Part of this Complete Breakfast

Happy Halloween everyone!

I was in the supermarket yesterday morning buying candy for trick or treaters, and decided to run a little mental exercise. I asked myself, what are the three largest products categories in the store, in terms of choice and variety? I did a quick lap around, and here's what I came up with:
1. Cereal
2. Potato Chips
3. Toothpaste

Numbers 1 & 2 didn't surprise me, but the third did. You'd never think toothpaste would make this list, but maybe that's because the product tends to be smaller, and come in palm-sized packaging. But look for yourself next time your in a supermarket. "Whitening," "now with Scope," "Tartar control," "citrus splash"...these are the descriptors consumers want, and the toothpaste people are listening. Each brand now has a laundry list of extension products, flavor selection is approaching the rainbow-status of Vitamin Water, and the result is one of the dense-ist aisle gauntlets in the store.

Now in terms of cereal, the fact that they were my clear #1 shouldn't surprise anyone. There are more variations of Raisin Bran than there are gossip magazines at the checkout. The selection of names runs a gamut from cartoon characters (Count Chocula) to Biblical references (Ezekiel 4:9). Every fruit, nut and grain in the world is present and accounted for in some form or another.

Recognizing that the cereal world now has such a complete selection of ingredients made me think of an innovative new business I saw online, named Moja Mix. A build-your-own-cereal service, Moja Mix essentially plops someone into the cereal aisle, tears the box tops off everything, and lets customers pick and choose what they want and the dosage size. Face it – the cereal aisle is as vast and huge as the world itself, with recipes and flavor combinations as culturally representative as a UN summit. Something like this, that puts the customer in charge, seems like a natural progression.

Paint your Walls with Ideas

I remember seeing black board paint for the first time and being impressed by the concept. Write on the walls? Why not - loved the idea! However, a few "clapping the erasers" in middle school detention flashbacks and the thought of having chalk dust swirling around in the air during meetings made me hold off and stick with paper and pen for a bit longer.

But a couple of weeks ago one of my fellow innovationists saw something at the ICA in Boston that showed me how far along the broader concept had come. IdeaPaint, conceived by some college buddies during a brainstorming session, is a paint that turns any surface into a white board. Very cool!

An Ice Breaker for Power Lines

By now, those of you who follow the NFL have probably seen highlights of Tom Brady & Co.'s 59-0 drubbing of the Tennessee Titans last Sunday. More ridiculous than his statline (6 TD's and 380 yards passing in less than 3 quarters work) was the fact that a wintery mix of sleet and snow - keep in mind we're talking about mid-October - moved in over the field about an hour before gametime and lasted until the final whistle.

The HD vision of Foxboro got the rest of New England thinking about Jack Frost breathing down their neck, and probably triggered a mad, postgame dash to Home Depot for bags of sand, ice melt and shovels.

Winter in New England can run the gamut of blizzards to Nor'easters, hail and rain to weeks of sub-zero temperatures. It can mean everything from school closings to grocery store's running out of milk within an hour of the weatherman giving his forecast. It can also mean ice storms, trees collapsing under their own weight, frozen power lines, and millions of people across our region losing power for extended periods of time. As it did last year.

That's why we're hoping this innovation from Dartmouth engineering professor Victor Petrenko has legs. He's envisioned a system that increases the amount of power/heat that courses through a set of power lines. The lines can be juiced up with the flip of a switch, until they are hot enough to melt any ice that may build up during the course of a storm. If implemented, his invention could mean saving millions in cleanup and repair...not to mention keeping folks with power in thier homes during a season they need it most.

May the Roof Tiles above You Change Color

A bit of technological and design brilliance emanated from a group of MIT grads last week, in the form of color-changing roof tiles. The tiles, made of polymers commonly found in hair gels, turn white when hot (to reflect the sun) and black when cold (to absorb the sun).

So on a scorcher of summer day, when you'd normally have the AC's cranking, the tiles turn white and help a home to stay cool from the outside-in. In the winter, when the air outside is frigid, they change back to black and absorb all the energy and heat they can from the sun's rays.

Mentioning "scorcher of a summer day" above made me think of how blazingly hot the blacktop in beach parking lots get in the summer. What about the roads? They are a mass of reflective gold that does nothing but bake all day in the sun. As usual, science is waaaay ahead of me: the Solar Roadways project.

Point-and-Click Google

Google has some UK designers off in a lab working on an innovative device that will provide tag information on a subject simply by pointing at it. Google Vision, as it's being referred to, will combine GPS, OLED and advanced image recognition technology.

Think about how this could change everything from how sightseers take tours to – further down the line a bit – how doctors could potentially diagnose and treat patients. It will also – when combined with my arsenal of iPhone apps – make me an invincible, omnipotent trivia machine! Muh-ha-ha!

(via Coolhunter)