Ideas you've had that someone else has implemented

[Switchgear]

I'm an idea guy, apparently. I've thought of at least 3 things that I now see someone else has done. Here's the main one.

Bidding fee auctions - I took an Artificial Intelligence course in college, back in 2000. The professor got on a tangent one night and started talking about the dollar auction drinking game. Basically, you offer a dollar for auction, starting for 1 cent. The rule is the last 2 bids have to pay, so if someone bids 5 cents and no one else bids, they get the dollar for 5 cents, and the person that bid 4 cents has to pay.

Up until about 80 cents or so, it's easy to get people to bid. "You'll get a dollar, for just x cents". As you get closer to the dollar, they get uneasy, but the person who won't win the dollar starts realizing, "If I win the dollar, I'll still get a few cents". At $1, the person who is winning will break even, but the other person is out 99 cents. However, if they bid $1.01 and win, it just costs them a penny. And so on and so forth. The professor said he'd seen auctions go past $5.

I did some quick math on all of those bids and realized there was a lot of money in the aggregate. It's the classic (x*(x+1))/2 sum. If you get people to bid on something, raising the bid 1 penny at a time and collecting all of the bids, by the time you get to $1.41 you've collected $100. At $3.16, you're at $500.

At $4.47, $1000

At $10.00, $5000

I ran the idea by professors and friends alike, and got blank stares from most. The one professor that really grasped it said "Your math is flawless, but your morality is questionable."

I let it go. Fast forward to the present. There are now quite a few of these sites. I'm currently watching 3 idiots in a bidding war for an XBOX 360 Kinect, retail $419. The bids are at $12.94 and climbing. The site has already raked in $8,378.

I should be the one fleecing those fools. Dammit.

[elkabong82]

I invented a time travel machine. but then future me came back and stole it from me. he keeps doing it every time I try to make a new one.

[Hubbs]

Switch, what if you could make a site that's better than the others?

I may have an idea. PM me and we'll talk. (No, I don't find the morals questionable. Bidders are acting of their own free will. If they lose, they lose. Welcome to an auction.)

[Burgold]

Switch, what if you could make a site that's better than the others?

I may have an idea. PM me and we'll talk. (No, I don't find the morals questionable. Bidders are acting of their own free will. If they lose, they lose. Welcome to an auction.)

I think where it's morally questionable is the scam behind the Mel Brooks' movie "The Producers" effectively bidders are purchasing this item 40 times, yet only one is per sale. Now, it's not as bad as the Producers where they sold three hundred percent of the rights to the show and therefore nobody could get paid off... in this case, there is a winner, but the auction house is killing it.

It sounds like a pretty good scheme actually, slightly evil, but not terribly so. The idea that some of the bidders are going to get nothing, but the risk and the opportunity to "play" is a little sketchy, but not that bad since they know the rules going in.

Per the topic, I've had a few ideas outright stolen.

[AsburySkinsFan]

A DVR radio for your car, got that gem a couple years ago, seems Buick finaly caught on.

Range finding binoculars that prevent sun glare (military application), found them in a Cabela's catalog about a year later.

A couple others that I can't think of right now.

[Larry]

I got the NFL to change their rules about whether a pass is a completion or not.

10 years or so ago, I was watching a Monday Night game. Don't even remember who was playing, but I remember one play.

WR goes deep over the middle. Ball is thrown, high. WR goes up into the air, reaches, reaches, stretches out. Manages to grab the ball in one hand. (MNF showed the play in very slo mo.)

The receiver, in mid air, looks like the Air Jordan logo. Legs spread, arms spread, ball in one outstretched hand. Frozen in mid-leap.

While he's in the air, he gets hit, in the legs, by a safety who's going the other way. His body continues moving one way, but his legs are moving the opposite way. He begins rotating around his center of gravity, as he begins to descend. The ball is still clutched in one, outstretched hand.

He continues rotating, as he descends.

The first thing that touches the ground is the ball, still in his hand. At the moment of "touchdown", the player, still spread out like the Air Jordan logo, is now completely upside down. As he continues to come down, his arm that's holding the ball, bends.

The first part of the player that touches the ground is his helmet. He literally lands head-first on the ground. The ball, still in his hand.

He continues to descend, his full weight now trying to drive his helmet into the turf. He winds up, eventually, landing on his back, the ball still in his hand.

He jumps up. Tosses the ball to the official. And begins jogging back to the huddle.

It's an incomplete pass. Because it's not a catch until his feet come down. And before his feet came down, the ball touched the ground. The fact that it was in his hand at the time is irrelevant.

At the time, NFL.com had a feature on their web page, where you could send a message to the NFL. I wrote them, saying that I thought that receiver's actions displayed incredible athleticism, concentration, and and effort. To grab that ball in the first place, and to hang onto it, one handed, through the hit, and the landing. I said that I thought they should change the rule, so that catches like that should count.

My suggestion was that they should have a rule like baseball's: If he hangs onto the ball, then he had control.

The NFL changed the rule, a year and a half later. If a player hangs on to the ball all the way until he comes to rest on the ground, then he had possession of the ball.

[SnyderShrugged]

I know it sounds morbid, but an idea came to me after my Mom described a horrible hell that she went through when her first husband shot himself (way before I was born), back then, she was forced into cleaning up the mess (blood and brains on wall, gross I know).

My idea was to start a crimescene/suicide cleanup company that made the area look like new. Insurance would pay for the work and I would have to have red bad disposal licensing.

I started learning all I could, did research on equipment, even lined up appointments for getting the proper licenses.

Then we had our forst child and I let it slip.

a few years later, low and behold, there was a biography on some cable channel about a multi million dollar company that did the exact same business.

[Burgold]

That sucks, but on the other hand that business would probably tear your heart apart, SS.

[SnyderShrugged]

That sucks, but on the other hand that business would probably tear your heart apart, SS.

Very true, in fact that was the key inhibitor even before we had kids. My plan was to do it myself over a few years and then have 3-5 man crews afterwards.

[ArmchairRedskin]

I thought that 4 blades on a razor wasn't enough and came up with the idea for 5 blades. You're welcome. I'm now working on the idea of 6 blades. Don't tell anyone, I'm gonna suprise the shaving world.

[Redskins Diehard]

PODS.

Had the idea in the military. Every time we would deploy all the single guys would pack up apartments and move them into storage and then upon return would have to unload the storage unit back into new rental place. It was worth it to save the rent money but required loading and unloading the moving truck twice. I thought that it would be awesome if we could just put it in a conex like we did with the military equipment. I'm not sure when that concept was taken to market but I do know that by the time I was REALLY sick of loading and unloading storage units that I saw PODS show up in North Carolina. They are much more expensive than what my plan would have been. My plan was to essentially charge the same thing as the storage facilities with a one time fee for the convenience of the unit. From what I understand that company charges much more than that.

[Mad Mike]

Back in the 80s, I had an idea for a sci-fi story that had a main character who was supposed to be sort of a next generation Bill Gates meets Einstein who creates something I called atomic particle circuitry. The idea was that since all computing is boiled down to the simple binary idea of a switch being on or off, that the smallest possible circuit would be on the atomic level. Computers would be thousands of times faster and memory more dense. I still have the notebook with the story and my idea somewhere in a box.

A few years latter in 1990 IBM did this:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html

People have been working on the idea ever since:

http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/22/8/084025

Abstract

The scientific and technical challenges involved in building the planar electrical connection of an atomic scale circuit to N electrodes (N > 2) are discussed. The practical, laboratory scale approach explored today to assemble a multi-access atomic scale precision interconnection machine is presented. Depending on the surface electronic properties of the targeted substrates, two types of machines are considered: on moderate surface band gap materials, scanning tunneling microscopy can be combined with scanning electron microscopy to provide an efficient navigation system, while on wide surface band gap materials, atomic force microscopy can be used in conjunction with optical microscopy. The size of the planar part of the circuit should be minimized on moderate band gap surfaces to avoid current leakage, while this requirement does not apply to wide band gap surfaces. These constraints impose different methods of connection, which are thoroughly discussed, in particular regarding the recent progress in single atom and molecule manipulations on a surface.

http://www.intute.ac.uk/hottopics/2010/03/atomic-circuitry-and-quantum-computing/

Working with colleague Thad Walker, Saffman and co-workers have successfully used atoms to create a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, a basic type of circuit that will be an essential element of any quantum computer. They describe details of the work in the journal Physical Review Letters and explain that this is the first demonstration of a quantum gate formed between two uncharged atoms.

Of course they didn't steal my idea and I'm not claiming this makes me some sort of genius. I damn sure don't have the mathematical mind to work out the details of such things. But I'm rather proud of the insight I had as a layman to see where technology would be heading in the future.

[PokerPacker]

Windows 7 was my idea :paranoid:

[Sticksboi05]

I had an idea for a perfume that smelled like the ocean. Calvin Klein stole it.

[EersSkins05]

The Kindle/Ipad is something I'd thought about well before MP3 players were even around. Although I'd thought about it more in terms of a larger, full book-sized piece of equipment which would be used primarily to read newspapers/magazines without having to use paper.

I do have an idea I've had for several years that I think would be really smart to implement someday. Have a production team at concerts that records and immediately burns CDs of the concert you just saw for sale as fans are leaving the arena. To some extent this is already being done (Dave Matthews Band has an online site that distributes live recordings of each concert), but only by bands that are in the Grateful Dead-mold of music-sharing, and certainly not for profit. In an era of illegal downloads killing the profitability of music-making, I'd think this would be an immediate cash influx.

[Chicken Fried]

Injectable sunscreen. Like a flu shot, get it once a year and don't have to deal with runny sunscreen in your eyes. Oh wait, nobody's done that yet. :paranoid:

[Chicken Fried]

The Kindle/Ipad is something I'd thought about well before MP3 players were even around. Although I'd thought about it more in terms of a larger, full book-sized piece of equipment which would be used primarily to read newspapers/magazines without having to use paper.

I do have an idea I've had for several years that I think would be really smart to implement someday. Have a production team at concerts that records and immediately burns CDs of the concert you just saw for sale as fans are leaving the arena. To some extent this is already being done (Dave Matthews Band has an online site that distributes live recordings of each concert), but only by bands that are in the Grateful Dead-mold of music-sharing, and certainly not for profit. In an era of illegal downloads killing the profitability of music-making, I'd think this would be an immediate cash influx.

In all seriousness, that's one of the best ideas I've heard in a while. Don't mind if I do.

[sportjunkie07]

Injectable sunscreen. Like a flu shot, get it once a year and don't have to deal with runny sunscreen in your eyes. Oh wait, nobody's done that yet. :paranoid:

i saw an article in a magazine a couple years ago about futuristic inventions that were being developed. one of them was a pill you could take to give you a tan.. not sure how far they went with that though.