Subterranean Cycle Parks: 日本に聞いて

Boris Johnson's Barclay's Cycle Hire scheme is a great first step towards aggressively promoting the benefits of cycling in a city which (let's be honest) would otherwise be too busy to take notice. However, it is only one step forward. To bring about a deeper cultural change, efforts should be made to encourage the average commuter to switch to the bicycle because (a) intercity trains are overcrowded, unreliable and overpriced and (b) finally more high-rise accommodation is being built centrally in Zone 1. In a nutshell, I'm referring to bike parking (storage) and security, something Japan is light-years ahead in.

Regeneration of Thames, and Everything Else

A general theory of environmental maintenance follows - faced with a beautiful environment, you will work hard to maintain it. Faced with a neglected environment, you will not work hard to maintain it, but will do the bare minimum to keep it functional.

Forget this green and pleasant land, London is one of the worst kept environments in the world, and I wonder why Councils are (relatively) happy to pay money to clean up, remove graffiti, sweep up dirt, fix broken installations or smashed windows, bus stops and telephone boxes. I claim that if we collectively made the effort to raise the bar and improve and clean our surrounding environment - indeed, at greater short-term cost - we would see a long-term sustainable improvement (and saving), as a result of greater respect and care for our environment embedded into our society.

I can't verify this with quantitative data, but I am building evidence.

II)
http://www.thameswater.co.uk/cps/rde/xchg/corp/hs.xsl/10115.htm

Aggregated retail sale data, pushed to user via GPS-trigger

Envisage an application that aggregates retail sale date and location information and combines this into a simple, clean UI that reflects what nearby sales are local, upcoming and tailored to pre-set interests be they fashion, tech, food, and so on. Retailers will buy in because it means they can potentially meet a larger audience without the cost of advertising. Users will buy in because everyone likes a sale, but in my eyes no one knows when they are. I don't believe there is currently a platform that does this, on mobile nor the web.

Body Dryer - Dyson Airblade Re-engineered

Many innovations find success because they speed up everyday processes or present more efficient ways of completing them. I think within the next decade this idea will become commercial. Here we have a way to save every single person 10-20 minutes of a Routine Task (RT) every single day for the rest of their life. Through innovation and searching for efficiency, RTs will always minimise over time. A simple analogy is computer boot times. Compared to the desktop machines of yesterday, today's load in a fraction of the time, allowing us to do the tasks we want to sooner, and for longer. Now we can wirelessly purchase and download eBooks to our Kindle devices, allowing us to spend more time reading, less time physically searching. It's common knowledge the Airblade was simply a redesigned Mitsubishi Jet Towel from 1993...

... but I hope Dyson or someone else can come up with this device, as it is definitely the future. It will more than likely be a combined shower/dryer unit for efficiency's sake, but whoever can get this to market first is surely onto a winner. If I don't see anything within 5 years, I'll apply to Dragon's Den myself...

And finally, a note from Mr Dyson himself. There is a worrying truth to his words, what with the government preoccupied with both protecting the financial industry and trying to promote a London-based Silicon Valley.

Opt-in Intelligent Discoverability

This idea is based on Facebook intelligently matching across patterns and trends in the data you upload to the site. If you two independent users, anonymous to each other, have a high-degree of corresponding "likes" then Facebook should suggest a friend match. Such a process would help Facebook further integrate ties between different groups of friends, making it increasingly relevant. The only suggestion tool now is "People you may know" through one or more mutual friends, but with networks, likes, locations, check-ins and keywords at its disposal, I wonder if Facebook could rapidly expand in this area. It could really take the current service (a reflection of realworld life) and turn it into a whole new life of its own. Of course the privacy critics won't like this one, so I expect such a service to be opt-in thenagain people have willingly provided such information in the past.

Location-based Intents

Smartphones with GPS should not just reacting to their users' requests but pre-empt and influence their thinking and decisions. This could be passing by a street when the phone alerts you to a particular sale up ahead or where the nearest pub is for live football because it is suddenly approaching 3pm on a Saturday afternoon...

Monetised Clean-up Mechanism

Incentivising a Green way of living through embedded tagging of product packaging.

Sky Walks...

Smart Vending Machines 日本製自動販売機

Telephone Bots

The smartphone era is fast rendering the humble telephone box into an anachronistic oddity, under threat from urban de-cluttering (just look at Oxford Circus).

In my mind, this icon isn't going anywhere fast - it is a globally recognised brand and part of the tourist trade fabric. With a little vision, they could even deserve such attention: free-call zones, Wi-Fi hotspots, touch-screen maps/guides, Oyster reader, even プリクラ...