Mashed Articles

This month, I’ve been in a bit of an inventing mood. Normally I’d race down to the patent office and become a millionaire. Instead, I choose to share the love. Take any of these ideas and push it to market and, as a special one-time deal, I’ll only take 70 per cent of the net. As you’ll see, that will still leave you a billionaire a hundred times over.

Idea #1: you know how people on the internet tend to be foul monsters you just long to cast into an abyss from which there is no escape? My hypothesis is that this phenomenon is down to three things: anonymity, distance and the inability to send painful electrical shocks through the telephone network.

Altering the first will merely put a name on the idiocy, while the second would bring you closer to them, which you probably don’t want to do. Just look at what they post!

The third, then, is obviously the secret, and it works like this. Anyone who wishes to use the internet must now have a small box plugged into their home PC that will keep a tally of all their activities. A troll post on a blog will count against you; a Wikipedia edit that goes unchanged for more than a month will be counted as a plus. If your score drops under a certain negative threshold, your internet access will be instantly cut off until you place your finger into the box and receive the equivalent in agonising pain to settle the tab. I’m sure there are some minor technical problems with this, like how to deal with identification or people who enjoy that sensation, but I’ll leave the implementation details to you. I’m more of an ideas man.

Speaking of which, here’s Idea #2, the ‘Try it anyway’ button. It’s an evolution of the classic ‘Ignore’, which will be mandatory on any and all computer dialog boxes going forwards. In any situation where your system throws up an error, one simple tap and your PC is forced to at least give it a go. CRC error? See what comes out! That grinding sound on your hard drive? Probably not as bad as it sounds, all things considered.

Idea #3 is an end to passwords. At least, mostly. They’ll still exist, but you won’t be allowed to change them any more. Instead, your web browser will look after them, and if you ever change browser, you’ll get a new one via email and plug it in. While this may seem a little convoluted, the advantages are obvious. You’ll never have to remember one ever again, you’ll never have to risk doubling up on any service, and any tool that needs better security gets a fresh start to come up with new methods based on how our brains work rather than trying to smash their squishy grey matter around what’s most convenient for some company server or gaggle of cryptography wonks with a fetish for exclamation marks and random capital letters.

Not impressed? You’re hard to please! But you haven’t seen Idea #4 – scratch and sniff printing. This is a gift to the wage slaves, forced to sell their souls on a daily basis in the name of food and keeping a roof over their heads. They may still have to write the report the boss plans to use to get his Christmas bonus, but now when the doors close, they’ll be able to take a quick furtive scratch of the special paper and breathe in the tell-tale odour of pure tripe.

Better still, all this requires for operation is a standard inkjet printer, a few special cartridges and an immediate superior with no functional sense of smell. If you’re out of luck here, try betting him he can’t snort a spoon of capsaicin powder.

Finally there’s Idea #5. I almost hate to mention it, because compared to these others, it may sound far-fetched. It’s a tablet designed to compete with the iPad, which sells for less yet still feels like a premium product due to focusing on things that can be done well instead of shooting for the impossible. Think Kindle or Nook. iPad competitors? Hardly. Brilliant e-readers? Absolutely. All components will be geared towards picking a few functions and doing them damn well, not trying to do everything with tech that’s merely ‘good enough’.

Headline features like built-in Flash will only be added if the experience is a genuinely good one, not simply to tick a box. Its OS will be updated until the hardware can’t be stretched any further, not simply until the next big version number change. Finally, as much attention will be paid to the software as anything else, on the grounds that it’s the experience that matters, and even wasting a supposedly measly £100 on a slab that ends up gathering dust by the end of the week is guaranteed to turn a non-technically savvy consumer off the very idea of tablets for… nah. On second thoughts, forget it. That one’s just silly.