What I hate most about modern email times is that more and more people believe that emails can be simply ignored. While this is partly understandable and probably due to the rising wave of spam that is sent by machines anyway, I find it incredibly annoying when you really have a request or problem and are longing for an answer. Two ideas: 1. An "I definitely want an answer" setting. Your email program will monitor if you received a reply to a particular message, and if you didn't,...

Yahoo has a service / website called "Launch." Launch will play videos & music for you, and you can tell the system if you liked the selection or not. With that information (and comparing it to other users' music taste), Launch will figure out your preferences, and ideally only play pieces that you like, including new ones you have never heard before. It would be cool if a similar system could be used in shopping centers. In most of them, the choice of music is really horrible, and I'm...

Not all people like tongue piercings, but those that do like them for various reasons - some think they're fashionable, others think they're practical... For those who think they're practical, I'm simply wondering if it's strictly necessary to punch a hole into your tongue to have a little stimulating something in your mouth. I'm aware it's a challenge due to the shape of the tongue, but I think it should be entirely possible to create a strap-on piercing (that's not actually pierced,...

With today's technology (speed radar, GPS, computer recognition) getting only a couple split times for a race against the clock (swimming, skiing, car racing) should be a thing of the past! It should be no problem to calculate the current split time at any given moment and display it continuously on the screen. This would definitely add excitement to many races!

Did you ever find yourself sitting in front of the oven waiting for your food to be done? Watching the cheese on your pizza melt can lack the excitement you may find desirable, so introduce "Action Pizza!" - Action Pizza! combines the calories of your evening meal with the excitement of a table firework. The firework is launched by the heat of your oven, and provided that you stick to the temperature and cooking time recommended on the package, the whole program should be pretty...

I've always heard that it's difficult to quit smoking even if you want to. Here's my suggestion: spend a voluntary night in hospital between two heavy smokers who look like skin and bones and are receiving treatment for severe cancer. Have their ex-wives walk in and let them chat for hours about their smoking habits, the surgery they already had, the size and looks of ulcers and the joys of chemotherapy. Have the smokers moan and groan from pain all night long. I swear this would be...

A service desperately needed is a concert reminder service: you create a profile where you enter your location as well as the bands you like, and the system will send you an email as soon as it's known that one of "your" bands is coming to town. Getting an email along the lines of "Hey Steve, we just got word that The Kills will be coming to town next April - secure your tickets now" would be just so much nicer than reading in the newspaper how The Kills rocked the local club this past...

This one's for the cold season... Have you ever found yourself kissing a girl on the sidewalk in winter - cold winds blowing - snow falling... can be pretty romantic, but if you're not careful, you'll get *very* chilly fingers in no time at all. Sure, you could wear gloves, but do you really want to caress her with mittens on your hands?! The solution is so easy that I really wonder why nobody came up with it before - pretty girls should have kissing pockets (or a kissing muff if...

If you get lots of business mail, you will notice that people make up all kinds of 3 letter abbreviations ("describing" their position) just to impress you. Long forgotten are the times when you just got mail from BMW's CEO or directly from the FBI. Today's decision makers are CPCs, DEOs, SPMs, or better! (Wow...) So I would love to have a SEA (Stupid Email Abbreviations) Randomizer. If you think about it, with three letters at your disposal, there are up to 26^3 leading positions in...

Ever tried to organize a surprise birthday for a friend? Well, the huge problem about surprise birthday parties is that they never actually come as a surprise - people KNOW when they have birthday, so if someone takes you to a surprise place on your birthday, it isn't very hard to guess what's gonna happen. Introduce the REAL surprise birthday. Let the government give everyone a random surprise birthday that changes on a yearly basis. Make the info available to everyone except the...