My mind tends to wander. Sometimes, my conversations with others wander into strange ideas or interesting proposals.

Most of these ideas are too vague or too far-fetched for me to pursue in any meaningful way, but maybe someone else can.

So here are some ideas to mull over. Feel free to steal them, or point me to examples that already exist.

1 – A Website that Tracks all of the Various Shows/Movies on Streaming Services

Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu already keep our media attention divided. With HBO Max, Disney+, and whatever streaming service NBC Universal cooks up all debuting soon, it’s suddenly going to be a lot harder to keep track of which shows are available on which platform. There’s no way most people will be able to afford subscriptions to more than two or three of these companies. Why not make each service be as competitive as possible by giving the casual user somewhere they can go to see what’s playing, and jump to a new service if they want.

This kind of service-hopping will probably be prevented by long-term service contracts though.

2 – A “Data Bank” for Personally Identifiable Information

Okay, I have to credit one of my former coworkers for this one. We worked in software, so of course issues of security and big news in the tech sector tended to come up in our everyday conversations.

We spent quite a long time discussing a way to secure personally identifiable information in this age of massive data sharing, digitization of records, and cyber warfare.

Why isn’t there a company that holds all of a user’s personally identifiable information (social security number, credit card numbers, birthday, demographics, DNA record, you name it) in a lockbox? Then, when any third-party, whether it be Facebook or an insurance company, requests that information, the Data Bank firm must get specific authorization from the individual to share that information.

This would prevent any 3rd-parties in any industry from selling off your information without explicit authorization from you, the individual. Your information suddenly becomes a commodity over which you have complete control.

This would obviously require a ton of regulation, and basically upending the way our information is protected from 3rd-parties (hint: it’s not), but who wouldn’t pay to control their own data?

3 – A Story about an Apocalyptic Future Ruled by Dinosaurs

I had a dream about this. I was in a city with white buildings and tropical vegetation with a group of people. For some reason I thought it was Rio, but I’ve never been there and know nothing about it.

It was clearly some sort of future setting in which human civilization was destroyed by the rise of dinosaurs, and we were being hunted through the city by a T-rex. Terrifying and awesome, and I woke up wanting to return to that dream world.

Alas, it has escaped me.

That’s All Folks

I’d love to know if any of these things already exist, so comment or share some ideas of your own.

Steve D