Tag Archives: ideas

Thoughts

Audience-inclusive advertising

After the new video iPod launched, and the possibility to purchase and download ad-free TV shows came to light, I realized that the advertising industry would have to come up with some clever ways to keep their audience if they were to maintain revenues. The following ideas sprung to mind:

  • A site can be set up and maintained by a consortium of advertising agencies and brand owners or a neutral body, that would either track viewer product preferences through data mining and random surveys, or would actively encourage users to register and provide product preferences. Alternately, existing user data could be compiled from various databases.
  • Advertising during TV shows that certain user groups watch could be more closely targeted to those groups by ad personalization. Users could register for the chance to have an ad dedicated to them. For example, a sample user we’ll call Jane could indicate that she likes the MINI Cooper, and so when an ad for the Cooper runs during a show that she likes to watch, names can be selected at random from the database of users, and if her name comes up, that ad could say: “This goes out to Jane” before it runs, and end with a “Thanks, Jane!” Quite simple, really, but it serves to capture the audience, since people will stay tuned during the ads just to see if their name will come up.
  • This concept can be expanded to include groups of users, perhaps up to 3-5 identifiable users per ad.
  • Through the medium of the website, brand owners can also take a cue from the users about the kind of products they need to advertise, this time in a more direct way, through hard data. Even more, they can more easily survey the users about the kind of new products they want to see.
  • Another way to keep the audience is to offer prizes for watching the ads and picking through clues that are weaved through both the ads and the shows. Entries can then be registered on the show’s site or at this main site for a chance to win something, perhaps even products featured on the show, or something as banal as an actor’s coat, or the actual bottle of perfume used by an actress on the show. These aren’t things that cost much but mean a lot to the audience.
  • People are making a big deal about product placement, but I think that reaches a saturation point very quickly. You can’t plaster products all over the screen and detract from the value of the story or the entertainment. Product placements works when it’s subtle, weaved into the story, and reinforced through the regular ads.
Standard
Thoughts

Gravitational propulsion-levitation vehicle

I’ve had this idea for quite some time – since sometime in 1997 – and I’ve carried it around in my mind, not knowing how to bring it to fruition, and certainly not knowing if I wanted to share it with anyone.

I’ve decided to share this idea with the world because I don’t have the physics knowledge that can allow me to figure it out on my own, and given my current and past schedule, it doesn’t look like I’ll have the time to beef up on physics any time soon. I hope that by sharing it, I can reach someone in whose mind the various pieces I’m going to talk about will click. Maybe this is one person, or a team of people, but that’s the power of the Internet – I can put my idea out there and see what happens!

I have to concede that this is the stuff of science fiction, of Star Trek and Star Wars and the like, but I really do think it can work. I think what makes my idea different from the sci-fi iterations is that it’s grounded – literally and figuratively speaking. I’m talking about gravitation. I have an idea for a vehicle that can move and float by harnessing the gravitational force of the Earth.

Here’s how I think it can work. The gravitational force of the Earth pulls things down to the ground. But it’s a magnetic force. We are attracted by it. If we can somehow deflect the force of attraction, we can move left or right along the surface of the Earth – that’s gravitational propulsion! If we can reverse it, we can rise – that’s gravitational levitation! Okay, so how can one affect a magnetic field or force? Through a magnetic field of opposing polarity. The problem is, I have yet to see a magnet that falls up, not down!

Here’s where it gets interesting. I can offer you the following clues, and I hope that you can put them all together to arrive at a solution:

  • Create – on a small scale – a gravitational field like the Earth’s, and attract other objects to it – this could be microscopic, it doesn’t have to be on a large scale. Once we can create this, we can apply the technology to see if we can create a gravitational field that the Earth “doesn’t like” and thus rejects – if this works, it means we can float, or levitate.
  • Look at the following two products currently on the market. The principles upon which they work is very similar to the way my vehicle can work. One involves an oscillating magnetic pendulum whose direction is determined by the repulsion from neighboring magnetic fields. This illustrates my gravitational propulsion idea. The second is an anti-gravity top, which, once tuned correctly, rises and stays in mid-air while it rotates. Please understand I’m not endorsing or advertising the company selling these products or the products themselves. I’m simply using them to illustrate my ideas. I do think the products are really innovative. I first heard about the levitating magnetic top several years ago, and that’s what helped me think about how my gravitational propulsion vehicle could work.
  • I think the repulsing gravitational field can be generated through the rotation (either parallel or perpendicular, not sure) of a disc or series of discs. It may be that some will have to rotate perpendicularly while others rotate parallel to the Earth. The angle of rotation can be varied to generate propulsion, levitation, or both. I think an important first step would be to generate propulsion alone – 2D movement along the Earth’s surface. That in itself would be a monumentous achievement. Levitation can come later, after the propulsion is perfected.
  • The vehicle can be perpetually moving. A rechargeable battery can be used to set the rotating mechanism in motion, and once the vehicle is moving and generating its own energy – remember, magnetic fields can be used to generate electricity – the energy from the rotating discs can recharge the battery.
  • The same mechanism can be applied to power plants, once perfected. We’ll be able to generate electricity directly from gravitational energy – no more nuclear or coal plants! The best part is that gravitational energy is in endless supply!

Just think of the benefits if we can ever get this idea materialized! I can go on and on, but I’ll let you dream about it: driving over fields of flowers without trampling them under wheels, sailing over water without getting anything wet, floating along the Grand Canyon, putting your hand out the window and picking fruits directly from the top of a tree… We won’t need roads anymore. We won’t pollute anymore. We’ll be able to camp out at the top of Mount Everest, or in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean…

Updated 2/27/13: I watched a documentary entitled “Modern Marvels – Car Tech of the Future” tonight, and was glad to see that others are thinking about this very idea: the capability of controlling gravity through what they call a “gravity capacitor”. See the video on YouTube and turn to 1:26:20.

Standard
Thoughts

The personal computer of the future

We’re still several years away from a device that can successfully combine a computer, phone, handheld, digital camera and music/video player, in a size/weight/price combination that’ll make most techies happy. But I’ve already got that device on my wishlist!

By computer, I mean laptop. I think that desktops will eventually disappear. Not only are they energy hogs, but they are simply too big and they aren’t portable. They take up too much space. Bulky desktops are already on their way out. The computer of the future will probably evolve from our current laptop form factor. I think the real breakthrough will come when OLED becomes a mature technology, and virtual keyboards are also viable. By virtual keyboard I mean either film you can type on, or simply a projected keyboard where your fingers breaking light waves trigger key down events.

The computer of the future will have all of the capability that we crave in a form factor that will likely approach the size of our current credit cards. It will probably be thicker, but I can envision a laptop with a rollout OLED or wall projection display and virtual keyboard that boots up in a 1-3 seconds, acts as a cellphone and digital camera, and that’s about 3-4 inches in terms of width/length, and about 1 inch or less in terms of thickness.

Standard
Thoughts

A truly portable cellphone

I think we have the capability of building a cellphone that is the size of a credit card, and about as thick as 3-4 credit cards put together. If we would use strip batteries plus an OLED, that could make it work. And I wouldn’t be interested in fancy games or the capability to customize the ringtones or to chat with my friends, etc. I just want a cellphone that’s thin enough and light enough to slip in my shirt pocket without seeing any bulge. I want a cellphone I can slip into my wallet or into an executive brief. The case could be made of magnesium allow or brushed aluminum. Now wouldn’t that look pretty cool?

Standard
Thoughts

Securing wireless networks

The business of securing wireless networks is booming. Everyone wants to go wireless, but are afraid of the seemingly poor security. I’ve read plenty of articles about companies who have come out with all sorts of approaches, such as client/server data encryption, special networking equipment, etc. I haven’t seen much news about a particular technology that could help us secure our wireless networking in a fairly easy to understand and implement fashion, by using GPS technology. Let me explain.

GPS technology has gotten to be commonplace these days. It would be fairly easy to come up with the hardware that can use this technology. But how to put it to work? Well, we’ve come up with some pretty good solutions for encrypting the data that goes back and forth between the clients and the servers. Where we’re failing is in limiting the reach of that data. We all know that wireless networks can’t be physically delimited. They will go through our walls and windows. That’s the clincher – if we could only limit how far it can go, we’ve got it made.

Well, I’d like to put forth one approach to doing this – and you’re probably already catching on, which is great! We need to come up with a hardware wireless access point or gateway that can act as a GPS transmitter. It will act as a central point, or antenna, and will broadcast its availability, along with GPS coordinates, to the clients. Here we can actually break this into two subs:

  1. We can program a map of our building or perimeter, into the wireless router/access point, and thus be able to allow or disallow clients to connect based on whether or not they are within our pre-determined perimeter. The clients would also need to have some sort of GPS functionality programmed into their wireless cards, so they can talk back about their location to the router. This, coupled with MAC filtering, would act as a wonderful physical barrier.
  2. We can come up with an additional hardware component – let’s call them perimeter delimiters – that we can stick (as guideposts) at the corners or our surface area that we want to cover. They would serve two purposes: would bounce wireless traffic back to the central router, and would determine whether or not a client that is trying to connect to the router is outside or inside our perimeter. This would eliminate the need of coming up with special wireless cards that have integrated GPS functionality. These “perimeter delimiters” would determine how far or how close a device is from the central router (based on the strength of the connection signal) and would then make a yes/no decision about whether to let that client connect or not.

Given that GPS positioning is fairly accurate (within 3-6 feet, at any rate), these methods would allow us to safely shut out unallowed devices from connecting.

You could say, yes, that may be true, but we still have a problem with those people would would listen in on our wireless traffic! Maybe, but I think I may have a solution for that as well. Let’s take these same perimeter delimiters, and let’s give them a different purpose. Instead of acting as wireless traffic mirrors, they would act as wireless traffic disrupters! We could let them be unidirectional antennas that would emit the opposite waveforms of our wireless traffic outside our perimeter, and will thus effectively cancel out the wireless traffic that goes outside our perimeter. This works along the same lines as radar jamming. Our perimeter delimiters would listen in on all of our wireless traffic in the area, then flood the external perimeter (through unidirectional antennas – which are the key) with the exact opposite waveforms.

Now let’s deal with data encryption. We’ve all seen that really expensive encryption hardware is not the answer. Just look at the Texas Instruments debacle that’s recently made the news with the car key chip. That’s not to say that we don’t need hardware encryption. We do, but we shouldn’t rely solely on hardware. I think we should also use software. Here’s what I mean. We now have all sorts of encryption methods: WEP, WPA, etc. The problem is that most of the hardware out there can only use one sort of encryption at a time. What we really need is the ability to come up with a different lock and key encryption method every time a device connects to a wireless router or access point. We can do this by first varying the encryption methods used for every connect, and also by varying the encryption methods used for portions of the data. We should also be able to insert bogus data inbetween our data bits, and by labeling them with a different key every time, allow the client and server to delete them out of the traffic and thus understand each other. We should also be able to vary the amounts of data we encrypt through a particular method, and the amounts of bogus data we insert between the real data bits. The router can come up with a particular ratio for all these combinations at the time of the connect. That’s what I mean by a lock and key method. We should also be able to randomly change how often the lock and key are changed while the device is connected to the network. By making multiple components of the encryption method random – and at random times – this makes it extremely difficult to listen in on our traffic.

Will this slow down the speed of our connections? Yes, but in some situations, it’s worth it. Ideally, we should be able to tone down the strength of our encryption on the home devices – and thus gain back our speed – but it should be coded in, just in case we need it.

Standard