more new random ideas...

Came up with one random thought this morning and one idea last night. These 2 should be useful enough and simple enough to implement by us =)
6) parking locator
There are plenty of times I, and i'm sure many others, had to walk around and around to look for our car in a giant parking lot. Seems like you should be able to get an accurate enough 3-D accelerometer, connect that to a simple embedded CPU, and make a small parking-locator that fits on any keychain. Only needs 1 button - "set location" when you park, and a display that points out where is your car with relation to where you are currently at. Only thing necessary is an accelerometer that's dead-accurate... time to do some research on this ;-)

Only hick-up would be those parking structures with slopped ramps that could make it confusing for the end users... but it's already a lot better than completely forgotten which floor you parked at, and end up going through 3 or 4 floors of parking structure looking for the car... I for one, have done that a few times at least -_-

On second thought - if the hardware in the iphone is "good enough," then it can be an iphone app first ;-) if not, then we'll have to use dedicated 3d-accelerometers...

prototype parts cost - shouldn't be more than $2-300
ideal production cost - <$25

7) fridge catalog
These days, we try to cook, but depending on phase of the moon, level of stress, length of work, or any other unknown reason, we often end up buying takeout. That's fine except once in a while, when we decide to go back to cooking ways, we find groceries from 2 weeks ago that are have already went bad, or on the verge of going bad. There are plenty of other instances where we throw something in the depth of the fridge, it gets over-shadowed by bigger items outside, and we forget about it until one day, we find little green things in a bag towards the back -_-' So, I figured we can easily setup a simple catalog of food in the fridge!

This should be a magnetic device that's removeable, so you can take it with you to grocery stores, so you don't have to make grocery shopping lists. Should have a color touch-screens with big icons, with several options:

inventory display (default, phase 1) - what kind of stuff is in the fridge, and how much of it. Also, how long it's been sitting there, and how much longer it can stay before it goes bad.

input options (phase 1) -
top level display - "freezer" vs. "4c"
second level display - "fruits" vs. "veggie" vs. "drinks" vs. "meat" vs. whatever...
third level display - detailed type, ie watermelon, strawberry, chicken, left-over food, etc. This is the only "customizeable" level, either sort by alphabet, by personal preference, or however the person likes it...
fourth level - amount of food of that type, either in lb, count, or "portion" if people wants to separately portion their food like we do before tossing things into the freezer.

grocery shopping option, simple (phase 1) -
input via touch-screen in an iphone-like fashion, of list of things to buy. easily cross-off/inventoried as you put things in cart. (would be neat if the device can double as hand-held balance to weigh various items =P)

recipe option (phase 2) -
Based on what's in the fridge, you can either have the device recommend some recipe. Also, based on what's in danger of going bad, the device can maximize the items in the fridge via various recipes. This could have an extensive amount of ethnetic recipes, either all contained in the device, or downloadable over computer. (self contained, with a "random" option would be kinda neat)

This options should also accompany an input option for various spices and other items available in the kitchen.

Additionally, various nutritional values and similar information can be stored on the device, for the health-nut who wants to be on some special kind of diet plan or whatever...

grocery shopping option, complex (phase 3) -
keep track of what's usually purchased and inventoried in the fridge, combined with cooking frequency and recipe used, recommend groceries to buy and how much. This can be linked to the "coupon/ad database" idea and can be designed to optimise for cost, for organic, or whatever. the device can have a simple coupon sorting capability too... *shrugs*

In terms of power, rechargeable battery would be nice, via USB would be ideal ;-) While this could be made into an iPhone app as well, I don't really think that the iPhone screen is big enough. Also, it's a "fridge device" that's best served when it's on the fridge, in the kitchen, dedicated and always-on, and I'm envisioning it to be similar in size to say, Kindle... (but that doesn't have a touch screen...) If Apple eventually releases the much-rumored bigger-touch or their web-pc or whatever it is, it might be the ideal platform to prototype and develop an application for.

prototype parts cost - shouldn't be more than $500-1,000
ideal production cost - <$300 (needs to be cheaper than a "tablet PC")