How to improve local food

Make local supermarket and grocery stores sales data available online so that local food managers can access them for a fee. By studying the data on grocery sales from all supermarkets and stores in the area food managers will get a pretty good idea of people's preferences. For example, if your local food deli or restaurant sells pasta you can find out from sales data which types of spaghetti sauce people in your area buy the most. First make sure that you offer them in the menu and then work on improving their taste.

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Store images on a globe

Maybe this is already available... but...I think it would be really cool to have a computer program that stores all your images on a big globe that you can zoom into, just like on Google maps.

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What will bookstores in the future look like?

Despite Amazon, people like to visit bookshops. On a recent class discussion on the future of Amazon, I had the thought of a new bookstore concept that blends Amazon and the traditional bookstore. I was thinking of creating a physical bookstore that sells paperbacks without stacking any of them on its shelves. The shelves will instead stack thousands of kindles with book titles on them. The kindles will look like physical books using 3D holography. When a customer picks a kindle book to browse, the titles of all the books next to it change to become more relevant to the content browsed.

Because there's no physical paper inventory, there are no sections. The customer types a keyword in a little screen and all the titles near him change. It's like browsing online in a physical space. When the customer decides which books to buy, he places the order, pays and laser printers at the back of the store print out the paperback. Books will be less expensive to buy and the experience of a visit to a physical location preserved. The second-hand bookstore will probably not be able to compete and die.

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A (pervert) gadget ring

I just thought of a ring that can be custom-made to contract and tighten in your finger in the same rhythm, timing and intensity as your lover's vagina muscles do. Assuming it's possible to store in memory and replicate vaginal undulations and create the ring, what do you think of it? Is it too pervert a gadget? Will it sell only as a prank-ring? Can it enhance sex drives if worn regularly? In a prank store it can sell under the name 'The Lord of the Rings'. In Tiffanny's it can take a more descriptive name, e.g. 'Tightania' with the word tight alluding to how the mechanism of the ring works :)

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Shoes that store kinetic energy

This thought was posted on Thinkaloo on 6 March 2008 by member bruce

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This is probably a very unrealistic thought. I am posting it in case any ambitious engineers might want to give it a go. Some gyms in California store kinetic energy that is produced when people run on machines or when they lift weights. The energy is then converted into electricity and is re-used or sold. What if the shoes we wear could also store the kinetic energy we produce when we walk or run? We could then convert it into electricity, re-use it at home or sell it