My Good Idea: In Case of Emergency Website

Concept: Preconfigured list of people to notify during a personal emergency Who do you call when you have an emergency or when you make it out of Labor and Delivery healthy with a new bundle of joy? It’s usually your significant other,  another family member or a friend who then takes on the responsibility of letting [...]

My Good Idea: Outlook Appointment Web Link

Concept: Schedule Outlook appointments by clicking a link on a web page Occasionally I’ll run across something online for which I want to schedule an Outlook calendar entry or appointment.  It could be a webcast, travel appointments, a television show, a concert or just a reminder to check something later in the week. Today, I have [...]

My Good Idea: Deadbolt Lock Monitor

Concept: Remote deadbolt door lock that reports its lock/unlock status My kids play in the basement all the time.  During their adventures, they occasionally go out the basement door to get to the back yard and they inevitably leave the door unlocked when they come upstairs. That door can go days before we notice that it’s [...]

My Good Idea: Stripmall Office Space

Concept: Daily, rentable shared office space in suburbia I work from my home office nearly every day of every month, except when traveling.  I love it, but once in a while it would be nice to get out to a real office setting, without having to make the long commute to my company office in [...]

My Good Idea: TiVo Open Source

Concept: TiVo embraces hackers and they join forces to make their box more valuable There’s a lot of debate about whether TiVo can whether the storm, with cable providers locking them out. Well, their survival does seem tenuous unless they can figure out a way to make the masses clamour for the cable guys to give them a [...]

A Handy RSS Reader for your Blackberry

An RSS reader is great when you’re sitting at your computer, but what’s a guy to do when you’re stuck somewhere, far away from your computer, with time to kill - in a long line at the checkout counter, waiting for a train, or stuck in the bathroom with no good reading material?  Well, thanks to a [...]

My Good Idea: The Portable Invisible Fence

Concept: A no hassle, no set-up invisible fence you take with you. I have two dogs who would love to join my posse when we set off for a picnic at the park. But it would take the Dog Whisperer and a small fortune in fees before I would even consider letting them off the leash [...]

Gentle Alarm Clock Follow-up

Just saw this on Engadget. I know it’s more trouble than it’s worth, but I bet you could create a simple application that would let you edit together different snippets of sounds, or songs.  The sounds could even be pre-loaded into the software and you could control the volume so some extent based on the [...]

My Good Idea: A Gentle Alarm Clock

Concept: An alarm clock suited to the process of waking up Let’s face it, no one really likes to wake up in the morning.  The actual process of waking up (making the physical and cognitive leap from dreamland to daytime) can be difficult even downright traumatic for some. For those in the latter category, the experience during [...]

No More Nail Salons or Cleaners!

This is a slightly different take on the good idea concept, but it’s one I feel very strongly about. I’m not sure if this is a local phenomenon or if it happens everywhere, you tell me. Every time a new strip mall opens around where I live, the very first shop that opens is inevitably  [...]