Smart Microwave - The idea

Microwaves are fundamentally stupid. The user basically has two knobs: time and intensity. The user also need to know their food and their microwave well enough to know how best to heat the food. The modern microwave is no smarter than a light switch with a dimmer.

The solution is to give the microwave some brains, or in lieu of that, some sensors. Smart Microwave would have four types of sensors: distance sensor, thermal, visible (camera), and a chemical sensor. The main goal of the Smart Microwave would be to get food to the desired temperature as measured with the thermal sensor.  The distance sensor would be used to make a 3d map of the food. The food’s color and temperature would be overlaid on that 3d map. The color and shape would allow the microwave to make a guess at what it’s trying to heat. Color change in food is sometimes unexpected and can mean something is about to burn. In these cases the microwave would know it almost went too far or used too high of an intensity. The chemical sensor would primarily be used to sense when something is starting to burn. If it were cheap and easy, more flexible sensors could be used to ‘smell’ the food to get a better idea of how to heat it.

There would also be a weight sensor on the spinning plate to weigh the item. The plate could also move in more than just the smooth motion of normal microwaves. By using some jerky motion, it would be possible to determine if the item being heating is a liquid or generally gelatinous. This could come in handy if the microwave is thawing a liquid. It would be an unpleasant surprise to find a bit of ice left in a bowl of mostly warm soup.

As creative as people are, they aren’t that creative about what they put into the microwave. The majority of the uses would fall into 5 to 20 categories. If would be easy enough to build models for these use cases ahead of time. All the user should need to do is say how hot they want their food: thawed, warm, hot, or very hot. If the microwave underheated or overheated, it would be easy for the user to give feedback and the microwave would learn (and upload the lesson for other microwaves to learn too).

Smart Microwave - The motivation

Microwave ovens are a great example of how design can improve over time. If you have the opportunity to use a microwave from the 1960’s, it’s worth it. The interface was so completely unintuitive that you probably won’t be able to figure it out in your first twenty guesses. The interface steadily improved over next 40 years, but it has stagnated recently. Designers now have a pretty good idea of how people use (or have been trained to use) microwaves. My question is: can we do better?

Shame These Apps - The pitch

Does your flashlight app really need to know your exact location, all of your contacts, and have the ability to send that data anywhere on the internet at a moments notice? Of course not! Shame These Apps will tell you will tell you which apps are good and which ones are sketchy.

Shame These Apps - The fun part

There is clearly some cool computer security work that could be done in this project. For me, the most interesting part is the categorization and determining automatically what the minimal permissions are.

Shame These Apps - The growth potential

If Shame These Apps sold for $1 in each store and it actually gained popularity, it could make a few million dollars a year.

Shame These Apps - The monetization

There would be two sources of revenue. First, Shame These Apps would itself be an app. Second, if there are several ‘good’ apps in a category, then one of them can pay to be ‘promoted.’

Shame These Apps - The idea

Many apps in these app stores are borderline spyware. Most users of these app stores don’t realize what these apps can do with the permissions they have. What’s important is education, and maybe a little shaming.

The solution is to make a database of all of these apps. Each app with be compared with the most similar apps and the minimum necessary permissions will be determined. For the most popular apps, a by-hand approach can be taken.

To determine which apps are actually spyware, android emulators would download the apps with test e-mail addresses and contacts. If the email addresses started getting spam mail, it would be clear who the culprit is. It should also be possible to sniff the traffic coming out of the app to see what’s being sent back to the app’s servers. If the app developer doesn’t use encryption, it should be possible to do statistical analysis of the contents of the packets and see under different emulated conditions if addresses, geo info, and other phone info are harvested.

Though I’m mostly focused on how to find the bad apples, the good ones are also important. For every app category that has competition, the apps that don’t ask for unnecessary permissions would be offered as alternatives to the possibly more popular but scammy apps.