Mass customization

Mass customization is here. It is going to be the thing that saves at least some American manufacturing. Anything that today is off the shelf can be customized. Take a look at www.cafepress.com. Part of the mass customization is software to take and relay the order, the other part is the manufacturing processes to build the product. This one doesnt take a genius to see as it is already here. Examples include Dell, Levis, even furniture companies let you build your own couch. This is just the very beginning though.


Furniture
Draperies (please invent this so I can decorate my house)
Clothing
Decorated cell phones
Personal accessories (like purses)
Computers (like Dell)

Unsolved Problems and Businesses

Up to this point I have posted ideas for inventions. Most of these inventions are pretty straightforward and I think with a reasonable amount of effort could be made reality. However, I am also interested in businesses (business models) and problems without current solutions. Therefore, I will start posting those as well. In future posts I will to begin writing about businesses that I really like that I haven't seen widespread or perhaps ones that don't exist at all.

I'll start with a problem without a solution: Folding clothes. Washers and dryers have drastically cut the time to wash clothes, but the last step in the process, folding clothes has simply not been addressed. If you want to create an appliance that will be in every home, solve the problem of sorting and folding clothes. As a software engineer I think that the problem exists in two parts, recognizing the clothes and then folding the clothes. I think that the technology finally exists to be able to recognize and classify clothes. The technology for folding clothes has probably already existed in some form or another for a long time. Since in-home robots are all the rage, it is probably time for a clothes folding machine.

For recognition of clothes you would need to solve the following problems:
Matching socks of the exact same type (color, patterns, subtle textures, slightly different sizes).
Determining exactly what type of clothing to determine how to fold it

For folding of clothes I think you could stick to the basics (t-shirts, pants, shorts, socks, underwear) and not fold every type of clothing, but leave some types as unknowns to be folded manually. I think the hardest item to fold would be button down shirts, however, I think that most people hang these so it really isn't an issue.

If the recognition part is too hard to solve, the user could sort the clothes manually and the machine would be focused on the folding rather than the sorting.

Even cancer mutates

Viruses and even cancer mutate and become resistant to drugs. Basically everytime they reproduce there are errors in the reproduction so that the progeny are not identical. If there are thousands (or millions) of versions, some small portion of them are resistant to your treatment. The only way to eventually treat these situations is to have custom cures. You take a sample of the offending organism that has infected you (i.e. HIV) . The device scans it and produces a version of the cure that the organism is not resistant to. The organism may keep mutating, but as long as you can keep creating custom cures, you will eventually kill all instances.

By the way, your immune system kind of works this way. You have antibodies for billions of combinations of foreign bodies. The cells that produce them lay dormant. When you are exposed, the particular cells that react to the foreign body become stimulated and reproduce. They then produce more of the antibody and eventually the foreign body is destroyed (or maybe you have an allergic reaction). As viruses mutate, different immune cells in your body are stimulated and reproduce.

Exercise is boring

I think I have seen the first glimpses of this, but I have been waiting for a long time for companies to begin focusing on exercise machines that are games and then for a fitness center to provide those. I think a fitness center that was primarily based on exercise games would do very well, although I am not that familiar with the business model of fitness centers.

There are already exercise machines that let you bicycle through a terrain, but it is even more compelling if it is a game. For example, you could have a bicycle that controls a tank. You can pedal forward and backwards to control your tanks motion. Maybe it is a treadmill that is a super mario like game.

There are already games like MOCAP boxing, river rafting and horse racing that take a little bit of energy. Imagine a kickboxing game with the sensors attached to you so you can really fight someone else with no contact.