Quebec Valley

Enough with the augmented reality thing! It’s cool but can we move to real life applications? I won’t be walking around holding up my iPhone at eye level just to get to a subway station. What if I’m riding a bike or driving a car? Useless! Voice-enabled direction by GPS seems more like a better fit to me no?

So what could be a good use for this technology? There’s plenty but here’s one that would ease the pain of billions of people: A plain language translator.

Wouldn’t it be great to point your iPhone at a Chinese sign while visiting Hong Kong and BAM! get an automatic translation of what the sign says? Restaurant menus, bus routes and all these signs everywhere could be instantly translated.

Now THAT’S augmented reality to me.

And while we’re at it, I don’t understand why Google isn’t doing Optical Character Recognition in Street view to allow “super local searches” (i.e. bread store on St-Laurent). Yes, businesses open ad close but it could be useful if Google were to drive around the busiest streets… Then again, it might explain why they bought ReCaptcha..? Will we see street-view-style captchas soon?

This is fairly obvious but when there’s a new product that’s quite popular, try to look at an existing (or similar) product in another country and duplicate the successful ideas. Here’s an example: Bixi. This is fairly new here in Montreal but "rent a bike" systems are not new. They exist in other cities around the world and someone who’s smart enough ougth to look at products and services around the "rent a bike" idea. So go out there, look around and you’ll get a great idea.

We almost saw a very good example with the Bixi Mobile application for the iPhone but it was quickly and sadly put back in its grave.

Also, try to think out of the box. Here’s a free idea that I had a few days ago. I don’t know if it would workbut it doesn’t really matter. I even found a funny name for my idea. I would call it "Caxe". If you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s a play on "casque" (helmet) and "bixi". See, most cyclists wear a helmet and if you rent a Bixi, you most likely won’t have one with you. Not only that, what will happen to the Bixi’s once a regulation forces everyone to wear helmets? So why not ink some sort of agreement and lease helmets next to the Bixi’s?

This is just an idea out of the many ones out there. Here’s another one. Cater to tourists (and locals!) by printing special coupons on the back of receipts. It is very easy to find out if a bixi user is from Montreal or abroad by looking at the credit card number. Bixi could print rebates according to that factor including coupons to restaurants located not too far away from the current location. While this idea needs to be implemented by Bixi themselves, there’s gotta be a middle man to find the sponsors…

As you can see, there’s plenty of ideas around popular products!