Jerome

All sound excellent ideas to me. Cold hands are up to 75% less efficient than warm hands. I have wasted hundreds of slices of toast in the way you describe. I also think the bottles are deliberately designed to topple easily so you go out to buy another bottle to replace the one that you have spilt.

DavidBrown

"Sorry, see-through toaster's already been done."

Must have stolen the idea from me.. damn, I knew someone would capitalise on my ideas .. been banging on about it for years now

KF

Curved pop bottles are for strength against the pressure of the liquid (and ease of manufacture). If you can solve these, you are onto a winner.
I seem to "invent" stuff, which much to my annoyance is invented by someone else within months - I started something just like one of these 2 years ago, but got bored.

KF.

DavidBrown

"Curved pop bottles are for strength against the pressure of the liquid (and ease of manufacture). If you can solve these, you are onto a winner."

Well, in the old days (when "all this was fields") they used to have a separate cap on the bottom of the bottle to flatten the base. But they did away with it.

DavidRB

There's only one place to find out about half-baked ideas.

fast bloke

I designed a system as part of my thesis where cars could communicate. Basically for less that 20 quid, a car would send a signal backwards for 100 yards when the brake pedal was pressed. The strength of signal would increase as the pedal is pressed harder. - No more pile ups. It would also broadcast traction control info and abs info, so your car could warn you about road conditions before you found them. We built the system into two cars, and it worked. (This is the same faculty that runs a competitive bike in 250 GP, so this was a fairly simple excercise in comparison)
The course tutor thought i should try to sell the idea to manufacturers, but neither of us had any idea where to start so we dropped it. 10 years later and still no-one has come up with something similar.

22BUK

The new Range-Rover has a heated steering wheel.

Ga22ar

How about plastic batteries ???

No more bulkly shapes making gadgets and gizmo's unwieldly... The battery becomes part of the case...

I had this idea 5 years ago, sadly I don't have the intelligence to do anything about it.. bugger

cheerio

BillyW

Maybe not exactly the same but you can get a onboard radar type thing for trucks which detect how close you are to the vehicle in front and any alongside you. It alarms if you get too close to those in front and has a light to tell you if you're next to anything. Also links up to cruise control so it can keep you a pre-set distance behind whatever's in front.

Pete_UK99

Can you get petrol pumps yet where you just type in the amount you want thus saving you going over 1 or 2p. Garages don't usually bother asking for the extra 1p but I've often wondered how much money they must lose over a year from people doing that, I bet it's in the thousands. It would also mean you could have your hands free i.e if it's cold you can put your hands in your pocket.

AndrewW

Pete,

What a great idea

We've had these sort of pumps in the colonies (ie australia) for donkey's years, although they seem to be phasing them out now

Oh, and if you go a cent or two over in Australia, they do tend to charge you for it [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

Andrew.

Dream Weaver

What a great thread

PeteUK - there is an Esso station near me that always adds 1p onto your amount. i.e. I used to fill up there and it would be bang on £20 when I went to pay. Get there and it would be £20.01p. If you queried this they quickly said "no problems". Apparently this happened to lots of people so they obviously make the penny back Dont go there now.

Back to the inventions, I used to always be inventing things, some which have appeared such as:

1) Snap-off steering wheel, which I came up with about 10 years back - now done by Raid.

2) Central locking for houses, with blipper - 2 guys also came up with this a year or so after me and sold the idea to a security firm for £100k.

3) Keyrings that snap together so when you need to separate your house key from car keys you dont lose a nail or finger with those ring things - now available in DIY shops for £5.

And other which have not yet come out which I still think will work:

1) Removable gear lever - I actually made up a mock model of this using a bayonet connection for the lever. Basically when you park, the lever disengages the security lock, you twist, turn then lift it up and take it with you. Scum cant nick a car thats in neutral with no stick.

2) A small keyring electrical gadget for storing web addresses - i.e. by scanning text, or using keys like a mobile. For those times you dont have pen and paper but see a web address you want to remember (or something else for that matter).

Plus others but cant be arsed typing anymore.

DW

fast bloke

DW - New invention 1 would only deter the scum for about 10 seconds. I used to take the rotor arm out of the distributor cap if I was parking in a scummy area. Many other people also use this as a form of security. I watched the police arrest a guy hanging about a car park one night. When searched, he was carrying a steel ruler, a screwdriver and 23 rotor arms. You need to do the lever thing on your own car and then don't tell anyone about it for better effectiveness

The_Gza

Top thread

I like DW's idea for a removable gearlever - good for whacking potential tea leafs over the head too

DW - Which DIY place did you see those key ring things? I've got this problem with swapping keys all the time

Pete_UK99

If we all got together we could probably make some prototypes of some of these ideas. Just think of the range of careers people on the forum are in. This time next year we could all be millionaires.
Seriously though I think a lot of these ideas could make a serious amount of money, it always comes down to the same thing though, wouldn't know how to build it or not enough time. There's also the problem of do you sell it to a company that deals in that area and get a small fortune, or set up your own company, risky but the rewards could be huge.

Dream Weaver

David already is I think

The Gza - I saw them in Great Mills about 4 years back. It is now Focus so not sure if they still do them.

DW

Dream Weaver

So I suppose it may be worth looking in "Focus, formerly known as Great Mills" or whatever the advert says.

DW

DavidBrown

"David already is I think "

Now that's the kind of reputation I like preceeding me

ChrisB

DW, you can get a little pen sized scanner that for (funnily enough!) scanning things these days.

Mice_Elf

Useless tip for you : squeezing the bottle of coke / fanta / whatever until the liquid nearly comes out of the top and then putting the lid on will help to create a vacuum in the bottle and will thus keep your fizzy drink fizzier for longer. When it gets nearly empty, just squeeze until the sides of the bottles touch each other and then out the lid on.



[Edited by Mice_Elf - 1/11/2002 1:05:36 PM]

Jay m A

iTrader: (2)

This idea is probably running already:

All your household appliances are LAN to your home PC.

Then you go on holiday, did you turn the gas off? who cares, just text your PC and turn it off. Same with heating, lighting, microwave etc. I love the idea of putting a curry in the microwave, texting it when your 5 mins from home - walk through the front door to hear the 'ping'

I hope bluetooth will do this and more..

Phoning your bed and getting it to change the sheets on the way home from scoring is a million dollar idea

chiark

Jay, it is indeed. There are so many devices that should have an IP address and a mini web server to control them, from the washing machine to the video recorder (how quaint) to the lighting...

The microcontrollers with web server and TCP/IP stack are cheap so it's just a question of demand, IMHO.

fast bloke

Jay - Isn't that what Bluetooth is all about?

Edited to say you already knew that. How did I miss that the first time

[Edited by fast bloke - 1/11/2002 5:01:58 PM]

[Edited by fast bloke - 1/11/2002 5:08:51 PM]

Jay m A

iTrader: (2)

If bluetooth can change the bedsheets i'll buy shares....also it had better be able to unlock your front door after you've left the keys inside, next to the remote door blipper thingy

roadrunner

HomeAutomation is becoming big in the US. It's based on the X10 protocol which can virtually manage any device over your powerlines in the house.

www.x10.com sells some v.good automation devices

NotoriousREV

I hope you all realise that by publishing your ideas on a public website, you can no longer patent any of them? Unlucky, I'm going to steal all your ideas and produce a heated keyring that stores web addresses a set distance away from the vehicle in front that you can get to program your video while you're at work. I may even make it see-through.

[Edited by NotoriousREV - 1/14/2002 4:35:14 PM]

DavidBrown

Yeah, but no-one would buy it, as all the smart ***** out there who've got wind of version 2 of the device will be telling everyone to wait for the next version, ad nauseum.

Adam M

Notorious, what you are saying would be great but the fact that none of these are patentable anyway means it doesnmt matter, steal what you like :P .

David I think what you have written is strangely funny.

I have patented an example of each of your ideas in the past year.

1. transparent toasters are patentable but because ovens have clear glass windows and can toast they anticipate the invention so it cannot be patented anyway.

The plastic bottle as stated has issues which prevent it from being financially viable, plus it is not great for stacking them in transit, it is also an obvious modifcation therefore it lacks an inventive step so would not be allowed by the patent office (wouldnt stop me from trying though).

the heated steering wheel has been around for ages.
(range rover as stated have several patents relating to it, as do fords, both of whom are our clients.)

fast bloke, your idea sounds great, but also has already been done, I worked on a system for ford that considered something like this years back.

There is much people dont know technology wise, all in the process of being patented. Like digital media they are withheld until the money is recovered on previous technological breakthroughs.

sorry guys its economics.

Just as a word of warning. dont ever put your inventions over to potential backers without some sort of confidentiality agreement (which they will never sign) unless you have secured patent rights or copyright (if it is sufficient) protecting you. Best bet is to seek advice from a patent agent (we arent all nasty money grabbers).

You would actually be surprised how easy and relatively inexpensive it is to get patent protection in england at least. This buys you a year before you have to decide if you want to patent across the world (which gets expensive) but it also gives you some time to approach potential manufacturers in safety.

you would be surprsied how many hairbrained schemes can make fortunes.

Best way to save yourself some time and money is to search the american patent office database.

the website is

http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm

There are companies who supply "free inventors kits" (con artists) who start charging >£500 for searching for you and always claim to be interested, when you can use this and do it yourself for nothing.

if you type in abst/ and then the search words you want to use you can see if anything in existence in the states at least is close to the mark.

[Edited by Adam M - 1/14/2002 5:03:03 PM]

DavidBrown

hehe, I wouldn't care if someone made money from my ideas (not like it'd be the first time), I'd PAY to have someone do a better Pepsi(tm) bottle.. and a heated wheel.. so the improvement in the quality of life would be enough

fast bloke

Mark - What year was that? I haven't heard of that one, but with Dr Fleck (that was the old guy who fell off the pit wall when the QUB team Optimum 500cc GP bike got on the podium)spending at least half the time building or rebuilding some kind of 'car' or bike its not surprising we missed a few

(I was probably pi55ed in the union )