Yahoo took a fleet of 20 custom-pained Electra Townie 8 bicycles and rigged each one with solar panels and a camera-equipped mobile phone mounted on the handlebars in waterproof housing. Each “yBike,” as Yahoo calls them, was also given its own, dedicated Flickr account. The cameras were then rigged to take photos every 60 seconds while the bike is moving, and to immediately upload and geotag them on Flickr.

And it got me thinking: why can’t a normal camera do this?

What sucks about mobile uploads is that the quality of the picture is bad, it takes way too long to send, and it’s just not a fun process.  And what sucks about camera uploads is that you have to do it through cables.  When your memory card runs out of space, you have to get to a computer and upload the pictures before you can take any more.

Camera companies need to get rid of the limitations they’ve put on our experience with their product.

So here’s my idea for Kodak, the company who wants to “do for photos what Apple does for music“:

Make a camera that can instantly upload our photos wirelessly (to iPhoto, Flickr, Facebook – whatever) and geo-tag them.

I know this technology is technically already out there, but it hasn’t been done well.  All the elements haven’t been put into one sleek machine yet.

Don’t make people run out and buy a special type of SD wireless card – have that stuff built into the camera.  I don’t want to have to be in charge of connecting my camera to a network, I just want it to do it for me.  Then whatever pictures I take, have it send them instantly to my private Flickr account and my iPhoto WITHOUT TELLING ME!  I don’t want to know that stuff is happening; I just want to keep taking pictures.  Also, I want my pictures to be automatically geo-tagged.

I know what you’re thinking: this is hard to pull off.  With the drain on battery life and collaborating with a wireless network, it’s just too hard.  And to top it off, that technology is already out there in different forms.

Well, mp3 players were around before the iPod.  Ever heard of the MPMan?  There’s a reason you haven’t – it sucked.  And right now, taking pictures sucks.  But not enough people realize that because they haven’t experienced the way things could (and should) be.  It may be hard to pull off, but that’s always the case when you want to make something great.

Kodak- you want to do for pictures what Apple did for music?  Well, here’s the starting point for your industry’s iPod.

I recently read Neil Strauss’ “Don’t Try This At Home,” a book about Dave Navarro (I’ll write a short review on this later).  In one of the chapters, Navarro says how Carmen Electra always left half-full soda cans around the house and they had a tendency to get knocked over.  When I read this, I stopped and was in disbelief that I’d never really noticed how cans, unlike bottles, don’t have a way to reseal.  After all those beer cans my roommates had spilled in college… there has to be a better way!  With a quick Google search, I found the invention that solved this problem (see pic), but wondered why it hasn’t been implemented.

Then today, I opened up a sealed pouch of roast beef.  The packaging keeps it air-tight, so it’s fresh.  The problem is that you have to transfer it to a Ziploc bag if you don’t use all the meat because the pouch it comes in doesn’t reseal.  Why the hell would they do this?  I can understand the freshness aspect, but you have to throw away the plastic pouch immediately after it’s been opened.  Is it because it’s easier for packagers to do things this way?  What’s the point of making things harder on your customers?

There is no point, I suppose.  Not many people care enough to correct these trivial little problems because we’ve all grown accustomed to them.  But if you opened up a bottle of soda and lost the screw-on cap, you’d be a little freaked out.  If you opened up a package of turkey slices, you’d be ticked if the company didn’t offer you a way to reseal the package it came in.

Redefine your customers’ expectations.  Make things better for them, not just your company.

But I’ve learned that is simply not the right way of approaching a business idea.  So I’ve come up with a set of personal guidelines that I follow for deciding whether an idea should be pursued or not.  The first two rules are required, and the rest are ideal.  Here they are:

1. Must change a world for the better – It doesn’t have to change the world, but the idea has to change someone’s world.
2. Must be able to illustrate the idea with a crayon - I got this from a VC that I met a few months ago.  The benefits of the idea have to be easy to understand.
3. Should be a highly replaced item – High volume and easy to manufacture are key.  One thing I always keep in mind when coming up with an idea is: the people who got rich during the gold rush were the ones selling the tools, not the ones digging for gold.  Give a niche market a tool they can use.
4. Only target emerging markets and/or desperate buyers – Best way for guaranteed growth is to ride a trend.  Best way to guarantee the market will support your business is to target desperate buyers (e.g. hospitals will never go out of business because the customers are desperate to have their problems fixed).  If you are entering a static market, then disrupt the hell out of them.  Like the Bubble Calendar is doing for the calendar market.
5. Should be able to automate the process - This is a personal goal of mine.  I want my business to create a passive income so I can travel.

I actually first thought of this idea seven years ago when I was taking driver’s ed.  They told me to pump the brake a few times before I wanted to come to a screeching halt, so as to warn the driver behind me.  I thought that was inefficient, seeing as how that was precious time I could be using to prevent myself from rear-ending the guy in front of me.  That got me thinking: it seemed wrong that the only way you could tell if a person was slamming on their brakes was by watching for manually flashing brake lights or seeing the weight shift to the front of the car.

So I came up with the idea for an automatic pulsing brake light, much like the one above.  I talked to the Invention Submission Corporation (now known as InventHelp) about getting it patented, and they told me it would cost about $10,000.  My parents, as supportive as they usually are, were understandably reticent about laying down ten grand for a teenager’s half-baked idea.  So I kind of just forgot about it.

I later learned that those invention submission companies are, for the most part, scams.  Thanks to Stephen Key, I found out that you can spend about $100 on a provisional patent and have your idea protected for a year while you try to license it to companies.  So I looked into doing that for the pulsing brake lights, then found out it was too late.  Someone had already patented the idea.

This has happened to me many times with other ideas, so I’m not heartbroken.  It’s just another one of those moments where you silently kick yourself for not having the knowledge back in the day.  Oh well.