A Novel City Wide Food Package System

Many groups are trying to make it easier for people to get pre-prepared foods (either prepped ingredients, like veggies, or premade meals) as a way to make it more convenient for people to eat healthier, but they are failing to penetrate the food market primarily because of the packaging. Yes, the packaging! Health conscious people whether they are aware of it or not have a sort of weekly quota or tolerance limit for plastic and "compostable packaging". 

If there was a city-wide universal container system that was made of sleek non-toxic, oven-proof, reusable (not compostable) materials and a novel distribution and collection system (think milk bottles of old) then the number of take away and prepped meals or raw ingredients we'd purchase would increase dramatically. For example, I refuse to buy prepped veggies packaged in plastic but would love to buy prepped veggies if they were packaged differently. The way to operationalize this would be to get city approval and pilot in one neighborhood - convincing the key restaurants and grocery stores to use the service all starting at once (akin to non-smoking laws). The biggest hurdle is operationalizing a collection system that would worth the hassle - I have ideas but none convincing yet. If such a system could fly, lots of web app and monetization options exist...

Smile iPhone Ap

Surely someone has thought of this. An Ap that let's you tap or shake your phone every time you make a stranger smile.

You get points every time you make someone smile. More points = more levels = more rewards. Smiling is inherently viral.

It would be easy to monetize this but I think of it as cost saving. Think of all our therapy bills. Then again, you could smile at the wrong person and two years later find yourself in therapy, so it's hard to say for sure.

As Discussed: the Burning Man Eco-friendly Bus System

Dear Internet: please take this idea and make it happen as I am almost 100% certain it is a good one - one that could even make money.

Burning Man has thousands of people, a majority (?) of whom live in the Bay Area, most of whom drive individual cars full of stuff to the Nevada desert for basically the same number of days as everyone else. The idea is to take a small fleet of the "Eco-friendly" (do they run on biofuel?) buses like those that comprise the menacing fleet that maraud our neighborhoods filled with Google employees, and fill them with paying Burning Man participants and their stuff. People could sign up and pay to be transported, and could reserve space on a more open, warehousey type of bus for their stuff. The Stuff Bus would leave at the same time as the People Bus. The Stuff Bus would charge based on square footage required to house the Stuff.

The tagline: The Party Starts on the Bus.

Postcard Printer for Museums

This is Katie's idea, and I feel like maybe it exists, but I am too lazy to look it up:

You have been there before: you are at a museum, you love the exhibition, you want to get the catalogue or the postcard from the show - especially because you loved that ONE piece so much! It moved you. You want to be reminded of that feeling. In the giftshop there are three postcards, none of which are the ones you want. You see the catalogue, but the one piece you loved beyond measure is not part of it. You buy the catalogue anyway because you are a sucker. But what if you could print out - in the museum giftshop - your own postcards of the image you liked best? Like printing an image from an image search on the internet, but this one is all licensed, the museum and the owner of the image get support, and you get a decent print on nice cardstock (or paper).

Reinvent The Urban Bus System

Sitting on the bus as I type - reminded of how much I hate the bus system. It's painfully slow, unreliable, too crowded and unfriendly. Not to mention motion sickness.

We need to reinvent the local bus system by getting rid of local stops. Busses should be express rides from neighborhood to neighborhood. This would encourage more walking which is good for everyone. It would speed up service and more people might want to take busses, so more busses could be added.

They need to get rid of the bottleneck payment system too.

This could be a boon for urban living.

Somehow I have to get off this bus now!

Sent from my iPhone

Silent Garbage Trucks

I have had this idea before (oh, so many times) so I am just going to put it on the blog in case someone who knows how to do this reads it and does it, since god knows I cannot.

The idea is this: HYBRID garbage truck that does not make sound. Isn't it possible to make those hydrolic lift things so that they are noiseless? We can go to space but we cannot make a hybrid garbage truck? They are so loud and wake me up almost everyday (so yes, this is a self-centered idea) and I have to believe that a quieter solution is possible. Or else an entirely new way to collect garbage?

Maybe one day we will be a zero-waste society and this will solve the problem? Perhaps I should concentrate on making that change?

Salad Study

Ok, I'm sorry. This is not a business idea. It's a research one.

I would like to know how many calories are in those salads one makes from Mixt Greens or equivalent chain. You know the ones - where they make a salad in a large mixing bowl, the way you would make a salad for a party of 4-6 people and then pack it into one of those giant plastic containers (after squirting a ginormous amount of dressing on it). Totally delisc if you make your own, but my hunch is their calorie estimates on their website are totally off (mostly because their serving size for dressing is just way too small). I'd love to do a study where you buy a handful of salads in a random fashion and send them off for nutritional analysis and then compare the values to the published estimates.

No money in this of course. Except it might not be great for business for Mixt Greens and co.