Ask HN: Idea Sunday

For reference from the past three weeks of Idea Sunday:<p>Last weeks Idea Sunday: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7616910</a><p>2 weeks ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7582077</a><p>3 weeks ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7541601</a><p>Humble recommendation: Maybe we can post these in the original post for people who would be interested?

I&#x27;ve been thinking about the problem of making make people organize their public and semi-public data better.<p>Groups (such as email groups and Facebook groups) and communities need a way to organize and share their data freely, but in a structured way. Also people who have data, or start building some kind of data, in text format, or tabular data, but don&#x27;t know of any other mean, so they build a blog and start posting everything, then it is impossible to make anything useful with the data later. Or maybe they make a spreadsheet and link to it.<p>I&#x27;ve come to 2 solutions:<p>- for the first thing (but also applicable to the second), a structurable database (such as PouchDB) stored in the people&#x27;s browser and communicating with other people from the group via webRTC could build a decentralized database everyone will have. Some things could be made on top of this;<p>- other thing is just a blogging platform that is not only a blogging platform (what I really want is it to not be a blogging platform), but it is also some way to publish static atemporal articles, tree-data, tabular data, hierarchical data etc. Written in javascript, running from the browser and communicating directly with GitHub or some other static hosting service with an API. The person would load the contents with the API then deploy the new contents as a static page. Free blogging, no central servers or providers (except for GitHub, but it could be made to generate HTML hostable anywhere), cool stuff can be attached (even some plugin that will take the data from the first solution and share in the blog&#x2F;page&#x2F;site).

How about a search engine that bases its results on how unique the information is on every one of them.<p>Every time I try to do an in-depth research on Google about some topic I open up 10 or 20 of the most relevant results, only to discover that at least 80% of the information is repeating itself in at least 50-60% of the pages.<p>One could write a search engine that compares the contents, groups the articles that have similar enough contents and only displays one article per group. This could work especially well in the case of longer searches with enough keywords.<p>Obviously, this is not a standalone product that would compete against the established search engines, but it could be built on top of them - a browser extension for example.<p>Any thoughts on this?

Bring back tactile controls.<p>Now that the smartphone innovation has slowed down a little, why not bring back real buttons, wheels etc.? They should be well-designed, precisely engineered and fun to use. I belive mobile gadget design is now awesome enough to make this work.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t mind a scrollwheel, or even real radiobuttons (one button goes in, the other pops up). The exact functionality would still depend on the current application.<p>Since they give real physical feedback they should objectively be superior to the touchscreen-only functions, no?

Terms and Conditions as a service.<p>Most websites have some kind of &quot;terms and conditions&quot;. They all seem to manually implement the whole process of:<p>- coming up with proper T&amp;C<p>- display them to the user<p>- ask the user to agree to them<p>- notify the user that T&amp;C changed<p>- etc.<p>For the user, the experience is just plain bad. I can&#x27;t recall two T&amp;C agreement process that were identical. Sometimes I have to check a box, sometimes I have to press a button. Sometimes I have to scroll to the bottom to be able to click &quot;I agree&quot;. And when I do, I don&#x27;t even get a copy or receipt of what I agreed to.<p>Call me stupid, but I usually never read T&amp;Cs. As far as I know, my soul could now belong to a lot of companies. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m a unique case.<p>What if websites could delegate the T&amp;C agreement process to a third-party service that does just that. This service could help small businesses create their own T&amp;Cs from templates, standardize the agreement process, let users have access to a list of everything they agreed to, and even let people (or lawyers) review T&amp;Cs to make it easier for others to know what they&#x27;re getting into. If a company wants to change their T&amp;C, the service will notify users of these changes, and let them react accordingly.<p>This service could also be extended to more than just website T&amp;Cs, and became a central hub for all your contracts and agreements, from your bank, phone company, rent, job, contract, etc. One place where you can see everything you legally agreed to in your life.

A public protocol and a reference implementation of a social network. The problem is stabilized, it&#x27;s time to do to social networks what SMTP did to email. Open it up to be fully decentralized, where people can host their social hub or use a hosting service, of which there would spring up a multitude.<p>Social networking is nowadays as central to the internet as email, and it is the first such, heavily used, application layer &quot;protocol&quot; that is closed.<p>For a small period of time I had hopes that this would be the path G+ would take to the top. It isn&#x27;t.

Html Tables as a service.<p>For the average Joe, making html tables is such a task. &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt; about a zillion times. Yes I realize that anyone putting a table into html should really be using a database, but again for the average joe, that is too much brain damage, and still too hard.<p>The idea is: Copy excel headers and data into the service, and out pops embeddable html&#x2F;javascript&#x2F;whatever code that the person can embed directly on their site. From the user perspective, they can have one place to keep their table data and have an easy way to embed a table into html from excel.<p>Alternatives: Google Docs embed, zoho creator embed, etc - but these do not integrate directly into the site (ie they cannot inherit css styles from the site) Tableizer - does the conversion of excel cells to html, but does not store the table and data for the user to call at a later date (ie data is static and used once)<p>It is really similar to the <a href="http://myjson.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;myjson.com&#x2F;</a> idea, except its for people who don&#x27;t know what json is.

I have been rethinking all the time when I am working on this (seriously, is this worth it).. Please let me know your suggestions..<p>a site which let&#x27;s you to post what your typical day would be(tday).. the tday can be either in a view of a profession (ex., a typical day of a doctor in San Francisco, a typical day of an cab driver in Japan (location plays a major role of a professional)) or it can be a view of personal one which could be shared with your fb friends..<p>Users can request for a tday for their known people by inviting them to the site via their social networking connections... also, users can request for a tday of a famous person by including their #tags or @name pointers and other users can support that request by upvoting them (obviously most users&#x27; request would be on top).. not only tday, if they can share their most special day, most special week, unforgettable day and other users can upvote them... this lets to know people beyond what is seen from them.. what do you think...

Included this last week, but a bit late so less eyeballs. Hope it&#x27;s ok to repost...<p>Chrono: chronological inventions and academic breakthroughs of mankind as a dependency graph. This is a lingering idea that has been coming back to me a couple times a year over the last decade or so.<p>What if there&#x27;s a kind of semantic wikipedia that is built upon a dependency graph of inventions and academic breakthroughs. What led to the invention of the internet, to nano-tubes, etc? How cool would it be from an education standpoint to be able to jump back in time and see invention upon invention replayed (with backgrounds on how these breakthroughs came to be) up to today. Check out what led to invention X (the galaxy S you&#x27;re reading this on), played back . Or reversely, lookup which inventions were build (transitively) upon the discovery of Y.<p>Socio-economic backgrounds, anecdotes, etc. what led to invention X, and how X was important for Y, etc. An interactive &quot;Short history of nearly everything&quot;

An ifixit[0] like site for repairing your car. I really like the format of ifixit because they give detailed pictures and the tools you will need. A site like this would be great for cars, ranging from just changing oil and tires to possibly harder things.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.ifixit.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;</a><p>EDIT: If you create the site, please let me know. This is not something I can work on right now but if it&#x27;s a wiki like site I&#x27;d love to contribute.

Analytics on all of my application usage, email, chats, texts, twitter and facebook interactions, and map locations. Should provide outputs like Google Now, but run on my own operating system (preferably Linux-based).<p>This (<a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/01/psa-back-up-your-shit/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;psa-back-up-your-shit&#x2F;</a>) should be good jumping off point to get a lot of the stuff. The system should have customisable hooks written in something like Python to write your own &quot;filters&quot;. e.g. &quot;If I&#x27;ve been in emacs for 1 hour straight, pop up a reminder to take an eye break, etc.&quot;<p>Suggestions? Thoughts?

A bookmarking service, that not only saves any &quot;interesting&quot; links that you visit but also saves the data in that link for future search. The service should let you specify topics that you are interested in and will analyze every page you visit (with the exception of blacklisted pages) and put it into the appropriate bucket (topic), for future reference. It should also index the PDFs and word documents that are read by you. In research we consume so much of content. Organizing them effectively becomes as daunting as the research itself at times.

Predictor of successful retail stores:<p>A small retail property recently became available about 2 blocks from me in NYC and, for fun, I began thinking about what kind of stores would do well. I&#x27;d come up with an idea and realize that a similar type of store was just a block or two away. When I thought I&#x27;d come up with a good idea, such as a pet grooming service, I asked the nearby pet store what the traffic was like and apparently it was horrible.<p>Enter predictive analytics. This tool would draw upon publicly available city records of what types of retail stores have been in neighborhoods that I can characterize through publicly available census data. If I could use the length of existence of a rented (not owned) retail shop as a proxy, I could, with X% probability, be able to predict, with probably surprising specificity, what kind of retail store would do well 2 blocks from me. This combines elements of what sort of retail store isn&#x27;t serving that particular area (as an assumed factor of success), what kind of stores have failed in the past in the immediate area, which have been &#x27;successful,&#x27; behavioral patterns of the neighborhood demographic (heck, combine that with social traffic tracked data), etc.<p>Obviously, this discounts the innovation of retailers that adds to a store&#x27;s success, among other factors, but this tool would at least yield an important factor to consider when trying to figure out what store would do well in a particular spot,

A mobile application to assist in the job of house&#x2F;flat hunting.<p>Something that could tie in to RightMove (at least in the UK), access your saved properties, and provide a simple interface to schedule viewings (although I guess this would still have to be a manual process to book viewings, but the app should provide a calendar to store them in).<p>The app could then alert you when the viewing is soon, and provide an interface for you to rate the viewing, add comments and maybe your own photographs to remind you later on, rather than having to scribble notes down on the same piece of paper that becomes home to your chewing gum the next day.<p>On a social front, it would be good to see how many other people were viewing the same property, to gauge the interest, and maybe you would be able to see an overall rating of a property based on what other people that have viewed think about it?<p>House&#x2F;Flat adverts are still relatively useless in the process of finding somewhere suitable, and until you can view and see a property for yourself, it&#x27;s impossible to tell. I think it would be very useful to be able to see ratings and comments from other users, such as &quot;the second bedroom is a lot smaller than the photos show, and the flooring in the bathroom seriously needs replacing!&quot;.<p>It doesn&#x27;t look like there&#x27;s an available API for RightMove at the moment, so I&#x27;m not sure how the integration could happen. Still, a stand-a-lone app could still be a worthwhile idea?

Email service for small business: something companies can use in combination with Box.com &#x2F; Dropbox.com or other cloud storage instead of Google Apps. This is not really idea but more of our need: we started using more Box (and Dropbox) instead of Google Drive but we are stuck with email provided via Google Apps. There is no other service on the market as Google Apps email for small business.<p>(I tried FastMail, Atmail, Rackspace, and none of them is a good alternative).

&quot;Pixel Bar&quot; or a brick and mortar photo&#x2F;print studio for a new generation.<p>Working in the photo industry, things have changed so fast but I still think there&#x27;s value in physical, printed products. I haven&#x27;t worked out the perfect setup but something like:<p>- a small retail location in a high-traffic, high tourism area (think union square in SF or 3rd St in Santa Monica)<p>- &quot;print stations&quot; where people can drop in, connect their phone and get great prints on demand. It looks like an apple store not a crappy kiosk as Walgreens<p>- photo booths or &quot;selfie stations&quot; where friends&#x2F;family can snap some shots together and get prints<p>- a staffed area like the apple Genius Bar where people can get a quick professional portrait taken and printed or order higher price-point printed products (think books or framed prints)<p>- sell photo related smartphone accessories<p>- have an app to order prints for pickup and do deals with other local attractions, hotels, conferences and Uber. For example, a hotel in the embarcadero encourages you to take a photo using the app or a specific hashtag. Those photos are automatically sent to the store and you can pickup prints any time.

A way to motivate yourself to complete a task (writing a book, losing 10 lbs, etc) by saying I will put up X dollars towards this goal, and if I don&#x27;t make it, I don&#x27;t get it back and it gets donated to charity.<p>The idea is that you need some sort of external consequence in order to really motivate yourself to do things outside of work, school, etc.<p>What do you guys think?

A browser extension &#x2F; additional service that allows you to tag&#x2F;lookup the music on google music &#x2F; spotify by any set of strings. And I mean your own saved collection, not for sharing&#x2F;exploring&#x2F;social purpose. This can be faked to some extent by multiple playlists, but it&#x27;s a bit hard to use in real life.<p>This would be great help when trying to dj dancing party: now show me a list of &quot;blues&quot;, &quot;chicago&quot;, &quot;slow&quot;, &quot;with breaks&quot; to choose the next song. Actually in this context, separate service &#x2F; app would be great - it would work on a mobile device, rather than just desktop.<p>(a long standing idea on spotify list already: <a href="https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Tag-Music/idi-p/57185" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.spotify.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Spotify-Ideas&#x2F;Tag-Music&#x2F;idi...</a>)

1. Roll your own Google Maps overlays &#x2F; plugins for navigation of large facilities. I envision a system where you take a series of GPS readings using your phone around the facility (a few on each floor). You then scan a blueprint or floor map and are able to import the structural data via OCR. Finally you roughly correlate those GPS coordinates with spots on the floor map and the software uses them and the known structural information &#x2F; layout to create a Google Maps overlay.<p>2. A peer to peer service for facilitating sharing of paywalled scientific journal articles. You could put in a request for a specific article, the utility would check which of your friends had access to the material, your friend would be prompted to download the article and place it into a designated folder for transmission.

A media browser for leveraging (browsing, and surfing) multi-terrabyte home media servers:<p>Problem: I&#x27;ve got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I&#x27;ve found my available tools to be too low-leverage on managing this anymore.<p>Context: about 2 years ago, I&#x27;ve stopped the directory structure madness, and embraced search as first-order link for media files. As a byproduct of this, I notice I don&#x27;t have a clear mental structure of what videos&#x2F;music is downloaded to my computer anymore, and to where (good riddance!). Neither do I want it to; instead, I&#x27;d like to have a &quot;youtube for local hard drive&quot;:<p>Basically, I&#x27;m looking for a local Media Browser application for windows: specifically, an app which allows:<p>* thumbnailed preview of all videos &amp; images<p>* Automagically categorized based on all online, or within-file available meta-information<p>* With a built-in search<p>To perform the following operations:<p>* Preview a thumbnail on video files (similar to file explorer)<p>* Display categorized lists of all media available locally on my drives<p>* Channelsurf, similar to youtube: be able to start from one movie file, and have &quot;similar&quot; videos around it<p>* Double-clicking on the file to start mplayer<p>* typing the first 2-4 letters of the movie&#x2F;image to instantly bring up the list of media with that part in it<p>While specifically not doing:<p>* Anything that requires me to touch any of the files in any way shape or form whatsoever<p>* Any upsale (I&#x27;m looking at you, windows 8 &quot;personal videos&quot;), advertising, or introduce any friction during interaction<p>* Bringing up any browsers: solution must be windows-native, and responsive (&lt;20ms results)<p>Specific things I&#x27;ve tried so far:<p>* The closest thing I can wave towards &quot;want&quot; is apple&#x27;s itunes, and JRiver&#x27;s media center; they both share the same weakness of not being able to use mplayer as playback engine<p>* Banshee on windows is unable to show video previews, have multiple stability issues, and can&#x27;t use mplayer for double-click<p>(I&#x27;ve posted full details of this to <a href="http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/2646/media-browser-recommendation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwarerecs.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;2646&#x2F;media-b...</a> a month ago, to no response avail, but getting upvotes, which evidences a market to be had for this )

&quot;My Top Priorities&quot; App.<p>* Ideally no downloads or installs required, you just list your top x priorities (up to 3, because we all know that if you have more than 3 priorities... you have none).<p>* Each one limited to 50 characters or so (e.g. &quot;Write Chapter 3 of my book&quot; , &quot;Buy food for Sunday&#x27;s cookout&quot; , etc.)<p>* You get a custom link that you can edit at any time, so when in doubt you reference it and know instantly what you should be working on<p>* Analytics would be extra fun, high potential for interesting trends. Basic sentiment analysis would yield &quot;priority&quot; trends and tendencies by city&#x2F;state&#x2F;country

My girlfriend suggests a menstrual calendar app that enables men to predict women&#x27;s moods, especially the days they&#x27;re most amenable to amorous solicitation, and generally because it&#x27;s good for men to know their partners&#x27; cycles. A woman might enter the data herself and share it with selected parties, or men could try to maintain their own records on behalf of women who aren&#x27;t motivated to do it. There is also a monetization potential for advertisers insofar as women are more inclined to pamper themselves at certain times.

A bookmarking plugin which is installed by the website owners. So instead of users having a extension button in their browser, the website will have the option bookmarking. This plugin is provided by a website, which just asks the end user to create a one time account. Then the end user can bookmark from any website that has that plugin installed.<p>Advantage: End user will not have to install anything. Cloud based bookmarking. Advantage for the website owner: Their link circulating because the website that provides this plugin has internal networking.

An insurance plan for APIs - in today&#x27;s world companies are extremely reliant on 3rd party APIs for a variety of applications (FB Ads API, Twitter&#x27;s API, etc.), however, in my experience, these APIs are not a 100% reliable &amp; can sometimes go down which impacts the end customer&#x2F;user. Similar to travel insurance, if you can provide the option as an add-on to buy insurance against this downtime - there are several business models - but essentially you would be offering a modern day &quot;SLA&quot;.

A tool&#x2F;system to manage dot files. Some ideas:<p>- easily install dot files on a new system<p>- keep track of files in git<p>- possible to specify different configurations (OS X, Linux, etc.)<p>- possible to exclude sensible dot files (i.e. .ssh&#x2F;id_rsa)<p>- easy to update files and keep them in sync<p>- the tool should not be mixed with individual dot files repositories so that it&#x27;s easy to upgrade to a newer version<p>- eventually: a dot file repository where people can share &#x2F; show off their configurations<p>There are a few tools available on Github but none which have all the above features (AFAIK).

&quot;Doubles Poker&quot; app.<p>What&#x27;s Doubles Poker? It&#x27;s quite possibly the most fun you&#x27;ll ever have playing poker. Two people get paired together for a duration of a tournament. The game is typically no limit Texas Hold&#x27;em but any game with an even number of rounds per hand of play would work.<p>During each hand the two teammates are not allowed to talk. Teammate 1 plays pre-flop and then passes the cards to teammate 2 who plays the flop. Teammate 2 passes the cards back to teammate 1 who plays the turn. Finally teammate 2 plays the river. On the next hand the order is switched so Teammate 2 begins playing pre-flop.<p>It can be a great deal of fun and adds another level of complexity to the game. Now you have to figure out not only what your opponents have but what your teammate&#x27;s motivations in the hand are. Is he setting you up for a big bluff or was he just taking a cheap shot at winning the hand on the flop?<p>Here&#x27;s a Double&#x27;s Poker tournament that was aired on tv awhile back:<p><a href="http://www.pokertube.com/videos/doubles-poker-championship-ep01-12" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pokertube.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;doubles-poker-championship-e...</a><p>I&#x27;d love to create an app (mobile or otherwise) where people could experience the joy and excitement of this form of poker.

Soulver for the web (<a href="http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acqualia.com&#x2F;soulver&#x2F;</a>)

Meta: it would be nice to get an exception to the flame war detection for these threads. It seems like they&#x27;re getting penalized.

Programmer&#x27;s laptop: A good quality, high performing, non-widescreen laptop with a 4:3 aspect rato.<p>Why? With a taller screen, there&#x27;s less scrolling and your eyes don&#x27;t have to jump as much when reading from line to line.<p>I would like to know if there would be a market for this and why manufacturers phased out 4:3 displays?

Oauth for contact details. When I change my phone number or address, the individuals or corporations I have authenticated should be able to fetch that latest info from a centralized service that manages <i>only</i> that information (and holds it in strictest confidence, no list-selling).

Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) for email.<p>I wish it was possible emails sent are erased from the recipient&#x27;s email client. I want to own the parts of the email conversation that I wrote.<p>The reason to want this is to not leave an electronic trail of everything you say. Chat clients, which communicate synchronously, can already do this. Is it impossible to do asynchronously with email?<p>One problem is people might want to archive what you write, which would defeat the purpose of OTR. This isn&#x27;t something a messaging protocol can solve. Once text shows up on a screen, you can copy the text. But I can imagine people archiving rarely in practice, if only because you&#x27;d have to do something manually, which would make keeping an electronic record the exception and not the rule.

More privacy.<p>A completely private social platform with messaging, email, timeline, blog, pics, docs, etc.

A context-sensitive &#x27;nag&#x27; app - Pops a simple notification (Growl-esque) when a window&#x2F;URL comes to the foreground. Should support one-offs and repeating nags. Could be used to create habits as well as just follow up on the details.<p>Use cases:<p>- Remind me to CC someone when emailing someone else.<p>- Remind me that I need to include X information when opening a ticket on a web page.<p>- Remind me to use new technique X when using App Y.<p>- Remind me where I was when I closed this doc.<p>Bonus points for:<p>- Triggering off of typed text (like an email address or function name)<p>- Triggering off of a selected email subject&#x2F;to&#x2F;from<p>- &quot;Do not show until&quot; on one-offs (I dont need to do this until tomorrow morning)

A laptop with a slide-out second (or third) screen for more screen space. Packaging and power consumption are big issues. Maybe a couple of years off until super thin, flexible OLED displays reach maturity.

A mileage tracking app that primarily uses the following input methods:<p>- taking a photo of the current mileage displayed on the dashboard that is automatically analyzed using text recognition technology.<p>- the current position (using the phones location information, e.g. GPS and cell-tower information) and address.<p>In case the photo cannot be interpreted or the location is not know, it should also be possible to manually enter the required information using an easy to use interface. It should be possible to categorize trips and take a &quot;snapshot&quot; at the origin and destination location.

A Yelp like review app for colleges. Currently the best way for prospective students to get the best idea of what a school will be like before attending, is to head to the schools cafeteria or quad and ask a student how they like the school. The current students and&#x2F;or alumni are most honest about their experience with the school. Make an application that requires some proof of enrollment to rate and review a given college, and allow for the most honest reviews of the school.

A latex add-on in Google Doc.<p>I&#x27;m aware writelatex and sharelatex exist. I would like a latex feature in Docs though. Preferably one that compiled&#x2F;rendered the output in realtime

A low-budget version of Prozone&#x27;s sports stats. If you could create the computer vision algorithms to create Prozone&#x2F;Opta-like stats from a commodity camera, you could sell that system to lower-league clubs and those worldwide with less money. Placemeter are already proving some of this is possible with old smartphone cameras, but the stats have proven their value in the sports world already.

A Developer Laptop.<p>Think &#x27;Macbook Air&#x27; for developers (open-source devs, .NET guys won&#x27;t benefit much from this) installed with an operating system without all the usual bloatware.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong the Macbook Air is a great machine, but it obviously has too much &#x27;Apple stuff&#x27; on it that I don&#x27;t use very much at all.<p>Officemates told me that the closest to a great developer laptop is the Dellbook XPS13.

An open source proxy server used for libraries to use so they can give access to the paid restricted-access databases and other websites available only to certain patrons. Most types of libraries (especially college and public) have resources they pay for and require users to authenticate in order to access. There&#x27;s currently not a nice easy to use FOSS solution for this.

This idea has two components and maybe it already exists. First a social network&#x2F;virtual gallery for visual artists (designers, photographers, etc) to post their work. Second a browser plugin that &#x27;knows&#x27; where ads are placed on popular free sites and overlaps a frame that randomly showcases the artists work (click to see more or click to edit preferences)

Internet of things for a washing machine. Think of the time when you had to pay like $2.5 worth of quarters just to wash a towel. What if you can pay by the amount of laundry you have? Also, it would be great if it alerts my phone whenever the laundry is done so that I do not have to keep track of how much time it has passed.

A blogging platform with content delivered in interactive narrative way. Suppose, a user has a story with two possible versions depending on the decision made by the readers at some point of time in the middle of the content. Then provide him with such a platform to write a story in that format.

A monitor that outputs wavelengths of light that are therapeutic. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Light_therapy</a><p>Been thinking about this since Asus came out with a laptop with an air ionizer in 2008.

An encyclopedia of odors. Like the perfume scent strips in magazines, but for everything.

A dead simple way to remember where you parked your car and when you need to move it. Like this: <a href="http://jchendy.com/2014/04/10/dude.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jchendy.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;dude.html</a>

A paying Wine (winehq.org) that would work with demanding multimedia programs such as Adobe LightRoom or Sony Vegas.<p>I would pay something like $100&#x2F;year for such software that would keep up with every new version of its supported programs.

A progress and time tracker like Habit RPG and Rescue Time that tracks number of hours spent towards a habit&#x2F;skill. Basically, something that can track where you are on 10,000 hours rule. More automation is better!

Real-time Groupon. All sorts of businesses lose money due to last minute cancellations - give them a platform to advertise discounted slots in the near future.

Scan a QR Code&#x2F;NFC to donate to a charity collector outside a train station.