A full list of the ideas currently in the IdeaLab

You’re sitting in a restaurant, and hopefully, it’s a restaurant that has a coloring book because you’ve brought one or more of your little rug rats. The coloring book is engaging enough that they are quiet until mealtime, and even give you a bit of time afterward to enjoy company while engrossed in crayon heaven.

What happens when they’re so engrossed in their coloring creation, they won’t leave. Sure, you can take it with you but it’s not easy to color in a car without a flat surface. But it is easy to do those things on an iPad (i.e. the portable kid entertainment device).

As a restaurant, you can differentiate yourself by your food, your service, or that you have awesome coloring / activity books.

The idea: offer restaurants a set of coloring options which parents can access on their iPad, and make it specific to that store location.

So, a parent would download the “Restaurant Coloring Book” app on their iPad, and access the app while in the restaurant. The app would notice that they were in that restaurant, and automatically show them cool new coloring book pages exclusively available at that store. And when they were done with food, parents don’t have to find a place for “yet another coloring page that your young child has done” on their wall, and instead can feature it on their Facebook page, or just keep it in the app. And perhaps the restaurant can ask for kids to submit their coloring finished product when completed, and have a TV that will show slideshows of finished coloring. Nothing is more enjoyable than seeing your work up on a big screen.

• Restaurant Coloring Book is generic, but personalized based on location
• Artists could have a platform to get their work into new and interesting places
• A finger isn’t the same as coloring with a crayon, restaurants can rent the Cosmonaut which is an iPad stylus that looks a lot like an oversized crayon.
• Sharing aspects could be within the families unit (Facebook, whatever). Or you can allow the restaurant to feature the colorings upon submission while in restaurant

What do you think?

A full list of the ideas currently in the IdeaLab

We bring our phones everywhere with us. And more and more, for a lot of us, the iPad is replacing most conventional uses of a computer, and introducing new usages we weren’t aware of years before. With the advent of Yoga and other eastern teachings becoming mainstream, meditation is certainly a big focus and most don’t know how to properly achieve this state.

Enter: Mobile Meditation.

The Idea: Your companion will help you achieve that meditative state. With a pair of headphones, and many different programs to select from, zen is just a couple of taps away.

The How:

1. Include several (public domain) pieces of soothing music designed to induce trance for easier meditation.
2. A timer at a configurable time to gently bring you out of the meditative state
3. Ability to use your own music from your iTunes library during meditation
4. For larger format screens like the iPad, offer the ability to use a slideshow of chosen images to play during the meditation

Another possibility is for in-app purchases of some famous voices helping you achieve trance. Deepak Chopra, The Dalai Lama, and many others are certainly possible here. In addition, this can be useful as a morning ritual to pump you up for the day rather than clear the mind. The inspirational speech given in the movie “Any Given Sunday” being one example, or anything by Vince Lombardi, Anthony Robbins, etc.

A full list of the ideas currently in the IdeaLab

Lately, I’ve been cycling down to the beach. It’s roughly five miles there, so my total ride is ten miles each time. One thing that struck me, about every time, was invariably some cyclist would speed past me, and it was an impetus to work harder. Obviously, competition is strong in most sports.

So I believe I’ve seen some ideas around having virtual reality glasses for stationery bikes. And a fairly popular iPhone application RunKeeper has a mode which gives you a pace for an invisible competitor. So the idea of using competition is certainly not new, but how effective is it to hear that the person you’re virtually running against, is 5 seconds ahead of you?

Most serious cyclists seem to wear sunglasses. How about VR glasses, that could show you a digital rendering of the road ahead while you ride, and insert a virtual competitor into the rendering. When you begin your ride, you could identify what you’d like your pace to be, and set certain parameters for how the competitor would react, and also insert some randomness to the whole event.

The sunglasses would be outfitted with a camera in front, to feed back into the glasses. And you’d connect the whole rig up to a smartphone (iPhone/Android), which seem to have enough power these days to perform the actions necessary. Plug this into any of the Fit / Running / whatever web apps out there, and make it social.

The biggest hurdle, is safety. How can you ensure that you are always accurately seeing what is ahead? If the software fails for any reason at all, a crash could be imminent.

It would be really neat, if there was a way to ensure transparency in the sunglasses while showing a graphical overlay on certain portions of the glasses. Then that hurdle, is erased.

Food for thought.