Previous Ideas of the Year: (click suns to rate or comment on ideas)

1		Hunger Helper. Alerts to avoid foods in shortage. When a crisis (drought or war) spikes the price of a food like rice that poor people need, issue alert to avoid that food. Volunteers avoiding that food reduce demand and price, helping poor avoid hunger.	E-mail
2		Internet dating sites tend toward either many people but no help in selecting compatibility, or the opposite. Solve the problem with a hybrid, letting users change between few, some, or many criteria to either widen or focus their search.	E-mail
3		Swear jar for first-world problems. When you complain about a trivial difficulty, write down a comparable but much more serious problem that someone in a very poor place might have, to give you perspective and maybe lead you to try to fix it.	E-mail
4		Let people on government assistance earn extra money (from government) if they would work during natural disasters, for example shoveling show or checking on older or disabled folks in their homes to ensure they're warm, safe and fed. Flooding, earthquake	E-mail
5		Nanophone: a microphone to hear sounds at a microscopic scale, including cells moving and organelles moving. Maybe it could detect things that microscopes can't see.	E-mail
6		S-SPACE House Modules: The all-in-one family solution to generate abundant healthy food, clean energy for home and transportation, all within an inexpensive and eco-friendly house.	E-mail
7		3D printer that consumes supermarket plastic bags	E-mail
8		Simple classroom app for smart phones and computers. Teachers are given an application that allows them to quickly access, edit, and scramble the roll of their class. Also allows for automated emails to be sent on command to principals & parents.	E-mail
9		Create a night light that senses the other lighting sources in your room. For example when you turn off your bedroom light, it comes on for 60 seconds then dims to off. This gives you time to find your bed! Interior lights in cars can already do this.	E-mail
10		New design for a smart phone: transparent body to look interesting, full touch screen, and USB connections to a computer and to a pen drive.	E-mail
11		To protect against loss of power to a nuclear power plant, use a water tower. Gravity can force cool water through the reactor until power is restored.	E-mail
12		Walkie talkies that have a fully functional navigation system with a screen that shows the position of other walkie talkie users.	E-mail
13		Aerogel made of rice husks for insulation and other applications: Green Earth Aerogel.	E-mail
14		Unarmed remote control aircraft seem to have unlimited potential. Mounting cameras on wingtips and front and back would enable stereoscopic vision. Depending upon mission, additional sensing capabilities should be added.	E-mail
15		Put soluble orange dye in the alcohol hand gel used in hospitals by staff and visitors. Then anyone not using it would be identified. It would wash off easily on leaving hospital.	E-mail
16		Tiny CCTV cameras in cockpit of plane connected to a multi-channel digital video recorder. Store the hard drive in the blackbox. If the plane crashes, full audio/video recordings of the crew and instruments, passengers, & out-of-windscreen view.	E-mail
17		Heavy buckets of water are very difficult for older people to carry. The manufacturers should add removable wheels so that the buckets can be rolled, then lifted.	E-mail
18		Paper used for shopping bags is to be replaced by cotton bags (old fabric rags, etc).	E-mail
19		Liquid nitrogen airplane. Instead of kerosene, fill tanks with liquid nitrogen, which vaporizes through nozzles to propel plane. Safer since no fire danger; lighter since no jet engines; no air pollution; no noise pollution. Or use compressed air.	E-mail
20		Save life by donating a kidney to a stranger. You may trigger a "domino transplant", in which several donors who were willing to give a kidney to a relative, but were immunologically incompatible, give instead to a stranger. Thus, many lives are saved.	E-mail
21		Pet rental: service to rent dogs, cats, and other pets to people for an hour, a day, a week, or longer. This would let people decide whether they like and can handle pet care and would reduce abandonment.	E-mail
22		Stores should have a small strip of one-way mirrors around the inside, where an armed guard could hide, even if a robber knew he was there, somewhere. A thief couldn't take hostages since he wouldn't know where the guard was (he might be behind him).	E-mail
23		Banks that are "too big to fail" threaten the world economy if they do fail. To prevent banks from getting so big, government should force breakups or block mergers of banks/companies with assets or liabilities > 1 day of world GDP (0.3% of annual GDP).	E-mail
24		A spiral slide as a fire escape from tall buildings. It has a cover and may use seats (& seatbelts) on gears (to regulate speed). It goes 10 floors at a time. Access via metal, locked doors, opened only in an emergency. Faster than stairs.	E-mail
25		Companies charge huge fees to workers who migrate abroad for long-term contract jobs (as maids, construction workers, etc.). Instead, governments should arrange migration and contracts at low cost to let workers keep more of their meager incomes.	E-mail
26		People are setting up a Twitter account to raise $1,000,000 for charity. Can they do it? See www.twittacause.co.cc or TwittaCause.	E-mail
27		If you want to wake up early in the morning, then before going to sleep say 100 times the time when you want to awaken.	E-mail
28		A house phone (landline phone) with an mp3 player, ring-tones, and ring-backs. (ringtones, ringbacks, land-line)	E-mail
29		Digital vehicle traffic accident recorder: a small, digital camcorder mounted into vehicle front grill would record for 30 seconds, allowing visual recall of collision causes.	E-mail
30		Bluetooth spectacles: Often one forgets where one put eyeglasses, thus add bluetooth to eyeglasses so that they could be pinged and made to beep to tell where they are placed.	E-mail
31		Lollipop cough drops: to prevent choking on normal cough drops that might be inhaled when sucking in air before a cough, cough drops could be made as lollipops with paper or plastic sticks or rope loops.	E-mail
32		Help people who live in trash dumps by employing them to run recycling machines. (Garbage, junk, recycle, poverty, scavengers)	E-mail
33		Vending machine manufacturers should program their vending machine dispensers to rotate past 360 degrees, like 380 degrees, then go back 20 degrees to a neutral position so that your chips or candy will fall down every time.	E-mail
34		A car company could partly fund development of a non-fossil fuel car, the world's first that would be mass produced, by collecting $2000 deposits from 500,000 people, who'd suggest features of the car. It would cut greenhouse gas pollution. (Wikicar)	E-mail
35		To help poor people who can't afford the high price of staple foods, we can reduce food prices by cutting demand for food. Let's all eat less rice and other grains and especially less meat, which requires much grain to produce.	E-mail
36		Pet water fountain for dogs & cats. It would look like a human fountain, but it would have a paw lever. The animal would put his or her paw on the lever, and the fountain will give water.	E-mail
37		Meter to monitor power usage (watts/amps) per outlet. Variation to be uses at circuit (fuse) panel to trace hi-use circuits. Could be simple analog or digital/programmable to compute cost of use. Could be separate attachment or built into outlet/breaker.	E-mail
38		To increase lending, better guarantees are needed. Personal guarantees can be dictated as videoclips, perhaps notarised. Personal guarantees address the problem of no title books. In traditional societies, guarantors' assets are well known.	E-mail
39		Escape from building fires. Once people are trapped in storied-building fires, a self-contained rope platform can help people evacuate from upper windows quickly.	E-mail
40		Mobile phones should have an internal electricity generator/accumulator just like the "kinetic" wrist watches.	E-mail
41		A Controlled And Effective Education System For A Country: The future of a country depends on the abilities of the young generation. It is the responsibility of the country to identify and enhance skills of each person to gain optimum output from them.	E-mail
42		Bubble Wrap, Pop and Smell: Popping bubblewrap is relaxing and stress relieving. Combine it with a smell, known for its stress-relieving properties, which is released when popped, and you have a product that delivers double the stress relief in one go.	E-mail
43		Prisoner mixing allows them to learn new crime methods and have the worst role models: other inmates. Instead, isolate all prisoners in cells (tiny, to save money) and provide job education and good role models via books and selected videos. (jail)	E-mail
44		Use a new word to describe the role of a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend: FROLO, or FRiend, ROommate, and LOver.	E-mail
45		Auto rotation of photos. Photos taken in vertical position are actually stored horizontally. To view on computer you need to rotate them. Cameras can use mechanism like spirit level to record camera position and rotate photo accordingly.	E-mail
46		Fast food chains should include one helping of vegetables in all their burger and other menus, for example, disguised as finely chopped vegetables added to the burger or more salad into the burger beyond the lettuce leaf! Roopa Karkhanis	E-mail
47		People who are determined to kill themselves should do so in a way that their organs can be donated and save the lives of others. (suicide)
48		Check your own income rank among everybody in the world at Global Rich List and see what your money can buy for yourself or for poor people.	E-mail
49		The parent-child divide can only be bridged if parents show they care for their children, keep open the channels of communication with them, and provide them with a companionship close enough to counter the unhealthy peer pressure often acting on them.	E-mail
50		With >6 billion people on earth now, and ~30 billion in human history, don't you think we could find 50 or 60 of the brightest to figure out a way to eliminate the need for wars altogether? Maybe a permanent UN council?	E-mail