Recent Products

This week I visited yet another awesome website for my research on recent products. The one thing that I observed these all have in common is the fact that somebody saw a new way to solve a problem and they went out and created it. Many of these seem kind of pointless to me but they're unique in a way that makes it so people will still want them.

• Self-Stirring Mug: While it's not that hard to grab a spoon and stir your beverage yourself, this cup mixes your drink with some super cool tech.
• Laser Keyboard: The laser keyboard is an extremely awesome way to connect a keyboard to your tablet. Using bluetooth and laser projection you put a keyboard on any surface you want.
• Fingerprint Gun Safe: Don't want anybody besides yourself to tough some of your important belongings? Get this mini safe that gives access only to yourself.
• Deglon Stainless Steel Nesting Knives: Like a set of Russian Nesting dolls these knives all fit inside each other, making them easy to store.
• Blind-Spot Free Rearview Mirror: A large mirror that replaces your rearview one. It upgrades your car and helps you make safe lane changes without having to turn your head around.
• Pocket-Sized Washing Machine: A small and easily packed washing machine, or scrubba, can wash clothes anywhere in 30 seconds flat. Extremely useful for travelling. 

The rest of the products on the website are interesting but not necessarily as unique and I can only picture the ones that I listed above as the really successful ones.

Unsuccessful Inventions

This week I'm going to be writing about innovations that I personally think are bad ideas. This is the type of stuff that I can't see ever succeeding in the market.

First there is the Anti-Slouch Screen that I picked up from that website I visited last week. It's a computer monitor that corrects you when you start to slouch and it will continue to annoy you until you correct your posture. It will also tell you when you need to stand up and take a break. Unless you are a chiropractor, I can't see anybody wanting a computer to tell them to straighten up while they are trying to get something done.

As for that idea on terrifying playgrounds that I mentioned last week. Although it may be psychologically correct and scary playgrounds could benefit kids in the future, I can't see too many parents allowing their kids to play on such things. As a rule parents just want their children to be safe and I think only a few parents would ever invest money to help build the playgrounds.

Now I will admit that this next one sounds awesome but I still think it's a bad idea. Not necessarily because I don't think it will succeed in the market but because I think it will cause a lot of problems. Similar to the whole debate about drones spying on people, I think that these bugs will cause even worse problems. This innovation, called the Cyberbug Drone, is based around ingraining a micro-system into an insect which gives you control over it's actions and the ability to spy on basically whatever you want. As cool as it is, this would cause a great conflict between government privacy, not to mention that it could contradict the Third Amendment in the Constitution (A right to have privacy in your house). The internet already gives your local creeps a powerful weapon, lets not give them any more.

Sometimes the inventions that seem to be for the greater good can backfire and become dangerous. A crop dusting plane for example, originally used to fertilize crops but later used to drop harmful poisons in the Vietnam War. Just something to think about folks. Be careful with what you create.

Psychological Inventions

Well, I've done some more research (as usual) and I found this website with a bunch of new technological treats. It claims Wake Forest University is working on developing electric clothes. Created by David Carroll and said to be fully developed within two years. Now don't worry you're not going to get electrocuted, basically it converts the heat off a span of your clothing into electricity. It doesn't give much power but according to Richard Morgan "a cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone’s battery charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours." 

Another invention would be the Strap Game. According to Jenna Wortham Strap Game is a device that replaces those strap thingies you hold onto when you are on a subway. To keep you from getting bored on the train to work, and to alert you when you are nearing your destination. 

This next one is really crazy, the Shutup Gun. You can plan on this being developed in a little more than four years, because if this thing works, you're going to want it. Instead of shooting people this gun actually just records your victims voice. Kazutaka Kurihara, one of the creators says that if you record someone speaking and play it back to them with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds, it is possible that it will take away that person's ability to speak for the moment. A phenomenon that's called delayed auditory feedback. Once this is developed you could make anyone who's annoying you shut up.

This invention is also used to solve a psychological problem. That problem being that children are too big wusses now days. The solution: Terrifying Playgrounds. Yes, these playgrounds have a much bigger chance of injury, but really this all revolves around the theory that "What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." The two Norwegian psychologists that developed this are trying to better prepare kids for life's challenges. Not to mention the fact that I would have enjoyed playgrounds much better if they had steep slides and epic monkey bars when I was a kid.

This stuff is all pretty darn cool and not once have I wrote on this blog and not found an interesting invention that I had no idea existed. 

Uno-Dicycle

Hello my peeps. Now I know that the products I talked about last week were eh... lets just say semi-cool, nothing too mind blowing. So I thought that I would try to make today's entry about something that I thought was super wicked. Who cares about the light bulb when you have the Uno-Dicycle, invented by a dude named Ben Gulak. I swung by his website and here's what I picked up.

• There are three versions of the Uno-Dicycle. Uno, Uno II, and Uno III. (Who would've known?)
• Basically they're  a cross between a motorcycle and a unicycle. The real wicked part is the fact that it can transform into either. Unicycle when you're going slow, Motorcycle when you're going fast.
• When it's in unicycle mode it functions on two wheels that are side-by-side. Using gyroscopic technology to keep its balance.
• The Uno II and III are basically the same as the first except for more advanced technology and they can reach greater speeds in motorcycle mode.
• It's small and compact yet it has all the same benefits of a motorcycle.

 Ben's biography describes his interest in science as a youth. As we all can guess, science is the root of all inventions and if things like the Uno-Dicycle are real, then there is still tons of cool stuff to come out in the future.