Imagine them everywhere.

Someone should start a chain of standalone concierge services.

They would be in little buildings, like you sometimes see pizza places in. There would be some people in full business dress behind a counter, and a couple of fancy seats. Some coffee. It would be like a rental car office except not terrible. It would be comfortable, welcoming. There would be interesting species of living plants that the concierges could teach you about, if you liked.

People could come in and make requests, which there will be charges for, or they can opt to buy a membership, which comes with a lovely little plastic or perhaps metal card and lets you skip lines and receive help for free.

The concierges would help you with anything. Many of their services are things that the internet, and therefore people's phones, can now do: finding a coffee shop, getting directions, looking up information. But they would still happily perform those tasks and many others that the internet can't: knowing secrets about the places they occupy, finding you a free bathroom or parking space, introducing you to a helpful stranger, discussing the finer points of anything you desire.

The concierges would have to be well read and highly educated and polite and have a lot of connections. They would have to know their way around and how to live in a place and who to call for any very specific matter that arises. But those people are out there. They're looking for jobs.

Summer job.

Buy an ice cream truck. Paint it more fun.
Sell the usual scooby-doo with gumball eyes and good humor bars (toasted almond, please), but also sell some alcohol-slushies and frozen jello shots and similar. Go around to college campuses and outside clubs on summer nights while lines of people are waiting to get in.

Also, instead of the entertainer, play electronic-bell midi versions of Biggie tracks.


On a separate note, if you need a commercial for some kind of refreshing thing, use that imagery of the ice cream truck turning a queue outside a club into a party in the street.

Have you been meaning to make a terrible college comic strip?

It's called "Oh My Quad!".
There you go.

A scene for your indie romance film.

One of the lovers-to-be is riding the subway (to work?) and sees a person (shh it's the other lover-to-be but we don't know it yet) looking at him/her and drawing in a goofily large notebook. They maybe have an uncomfortable moment together because neither really wants the other to notice him/her. At the end of the scene it is revealed that the drawer has rendered a comic-style portrait of the other's shoes. It is heartfelt, and that is how we know that they're meant to be.

But I don't know why.

So you rent a tall danceclub and mount a high quality camera on the ceiling facing down. As the people roll in you give them hats with qr codes or something on top. You can then use a computer to track and analyze the migration patterns of the party.

There is only one time.

Let's start a company that makes watches that don't have any hands and just say "Now." on the face.

Digital ones would be pretty easy, too.

Necessary business idea.

Someone needs to start an internet business that will delete all of your social networking profiles when you die.

I want all of the internets.

So I am sitting in my friend's condo, and she has a secured wireless connection, but there are also a few unsecured networks in nearby units. A different friend is emailing me gigabytes of video files, and it's taking figuratively forever to download it all. Someone should pioneer a software system with which I can connect my computer to multiple wifi networks simultaneously. If there's a restriction on the hardware, that is a problem. Although, you could still probably build a little usb duder that would make it happen.


Full discretion - I am not checking to see if this already is a thing because I lied and am not really in a condo. I am typing on my phone in the metro. But I did just leave my friend's condo.

BEST IDEA.

Let's start a business where people send us their dead pets and we turn their skin/fur into shoes.

Potentially un-PC terms I learned from my otherwise very sensitive mother.

Whore's Bath - washing down just your smelly bits instead of getting a full wash.
Old Maids - the unpopped kernals left over after making popcorn.

Electro-hinge, inc.

If you mounted little generators in the hinges of the doors of busy retail spaces (or libraries or anything) could you get enough power to make it worthwhile?

Band names.

I just found a bunch of band names (two with album names attached) I pitched to some folks I was writing music with in February of 2009:

Scam Artists (Scartists)
Dr. Thankenstein
Count Thankula
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Thanks
Swamp Thank
Thankzilla
Tyrannosaurus Thanks
Thanks-a-Mouse
Franksgiving
the Batman Suicides - Lost in TransBatman
Batman Antoinette - Bed, Bath, and Batman
There Will Be Batman
The Batman Prophecies
the Truth About Cats and Batman
Grosse Point Batman
Tricerathanks
I Might Be a Trucker

Plans for the most appealing least functionally appropriate instrument.

Get a turntable, slightly broken or fully functional, whatever your price range. Swap out the motor with a stepper motor. Press a record with concentric circles instead of a spiral, and put different quality tones in each circle, but all just playing a440 at 33rpm. A sine track, a square track, maybe a stretched out dog bark track, whatever. Then you can, using arduino (or a basic stamp or whatever you prefer) create an input that will convert midi-inputted notes into the correct speed ratio to spin the turntable and produce any pitch you want. Like an optigan or a mellotron, but way cheaper (except the pressing vinyl part).

Alternately, for the lazy/adventurous, just put a variable resistor in place of the speed switch on the original motor. It could be a pot, or a capacitance thing (like a theremin), or some kind of string (like an ondes martenot). Whatever. That way you could get all portamento-y and wobbly and inconsistent.

This is all totally clear in my brain. If it doesn't make any sense out of my brain let me know. I'd hate to be confusing anyone.

ALSO, really the plan here is to just produce a bunch of copies of that piece of vinyl, and sell them along with maybe some plans on how folks can make the instrument themselves, and people will all go nuts with it.

Let's make MMA but for musicians.

They can battle like a DJ battle, but they can do any kind or combination of kinds of musics they want.

"Step into the optigan!"

Rejected Halloween Costumes.

Walrus vampire (the biggest teeth).
Spraypaint can with actual spraypaint in the nozzle.
Trojan horse (horsey face, and a velcro rip-open belly full of toy soldiers also cloth intestines).

For the business-minded.

Cyberdinette: kitchen furnishings for and inspired by killer robots from the future.