Idea 49: Live Web Interactions With Video Chat

The popularity of Chatroulette shows that plenty of people on the Internet are eager and ready for live video interactions with another stranger. Why not? People are social animals.

Emerging technologies not only provide platforms for massive live video interactions right in your web browser, like Tinychat, but also providing API's that enable web developers to easily embed video chat boxes into every page of your website, like Tokbox.

These technologies will, along with upcoming HTML 5, open up a new world of rich, interactive, multimedia web, where the possibilities of applications are only confined by your imagination. For example, dibake.com is a new web service that enables live video debate, along with a dichotomy of user opinions, on any given subject, from political to scientific. Or, go see a psychiatrist with a virtual therapy session online at Pretty Padded Room. 

Well, not to mention the most important face-to-face interactions: education. This opens the door to a potentially disruptive force to change the way education is done.

Idea 46: Free Local Public Transportations

Today, I took the ferry between Wall Street and Staten Island. The view was simply amazing, blue waters and city landscape, under the bright sparsely decorated sky. I would say this is one of the must-do's for anyone visiting New York City.

Even more surprised to me was that the ferry is completely free, running every 30 minutes with heavy traffic, 7 days a week. Similar ferry in San Francisco, between the Pier 39 and Sausalito would have costed $22 round trip. Salute to the transportation department of NYC!

This got me thinking, why should we pay anything at all for local public transportation?

Local city buses, subways, ferries, should and can be made completely free! This would encourage every commuter to seriously consider abandoning driving, thus reducing our carbon emission, eliminating highway congestion, resulting cleaner air and better lives for all.

The online world has gotten used to free services with ads support. Why the same model can't be applied to public transportation? Make some creative use of the empty inner walls on the bus, in the subway, and in the stations. Free services will guarantee a huge spike in the amount of people taking these buses and subways, and thus the amount of eyeballs, which increases the value of these ad spaces also.

Let's learn something from the Staten Island ferry, and make public transportation free!

Idea 37: Smart Waste Processor - Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

It's amazing how much waste we generate, just the U.S., more than 250 million tons per year. It takes tremendous resource and energy to process them. If only every household starts to reuse, reduce and recycle!

Here's an idea. A simple house-hold appliance that helps you reduce waste. It consists of four parts:

1. A composter with worms to process vegetable scraps, green wastes, and the paper waste, such as junk mails. Yes, it does work.

2. Mechanical compressor that compresses the aluminium cans, plastic bottles, and other recyclable wastes, so that they are easier to carry and process later. Remember Wall-E's job?

3. A anaerobic digester to convert food waste into extra engery. Well, it does work at scale in Oakland, CA, but may take some time to bring the technology to every home.

4. Dynamic monitor that displays how much carbon footprint you are currently producing, and saving, very much like this one.

In conclusion, if every household owns such a device, we would, roughly, reduce the waste production by as much as 50%. This is a win-win-win situation. :)

photo credit Don Solo

Idea #30 Open Source Peer-to-Peer Education

Education, I still believe, is the key to freedom, spiritually and financially.

Enable education at every corner of the earth is one of the most effective approaches to making the world a better place.

MIT is opening up its intellectuals to the world through the popular MIT open course.

We can do more, and we should.

Everyone has something important to say; everyone is a teacher in some way. As Seth Godin rightly pointed out in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, any individual can lead a tribe and enable change in an unconventional way.

Meetup.com provides a platform that enables anyone, passionate about any subject, to lead a tribe.

We can and should enable everyone to become a teacher, a good teacher.

Here's an idea.

Provide an open platform where anyone can develop a curriculum on any subject, technical, political, literature, or recreation. Anyone can contribute further on the curriculum to improve its quality, whether it's uploading course materials, exercises, references, or providing a video.

From the database of curriculum, anyone can teach a course; anyone can take a course, virtually, from anywhere in the world, even in the remote villages in India and China, as long as wireless access is available.

Yes, I'm aware of unclasses, a good initiative, yet we need more curriculum, wider accesses, broader coverage.

Educate the mind; free the soul.

photo credit slideshow_nyc

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 #27 Virtual Stock Market for Non-Profit Initiatives

Always, too many initiatives chasing too little resources, and attention.

Big world-changing impact requires large long-term investments and razor-sharp focus. Think about what it takes to fight against AIDS, hunger, climate change, energy shortage, ......

Here's an idea:

Create a world-wide virtual stock market for non-profit world-change big initiatives.

Contributors "donate" for an initiative, based on her judgement of the potential impact, through purchasing its virtual stock.

Virtual stocks are traded among contributors.

Virtual stocks are measured by P/I, price / impact, ratio.

Funding flows to the initiative that has the biggest impact. The price of a virtual stock would not fluctuate much, think about Berkshire Hathaway. However the long term impact and steady progress of big initiatives will stand out from the crowd.

This is a capitalistic way of doing social reform. Much of the sophistication involved in the world financial market can be applied to the non-profit initiatives. As Alan Greenspan rightly pointed out in his book, The Age of Turbulence, the hedge-fund industry is like lubricants that ensures the machine of the world economy runs smoothly.

Thus in the same way, we make sure that the limited resources that we have today are most effectively used for making the world a better place.

Let me know your thoughts, or how feasible this is.

photo credit southernpixel

26 Big Ideas That Can Change The World and Counting

This is a collection of "Big Ideas" that can and may change the world ahead.

Courtesy of Guardian.co.uk and Manchester International Festival's expert panel on the most promising ideas for tackling global warming:

• Concentrated solar power - Gerry Wolff explains how concentrating solar power in deserts could supply enough electricity to power the whole of Europe.
• Thorium nuclear power - Switching from uranium to thorium as our primarily nuclear fuel could lead to cheaper, safer and more sustainable nuclear power.
• Carbon capture plants part-fired with wood - If affordable carbon capture and storage technologies can be developed, the prospect is there for "carbon negative" power plants that burn a mix of coal and wood.
• Ceramic fuel cells - Domestic fuels cells are super-efficient mini power stations that can efficiently and cheaply provide electricity and hot water.
• Sequestering carbon and boosting crops with biochar - Turning crop wastes and other biomass into charcoal and spreading it on tropical soils can sequester carbon and boost crop productivity.
• Marine energy - Marine turbines are like underwater windmills than can extract energy from fast-flowing tides or deep ocean currents.
• Regenerating grasslands - Grazing cattle in a way that imitates the movements of wild herds could lock huge quantities of CO2 into the world's dry soils.
• Efficient cooking stoves - Simple and inexpensive biomass cooking stoves can slash emissions, save forests and avoid lung disease.
• Universal family planning access - Global investment in family planning and female education could slow down global population growth, reducing future emissions and tackling climate change vulnerability.
• Enhanced geothermal power - Enhanced geothermal systems, or 'hot rocks', can be exploited in a larger number of locations and operate 24 hours a day.

Courtesy of Fast Company ten ideas that could change the world.

• LifeStraw - The straw-like device is a highly portable, personal water-purification tool that turns even the dirtiest water into safe drinking water. (The Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas)
• Speaking Books - By using an adaptation of a children’s book technology – the talking book – the South African Depression and Anxiety Group aims to surmount the barrier of illiteracy.
• Acuset IV - provides a cheap and precise alternative to the $2,000 microprocessor-controlled syringe pumps that are used to ensure accurate and safe medicine and re-hydration fluid delivery by intravenous infusion in the first world. Because about 2.5 billion IV sets are used annually throughout the developing world -- and when administering potent drugs even a 3mm mistake can be fatal – the $6 controller could save millions of lives.
• One Laptop Per Child - The OLPC Foundation aims to provide every child in the developing world with one of its laptops, with the goal of eliminating illiteracy and poverty through education.
• Restoring Sight To The Blind - A project of the Harvard Medical School, this still evolving idea was featured among this year's finalists because it has the potential to provide the blind with sight. The idea is to overcome the problem of a diseased, damaged or no longer working retina.
• Brain-Computer Interface - The Wadsworth Brain-Computer Interface enables paralyzed people to communicate and control their environment by using brain signals alone.
• PerspectaRAD - a system that aims to overcome the difficulty that arises when a procedure that is inherently three-dimensional has to be planned on a 2-D display.
• Crossbreed Collapsible Wheel - The Crossbreed Wheel circumvents the difficulties of storage and transportation of wheelchairs and bicycles.
• Printing Skin and Bones - While it is currently difficult for surgeons to reconstruct any complex disfiguring of the face using CT scans, this ink jet based technology aims to build a fragment which will fit exactly, by placing cells in any designed position in order to grow tissue or bone.
• Village Phones - Consisting of a mobile handset and SIM card, an external antenna, a power source, and marketing materials, the kit allows rural entrepreneurs to rent the use of the phones to their communities.

Courtesy of Esquire, the six ideas researchers are still working on to change the world.

• Breaking Down the Firewall
• Electronic Skin
• The Pollution Magnet
• Machines That Fix Themselves
• Burying Our CO₂
• The Next Plastic

The list will be expanded. So let me know your suggestion on the next "Big Idea".

photo credit Cherrylynx