Let’s say I’m an avid Hero’s fan (which I am actually) with a wife who likes to watch something at the same hour (which I do) or I like the flexibility of being able to tote my favorite shows with me wherever I go on my iPhone or PMP. If I could buy a subscription, or season pass, to the whole season of Heros for one charge, $10 or $15, I just might do that. As new episodes are released, I could go watch or download them at any time. I’m getting a bulk discount and the network gets me to pay for some of the episodes even before they air. Moreover, the network may even be able to cut out the middleman. But for the networks, theres an added bonus – the “gym membership effect.”

Most gyms can sell an infinite number of memeberships, regardless of the size (within reason), because they count on people going for a while and then slipping out of their routine. Their clients still pay for the membership, but rarely go. They could have 10,000 monthly paying members, but only a small portion go religiously.  For the media companies, this translates into a previously unavialable upsell. They may be able to attract more money from people who otherwise wouldn’t have spent $10 or $15 on video downloads – like the person who thinks they’ll download a few episodes, but sees this as a benefit becuase they’ll be less restricted by the clock or calendar.

As far as I know, some of the networks or content producers may already be doing this or considering it, I don’t know. I’m curious what you think. Would you pay for a season pass of Heros, House, or 90210? No comments on my choise of programming though, we all have our guilty pleasures)?

Today I want to address something on everyone’s mind – energy. It’s obviously a hot topic, and with good reason. Who though that we would ever see $4/gallon gas in the US?  Prices are coming down a little, but nearly everyone agrees that they’ll never be back to the record low levels we saw at the turn of the century. There are many things we could be doing to reduce our foreign oil’s stranglehold on our economy, but the most significant would be to get our gas hogs off the road and shift to alternative fuel vehicles.

So what’s my good idea? I think the government needs to put a man on the moon all over again. Except this time, instead of actually putting a man on the moon, the next president would establish a vision, timeline and investment program to creating new alternative fuels and vehicles. By brining together the best minds in science and industry and giving them significant financial resources for R&D, the government could actually be a catalyst for change, rather than an inhibitor as it has been for so long.

The outcoume wouldn’t be limited to a reduction in the demand for oil, or cleaner air and water, but an a whole “new” industry that itself could fuel the economy for years to come because other countries are just as eager to reduce their own demand for oil. If we hold the keys to the city, thanks to smart government investment, then the us just might be able to remain a player in the global economy later on this century.

Granted, the government is probably not the ideally suited to RUN this initiative because they’ll only screw it up. But the government needs to put the wheels in motion, open up channels of collaboration, set asside political bickering, and use our tax dollars for something that would ultimately help the entire country.

So what do you think?  Ridiculious or potential platform for Fall 08?

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 all of your “people” know the all is well. But they don’t always know who all of your people are.

So what do you do? You give them a list of contacts in advance and they fire off an email or start smiling and dialing. But that’s so 1990. In this age of social networking, always on connectivity and the permanent cell phone appendage, there has to be a better way…a site where you can register all of your “special people” when something important happens. And when it does, with a few keystrokes, your appointed family member or friend could use the site to notify everyone on your list, in the way most appropriate way based on each person’s lifestyle – email, broadcast phone message, text message, Facebook wall posting, etc. That done, you would be able to rest comfortably, knowing that all is well in the world.

Like many of the ideas on this blog, this may not work as a standalone service. It may need to be bundled into someone ’ offering (GrandCentral, Facebook, an Insurance provider, etc). The idea may not have legs at all. But I’m putting it out there, nonetheless, for you, oh faithful readers, to ponder and debate.

Concept

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 to go to Outlook, open my calendar, find the date, copy the times and save it. We can email calendar entries easily enough, but I’m not aware of an application, plug-in, XML or javascript code that would allow a web visitor to open a new calendar entry directly from a web link with the date and times populated. If it is, I haven’t run across it yet.

The first place I would expect to see something like this show up would be as a Firefox extension. Would this be difficult to create for Firefox or Internet Explorer?  I don’t know, but I think there are plenty of people and organizations that would benefit, everything from travel sites to broadcasters, to schools and enterprises.

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 unlocked – which always sends a shiver down my spine. We have other doors that we’re often shocked to find unlocked as well.

Okay, so common sense says that we should check the doors every night before going to bed, which I try to do, but admittedly forget (obviously). I would love to be able to install a remote monitoing device, or special lock that would let me know when the door is, in fact, unlocked. I imagine it could be done via RFID, wi-fi, or some other, compact, radio-like device that could be installed between the deadbolt and the door.  On the other end would be a simple receiver that shows red when a lock is open, and green if it’s securely locked down.

Now, this may already exist on the market, I’m not sure. But if it doesn’t, I imagine that there are a lot of commercial applications. Hotels could install them as a feature to give guests peace of mind that their things are safe in their rooms when they step away. Schools could use them to monitor side and back doors that hoodlums may be using to sneak in our out of the schoolhouse. Factories could use them to keep an eye on back doors to minimize stock shrinkage. The key would be for the monitoring device to be small, cheap and easy to install. Like most other items I’m talking about here, I’d be first in line to get this product.

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 town (a 1:15 drive during rush hour).  Sure I could go to Starbucks or one of the many other wi-fi connected social settings, but that’s not a realistic for conference calls and they don’t have the infrastructure of a normal office.

Suburban America is littered with stripmalls that are half empty, other than the standard nail salons and cleaners. I’d love to be able to hop into my car for an ocassional 5 minute commute to a nearby stripmall where I could rent, on a daily or hourly basis, a fully pimped out office – color laser printers, a T1 line, white boards, maybe even a real water cooler.  I have a lot of other neighbors who have expressed the same interest.  In fact, if such a facility was available near my neighborhood, we could even organize an ad hoc, neighborhood “day at the office” when we would all go to the local stripmall to work together. It would alleviate some of the isolation issues which begin to plague telecommuters after doing the work from home thing a while.

I’m not sure the business model would prove out, but at a minimum, it seems like something FedEx Kinkos could implement relatively easily simply by expanding their exising locations with a little more square footage – they have the technical infrasturcture, they’d just need the extra space and the office furniture. Or, they could franchize the concept and let someone else do all the work.

Any takers?

Concept

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 break.  They’ve got this new deal with Rhapsody, which is going to drag about 10 new subscribers in.  Rhapsody is a benefit guys, not a feature – at least that’s the way the public sees it…ok, the way I see it.

But TiVo does still have a rabidly loyal user base. What they need is a groundswell of demand to turn the tide. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to their technology, beyond the fact that it’s big hard drive, an operating system and some software, but there’s a whole community of TiVo hackers out there doing new stuff with their equipment.

If took the open source approach (call it TiVopen), they just may end up with a killer app or two that would make their box far more valuable than a VHS on steroids. Here are a few ideas that I’ve thought of on the spot, they require some backend work and services, but it just may keep them in the game, may even lead to some new revenue opportunities:

• What’s That Tune – list songs playing during a TV show or commercial, and allow people to buy/download it
• My TV History- send the list of what you watched last night to a widget for your Facebook or MySpace page, then have a button that lets others click it to record it on their TiVos
• My Playlist – organize the programs you want to watch and play them back to back without going back to a menu in between
• Who’s that Actor? - highlight  an actor or director’s name in the description box and pull up a bio and filmography
• Split-screen Viewing- Why can’t a set top box show two pictures on your TV? It’s got two tuners. And screw that little picture in the bottom corner. With today’s big HDTVs, you have plenty of space for side by side.

I’m definitely a fan of TiVo and want to see them stick  around.  I don’t doubt that they’re only a few years behind the record companies in their slow, sad demise, but open the doors, throw in a little crowd-sourcing, tap into your rabid fan base, get social, and you might have a fighting chance.  After all, TiVo is not the box, it’s what’s inside the box. Okay, cheesy but cute. 

It’s a great Blackberry application that I found a few months ago and now couldn’t live without. Best of all, it’s free! It comes loaded with tons of feeds to choose from and you can add your own. And, because it’s constantly polling for new posts and downloading them to your device, even when you you have no signal, you can still read your posts.

Check it out here.  You can enter your mobile email address and they’ll send you a link to download it OTA.  After you’ve installed it, click the Viigo icon on the right side of my blog to add My Good Idea to get read my latest posts wherever you are (just keep that information to yourself). It’s totally worth the download.

Concept

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 in public.  Enter the portable invisible fence. [Disclaimer: I am using the expression invisible fence generically, although it is a brand].

The concept is similar to the fixed invisible/wireless fence.  You set run a wire around the perimeter of an area in which you wish to confine your beast. A powered base unit sends a low power, short distance signal through the wire.  Scruffy wears a collar with a receiver that beeps when he gets too close to the boundary. If he goes to far, he gets a shock…and turns around.

The portable model would be similar, but in reverse.  The receiver would constantly be receiveing the signal from the base station. Instead of correcting the dog when the collar receivesthe signal near the boundary wire, the correction would occur when the signal is lost – Scruffy strays too far from the base station, colar loses signal, beeps for 10 seconds and if not back within range, zaps him.

As with the fixed system, you would probably need to bring a few flags to mark the boundary for Scruffy, but other than the base station (and Scruffy in his fancy new collar), that’s all you need for a relaxing day at the park with the whole family. 

And during your next party, it could serve as a handy DUI prevention device.  Just put it on your drunken guest’s neck, secure with duct tape and go to bed confident you’ve kept the streets safe.

Cesaer, you’ve got first dibs – give me a ring!

Then you could move it to your iPod and use that as your gentle alarm clock.

Sure, it’s not as sexy as the original concept, but I suppose it’s more pratical, more realistic.  And if you don’t want to wait for someone in the year 2020 to figure this out, you could just mix songs and sounds together yourself with an off the shelf program.

But that’s no fun and I’m a dreamer.