3 Features Missing From Evernote

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1) Smart Merging. When processing notes in Evernote, two notes about the same thing often show up. While you can merge them in certain views, it could be made much more functionally intuitive and easier, perhaps by dragging one note on top of another, using a contextual menu, or activating the feature before selecting two or more notes to merge.

2) Contacts. Of course you can keep contacts as notes tagged with “contact,” but there should be a better way. Rather than create an entirely independent system for contacts, just enable contacts that sync with GMail/Android/Yahoo/iPhone contacts.

3) Share from Web Clipper. The Web Clipper is great and allows you to clip portions of blog posts and articles to Evernote, but what if you would rather immediately share that with a contact? With #2 in place, the Web Clipper offers the option to send the clipped portion to one of your contacts, either as a link via SMS, or as an email, or even directly to their Evernote inbox for trusted contacts. (!)

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Client: Evernote Corporation.

The VIP Music Listening Experience

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by fluffisch

These days, I have no idea what the actual name of the song is for half the songs I listen to on my phone. They just play in a continuous stream through my earpods. I suppose this is no worse than when I had a CD player and only knew the track number of the song.

So, imagine listening to an album that is being DJ’d by the artist himself. So, as the first track ends on that Bob Dylan album, you hear Bob mention the title of the track, maybe one or two interesting tidbits about it or the upcoming song, and you continue on with the album this way.

In the case with a deceased artist, you could have different people do the same thing, e.g., producers, family, friends, other influential musicians in the same genre. With a little imagination, you can see complementary and alternate versions of the same idea.

The value here is twofold. First, your listening experience is enhanced. You know not only the titles of the songs, but also a little bit more about the whole album, and often from the band themselves.

Secondly, this service could be cloud-based, such that these snippets are served to your device as needed, which would allow them to be a value add for a distribution service like iTunes or Spotify, and should encourage people to acquire their music honestly.

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Client: Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, RIAA

How To Skip The “I Accept The Terms And Conditions” WiFi Access Screen

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cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Bartek Kuzia

Every single time you go to Starbucks, you have to check the box that says that you accept the terms and conditions to use the free Internet connection before you will be connected. It’s not just coffee shops. Whenever you go to any hotspot that provides free WiFi, e.g., hotels, libraries, airports, etc., you usually have to deal with the same inconvenience.

The idea here is that the terms and conditions used at these locations is remarkably similar, so perhaps it makes sense to draft a boilerplate version of WiFi access Terms and Conditions—similar to the GNU and CC licenses used for software and creative works respectively. This way, you could tell your device that you will always accept these standard terms, and any location that used them unaltered would automatically allow you to skip the “I accept” screen and be immediately connected.

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Client: Starbucks, Holiday Inn, Barnes & Noble, The University of Texas.

PS: If a company wanted to use a few additional terms, they could do so with bullet points on the agreement page, which would present the added terms directly to the user before they agreed, making the agreement more transparent and ostensibly more enforceable. But knowing that they would force the user to make an additional step might make the company think twice about the necessity of additional terms.

A LIKE Button For All Messages

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cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Sharon Drummond

At first, I thought this would be a good idea for text messages. The way I see it, you could just tap and hold the sender’s message and would be presented with the option to like it, which would then alert the sender.*

But then I thought that a thumbs up emoticon does essentially the same thing right now as far as “liking” a text is concerned, so I’m not sure how necessary this feature is with emoji.

With email, however, this idea may make a little more sense. Instead of having to respond with “Great!” or “Thanks!” or “That’s hilarious!,” wouldn’t it be great just to click on a thumbs up icon, or a heart, or a +1  (for GMail) and have that displayed as a notification in the upper or lower right-hand corner of the sender’s browser window when they are logged into their email account? 

This way, these simple acknowledgments wouldn’t clutter up your inbox and could be received whilst composing or reading other email.

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*Alternatively, you could be presented with three options for a quick reply. The first is to like the message, which may send the user your emoticon of choice or a custom platform-based icon. The second option is to simply acknowledge the message, which would reply “OK” or something similar, and the third option would be to reply with a laugh—which would reply with “haha” or “lol.” These are all two click options that would cover a significant portion of replies. Plus, if you could customize one or two of the three options, you could make this feature fit with your particular style of messaging.

The Perfect Combination

You drink a cup of coffee or a can of soda. As you go to toss it into the recycle bin like the good steward of Earth that you are, you find in the recess under the bottom of the cup (or can) a foil tab. Being the curious person that you are, you peel back the foil seal to reveal a breath-freshening mint. 

Gives you a boost of confidence in those post-beverage conversations.

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One-Click File Management

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cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Ika-Ink

Imagine a magical piece of software that organizes your entire hard drive for you.  

Whenever it finds an .mp3, the software scans it, tagging it if necessary, and understands that it isn’t a song, but rather a podcast, converts it if necessary, and places it in the “Automatically Add To iTunes” folder. 

You specify whether to sort by date, person, place, or contents, and the program sorts all of your images into a logical file structure using facial recognition, location tags, file date, &c. That makes it easy to add them to iPhoto or Picasa, and saves you having to sort through and organize all of the imported images like you usually need to.

Likewise, it scans your .pdf’s and .doc’s for subject matter and organizes them into categories, understanding the difference between the .pdf version of a book and a .pdf of your bank statement.

You can see how you can apply this to the most common file types at first, with a handful of options and reiterate the software from there. 

It may be better to have it only partially-automatic. In other words, it may be best if it gets a one click confirmation from the user for any decision that doesn’t produce a certain confidence level. As it does this, it offers one or two alternate options for the file that the user can specify with a click.

And, most importantly, information about the files is anonymously relayed to a central location where you can see where the program gets it wrong and compare how different users chose to sort certain files so that the program educates itself and performs better for each subsequent user. So, if 1,000 people have a .pdf with the same header (even if the rest of the file is different,) and 900 of them said that it belongs in a folder called BANK STATEMENTS, then the software defaults to doing the same for you.

Finally, to find or manually manage a file, you’d use a graphic-based search within the software (or as a stand-alone OS integrated search.) This way, if you download an image of Olivia Wilde—and the software has already processed the download location, you’d simply search for PICTURES > PERSON > OLIVIA WILDE, or PICTURES > FEMALE > RECENT, or PICTURES > FUTURE GIRLFRIENDS.

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Smart Commercials For DVR Television


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pörrö

Visiting my parents, I realized they watch a lot of television. Most of it is recorded using their DVR system, so whenever they get to a commercial break in the show, they do what I think many people do—they fast forward past the commercials.

Under the current system, this effectively kills the commercial value of the advertisement. It occurred to me a few months ago that with a little piece of software added to the DVR, you could solve the problem for advertisers without inconveniencing the viewer.

Here’s how it works: When the DVR is recording a television show and its commercials, it downloads an alternate commercial that, instead of being a 30 second clip with video and audio, is simply 1 to 3 billboard-style graphics with no audio. This alternate commercial is used whenever the DVR detects that the fast forward is enabled.

In other words, fast forwarding magically changes the format of the commercial from a 30 second video to a 5 or 10 second billboard. Perhaps this is a single branding image like Coca-Cola would use, or perhaps it is a picture of a new Audi followed by a second frame advertising the lease price.

The advertiser still gets to reach the viewer, and the viewer gets to save the same amount of time.

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