Ideas and musings…

Smart Dumb Phone

• Need for a minimal, distraction free smartphone
• Should operate on attention polling, not interrupts
• Your smart phone is making you stupid
• Dumb phone leaves the need for too many other simple devices
• Just the non-distracting things (very subjective…)
  • GPS/Navigation
  • Spotify/Music
  • Text/Email
  • Fitness apps
  • Docs
• Consolidated social feeds?
  • FB/IG/SC funnel to periodic/daily update?
• Could possibly do this without a dataplan (or minimal) with offline music, maps, etc..
• Special version of Android could suffice. Few can or will install new OS on phone
• Punkt is an attempt at a distraction free phone, but too dumb and too expensive. Can get a less sleek and cheaper version of this with any dumb phone.
• Can/Will we pay for our attention??
• Google and Apple seem to be slowly adding in these sorts of features in more recent OS updates…

Penny Commenting System

• Pennyforyourthoughts?
• Commenting system that requires a penny per comment. Incorporates voting to distribute money for good comments
• May curb spam, abuse and pointless or negative activity
• Sites that use it get % of profits encouraging use over ads
• Incentive for good comments, if they don’t suck (voting) they are free or payback
• Existing Overview
• YC-Disqus comments investigates a bit
• Isso - core to start from?
• Could use this same concept for chatrooms and more. Gamify chatting

Wiring Harness Manager Software

• High end CAD packages can do this in 3D space, but very expensive if that is all you need
• Also overly complex for something that could be done in a simpler fashion
• Excel gets messy and hard to control
• Need to track lengths, colors, functions, connectors, more…
• Add visualization/routing processor (similar to tree graph?)
• Harnware and Rapid Harness exist, but still seem very heavy and/or pricey for a quick harness assembly document.
• Workcraft uses Graphviz for many things and is investigating using it for automatic schematic layout. Graphviz Dot format could be used as text based model of harness. Catlab also has an interesting example…
• Open source opportunity?

Cycling Cadence Tracking App

• There are plenty of RPM sensors out there… But many beginner cyclist won’t make the jump to a device that can use them.
• A phone should be able to calculate this without an extra sensor
• Running based version Runzi, other apps that do this require a sensor
  • Haven’t seen a standalone for cycling.
• This could be done one of at least 3 ways:
  • Accelerometer/Gyro: Side to side motion on bicycle
    • How detectable is side to side motion on good cyclists? Resolution at high RPM?
  • Acoustically: Sense the sounds of the environment, filter out oscillations (crank rotate)
  • Video/CV possible for stationary setup, but not terribly useful
• Wahoo has heart rate monitor that will calculate cycling cadence, so certainly feasible.
• Could this be used to calculate gear ratio on a bicycle or power?? PowerPod.
• Tough to justify as standalone app, likely better as part of a cycling app like Strava…
• Could be useful if it could stand in place of or mock an actual Bluetooth sensor ~$40