What Were They Thinking?

I learn of interesting new technologies and products every day.  Because a successful business reflects more than the value of its products, most of these won’t be big hits even if they are really good ideas – and many are really interesting technologies.

But then there are others which remind me that not every technology advance makes sense.  Some indeed raise that old question – what were they thinking?  I’m sure I’m going to get complaints about pointing out some of these items, so I’ll apologize ahead of time that maybe I’m just missing the genius of these ideas 🙂

The government of the United Arab Emirates has decided to adapt one of the ideas proposed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.  See the Reuters story at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/us-emirates-drones-idUSBREA1906E20140210  The UAE too would use a very modern technology – unmanned drones.  But instead of delivering products, they would deliver paperwork to their citizens.  The technology also uses sophisticated fingerprint and facial recognition.  Perhaps they haven’t heard of a different technology that eliminates the need for the paperwork to begin with – ah, the Internet?

Then there’s this concept that is the merger of the much heralded Internet of Things and wearable clothing – the bra that cannot be unhooked without “true love”.   While the Japanese clothing company responsible for this idea only created it as a celebration of their anniversary (https://www.ravijour.com/anniversary/moodup) you can see they do take it seriously in this video at http://youtu.be/B8Wd831gUt4  .  I’m not sure anyone else would trust or try to use this particular application of the latest tech.

There have been a few recent experiments in making music in non-traditional ways.  (I’ll have more on that in a future blog post.)  But one of those experiments that belongs here perhaps is Lickestra.  As you can see at http://www.emiliebaltz.com/2014/01/lickestra/ , people generate musical sounds by licking ice cream.  Obviously this is not for concert length pieces.

And so it goes on the far edges of the technology world … more to come, I’m sure.

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