Idea 47: Voice Enabled Auto Tweet

I like one thing about human nature that is bringing a lot of motivation for technology innovations -- laziness! Yes, we are lazy, and we invent things to justify being lazy, which is good.

Today's idea is for all those lazy Twitter-holics. You don't have to type anything on the keyboard in order to Tweet your status. Just speak to the application on iPhone, or other mobile devices; the voice recognition software will translate the sentences to text, making sure it's within the 140 character limit, then transmit to Twitter server.

What would make it more interesting is, if it can understand emotions, and transcribe that into Tweets as well. Make a laugh, now you have "HAHAHA", or ":D" in your Tweets. That would be fun.

Or, how about automatically discover URL links? Whenever you say "Guy Kawasaki blog", it finds the URL and brings that link into your Tweet.

Lazy is good; lazy motivates innovation.

image credit Louise Lazell

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 36: Call My URL Since I Can't Remember My Phone Number

Since I'm not good at numbers, I find it annoying having to remember a separate phone number in addition to the name of a company, or service. Why can't I get my banker on the phone by just calling wellsfargo.com, or speak to a FedEx representative by calling fedex.com?

That's the idea. No more writing down a 7-digit phone number, or remembering 1-800-call-att. Download our application on your smart phone, you'll be able to reach the default phone line by just typing in the URL.

Well, there are a lot of details that's needed to make it happen, like registering a phone number to a domain name, connecting to the phone line from the app, etc, but that's for the engineers.

In fact, if all domain owners register on Skype, it would have been an easier route. Yes, let's register our domain names on Skype and connect to our phones. :)

photo credit sachman75

Idea #32 Wireless Identity - Know Who Are Around You

Ever in a conference or social event, and don't know who to talk to?

What if when you point your iPhone to the people around you, you see their Twitter timeline?

That's the idea.

You can already exchange business cards through iPhone.

The new application will allow you to configure your wireless identity and constantly broadcast in short range, through bluetooth.

You can even program automatic matching, that is, whenever your profile "matches" with your specified "target", contact information is automatically exchanged, and you get a signal to find that person physically. Kind of like speed dating on robots!

Some would concern about security, identity theft, and blah. Well, with people broadcasting what they eat each and every day, that is only for people who're not using Twitter.

Let's social.

Update: thanks to Sandeep Das for pointing out, Loopt already provides such a service in its latest Mix feature.

photo credit Themis was here

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 #24 iPhone For Personal Weight Tracing And Diet Optimization

Information is exploding. We never cease to increase the rate at which we produce and consume information. That is going to continue, and it is going to get more and more personal, with the help of ever pervasive wireless connection and devices such as iPhone.

iPhone can help us conveniently collect all kinds of personal information, upload it online for analysis. Why? optimize our lifestyle. (talking about lifestyle design) Here is one idea for personal weight tracing and diet optimization. It has three components:

• Bluetooth enabled scale that sends weight information wirelessly to iPhone whenever you step on it.
• iPhone app to receive and record this information daily.
• Online database and application to synchronize with iPhone, analyze the data over a period of time, compare the results with standard research results (or even with your friends). Finally, it makes recommendations for your diet depending whether you want to gain or lose weight.
  

I think this system will be a popular one, as people are becoming more concious about personal health and life style. When Nike unveiled their running monitoring system Nike+, a joint product with Apple, which allows runners to track their running distances and time, Nike did not expect it would reach 1.2 million runners so quickly. No one did, as was covered in Wired. As technology develops, we will think of creative ways to produce and consume information.

Please voice your opinion using the comment form below, whether this personal weight tracing and diet optimization iPhone app will fly or not. Go iPhone.

Update: the FlowingData project makes it ever easier to track your personal behaviors and decisions through your Twitter stream.