Digital Cane - The motivation

Life as a blind person is fairly challenging. Tools like guide dogs are nice, but it’s still hard to have the same quality of life as a non-impaired person.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The pitch

No more extra appointments to find out if you have arrhythmia, with Digital Beats it’s now a simple 5 minute test any nurse can apply.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The fun part

The pattern recognition is the fun part in this idea. Could a computer do better than a doctor? I think so.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The growth potential

There are around 6,000 hospitals in the us, with a total of about one million beds. If there is a need for one unit per ten beds, that comes to 100,000 units for hospitals alone. If the device needs to be replaced every 5 years, that would come to a 20,000 units sold per year, or $20 million a year in revenue. Globally it could be $100 million a year.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The monetization

The device would be be sold on a per unit basis for about one thousand dollars. I expect that a clinic with ten rooms may only need one unit. A clinic specializing in heart care would probably need twice as many.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The idea

We have simple technology that measures blood pressure and pulse. There should be another simple medical device that can determine if a patient has an arrhythmia, such as mitral valve prolapse. The sensor would be a digital stethoscope that is placed on the patient's chest for a few minutes. The computer attached to the sensor would use pattern recognition to determine which, if any, arrhythmia the patient has. This could be turn what is now an appointment with a specialist into something a nurse can do on demand, and more people could be screened for heart rhythm or other abnormalities.

Acoustic Cardiac Monitor - The motivation

Diagnosing heart rhythm abnormalities is a somewhat involved process where a specially trained doctor listens to the patients heart. This is a waste of medical resources, and should be off-loaded onto computers.

Hater Network - The pitch

A place to bitch about things, coffee sucked today? Stop light has messed up programming? Bitch here. If something really bothers you, you can try to organize with other haters for real change.

Hater Network - The fun part

Social networks are really scary businesses. They have no inherent value. Period. The only value social networks have is their use, so the key to making this into a real business would be to make a compelling product that people want to use routinely and share with their friends.

Hater Network - The growth potential

If the network took off, tens of thousands of businesses would want to sign up. The revenue could grow to millions of dollars per year with most businesses signing up for basic monitoring. The ad system could also grow to millions of dollars.

Hater Network - The monetization

The way to make money with this idea is pretty simple. Businesses sign up to monitor their reputations and get detailed summaries of the main complaints. Basic tracking for small businesses would run $10/month. Advanced analytics for large businesses would run $25/month.

Hater network would also have targeted ads, where if someone hates on a business, they might get recommendations for similar businesses that are hated on a lot less. I think the ad system could bring in as much money as the monitoring service.

Hater Network - The idea

Social networks like Twitter have created a world of constant public commentary, much of which is banal.  However, there have been campaigns born on Twitter that have lead to real change. For example, Bank of America a few years ago wanted to increase debit card fees; It didn’t end well thanks, in part, to Twitter. Large groups of people can have a real impact when they act with a single voice. However, Twitter is not a great platform to affect things on a small scale.

Hater network would be a centralized place to complain about the (fixable) things that bother you in your day-to-day life. For example, you get a coffee to-go from the local coffee shop, when you get home and try it you, realize that it’s marginally stronger than water. You find the business and explain (colorfully) about what went wrong and what they could do to fix it. When you go into a business that people have been hating on a lot recently, your phone would let you know that you may want to go somewhere else. You can also search for local businesses that people haven’t been hating on very much. If something really bothers you and it’s something you can fix on your own, you can start a hater petition. As other people hate on the same place, they can see the petition and sign on. As it grows, other people who are similar to those who have signed the petition will see it and get a chance to get onboard. The goal would be to get the business to make a change, such as a change to a company policy.

On the flip-side, hater network would be a source of honest feedback for businesses. This would allow them to spot problems as they arise instead of finding out about them after they snowball or make many customers angry.

So far, this social network doesn’t sound very social. I think the sharing/social model would be to see what people similar to you are complaining about or global trending in hatred. If someone is really colorful in how they hate, then you would ‘follow’ them a la Twitter.

Hater network could also be an opportunity for non-hated businesses to get new customers. If you say you are really fed up with Starbucks, you might be interested in another coffee shop nearby.

Hater network could also be great tool for civil engagement. If a traffic light is programmed poorly and is super annoying or there is a nasty pothole on your drive to work, you could hate on it. Also, if you are irritated that you don’t have any real choice with your cable provider, hater network could inform you about political organizations that are trying to get real competition in that space.

Hater Network - The motivation

What do you do when you have a bad experience with a website, a shop, or a product? Do you write them an e-mail? Adjust your rating on Yelp? Neither of these are great solutions. When you have a problem you usually want two things: 1) the business to do something to fix the problem and 2) to warn others about the business or your experience. There isn’t a venue to address these use cases right now.

Cirrus Traffic - The pitch

Is traffic costing your city? You could help ease the commute and make better decisions about road construction and design with Cirrus Traffic. They could even help remove the most dangerous drivers from the road.

Cirrus Traffic - The fun part

This project has four cool things: computer vision, hardware/optical design, autonomous vehicle design, and maybe some traffic modeling. A really diverse team of engineers would be needed to tackle this project.

Cirrus Traffic - The growth potential

I think the largest twenty cities in the US and, potentially, 80 other cities worldwide would want to have access to this information. That would be $500 million in revenue per year.

Cirrus Traffic - The monetization

I think the business model here would be that a city buys the UAVs and software from Cirrus Traffic. I think a package for 50 UAVs with software would run $50 million dollars (amortized to $5 million per year over 10 years of service), which seems like a lot, but is tiny compared to the budgets of large cities, which in LA’s case, is almost $8 billion.

Cirrus Traffic - The idea

Cities should use groups of UAVs to study traffic, provide useful real-time information about traffic, and find and ticket dangerous drivers. There are already UAVs that stay airborne for two weeks at a time. These low maintenance UAVs are perfect for this task. The UAVs would have a payload of camera equipment and communication equipment to broadcast (encrypted, of course) its feed. It would use solar panels to run during the day, and at night, it would turn off the camera and run on battery power so that it wouldn’t have to use energy on landing and takeoff every day.

The camera spec

The primary use case is tracking highway traffic. We can assume cars may be moving at up to 80 mph (36 m/s). Using a Honda Accord as an example car, that means that the car travels 7.5 car lengths per second (the Accord is 4.8 meters long). For the images of cars to not be blurry then the frame rate must be much faster than 7.5 fps (or at least the exposure time must be much less than 130 milliseconds). It’s not uncommon for modern digital cameras to be able to capture 60 fps at 1080p. Unfortunately, that won’t be high enough resolution, as each pixel would cover several cars. Sacrificing frame rate, it’s possible to get 6fps and an exposure time much less than 130 milliseconds with the Sony Alpha SLT-A99.

The UAVs would fly at an altitude between 3,000 and 10,000 meters, which is high enough to capture large chucks of the city. The amount of area covered by each UAV won’t be limited by the altitude, but instead by the resolution of images recorded. Each car on the road should be covered by several pixels. A reasonable scale is each pixel is a meter by a meter. That would make cars around 5 pixels long. The sensor of the SLT-A99 is 6000 x 3376 pixels, so it could cover 20 square kilometers. With that amount of coverage, it would only take 65 UAVs to cover all of Los Angeles, which is not a particularly small city. With a little engineering effort, one could combine several of the image sensors onto a single UAV and cut the number of UAVs needed to patrol the skies.

What to do with the data

With detailed data about the routes of every car and their reaction to their surroundings, it should be possible to make very accurate models of driver behavior. These models could easily be validated against new days of traffic. These models could help answer what changes to road design and construction could reduce traffic accidents and jams. It could also give insights into what makes for good defensive driving and traffic reducing driving. What if you could alert drivers that there would be a jam ahead and convince them that they should slow down by 10 mph? Would that help or hinder? There are many interesting questions that could be answered with these data.

Getting dangerous drivers off the road

The data from the UAVs could find the most aggressive drivers and send police cars to pull them over or combine the UAV data with highway camera images and just mail the offender a ticket.

Cirrus Traffic - The motivation

One of the biggest drains on the quality of life of suburbanites is traffic. It’ something we have to deal with everyday, but we really don’t understand it very well. We know when accidents happen, but we don’t necessarily know how many close calls there are or the exact confluence of factors that caused a particular crash. While traffic has become more important, UAVs have gotten cheaper and easier to use.

Cold Vault - The pitch

Tame the biggest energy hog in your house--the fridge, with Cold Vault. Your fridge will sip energy instead of gulp it.

Cold Vault - The fun part

There is a lot of challenging mechanical engineering required for this project. The refrigerator needs to be designed to last for twenty years. Not only making the fridge work, but making it work for two decades would require serious engineering skills.

Cold Vault - The growth potential

If one hundredth of the households in the country bought one every year, that would be 1 million units sold or $4 billion in revenue per year.

Cold Vault - The monetization

This fridge would probably have an annual energy consumption of one twentieth modern refrigerators. Modern fridges consume around 450 kWh per year. In LA where it costs around $0.22 per kWh, that comes out to be $100 per year. With older fridges it’s more like $300/year. Replacing an old fridge with one that costs $5 a year to run would save anywhere from $95 to $295 a year. I think the fridge could sell for $2,000 to $4,000. Even without the cool factor, the fridge would pay for itself in as short as 13 years.

Cold Vault - The idea

The there are two big reasons why fridges consume large amounts of energy. First, there is idle energy consumption used to keep the contents of the fridge and freezer cool. Heat gets into the fridge because it doesn’t have perfect thermal insulation. Heat gets in from all directions to varying degrees, but the biggest culprit is the seal around the door. The second main source is from opening the door and letting the warm room air mix with the cold fridge air. The door doesn’t have to be open for long to lose a lot of the of air that the fridge worked so hard to cool. It’s even worse with freezers (non-drawer style). If you watch from the side, you sometimes see the cold air pour out of the fridge (which you can see because it condenses the water in the air in the room).

The solution to these problems it to minimize the energy exchange between the fridge and the room. The way to do that is to rethink the way one interacts with a fridge. Normally, we open the door and look around for what we need and moves things, if necessary. This new fridge would have cameras on the inside and would take pictures from several angles of each item to produce a 3D reconstruction of the item. When the consumer wants something from the fridge, she would tap the screen on the front of the fridge and see a summary of the contents of the fridge. If something looked appealing, she would tap the image of the item and it would be moved to the exchange point. You can think of the exchange point as a box within the fridge, the front of the box is flush the front of the fridge and opens to let the consumer put things in and take things out. The back of the box can also open and close as part of the exchange. The front and back are never open at the same time which greatly minimizes the cold air loss.

The biggest engineering challenge is to maneuver the items around in the fridge to pack them efficiently. There are at least two ways to accomplish this task. First, a conveyor belt system could move things around. To have multiple levels (which would be important) the fridge would need a section of at least one of the level to be able to move up and down, which isn’t too crazy. The other way to solve this problem is to put each item on a tile and have the tiles shuffled around the fridge either using simple robotic arms to pick up the tiles or by moving the tiles via magnets (and an elevator to get between levels). There would be a magnet in every tile and electromatics under each level to move the tiles around. Other than the exchange point and the computer-organized contents of the fridge, everything else would be the same. Specifically, the cooling system would stay the same and the overall form factor would stay the same.