Some more ideas I will likely never have time to finish, but you should. LMK if you are serious about any of them and I will do my best to help.

BedBox rental/installation service

I sleep in a box and it has transformed my life. My guess is that there are millions of people in NYC who get chronically woken up all night, every night and they would be different people if they could just have a suitable place to sleep. Not being able to get a good night sleep in loud and hot cities is a massively underappreciated public health problem. Maybe worse than smoking or junk food.

A BedBox is basically a room that you build inside of another room. It is carefully designed to be as soundproof as possible. I can build a 8’x8’x8′ one for about $2500 in materials from HomeDepot.

The idea is to make a service where anyone can order a bedbox and a crew shows up the next day and builds it inside the apartment in a couple of hours. It would work like the existing pressure wall services in NYC do. You can also prepay to have it taken away when you leave the apartment (some landlords understandably require this).

To execute, you would first need to perfect the design so it was fast and easy to put together on the site. You’d also want to perfect things like the HVAC and security systems (eg making sure you know when there is a fire alarm or motion happening outside the box). Optionally, you could make it look more cool than a box. People seem to like gable roofs so this could be an upgrade.

For operations, you’d need a van and a 2 person site crew and they would have to be excellent.

I’d probably start by charging $7500 in NYC and see how many you could sell and figure out what the real costs and problems end up being like.

If it works, you could expand by adding crews, lowering prices, going to new cites, or developing an ikea style flat-pack shippable self-erect version. But more important than the money, you would be radically improving peoples’ lives. It could also meaningfully impact the housing situation since it could make many more places livable by being able to drop a usable bedroom almost anywhere.

Another possible business plan would be to build bedboxes in hotel rooms and airbnbs and then market them to people like me who would happily pay a huge premium to stay at a place where I know I would be able to get a good night sleep when traveling.

Here is an old mission statement:
https://josh.com/ly/bedbox.txt

The HelloAgain POS system

Make a system for coffee shoppes that automatically recognizes repeat customers and discretely prompts the barista with their name and regular order and loyalty info on the POS. Good vibes for the customer and time savings for the barista.

This is now almost trivial to execute this from a technology perspective. The hard part is avoiding any ick.

If you could make this work (without ick), then I think Square basically has to buy you out.

(BTW, I personally think the WeChat system is so so much better than this, but outside China people want to tell their order to another person for some reason.)

Socket Rocket

Make a little round<$1 PCB that fits neatly below the bulb in an Edison screw socket and is controllable using X10-style commands through the power lines. Just needs a microcontroller and a power transistor and a few passives. Because it lives inside the socket, you can avoid a bunch of safety issues (no isolation needed so eg you can use a shunt regulator).

You also need to make the gateway transmitter and an app. Neither is hard.

Because it is so cheap, people can afford to buy a lot of them and make amazing giant displays like the blinkenlights.

Ultimate in-ear microphones

The holy grail of recording – use your own ear drum as a microphone!

You can measure extremely tiny movements using laser interference, and lasers (unlike normal in-ear mics) do not obstruct the ear canal and pina so you capture the transfer function of the whole system.

Then for bonus points you could find a way to directly actuate the same person’s eardrum with the previously recorded sounds and then you should be able to almost exactly recreate the aural experience (as long as they do not move their head).

I am guessing there is some niche business opportunity here, maybe in ultra high end audio or in research or medicine? But the real pay-off is that you could finally know what it feels like to be a bat sounds like to be Fred (at least at the eardrum level).

The Gawanus Firefly Project

This would be an awesome site specific public art project to light up the Gawanus Canal in Brooklyn with self-synchronizing barricade lamps. Trust me, it would be a sight to behold and people would come from all parts to gaze apon it in amazement.

Here is a pitch sheet:
https://josh.com/ly/Gowanus%20Lights/description.pdf

The only (very) hard part to this project is dealing with all the agencies (did I mention it is a federal superfund site?) to get approval. If you can do that, I can do everything else to make it happen.

Cheap traffic light upgrade

It is now possible to cheaply make a system that could mount on existing traffic lights and make them smart enough to do things like..
* alter timing for more efficient intersection utilization,
* clear a path for emergency vehicles
* report back to a home base about traffic levels and incidents

These could have a huge impact if widely deployed in a city, so the challenge is to make them super-duper cheap and easy to retrofit and then offer them to cities as a service where you build, install, own, and operate them. They could also do full city license plate reading for seamless reactive tolling and flow analysis and so many other things (although you might want to leave the LPR stuff alone at first because it gets some people riled up).

The technology is ready so this is only a moderate engineering challenge. The hard part is dealing with governments and convincing them to say yes. You could make big money and make cities significantly better.

Modern bluetooth beeper

I think the world needs a comeback of the Motorola Bravo Plus pager. People today actually are buying vinyl records and installing apps that block them from looking at their phone screen, so the time is right.

It would not be hard to make a new bluetooth version of this classic device that either links to a phone or has its own LTE IOT wireless network connections.

Maybe you use this as an opportunity to build a new from-scratch messaging network that finds a better place in the urgency/exclusivity/privacy/distraction/bandwidth/formfactor communications space.

PEN testing for parents

Start a white hat security firm that will PEN test people’s parents with phishing emails and fake phone calls. Customer pays a small fee to sign up and then a big fee when ever you are able to steal their parents’ AOL password or get them to send a Western Union.

Oh man, the world needs this so bad and things are getting worse every day. You should be so happy to pay a trustworthy company to try to hack your parents because otherwise your parents are going to get hacked by someone else and it is going to cost so, so much more.

Book streaming service

Sometimes I really want to read a book but t is not available in any electronic format. This service would let me order an amazon book to them and then they would figure out a way to legally stream it to me. This could be as dumb as a Zoom call with person who holds the book up to a camera (probably no copyright problems?), or maybe the service has automated book streaming machines that can remotely turn pages. IDK, you figure it out – but I would definitely use it. Limited upside, but all it would take to get started is hanging a shingle.

(Note that I have been running a different kind of book streaming service for decades, but I specialize in specific hard to find and very expensive books).

Arduino POTS shield

This is a simple shield that adds an old skool wired phone jack into an arduino. All features supported, including full duplex sound, DTMF, on/off hook detection, make/break counting, and even (90VAC!) ring down.

You’d make the shield stackable so people could build their own mini phone exchanges. Of course, each shield has a physical DIP switch to set its i2c address in the stack.

You will not make a million bucks with this one, but it is pretty simple to design and build and I think you’d unlock a lot of creativity and fun.

Electronic Circus Spinner

You know those little spinners at the circus where you push the plunger in and they spin and make sparks?

You can make one of those using a PCB and RGB LEDs rather than sparks it would show awesome POV displays (and sparks) and it could get the power from the spinning (no batteries) and look really cool and be cheap and you could also make them respond to IR transmissions inside the venue so they could be cued to the show which would look very cool.

Again, not a million dollars to be made, but simple and fun enough that it would probably be worth the effort to make and sell them. If you make it good enough then you could cut a deal with a circus and you’d have a nice, no-effort recurring revenue stream. And free tickets when the circus comes to town.