Idea 50: Trash, Trash and again Trash
Problem:
Trash – a problem that many cities know. Sometimes, the regular schedule of city cleaners is not congruent to the amount of trash that is produced by the citizens or that trash collectors can hold. The consequence: mountains of trash piling up. Especially in a city that lives of tourism this could be a tremendous setback.
Solution:
Citizens oftentimes care about their city and want to help sustain it. Thus, giving citizens a platform where they can contribute to the “cleaning” process, might offer great value. This platform could come in form of an App that allows people to indicate “mountains of trash” that were accumulated and do not fall into the regular cleaning schedule of the city. The city then could deploy certain cleaning trucks that take care of the problem in “real-time.”
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Idea 49: Smart Street Lights
Problems:
Advertising space – something that multinational companies as well as political parties pay millions for; especially in metropolitan cities worldwide.
Solution:
Street lights are already being used by, usually individuals but also political parties for their campaigns, as an easy “advertising space.” However, combing this “habit” of using street lights as an advertising space with the technology of HD curved screens and mobile internet, one could leverage this already existing space to the maximum by including these technologies into the actual street light, thus creating a 2.0 version of the street lights we know today. These screens could also be touch sensitive as to permit people to interact with the messages they are being shown. These screens could be powered by the same power line that powers the actual street light, and be distributed around the city to obtain maximum coverage of a particular message. Another usage, other than advertising, would be the overall spread of a generally important message, such as earthquake warnings or other things that could harm the population of a city equally.
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Idea 46: Translation through Comparision
Problem:
Let it be Chinese, Japanese, English, German, Russian or Spanish – translating can be a time-consuming activity, especially when the alphabets are different and one does not have a dictionary at hand.
Solution:
When considering that any word, any sentence or any phrase can be defined as a “symbol,” one might be able to create a system that translates through comparing “symbols” with a given database. For example: the sentence “I like to play tennis” is not “4 english words including a “subject” and “predicate” etc but a symbol/picture consisting of lines and dots. It would work like “face recognition” but with words and allow instant translation using a smart phone.
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Idea 45: 3D Busts
Problem:
Photos, letters, videos, and pictures are often the common ways to capture memories and preserve them over the years. In the past, one more “tool” was used – statues and busts. Mainly used by the upper class, royals and aristocractes, statues and busts were a symbol of power and an attampt to prepare one’s likeness for eternity. Today, statues and busts are still rarely used as, although living standards have increased, the number of people with the abilty to produce them decreased, which conseqeuntly resulted in an increase in prices.
Solution:
Thinking about pet owners for example, statues and busts might offer a way to help their minds to keep their favorite animal “alive” due to the physical characteristics that speak directly to one of the five senses – touch. To make this possible and affortable, the idea is to use 3D printers or lasers that would work based on 3D models of somebody’s favorite pet and hand in hand with materials such as glass/krystal and different types of plastic.
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Idea 44: Waterfall Turbines
Problem:
Renewable energies open the gateway to clean and sustainable energy production. In some cases already existing kinetic energy is used and turned into electricity, for example in water turbines. A question connected to this example is where this constant flow of water exists and how we can use it.
Solution:
Although water turbines are already used in many different settings, one of the places that might open up room for future innovation focuses on waterfalls. Waterfalls would offer a lifelong stream of energy if we would know how to capture it. Due to its vertical flow, multiple turbines could take advantage of the same water stream at different heights. There are several problems with this idea, but one of them surely is not the number of capable engineers in the world to think about it.
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