The Best of Halfbakery – September Ideas
It’s a new month, so we’ve gone and found another batch of crazy invention ideas from Halfbakery.com to give you a smile and hopefully kickstart your own creativity! If you’re unfamiliar with our Halfbakery series, check out the introduction in our first post.
“A maze where the ‘walls’ are made from sheets of falling water, piped overhead. You can cheat, but you’ll get wet doing it! The cool thing would be you’ll see vague shapes of people on the other side of the water, and maybe occasionally (on hot days) an arm would emerge from the cascade.”
We loved this idea because it seemed very do-able. With a little ingenuity a determined entrepreneur could possibly even construct a small one in their back yard for the neighborhood kids. Or better yet on a big scale, this would be an awesome attraction at any waterpark. We emailed the creator, Simon Whitaker, for a follow-up on this idea, and although he hasn’t done anything about building a watermaze, he has been busy with another project, Bathcode.com, which markets and sells “grooming products for geeks”.
“Morning Scent Alarm Clocks would work in kind of a Glade Plug-in fashion, with a disposable scent-pak. (Because maybe you can patent “scent-pak”, but you probably can’t patent “replaceable disposable scent package”.) Different scents could be used: fresh grass with morning dew, a girlfriend’s perfume, napalm- whatever is going to get you going. Even negative smells — like a skunk, your grandmother’s perfume, or napalm again — could be used if you respond more to bad smells than to good ones. Or, a more deluxe model could have a good smell to wake you up, but a snooze alarm would let you sleep in scented bliss until the smell of a skunk hit you 9 minutes later.”
If I could find an alarm clock like this, I would definitely buy it. I especially like the deluxe version with the good scent turning into a nasty one if you hit the snooze button too many times! It appears that there’s already a patent on a product similar to this and a quick google search revealed a bunch of soon-to-be scent alarm clocks, so perhaps we’ll find them in the store sometime soon!
“Sometimes you just have to tell someone about it. Anyone. In fact the more anonymous the better.
The two traditional ways of dealing with this situation are:
1. If you are a catholic — go to a confessional booth.
2. Write it down, put it in a bottle and throw it in the ocean. Maybe someone will read it. Sometime. Somewhere.
I propose a service where people can pour their hearts out in an anonymous message (SMS? Web? Mail?). The message gets printed on plastic, folded up and put securely under the lid of a bottle of “Confessional Cola”. When you buy the cola you can gain a little insight into someone’s world.”
This idea didn’t seem that far – fetched either. There are brands of juices and drinks out there now that have some sort of message or inspirational quote printed on them. Knowing there’s a hidden message from some unknown person could be a huge selling factor! Messages would have to be monitored for content of course, but I could see it becoming popular.
“Caught in a boring meeting or stuck spending tedious hours trying to stay awake in class? You need a Fidget Widget! A pen or mechanical pencil on one end, with various buttons, wheels and twisty things on the other, each of which requires a different movement to operate and makes a different noise. More fun than drumming on a table.”
While a retractable pen would probably be sufficient in taking care of your fidget needs, this gadget sounds like it could be more fun but still fairly unobtrusive and useful as a writing tool in a business or school setting . It also seems like a pretty simple concept, and many different versions could be made.
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