Air Buoy & Buoy

Posted on October 27, 2018 by gemmell

This is Air B&B but for births for your boat. Plenty of people own a warf. This is a facility for them to lease it out as a place to moore a boat for a short amount of time. Great for boaty getaways.

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Stable Stand – a retrofit platform on boats that keeps still on rocky seas

Posted on October 27, 2018 by gemmell

The idea here is simple: Drones were enabled by fast, small, efficient processing. They physics was always known, what happened is that computers became fast enough to process events and respond to them to enable a drone to alter things to keep itself more or less hovering. So can we use the same sort of technology to create a stable platform on a rocky boat? Think of a 2 people sized bucket, which sits on a single point, and then has a bunch of motors on each side of the bucket that essentially tip the bucket one way or another. Then a heap of sensors on the boat that can detect when it starts to move and tell the bucket to compensate.

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Reducing Roadkill

Posted on October 27, 2018 by gemmell

How much does roadkill cost society? Both in accidents, injuries, and the ecological toll? I bet nobody’s done the numbers, but it seems to me that if we can reduce road kill, then nobody is going to lose out. This is a series of ideas I had.

Idea 1: A drone that flies 50 m in front of the car, if it identifies an animal it can buzz down to try and shoe it away from the road or it can just “sound the alarm” (visually) so you know to start hitting the brakes RIGHT NOW. Problem is that no drone can go 100km/h for 3 hours, so it’s useless for a trip down the coast.

Idea 2: Drones that sit along side the road and essentially guard the perimeter of the road…

Idea 3: An attachment on every single one of those red and white reflectors on the side of the road to give it a heat sensing camera and some smarts to identify animals and a light. When one of the reflectors detects an animal it communicates to all the other reflectors around it which can also light up to alert a user that there is an obstruction/animal on the road up ahead and to start slowing down. The reflector that has detected the animal can also shine a light on it (and you’ll probably get multiple) to illuminate it so that it can be seen on dark roads well in advance.

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Bird Off Drone

Posted on October 27, 2018 by gemmell

This probably exists, but the idea is that cafe’s like the Yarallumla Nursery have a bird problem. They fly down to the table and eat any left overs. And then they get bolder and bolder until they’re bothering guests and stealing food from their hands. This is a drone that “waits tables” by flying around and basically identifying and scaring off birds. Yeah it isn’t super effective immediately, but you’re trying to tip the balance so that it’s a too much of a pain in the ass for the birds to keep trying so they stop hanging around and being so bold.

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Drone Drone

Posted on October 27, 2018 by gemmell

A drone which is dedicated to hassling your kids. “Get up, get dressed, get in the car” etc. Essentially you switch it on, use the phone app to assign it to a child, give it a sentence to endlessly repeat and press go. It’ll go and hover just out of reach of your child and endlessly intone your nagging without you having to. Great for single parents with multiple kids or those which find every morning a struggle!

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Conscientious Consumer

Posted on October 8, 2018 by gemmell

A community driven site where people do research on products so that conscientious shoppers can choose products.

For instance, if I plug in that my main choice factor is environmental impact (plastic) and avoidance of palm oil and that I’m shopping at woolworths, then it will recommend me products that tick those boxes.

The idea is that this would be a site that is entirely consumer driven. So if I have done the research on a particular product (e.g. does it contain palm oil, is it sourced from renewable materials etc) then somebody else does not have to.

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Should I Drive?

Posted on October 8, 2018 by gemmell

A social app or plugin that allows you to ask your circles anonymous questions. e.g. Should I drive home tonight? The idea is that those who are perhaps not happy to speak up can vote… obviously flawed in a lot of ways.

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Automate.me

Posted on September 28, 2018 by gemmell

So this is a premium service where a couple of guys follow you around for a few days and see exactly what you do. They have a backend dev team that works to build systems to automate parts of your day. For example, you’re a high powered lawyer, you cannot get across 100 emails a minute, we would get across the problem, and build a tailored solution for you. Cost is $100k per month for us to slowly automate all the automatable parts of your life so that you have more time to live.

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Good Times 4 Bad Times Phone/Photo App

Posted on September 11, 2018 by gemmell

One thing about depression is that you can’t see anything good. Good Times 4 Bad Times is an application that runs on your phone (plugs in to Google photo’s?) that asks you some really specific questions about your mood and then asks you to pick something from recently recorded videos & photos that shows some specific value you bring to the world. For example, I am a good father to my children – photo of the kids smiling at the camera.

Then there is a big red button “HELP”, which essentially puts it into a mode where it proves to you that you have value.

You are a good father: video of you playing with your child from last month.
You are well loved: photo of your partner smiling from last week.
…

Basically the whole premise is about recording some things like “I am well loved”, “I am a good person” with photos and video evidence. Essentially your good-times-self proving to your bad-times-self that you have intrinsic value. It is easy to see how you have a positive impact on the world when you’re not “in the hole”, and it’s impossible when you are down in the dumps. So this app is simply you proving to yourself that you have intrinsic value, and that you should soldier through.

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Chat Grease

Posted on September 11, 2018 by gemmell

The problem: Text is devoid of emotion. Emoticons do a great job of lightening things up a bit. However us geeks aren’t exactly known for being socially aware. I find that I can read text, and depending on my frame of mind, read it with whatever tone suits my feelings at that point. Plus geeks are notoriously rude and condescending, which can affect team performance and cohesion.

Chat Grease reduces the friction that occurs in text based conversations.

Chat Grease is a service that can take text, and
A) annotate it with emoticons to make it “lighter”; or
B) change the text slightly to be friendlier;
C) Give you a warning that particular passages are in danger of upsetting other people.

The idea is that people don’t get upset when there is no reason to, and that the tone of conversations stays light. This service takes text and can do any of the aforementioned 3 services, which means that you can create plugins for email clients, slack etc.

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