Idea 45: Record And Share Your Life Style

iPhone is bloody useful. We touched merely the surface with idea on personal metrics for diet optimization, and idea on real-time route sharing for smart carpooling. Now with people sharing daily meal pictures on Twitter, it might be useful simply to record and share your entire life style.

That means recording the places you visit, thing you do, media you consume, people you befriends, what, when and how. The new iPhone app will have the following:

A push button to record the current time and place, and the reason you're here. It might takes a bit of discipline to form the habit of writing down the activity whenever you visit somewhere, but that might just prove useful. Over time, you'll leave a trace of footprints as to how you lived your life, what you've learned, what you did right, or wrong. It might help if there are pictures annotation as well.

Another button to start and stop the recording of real-time routing trace. When started, the app will intermittently query the GPS for current location, and record the complete travelling route, until the stop button is pushed. Want to share your shortest driving routes? Want to share your favorite running tracks, hiking tracks, biking tracks? This is the way to do it!

Life is short, interesting, and full of excitement. Why not record it, share it, discuss it, and pass it on?

image credit omar eduardo

Idea #28 Mobile Route Sharing And Smart Carpooling

How to encourage people to drive less and reduce our carbon footprint ? Need more people to join initiatives like NuRide, to volunteer skipping the car.

However, I believe there is a business model to make good profit and at the same time making the world a better place, talking about social entrepreneurship. Here is an idea.

Drivers, any time you are driving and feel like sharing a ride, which you should, upload your source and destination locations using our iPhone app.

Riders, upload your desired trip starting point, destination point, and travel time constraints, online or with our iPhone app.

Our backend server will collect all available driver routes and requested rider routes, find the optimal shared segments among these routes, and make recommendations to the drivers and riders. The recommendation will include potential meeting point, meeting time, and the information about the ride partner.

This will involve some heavy weight multi-terminal routing algorithms to sort out the best solution, but that's not the most difficult part, well for a technologist....

Think about how much energy will be saved, how much carbon emission will be reduced, and how greener our planet will be.

Enjoy your impromptu rider, accidental traveller!

Update: some commute/ride sharing services are available, such as CommuterLink.com or Ridester.com, but they are far from "real time" and "social".

Idea #9 - Road Express - GPS Navigation By The Crowd

The best point-to-point driving route comes from the people who drive them every day.

Embed a route recorder in the GPS navigator. Record the actual route taken by the driver between any two points. This can be done automatically, or as instructed by the driver. Some incentives can be given to the first contributors of the system. Once the driving records reach a certain level, the wisdom of the driving crowd will show its intelligence.

Whenever a new route is requested by a user, the GPS system can use the huge driving record from the drivers to compute the fastest, most convenient route, for that particular day and time. You will be able to obtain the special local road connection to avoid the highway commute traffic at 9am; you will get a different route suggestion at 9pm, or on Sunday; you will get inter-state highway 80 to Lake Tahoe on Friday, but highway 580 and 5 for your drive back on Sunday.

It will take some time to attract driving records and establish the network effect, but once it is established, it would be immensely powerful.

Note: I realized later that Dash Navigation has been pursuing intelligent navigation using the wisdom of the crowd for long, although with a slightly different approach.