Was at a reading in an art gallery last night and while checking out their lighting set-up I had an idea for a way to do an art show. Hang the work like normal, but, instead of the normal lighting, the gallery should be as near to total dark as possible. When visitors arrive to view the work, they are given miner's helmets with forehead flashlights on them. I can picture the beams moving about the gallery, the pieces with more than one viewer lighting up with more light, the show's overall...

I've heard several stories of artists forced to abandon storage units or old apartments in a hurry who had to discard or otherwise leave behind large portions of their work. Seems like it would be a viable business to form a non-profit organization that could go pick up the art and give the artist a receipt for a donation at some reasonable amount; this way the artist could at least get a bit of a tax deduction for the donation, and, the organization could then redonate the art back to...

Been looking recently for a site that does what I want to do and am finding a few things that are close, but none that are spot-on what I think would be ideal for both artists and the business built to serve them. The closest is ArtistShare.com, but they miss the mark on a couple of fronts. First, they're expensive. Second, their model doesn't incentive the artists to generate content for the site (what I mean is, the artist gets paid the same regardless of how much material they...

Take a photo of every single person you know. Hang them in a gallery. Run colored string between the pictures. Color code the strong to indicate the nature of the relationship.

A laminated business-card sized piece that contains the convention city's most common (basic) menu terms defined and translated into the major conventioneer languages. Terms like: vegetarian, beef, pork, chicken, etc. would help visitors navigate menus. Recently I was in Germany for two weeks, and when you travel on business you eat out for pretty much every meal. There were quite a few terms in each city I was in that kept appearing, and I would eventually learn them, over time, but having a...

Products like cigars and wine are extraordinarily complex to shop for as a consumer. The range and selection are so vast, and the subset that any given store carries is so relatively small that it can take decades before the act of shopping can become a comfortable process. This should be fixable with a web service that would allow consumers to create a profile that would allow them to record, reference, and rate their purchases and then use the aggregate data of all the users to help...

When a teenager would rather downgrade to a less damage-prone cell phone than her iPhone, it gets me thinking. Why would a person rather deal with a feature-deficient version of a device? Because they value something different about that device. There is a whole class of cell phone users who want something the current crop of cell phones isn't addressing directly. They want dependibility, durability, reliability. It's become their lifeline of communication to their friends and they'd...

Standing waiting for a table at a restaurant recently and listening to the hostesses repeating the mantra "10 to 20 minutes" to everyone who walked in the door while watching servers enter orders into the restaurant's POS system I realized those systems are not currently integrated at all. But there's some huge scheduling benefits to integrating them. When servers key in orders to the POS system they put in a table number. So the system could know not just what tables were "in use" but...

A guy I used to work with back when I was in the restaurant business used to dream of opening a restaurant called Just Frickin' Chicken. He planned to have a bank of broasters (pressure fryers), and three sauces (BBQ, Honey Mustard, Hot Wings Style), if you wanted them, or serve the chicken plain out of the broaster. No cole slaw, no mashed potatoes, no soda pop, no biscuits.... just frickin' chicken.

A lightweight (fall/spring) jacket with a pocket/pouch in the back big enough for a laptop and a couple of file folders. Easier to sling on than a backpack going over a jacket. Less bulky, but able to carry the essentials.