieter times of the day, it would be great to have a more flexible system kick in.

Of course you could go beyond simple co-ordination of  ”red for you, green for me because I got here first.” What if the robot (what we call traffic lights here in South Africa) knew that you were coming before you had stopped, so that you wouldn’t have to stop at all? You would need more sensors then, but traffic would run so much more smoothly. In fact I’m pretty sure that in many places, a system like this would stop traffic before it happened.

Students: You need a pillow back-pack!

You’re tired. You’ve just done 5 straight hours of lectures, and you finally have that golden 1 hour gap to yourself. Are you gonna review the ground you’ve just covered in class? Read the prescribed section of your textbook? Hell no! You’re gonna take a nap on the lovely green grass, with your backpack as a pillow. It’s very common to see students passed out all over university campuses in this way, so I think I speak for all students when I say: We need a backpack with a little extra padding, designed for the between-lecture time-out! Not only would it make the grass nap a whole lot more comfortable, it would also improve carrying comfort.

Ok, so this idea is more playful than it is serious, but tell me what you think nonetheless.

Fun game idea (can you name it?)

You are in an empty, square room with wall widths of about 4 meters. In front of you a blank white wall, and behind you a projector. Beside you is a basket of tennis balls (or any balls you like). The wall will serve as your screen, and the projector will be providing you with your targets. It will beam between one and ten “light spots” that will shoot across the wall in random directions and at varying speeds, which will continuously bounce around until you nail them with a ball. It’s really that simple. There is no doubt it would be fun (imagine this as a multiplayer game!) but there are questions about the execution. Could an Xbox Kinect-like eye track the spots, and detect whether or not you hit them? But that is a detail that I’m sure could easily be resolved. To make things interesting: Make the room completely dark, with no light source except the “light spots” that are projected! Even more interesting: Bonus points could be earned by hitting smaller or faster-moving spots that are colored differently. Wouldn’t this be fun though if it was the “no-work room?”

The No-work room, for workplaces

90 % of stress is work-related. Stress, as we know, is not a nice thing to experience, and long-term stress is well-documented to cause significant health problems. Why do workplaces do so little to address the problem? Is it really more profitable to have workers running on hamster wheels? Most certainly not. Happy workers are productive workers, but a great many workers are not happy.

Shouldn’t all employees have a space where they can just chill for a minute or two? Possibly ease tensions a little and rejuvenate tired minds? I’m of the opinion that constant immersion in the workplace does not benefit anybody. Employees are never going to achieve maximum productivity if they are strapped to their chairs all day, and besides, it’s simply not healthy. In fact, the best way to pormote tensions and frustration at work is to cage a few people up in an office and keep them there for a day. Balance, as always, is vitally important. People need space(which they usually can’t find at work), and they need some way to offload the stress accumulated during the day so that they don’t bottle up negativity.

So why is it so rare to find a workplace with a space specifically designed to promote balance for employees? Each and every workplace that employs 10 people or more should have one or more rooms that satisfies the following  employee needs:

The need for FUN: Workers do not cease to be human beings just because there is a job that needs to be done. They need to be stimulated and engaged somehow, whether or not their actual work provides that. Table soccer, ping pong, or even just a shooting hoops are all great ways for workers to unwind. If regulated, there is no reason at all that “work hard, play hard” shouldn’t happen at the same place.

The need for exercise: Sitting behind a desk for hours on end is bad for your circulation, your back, your waistline, and your eyes (computer screens). Employees should have access to a cardio exercise machines like a treadmill or an exercise bike, and work performance will instantly improve. An allowance of 25 minutes a day (to be spread evenly throughout the day) should be adequate.

The need for space: Put 2 or more people together for any extended length of time, and conflict inevitably arises (even amongst best friends). The antidote to this couldn’t be simpler: separate the people. When in a conflict situation, it makes a world of difference if you have a moment to be on your own and cool off.

So three important features of the No-work room are: one multiplayer and one player game, a comfortable couch, and a cardio exercise machine. As simple as that. In the next post, I will go into more detail about what some of the features of the features of the room.

Web Browsing needs to EVOLVE!

I’m what you might call a power web-browser. When me and the web get together, we really get along (I’m talking 7 browser pages open at once, minimum). My problem is that my browser experience is generally quite clumsy and inefficient, which is mainly the fault of the software. No one browser has everything I need. Opera has the nifty “speed dial” function, and is quite heavy on extra features, so you can have your favorite sites as large icons on a grid menu for quick access; Google Chrome is slim and light, generally not taxing the user’s RAM or patience too much; and Internet Explorer is simply old faithful (seems to work when other browsers fail me). But even combining all the plus points from these browsers does not give me a browser that does everything I want it to. No, the way we browse is going to change significantly, because, as big as the internet is, it’s going to get MUCH bigger. And when it gets bigger, people are going to demand more from their web browsers as they begin use the web more and more extensively.

Am I the only one who complains about how tiny the “home”, “favorites”, and “stop page load” buttons are? They are everything they should not be. Positioned discreetly in a corner, and not quick click friendly at all, they make heavy surfing a pain. And what about opening a new tab? Why do we still have to navigate to the “E” icon on the taskbar, right-click on it, and then select the option from the little pop-up menu to open a new page? Shouldn’t we be able to do this in a single click? I foresee three main ways that web browsing will evolve to accommodate the data-hungry hordes (and the horde is growing):

Screens will get bigger, a lot bigger. In fact, when it comes to surfing, we will most probably ditch the traditional PC screen altogether, opting instead to enlist the services of our big-screen televisions for our cyber purposes. More inches in screen size would give us a brand new playground for innovative new features. Browser add-ons (you know, like specialized search bars) will finally have their very own stage. In other words, they won’t be competing for precious space with the webpage you’re viewing,  as they are currently forced to do. Oh, and you won’t have to do half the clicking to access your extra functions either (and the normal ones). Don’t believe me? Take a look at your flatscreen TV, and then take a look at your laptop/PC screen. Now glance back at the TV and mentally subtract the size of your PC screen from the TV screen. Take the space that your PC screen just ate up, and multiply it by two. How much space left on the TV screen now? Still plenty. And that space will all be devoted to streamlining your internet experience. You can have add-ons galore. You can have a mini-window just for simple Google searches when you want a quick answer to something. What about a Facebook notifications corner? You can have a row of large, pretty icons allowing you to quickly dart into your favourite websites without first having to open a ”favorites” menu. And why not throw in the option to have multiple pages visible at the same time? You can drag your mouse pointer off of one page, and straight into the next one. Our computer screens will look very different when we have more screen to play with. We will divide the screen space into a series of little boxes according to our needs, instead of having a single page or task hog all of the screen at once.

Touch functionality is coming to PC. There are televisions and PCs that have already reached this milestone, but only baby steps have been taken as yet (how many of your friends have a touch TV in their living room?). The iPad has kicked off the revolution, but the revolution will still hit bigger-screened devices with its full force. TVs will eventually serve both the couch potato and the workaholic. They are going to become the ultimate multi-tasking stations. For the simple reason that sometimes you want to do a quick Google search while reading some article, and you want to be able to see the answer without leaving your article to open a whole new page. Toggling is just no good. Precious time is wasted when you are constantly jumping backwards and forwards to try to stitch together relevant information from different web pages (ask any student who’s done a big research project). Touch screen tech will also greatly alleviate the problem of limited screen real estate by enabling gestures. No more menus to navigate in order to find the action you want to execute, just smart screens that know exactly what you want by the patterns you draw with your fingers. We’ve seen this on the iPad, why have we not yet seen it on any productivity-centric computer device? Wouldn’t it be a pleasure to actually touch the little task boxes I spoke about in the previous point and jostle them around with a finger? And just imagine if you could resize your boxes as you needed to by pinching the corners of the box together.  If you prefer to use a visible menu instead of touch gestures, why couldn’t we use a slide-out menu that you “drag” out by touch?  The Android and Apple smartphone platforms are constantly integrating this sort of functionality to make their interfaces smarter and more user friendly, which is why so many people are buying smartphones.

A Web-Controller. PlayStation has one, and so should web-surfing. There is a very good reason that many gamers prefer their handheld controllers to the mouse and keyboard of computer gaming: the controller is designed optimally for a single purpose.  A web controller will take all the important buttons off of the screen and onto an uncrowded and intuitive keypad (buttons like Home, Favorites, Stop Page Load, Reload Page, and Open New Tab), much like the PlayStation. In the past we would only pop onto the internet to view two or three pages in a session. Some people would use the internet solely for e-mail. Back then, having a web-controller would be a lot like having an rice cooker: pointless (no offense meant to the rice-cooker, but a standard microwave filled this job vacancy long ago ). It’s not like that anymore. The web is not optional. It does not fulfill just a single task. It is all but omnipotent, so it’s high time it had its own controller. Bonus: Make the controller motion sensitive and add even more options. By now my creativity centre is working overtime: I’m seeing multipurpose controllers that will work for gaming consoles as well as computers. I’m even seeing buttons that light up differently to match the task they’ll be used for. But the rest of the imagining I must leave to my readers! So please create doodles of your ideal concept controllers! Where would the buttons be? What shape would the controller be? Will it be like a remote or like a PlayStation controller?

20T Museum Update 1!

Over at the New Ideas Blog, Steve Gillman has been very gracious to do a little write-up of my fledgling blog. What’s more, he’s offered me some fantastic suggestions for my “20T museum.”

He’s struck gold with his “anonymous day” idea, where he writes:

“Apart from the appeal to artists, there is something else that makes this an interesting plan. It is that we would see which “art” is truly appreciated by the public and which is not. In fact, it might be fun for the museum to have an “unknown artist” day, when the paintings are not labeled, and the artists signatures covered. Throw in some decent amateur paintings and we could see if the masters are really enjoyed that much more by viewers, or if the name is a big part of what brings them in.”

The idea fascinates me. Why could we not have an “anonymous month”,  for the sake of argument? It adds an extra dimension of fun to an already fun museum, ‘cos now the public has to play a guessing game. Thoughts? Additions? Comment!

App Idea: Ads Now

“Augmented reality” is a big deal right now. If you own an Android or Apple smartphone, chances are you have a useful little app called “Layar.” But in case you’ve never heard about augmented reality (shame on you, you un-techie!), Pocket-lint.com describes it thusly: it is the super-imposing of computer generated content over a live view of the world. It is quite literally the practice of enhancing what’s already around us.” Apps like Layar allow you to point your smartphone camera at a well-known city-scape, for example, and within moments receive detailed  information about where you are. Or if you like, you can scan your camera over an ad for a music concert and be offered the option to buy tickets online. Layar also hooks up with your GPS and compass, so you can literally point your phone where you’d like to go, and find out what’s there (or you could just see whatever is in your radius). You can imagine how useful this app is for a traveller.

The technology is already there, now what I would like to see is more widespread application of the idea. Layar is a super marketing tool for businesses (including restaurants, clubs, clothing retailers, and even gas stations), but it is limited by geography. You can’t show up on someone’s Layar unless you’re already in the area. But my suggestion is that apps like Layar provide a portable ad service for say, Luigi’s Pizza and Pasta. It’s really the same thing as Layar,  just made mobile. Instead of waiting for the customers to come to you to see your Layar listing, they would see your Layar listing wherever you go, so you’re taking the ad to them.  But business advertising is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m thinking a lot bigger than Luigi and his linguini. I’m thinking a public advertising platform. We all know that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Everyone has junk to sell, but finding a taker is often a problem. It is in fact one of the oldest problems that entrepeneurs have had to face. There is no doubt that a buyer is out there somewhere, but how do we connect buyer and seller? 

Let’s say you fancy yourself a fancy DSLR camera, and you’d like to sell your old compact digital. You could go online and post a classified advertisement, and then watch your ad get jostled into the lonely dark corner that is ads-page 23. It could be weeks, even months before you manage to sell it.  Or you could create a mobile classified ad that notifies any wireless device within a 20 metre radius of you that you are selling a camera (the app must be installed on the other devices, obviously. Now put yourself in the shoes of a buyer. You want a nifty little point-and-shoot camera to snap your shots, nothing fancy. So you post a mobile ad in the Photography section of the Ads Now app, and you’re off. Every second you spend in public is more coverage for your ad, and a greater chance you’ll bump into someone who has what you want. Spam won’t be a problem either, since you’ll simply set your app to notify you of ads that match your specification (“Only notify me of Photography and electronics ads”).

The reason this is so great is that everyone has something to sell. Think about it. A grad student may have some old textbooks to sell. An amateur artist may have a pretty painting or two that he would like taken off him. A young mom may have a pram that her infant has just outgrown. Ads Now connects them all to a buyer. On more than one occassion I’ve run into someone completely by chance who just happened to have the expertise that I needed. It makes me wonder how many times the guy browsing right next to me in a store has actually had the very thing I needed. These sort of coincidences must happen all the time, but only very rarely does one actually become aware that the guy perusing the t-shirt rails next to you has exactly what you want.

Why this app is reeally great: when you hear your little Ads Now alert tone going off to tell you your ad has a response, that must mean that the person you’re looking for is right in your vicinity. No time need be wasted in contacting your buyer/seller and arranging a meeting place, both of you are already there! And since you ran into the Johnny that has that laptop you want while you were surfing the local mall, chances are that Johnny doesn’t live too far away. Buyer and seller, harmoniously united!

Fun feature: If 2 ads harmonize (that is, a seller has what the buyer wants), an instant chat box opens so that they can meet up. You could for example tell Johnny, “I’m the guy with the red shirt standing in front of the bookstore entrance.”

So readers, what features would you add to this app? How can you expand the functionality of Ads Now. please leave comments!

The 20-Token Art Museum

Yes, it seems I’m thinking a lot about art lately. Well, my newest idea is similar to my post about the “Open Gallery” in the sense that it’s all about making the public part of the art. I’m visualising a cross-breed between an art museum and an art gallery. Basically, a museum where artists can actually earn from every positive response that their art illicits. When I was visiting various art museums during my travels in Europe, I noticed that all of the museums were lacking something very important. Interactivity. The focus is entirely upon the art, and visitors to the museums can be no more than spectators.

Museums are moving forward though. The use of audio-guides, for example, is at last becoming widespread, allowing visitors to press a button for the information they actually want. Many museums are now also offering touch panels for visitors to play on and learn through as well. The Science Museum in London is a great example. It has many interesting little consoles that invites visitors to take control of the learning experience. One fascinating exhibit informs you that you will be creating the art, and tells you to hold up your cellphone camera to a curved screen that’s covered in “unlit” LED lights. Except that once you’ve pulled out your cellphone, you see bright blue text running across the screen. Absolutely fascinating. But sadly, I did not find that same sort of experience in any art museums while I was travelling. Even the Tate Modern was something of a letdown! What I’m looking for is an art museum where the opinions of the visitors actually affect what art the museum displays, and artists are rewarded for positive impressions on people who view their paintings. How could this be achieved?

What if each painting/sculpture had a simple coin box beside it? Not for real coins, but for receiving plastic tokens that visitors would buy as they enter the museum. All the art in this museum would be organized strictly by category, and no category would contain more than 20 pieces. The visitor decides which categories he/she wants to visit and pays a flexible ticket price that will depend on how many rooms the he/she will be visiting. The rules are basic: you have 20 tokens to spend in each room, the tokens must be shared among the 20 works of art as you see fit, and you may spend no more or no less than 20 tokens in each room. You could choose to give one token to each piece, or 20 tokens to a single piece.

So why limit the tokens one can give in any particular room? Well, art is very subjective. Some people enjoy art that is pleasing to the eye, others enjoy art that conveys an abstract concept well. By placing the same art in categories, art lovers can only compare apples with apples. If you put the bright yellow ”Sunflower” acrylic next to a sombre grey abstract piece that is meant to represent depression, the sunflower is going to take 18 out of 20 coins, because most people will only give less vibrant pieces a passing glance without trying to understand them. But put 2 paintings that are both trying to capture depression visually side-by-side, and the game is fair.

How would you enforce this rule? By only giving visitors their coins once they are in a room. Visitors would be given little buckets after buying their tickets, and they could collect their tokens from a token dispenser once inside the room (of course the ticket they’ve bought will limit how many rooms they’re allowed to enter). No strict surveillance is necessary, just a couple of guys manning the entrances to make sure that buckets are empty when they come in and empty when they go out. Most museums have these guys in there anyway just to keep an eye on things.

Dynamism is key for the 20T museum. All categories must be cleared of their art on a monthly basis by converting the category rooms into auction rooms (categories must also be refreshed). All paintings in the room, save one, will be sold (how’s that for a fun museum that involves the public?) The lone unsold painting will be the one that has earned the most tokens( or “votes”) from visitors in that month. This painting will then be moved to the Elite Gallery and given a detailed info-plaque about the artist, his/her inspiration, and an analysis (done by the “resident” art critics of the museum) of what makes the painting great (why they think the public voted for it.) The public can then repeat the voting process with the 20 paintings that have made it into the Elite Gallery, and thanks to the write-up that will be done for each painting, will able to decide fairly which Elite painting outshines the other Elites (by considering the context that the artworks won in, it’s still possible to compare apples with apples).

At month’s end, all tokens will be counted up and the artists remunerated according to how much buzz their creations have generated. But it is actually the public and not the museum that is paying them, since visitors are paying per room that they visit, and not just a standard entrance fee (of course they won’t have 20 different tickets for each of the 20 different rooms, the number of rooms they’re permitted to enter will be printed on the ticket). The museum will keep a commission of what the artist has earned, and reward him/her with a spot in the Elite Gallery plus a chance to earn more from the higher ticket price that art-lovers have to pay to enter this Gallery (oh, plus a title that will fetch the art a higher price). The museum wins, the public wins, and the art contributor wins. WIN WIN WIN situation.

To make things really interesting, there could be a few of these museums placed all over the country, and with a single Grand 20T Museum to collect the Elite of the Elite artworks (not unlike the Open Gallery I wrote about in another post). At this museum viewers could vote to immortalise artworks in the permanent gallery. Artworks that don’t make the final hurdle will be snapped up quickly by big-paying art connoisseurs. I can just hear the proud owner of a private collection boating about one of his paintings, “It’s an April 2013 Elite Gallery winner, and a Grand Gallery finalist.”

One question that comes up frequently among art-viewers is, “But is it really art?” No painting can ever be objectively called ”ugly” or “un-art” so long as there is one person who finds some sort of beauty in it. But surely an artwork can only be considered great if the majority can find something to relate to in it. Although we will never be able to say “That is bad art,” the 20T museum will most certainly allow us to say “That is very good art,” and to see whether it’s true or not.