dining in while eating out

I'm considering transplanting myself from San Francisco to New York, but if eating out here is already pinching my wallet, eating out in there is gonna be worse. Even though my friends and I can make delicious food ourselves, eating out is somehow more social, exciting – it is, after all, eating out. So how about a kitchen-bar-thingie where you bring your own ingredients, pay a minimal fee to use a high-quality kitchen, and make your own food communally, with access to a bar? You'd get the best of both worlds: pay less for delicious food and enjoy the eating out experience. Live music would be pretty awesome too.

wine tags

A buddy named Noah Brier started something called brand tags, an application that lets people tag brands with words. What results are tag clouds for brands, i.e. an ingeniously simple way to gauge how consumers feel about different brands. Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I've wanted to do this kind of thing for, well, everything: political candidate tags, musical band tags, and of course, TCHOcolate tags. But a pretty great application could be wine labels, which oftentimes feel irrelevant to the point of satire and are written by only a handful of wine connoisseurs. No offense, they certainly know their wine, but how much more meaningful might wine labels be if they were crowdsourced to consumers via a wine tagging app? A tag cloud as a wine label might not only be meaningful, but beautiful.

mixed-world videoconference

It shouldn’t be too difficult to cook something up that lets a person videoconference with an avatar. With improvements in virtual body language, a person chatting with an avatar might actually look pretty great. Consider how fun/dangerous it would be for kids to talk directly to SpongeBob, not to mention the marketing potential for animated characters in general.

space by the minute

Throughout a 24-hour cycle, furnished urban spaces alternate between vacant and occupied. Meanwhile, urban centers are becoming denser and space is in high demand. So it may become sensible to start renting out space not only by the month or year, but by the hour or minute; kinda like City CarShare. Take telecommuting, which has risen x% in the past x number of years. A database of vacant office space by the hour would cut rent costs for companies with telecommuters, besides being a more efficient use of space.

This might be especially interesting/infeasible if applied to homelessness. It would help homeless people perpetually migrate from one semi-furnished urban space to another, creating a distributed home throughout the city. If nothing else, at any given moment there are probably more vacant parked cars in San Francisco than there are homeless people. But if cityfolk aren’t comfortable with a municipal let-the-homeless-sleep-in-your-car night, there are more (semi-)public venues, e.g. movie theaters between flicks or the tactile dome between birthday parties. Sure we could build funny-looking contraptions, or we could just let the homeless occupy furnished spaces that are already available. Of course this pig would never fly and even if it did, it's just a band-aid. But band-aids are a part of the trajectory, so more people might as well enjoy the view of the bay from an otherwise empty AT&T Park while we're on route to preventative health. (Plus, the sight of homeless people hanging out in AT&T Park would make quite a compelling view in itself.)

Flying pigs aside, space by the smaller-increment-of-time is coming, because the legos are here and all we have to do is make them smaller.

if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it ...

…it doesn’t really matter because we’re still talking about it. And laughing at us is what made the tree fall over in the first place.

So Close Yet So Far Away

“Why talk/twitter/whatever with your long-distance Loved one when you can share some romantic chocolate with them? Announcing So Close Yet So Far Away, a Valentine's Day experiment in tele-intimacy. Tables for two: you across from your date via your laptop. Using videoconference, you two can sit face-to-face and enjoy some luscious chocolate. Together. We provide the chocolate, network connection, and romantic ambiance; you’re responsible for yourself, your partner, and your laptops.”


These words were my invitation to So Close Yet So Far Away, an experiment in tele-intimacy that I organized at UC Berkeley. And an experiment in tele-intimacy it was! Experiment in the sense that it was an initial trial; intimate because the people were few. But it was this smaller-scale setting that allowed it to be experimental. Different people engaged with different media in different ways: some used video and others purely audio; some iChatted and others videoSkyped; some videoSkyped together while sitting across the table from each another; some iChatted with one person on one laptop while videoSkyping with another person on another laptop (video-cheating?); some set their laptops screen-to-screen, allowing their tele-dates to tele-tele-date; some took photos and others video captured; some ate truffles and others ate dates. But we all sat together and communicated with each other and each other’s others. And I even landed a spot in WIRED. So although there are certainly kinks to iron out, I look forward to further exploring the potential of social tele-intimacy. In fact, I aspire to translate it into a career. Check the Facebook profile and comment below for further details...

Another hint of what this might taste like: