Category: Product

Think Umbrellas

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fresh frozen strawberry umbrella

Who came up with the idea to put mini umbrellas in drinks? ridiculous! brilliant!

When I was a young man (19 I think), I was out to lunch in Atlanta with some work mates and when we came out of the restaurant there was a massive thunderstorm. We had to sprint to our car to avoid having to change our clothes and still we ended up drenched.

I thought – Why not have free single-use umbrellas that shops can give to their customers as a courtesy? They could be super-cheap and silk-screened with their logo (or sponsored by another company looking for exposure).

The good feeling gets translated into a relationship to the brand. right?

Parking ticket reuse/share

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Living in Boulder, CO, we have these new pay for parking kiosks that dispense a paper ticket with a given amount of time on them.

You are supposed to put them on your dashboard and they won’t ticket you.

Frequently I find that my estimation of the time I was going to spend there is off. Usually in the positive because I have made the mistake of going the other way and getting a fat ticket.

So, I typically have a half hour or more of time left on my ticket that I end up just tossing.

What if we had a way of giving the ticket to the next person coming in, assuming they were going to spend roughly the amount of time on the ticket doing their things.

plastic-holder-thingy

We could use a pocket attached to the kiosk perhaps?

Cafe table solution

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Have you ever been to a restaurant/bistro/cafe and had your drink spill and/or your conversation be interrupted from a wobbly table?

Of course you have.

Well, that irritates me. I have been drawing this out for a while and will get it prototyped at some point. Here it is in its current form:

The Table Equalizer

Table legs can usually be adjusted via a screw-in leg end but that requires you to bend down and grab it with your hand and twist it. gross.

I designed this device to constantly seek a length that will give resistance to the spring. If it reaches it’s limit, it resets and starts over. This requires a person to perhaps force-reset by lifting it up for a second but that’s not a big deal, right?

Simple, cheap. Necessary!

equalizer-02

G.E.T.

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A little device I invented called the Gel Extraction Thing (GET)

So, most of my ideas come from being irritated by something which is common.

See if you have the same pet peeve: The carbohydrate gel single-use pack. Great for what it does which is that it gives you a jolt of energy when you’re on a long adventure or race. Awesome.

What it fails at is delivery of the product in a reasonably quick and complete manner. It sucks. You really have to pause your activity/race in order to get it all out or leave a bunch of the goo in there and slam it back into your shorts or jersey or pocket (you would never throw it on the ground, right? right?).

Flashback to when you take your jersey or shirt out of the laundry with a bunch of goo on it and potentially all over every damn thing because you forgot about it.

Enter the GET, a simple plastic device that takes a packet and uses a basic compound leverage technique to enhance your hand’s power and extract ALL of the product out in a few seconds. No pausing/stopping to roll the dang thing up slowly to get all the good stuff. No extra left in to get all over.

I made a 3D printed prototype and put in on Kickstarter in 2011. It didn’t go anywhere, for several reasons. One is that the proto was just a proof of concept and not very sexy. The other is that, yes, it’s a small market and most people get along fine without it.

I believe that if I can get it to market, people will love it and like lots of things that they never thought they would ‘need’ find that they can’t really live without it.

(patent pending)

We’ll see. Anyone willing to write a check and see it come to fruition, please send me a note.

Kickstarter vid:

gotta get G.E.T. from Alec Uitti on Vimeo.