Free idea....to a good home

They say that "an idea not acted upon is worthless." Well, what if someone else acts on it?

Ever had a great idea but lacked the resources...or motivation to act upon it? Well don't throw that great idea away...donate it! Authors Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff have written a book called "Why Not?" which among other things discusses "open source" ideas. They've put together a companion website which acts as marketplace for free ideas. As of today the catalog of donated ideas contains 249 categories and 2,089 ideas.

My own humble submission to the catalog can be found here, but I like the idea so much I've included the text here as well (it IS my blog :-) :

This is something 3M should team up with Dell or HP to produce (IMHO). An office computer printer that uses a "yellow sticky" notes as the page separator. The networked printers in most offices are usually set up to have a cover sheet that separates different user's print outs. The problem is that if there are several printed documents or a large document, you spend several minutes sifting through a pile looking for the separator. With this idea you could have a sticky note that separates different print outs off to the side. To get fancy, the printer could print "John Doe's print out" on the sticky note before placing it as a separator. It could go on to place the notes so that they were staggered between print outs, to let you read all the notes in a large pile at once. This would save people time, and a nice added bonus would be all the paper that is saved from all those full size cover sheets.
-mditson, Aug 23 2005

And to the person who left the comment asking "don't all good printers collate?" the answer is no, absolutely not-- you're just lucky in your office I'm afraid.

This brings up another point about good ideas and getting them into the hands of people who can use them. Why is it so hard to contact the right people at a company? Why doesn't 3M, Dell, or HP have a big old "suggestion box" button on their web sites? Too busy to listen? It's too bad. As a product marketer myself I would love direct, unprompted access to ideas from prospects in my target segment.

Weblogistan

From Wired Magazine’s Sidebar called “Jargon Watch”

“Weblogistan: n. The Iranian blogosphere, where activists go to vent anonymously in the face of Iran's oppressive regime. Weblogistan is now so vast that Persian is the fourth most widely used language on blogs.”

I love this! In the 1980s the Reagan administration fought the psychological war of ideas through the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. These institutions passed messages of hope and liberty to the trapped and the enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. When I say messages of “hope” and “liberty,” I mean it literally. The Voice of America would pipe recordings of Mass being held by Pope John II behind the borders of the U.S.S.R. where people had to worship secretly. News of the world unfiltered by “Pravda” provided Soviet citizens with alternative sources of information.

In his book on Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza calls out the importance of these messages to the people inside the U.S.S.R. “…several former dissidents told Reagan that when they heard he had called the Soviets an “evil empire,” it gave them home, and they said to each other that America finally had a leader who clearly understood the nature of communism.”

Clearly, the Internet is the new medium of choice for the message of freedom. Now instead of just broadcasting messages into an oppressed country, the message can come from within, from the people themselves. Can you imagine the type of courage it must take to post an anti-establishment blog message inside Iran? Check out the Cartside blog for a further write up of the Weblogistan phenomenon. “A young man who calls himself Hoder has started nothing short of a media revolution in Iran. In the 'islamic republic', which human rights reporters label the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East, a new form of publicity is budding. Here of all places.”

The significance of this type of communication can not be emphasized enough. How does the saying go, “the first rule after you conquer a new country – take over the airways.” Controlling information is a way of keeping people down, of keeping them under control. Well, that’s no longer possible, is it? The emergence of the Internet means oppressed people can communicate with the rest of the world still.

The United States should adopt a policy of doing everything it can to nurture Internet communications between people in oppressive regimes. In Iran, this may not even be necessary. The country already has over 100,000 blogs (see a directory of many English/Farsi blogs at http://blogsbyiranians.com/). It is possible that one day Axis of Evil countries such as Iran and North Korea will stumble and fall—eaten out from within by the free flow of messages of hope and liberty.

How many stamps to send to Tuva?

I once read a set of personality test questions on the Internet. One of the questions was, "if you could meet any three people in the world alive or dead, who would they be, and why?" (Or something like that). One of the people I chose was Richard Feynman.

Feynman was one of many young physicist that worked on the Manhattan project. Later in life he won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics (no, I’m not exactly sure what that is-- something to do with quantum mechanics and particles taking every path at the same time rather than any of the infinite options). His 1959 lecture, "There's Plenty of room at the bottom," is also widely credited as the start of the science of nanotechnology. In addition, he was also the person who (among others I would guess) who figured out that the space shuttle Challenger exploded because of the faulty O-rings.

All of that is only half of why I chose him as one of the three I would like to meet. The other half was that he was just an extraordinarily interesting character. Feynman wrote several books about his adventures. Ever read about how a Nobel physist approaches meeting women? How about his experiments in sensory deprivation chambers? Better yet is his "hacker" past as a guy who made a hobby in the down time at Los Alamos cracking safes.

The U.S. Postal service has recently commissioned a new stamp of Feynman, and I just thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about him.

Exi-stencill-ism

Finally, all those frequent flier miles are paying off. In my house, unused FF miles go to free magazine subscriptions. I've been getting Esquire this way for a year or so, but the most recent issue has paid off in spades. An article, titled "I am Banksy," in the most recent issue details the author's search for what is now my new favorite artist, Robin Banksy. Apparently I am very late to the party, but who cares, this is good stuff.

His work has popped up in the form of graffiti all across London. Beyond the article, I've found two great places to view his stencils: His web site, here, and another site that actually shows many more pictures of his work around London, here (click on galleries on the right).

From my admittedly sub-half-day fandom state, I can tell you honestly in my now "expert" opinion that his work has a running subversive theme most often based on hope. Graffiti is a form of subversion in and of itself, but the actual content of his work seems to address authority and "state" rule in many ways. One picture is a of a large tank surrounded by soldiers looking very initiating with assault rifles and and all in black. What leaps out is that all of the soldiers have the yellow "have a nice day" smiley faces. Another cool one is on a brick wall facing a busy roadway. The picture is of two soldiers. One is down in a defensive stance, covering the other with his assault rifle while the second is shown bent over spray painting a large Peace symbol on the wall.

The pictures of hope are even more inspiring. They show worlds full of grey and sadness, but with subjects that have suddenly opened windows into different worlds of hope and possibility. According to the article, in July Banksy actually created nine pieces on the Palestinian side of the West Bank wall. One picture in the article shows a huge piece of the actual wall with a cracked and broken "hole" as if pushed through the wall. the actual fence looks like what it is, water-stained concrete, through the hole we see a boy at the beach with a bucket and shovel, framed by blue skies and puffy white clouds (similar but different than the one I've included above).

Past that, several of these works are just plain fun. My favorite shows a large UPC barcode symbol with bent "bars" in one section, and a leopard that has just "escaped" coming toward you.

Banksy has an interesting manifesto (read it here) on his site that captures the goal of his work much better than I have. It's the story of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, a British soldier who was one of the first to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. It's haunting.