10 Product Ideas for products, startups, new innovations
By: George Krasadakis
Tags: Innovation, Software Development, Ideas, Startup, Tech

2. DIGITAL annotations on PHYSICAL books

You are reading a book — a physical one; it might be a novel, a technical, or textbook. You are at an important point/ paragraph where you need help or you need to comment on/ with a question or explanation.

image: pixabay

Imagine the following scenario:

You use your smartphone to scan the paragraph or phrase of interest — the physical book The app performs OCR to extract the text from the paragraph/phrase/ page you just scan The app triggers a full-text-search against a large database of books — could be a service call such as Google’s Book API or similar. The app receives the response from the API — including the identifier of the book and the positioning — a reference to the paragraph and page. The app retrieves user-generated-content and metadata about the specific paragraph/phrase/page of the identified book. The summarized user-generated content is then presented to the user via the app — possibly in an Augmented Reality mode and/ or with voice support. The user can use voice, via the app, to append his/her own private or public comments on the identified paragraph of the book.

The full history is maintained for the user and the book — available also via classic search experience.

3. A self-organizing ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode

Ever been in a theater, cinema, or other noise-sensitive social situations where sounds from mobile notifications can spoil the moment?

The common sense in such a situation is to set the mobile in silent or ‘Do not disturb’ mode. Although obvious, this is not the case for everybody: there are always those few who either by mistake or disrespectfully skip this.

What if there was a way for the audience to seamlessly self-organize?

‘The system’ could identify the situation as requiring ‘silent mode’ and notify the members of the audience to silent their mobiles (those who haven’t already); Or, in a more aggressive scenario, automatically set the phones in to ‘Do not Disturb’ mode

Mobile devices automatically enter silent mode when users join special social arrangements (a concert, a lecture, etc.). This could happen seamlessly with no controlling system or particular rules: Assuming a number of people are at a particular place — within a specific radius and possibly around a particular known location; each time a mobile device is set to ‘silent mode’ by a user, an event is triggered which sends location and mode data into a centralized data store; this database allows the identification of ‘concurrent’ transitions to ‘silent mode’ within the same radius.

Multiple human-originated transitions to ‘silent mode’ which are time-aligned and within the same radius, indicate a self-adjusting behavior (people set their mobile phones to ‘silent mode’ at the same time and possibly for the same reason)

If this behavior is significant (as a percentage of the audience — more than x% of the people identified in the same radius and time frame) there is a clear signal that the particular situation (people arrangement+point in time+ location) is requiring mobile devices in silent mode. Assuming that this behavior follows particular patterns — like specific days of the week, months, time-slots within the day, size of the audience, time-frame length, etc. — the system can safely identify this location and time arrangement as ‘sensitive to noise’.

Images: pixabay