Cool products that I would love (someone) to make if they don’t exist yet :P
Have you ever had that moment… when you are facing a problem in your everyday life and you think “Why the hell hasn’t anyone made a product to deal with this”…..well, am pretty sure you had. Anyway, I most certainly have, and quite frequently too. But I never did anything about it and the thoughts used to die after the moment was gone and were sent to some weird graveyard of lost ideas and hopes ( **cough** no reference to Arxiv **cough**).
Anyway, having all the free time in the world due to COVID, last weekend I decided to start keeping a note of all such weird ideas that pop into my mind about cool stuff that should be made ( by someone else ) for making life a bit easier, which resulted in this article. Now well, it’s a bit embarrassing to make this post, since being a CS undergrad, we are expected to make solutions to our own problems, but the truth is….I suck at coding stuff up…so that’s that. Can’t expect to make any of this on my own, but hey maybe you can do something about these? At least please please do let me know if solutions to these already exist :P
Since this is something I started doing pretty recently ( like 3–4 days ago lol ), I have come up with only 5 products that I would love to see someone to make and would happily pay for (well…maybe xD ). Here goes :
Why can’t we have a smartphone for minimalists?
I was recently intrigued by the concept of minimalism ( after watching this awesome documentary called “The Minimalists” ), and well keeping the explanation minimal, what it means is that while in modern society we are following the “American Dream” of a previous age, where the more there was, the better. Maybe….just maybe…less is more? Anyway, I am not going to talk much about minimalism here( maybe next time ? ).
But hey, just think about it yourself, with computational capabilities following Moore’s law and rising exponentially, our mobiles are getting loaded with more and more stuff ( read: crap ). We load them with one app after another, and even the mobile loads us with more notifs after notifs. And everything is super-customisable, you have like countless possible combinations to set-up your mobile in with all the themes, widgets, launchers, setting configurations etc etc.….and ah well, personally, for someone like me who goes to an ice-cream parlour, gets confused by all the options and ends up taking the plain vanilla scoop at the end, I’ll love a minimalistic mobile, and I guess others will also, right?
Maybe it can have very few options for stuff, or maybe have an AI algorithm that automatically tunes everything. And it only has a single app for every purpose, just one pdf reader, just one calendar app, just one music app. And no social media please ( now this is just customising it a little bit for me lol ) and minimal notifs. Now I know this will have a hard hit on the monetary side of things and would be a turn-off for most people, but for some weirdos with even weirder OCD’s (like me), it would be heaven-sent :P
Why can’t I get that magical feel of touching paper while reading ebooks?
A quick piece of info, I fucking reading love books, period. And most of the reading I do is in ebook format, which is all great and flexible and all, but there’s that one super-important element missing from them — The magical feel of the texture of the real paper. Having a personal library full of paperbacks is high on my bucket list ( yes am a nerd :P ), but well, it's hard to realise until I start earning some money. Until then, I would love someone to make ebook reader with the texture of real paper ( and maybe with the blissful smell of books as well? ).
I had a design in my mind, which may or may not be feasible. So basically it was inspired from that magnetic slate kind of thing we had when we were way too young ( you know, the one with the pen, and a slider below to like slide and erase stuff ). Maybe we can have a controller on the front, which is basically a digital interface for like users to select the book to read and like change the pages etc. And then we had like 10 pages constituting the book, having texture exactly like real paper, displaying the current 10 pages, which worked on the same concept of using magnets to orient iron on the paper to display words, and maybe we can combine it with some tech from Braille for blind people to give the words some thickness, idk…sounds cool lol, would certainly buy one.
Where is the stuff I stored somewhere in my house ages ago?
Well, it’s a sad truth of life, that not everyone is like Sherlock Holmes, having a “mental palace” in their mind, with a perfect replica of whatever they have seen. If you are anything like me, you would have limited space in your brain for stuff ( and if you are more like me, that’s already full of useless shit :P ). And ever so often we forget about where we kept our stuff in our house ( which can be pretty large for some people and/or full of too much stuff ) making finding something small like say a pendrive, a needle in a haystack problem.
Now imagine, having a mental palace of your own just like Sherlock, through an app. Which has a great 3D model of your entire house, and in which you can keep track of what stuff goes where and easily search for where was your stuff stored. Also if it’s a 3D model, maybe it can help you in organising your house well, like optimising the space allocation of your furniture to give the optimal distribution.
Well constructing a 3D model may be hard from scratch, but remember every house has a well-detailed drawing made by the architect, which is also used for the construction of the house. So maybe we can have an app which takes in that drawing and create a 3D model out of it.
And well maybe, we don’t need such a fancy solution, maybe we just want a simple app to keep track of where we kept things in our house, who knows?
What to make today for dinner?
Okay, this is not my problem, but its a question that haunts my mother almost every day lol. What exactly should we make for lunch/dinner today, like really?
Now given the limited amount of things that different people eat in our family and the inventory of stuff available in the fridge, and the recency of stuff in the past few days, there’s only a limited amount of stuff that can be made. And solving this kind of optimisation sounds like just the perfect thing for an app.
Oh and we can get all fancy with it if we want, we can have all these nutrition assigned with all the dishes, and your mother can like, slide this bar from tasty — healthy and get an entire spectrum of combinations. Also, it can get real-time feedback from my dad who is otherwise in office, about what he would like to eat when he comes back home, there can also be some AI added, which learns our preferences and stuff….and hey, who said this is limited to my house, it could be scaled up to hotels and cafeterias and what not.
Why is it so hard to find research opportunities as a beginner?
If you think getting interns are hard, try getting a research intern as an undergrad, it's hellishly hard. And for good reason as well, there’s not much of a place for students to connect with researchers for opportunities. You don’t have an AngelList/Internshala for research interns. And the only option you are left with is to go through the dreaded cold mailing process, which is more or less, just a random process.
Now I know it sounds cliche, but it would be great to have some kind of social platforms for less experienced researchers to connect with experienced ones and get work under them. The process is already super common in the software engineering domain, then why not in research? Interns are cheap ( some like me, even work for free ), they are super enthusiastic and can endlessly carry out mindless experimentation, and hey, professors do want people like that lol.
Now there certainly are websites like Reserachgate etc which aim to do this, but maybe having something specific for research interns would help a lot.
Anyway, I wanted this article to be a quick one, so it might have been a bit rough and unpolished, but please please do let me know if anyone of these ideas has been already implemented. And as usual, if you are someone with whom I have not connected in a while, do drop a message, would love to talk!
So, until the next one :P
