Democracy and Technology

In the earlier days of American Democracy, each public representative represented tens of thousands of people. He could find the opinion of the people on any topic by holding a few town hall meetings.

As populations grew, it became difficult for them to know the opinion of people on specific topics.

Now, technology and biometry has made available the tools where representatives can get an opinion and get a vote from their constituents using internet or text messages, before casting their own vote. They still might make their own decisions but can get a feeling of what the constituents feel about a topic.

I suspect many internet based companies to come up with such tools.

replacement of QWERTY keyboard

The original QWERTY keyboard was designed for mechanical printers. It was designed to keep the vowels away from your index fingers and closer to your pinky fingers, so you are forced to type slowly, thus avoiding any mechanical jams from overlap of typebars.

With Electronic keyboards of personal computers, alternate more ergonomic keyboard layouts can be made popular with software to switch between the 2 keyboard layouts.

These would be more efficient and might help in alleviating carpel-tunnnel type syndromes.

Wet Umbrella Wrapper

On one of the rainy days in New York, I saw a beautiful new product at the entrance of a company - it is a "Wet Umbrella Wrapper":

from Hibernate to Normalized or OLAP database structure

In the IT world, for a long time, data was organized in a normalized form - for easier access and update operations. Later, for Business intelligence projects, the data was de-normalized (for OLAP) for faster reading and data mining purposes.

Java Programmers had to rely on the experience of database experts for database designing.

However, Hibernate software changed this scenario as data could be stored and self-managed by a middle tier between the Java-engine tier and database tier.
Hibernate organizes data in an object-oriented-structure. With Hibernate, a java programmer does not need to take the help of database experts for designing data in the database.

This type of Object-Oriented-structured data is difficult for traditional database designers to understand, as the data is neither normalized nor de-normalized.

It has created a need for a a tool which can convert Hibernate based data to either normalized or de-normalized data to be used with traditional business intelligence tools.

Alternatively, new business intelligence tools are needed which can understand this Object-Oriented-structure data.

Fresh Juice Vending Machines

The weather in NY Metro area last week was hot - above 90 F on many days.

While traveling around the metro area by public transportation - there is limited choice for soft drinks - you can get packaged soft drinks, water and juices from vending machines, but if you want fresh juice it is generally not available.

A few specialty stores do offer fresh juice, but it is very expensive due to the labor costs.

All the technology to make fresh juice making vending machines is available, and I do see some online ads about it in other countries - but is yet to be commercialized in US.

Cinemas with Beds

The first time I saw a cinema theater with beds, pillows, comforters and side tables was in a smaller city in India, many years back. Here, waiters could bring you food and soft drinks on your side table. The beds could be adjusted to suit your comfort while watching the film. The ticket for this homelike-comfort was 5 times the regular price.

Also, very recently saw an ad by a cinema theater in US. It has dinner tables and they can serve you food and drinks while you watch the movie.

Perhaps, altering the level of comfort in any service can be utilized to charge higher pricing.