It sounds to me like the mind set of inventors is to look at their everyday life from a distance and, every instant, think about what is deeply inconvenient in what they’re doing and what could be improved.
And I believe this is not easy at all: most of us are so used to doing things every day the usual way that it’s really hard to look at the situation from a fresh point of view.
The recent buzz about Amazon automatically deleting eBooks from people’s Kindle was interesting. For a little bit of contrast here’s the workflow I’ve been using for about 1.5 year now.
And voilà, you got all your news, with images and all, in your Sony Reader to make your commute time a bit nicer.
This is a call to entrepreneurs who want to make money 
I think this would be a cool idea but I don’t have the time nor the interest of developing it. If this already exists, then please excuse my ignorance and tell me where I can find these cafés! Cybercafés don’t count, I want to use my own laptop, I want a comfortable chair and I don’t want an hourly rate.
Simple observation one: working conditions are becoming more and more flexible.
Simple observation two: having fewer actual offices and more employees working from home can cut costs for companies.
Random prevision: it’s going to become more and more common for people to work from home.
Simple observation three: many people like to have a clear separation between work and private life. Moreover, many people can’t afford a home large enough to have a special “office” room. And many people don’t like to be completely isolated from any human presence.
In this context, I think cafés where you could work comfortably would fill an increasing need. It seems like Starbucks is slowly moving in that direction… too slowly I think.
A café where I could work from needs:
This café could offer, for a flat fee (say, 5 dollars for the day), a drink, a comfortable seat, an individual table, a power outlet and unlimited wifi access. Now maybe I could get a 26-inch monitor and a comfortable keyboard and mouse for an extra 2 dollars or something.
You could even get (extra fee, hin, hin) a super-duper comfy chair, the kind where your back or neck never get sore or sweaty even after 8 hours of work (we use those at Google, I have no idea what their name is but they’re totally awesome).
Hourly rates might also work, but I think I’d prefer a flat fee because hourly rates make you look at your watch every ten minutes. “Man, I need to finish this chunk of work in the next 17 minutes or I’ll pay for another hour, quick quick!”
Ultimate refinement: strike deals with companies so that their employees get discounts when working from those cafés.
So, entrepreneurs, pretty please with coffee-sugar and whipped cream on top? Or does that exist already? If so I want one in Paris, French entrepreneurs!
Thank you very much.
As some of you may know, a new law (”Hadopi”) has been voted in France that allows private companies to monitor illegal downloads of their copyrighted content, log the IP addresses, ask the Internet access providers for actual names, and then start doing stuff like sending email and disabling your Internet connection for up to a year (while you still continue to pay for it).
As an effort to try and show how absurd this law is in today’s world I put up a fake page (in French) selling the “Hadopi router” that automatically cracks passwords of the nearby Wifi networks and connects to them to download torrents.
It’s a dumb joke, but I think it does point out a little bit of the absurdity of the law Comments and suggestions welcome!
Programming tools like Eclipse assist your geeky typing by automatically adding closing brackets and ending quotes for you when you type the opening ones. This gives you extremely bad habits and you end up leaving all kinds of doors open.
Now I am not saying it is always that bad, but frankly, I could have taken this photo in many (if not most) car interiors in any Chinese large city:
Note the lucky charm (top right), but no belt (also note that this is a fancy car that belongs to a very wealthy family).
… would probably require some way of preventing your head to move at all, but wouldn’t that be neat, and a great way to keep you relaxed?