Over the holiday season, in conversations with friends and family, it became apparent that some smart person in the world needs to invent two useful gadgets. Both are guaranteed best sellers based on in-depth discussions.
For a long time, syndicated newspaper columnist Dave Barry would test new products with his tongue firmly planted in cheek. He’d find weird, useless, comical devices, then brilliantly rip them apart and poke fun at them. He may still do this for all I know, but I don’t see the column in our local paper, which gives you the assumption he’s retired it.
This end-of-year (EOY) roundup is different. We really want to see these products produced. They fill a void. They improve lives.
The first is an app that would program the weather for your entire trip by car. Our family found out the hard way that this is not currently available and paid the price by hitting icy roads that sent cars careening into ditches and down hills for 2+ hours until we plotted to get off the interstate and take a less direct route where the roads were not slick.
Our travels took us from the Dallas-Ft. Worth (DFW) metro area to Topeka, KS. We checked weather for key cities from our home computer before we left, and from our smart phones as the journey began. It was a tossup on whether to take our normal interstate route or up some two-lane roads that wind through small town America.
The main route showed some rain, and slowly freezing rain and flurries. Not good if that got slippery.
Alternatively, the country-ish path hit tremendous lines of thunderstorms for most of the drive. Massive potential flooding. Not good either. We batted it around in the family, changing our decision 3-4 times before deciding at the last minute to head up our normal route.
If we had the aforementioned app, we could have tracked the whole length of the trip, identifying in real time when bad weather would exactly hit the roads we were traveling. We could possibly have avoided the icy slick stuff, backtracked or identified alternative safer roads. The world needs this new app. Someone please invent it. We need a coder to get it done. Call me.
The second one is even simpler. With several nappers in our group who still maintain land phone lines in our homes, it’s become increasingly irritating to have our sleepy time interrupted repeatedly by Presidential pollsters and people calling to seek donations for causes we don’t believe in.
Yes, we could disconnect our phones, but that would mean going around and unplugging each, then returning after the nap and plugging them back in. Not gonna happen.
We want a switch that you can just turn off when the nap is imminent. As the mindless pro football game grows increasingly boring and our eyelids heavy, we reach for the switch, click the telephone off, put the big cushy pillow over our head and lights out baby! Waking up an hour later, we flip the switch back on, check the score to pretend we know what happened, then head to the bathroom to wipe the drool from the corner of our mouth.
We are refreshed, happy. We can then go out to chop some wood, and hold intelligible conversations the rest of the day, pleasing those around us, too. No more grouches in the house.
An engineer is also required for this product, which is universally applicable to all males every Saturday and Sunday (at a minimum). HUGE market potential.
Share this with your friends. Have them contact me if they can design either one. I’ll gladly test market either one.
For a long time, syndicated newspaper columnist Dave Barry would test new products with his tongue firmly planted in cheek. He’d find weird, useless, comical devices, then brilliantly rip them apart and poke fun at them. He may still do this for all I know, but I don’t see the column in our local paper, which gives you the assumption he’s retired it.
This end-of-year (EOY) roundup is different. We really want to see these products produced. They fill a void. They improve lives.
The first is an app that would program the weather for your entire trip by car. Our family found out the hard way that this is not currently available and paid the price by hitting icy roads that sent cars careening into ditches and down hills for 2+ hours until we plotted to get off the interstate and take a less direct route where the roads were not slick.
Our travels took us from the Dallas-Ft. Worth (DFW) metro area to Topeka, KS. We checked weather for key cities from our home computer before we left, and from our smart phones as the journey began. It was a tossup on whether to take our normal interstate route or up some two-lane roads that wind through small town America.
The main route showed some rain, and slowly freezing rain and flurries. Not good if that got slippery.
Alternatively, the country-ish path hit tremendous lines of thunderstorms for most of the drive. Massive potential flooding. Not good either. We batted it around in the family, changing our decision 3-4 times before deciding at the last minute to head up our normal route.
If we had the aforementioned app, we could have tracked the whole length of the trip, identifying in real time when bad weather would exactly hit the roads we were traveling. We could possibly have avoided the icy slick stuff, backtracked or identified alternative safer roads. The world needs this new app. Someone please invent it. We need a coder to get it done. Call me.
The second one is even simpler. With several nappers in our group who still maintain land phone lines in our homes, it’s become increasingly irritating to have our sleepy time interrupted repeatedly by Presidential pollsters and people calling to seek donations for causes we don’t believe in.
Yes, we could disconnect our phones, but that would mean going around and unplugging each, then returning after the nap and plugging them back in. Not gonna happen.
We want a switch that you can just turn off when the nap is imminent. As the mindless pro football game grows increasingly boring and our eyelids heavy, we reach for the switch, click the telephone off, put the big cushy pillow over our head and lights out baby! Waking up an hour later, we flip the switch back on, check the score to pretend we know what happened, then head to the bathroom to wipe the drool from the corner of our mouth.
We are refreshed, happy. We can then go out to chop some wood, and hold intelligible conversations the rest of the day, pleasing those around us, too. No more grouches in the house.
An engineer is also required for this product, which is universally applicable to all males every Saturday and Sunday (at a minimum). HUGE market potential.
Share this with your friends. Have them contact me if they can design either one. I’ll gladly test market either one.