A DEX that trades security synthetics from emerging markets. Instead of trying to back these CFDs with the underlying security, they could be pegged to a stablecoin of equivalent value. These markets are currently inaccessible to retail traders.

An AI food photo enhancer for online restaurants using delivery services.

A simple companion voice bot for elderly people. Its knowledge base is built locally from the conversations it has while being set with some initial context.

Packaged ice done better. Available through delivery services.

An AI tool that can take existing design systems or page designs and reconstruct them. Most built products have components or some systemised element of the design in the front end as it happens naturally when you code it (DIY, etc). Throw an LLM at this and build its own interpretation of the design system.

Presentation software that is able to read the presenters body language to control it. Signal to jump to specific slides or zoom in and out with pinch gestures. This could be done when live streaming by watching the video of the presenter and reacting in real time.

Gamified product management and start-up building. There is so much "I've built XYZ to some ARR in 6 months" chat online. I wonder if you could bake that into a competition somehow. Scoring founders and PMs on their progress from a statistical standpoint rather than a community standpoint like ProductHunt.

3D UI mode for websites that makes them more suitable for VR.

Elevate e-commerce by using GenAI to render clothes on artificial models that look like the shopper. "Try these on your virtual model." This approach is technically easier than the AR route as you don't need the clothes in 3D.

[Inspired by the Vision Pro launch] In order to help websites break out of their 2D containers when viewed in a 3D space, create a web plugin that utilizes CSS 3D transforms, or another language mechanism, to give existing UI elements depth when viewed in Extended Reality environments. This would be a quick win for existing products looking to provide a more immersive 3D experience and help the web evolve to this new form of browsing.

A satirical horror film set in dystopian 2100AD where automation has made all forms of physical labor redundant and 'in-person' is a phrase of the past. Featuring a salesperson protagonist, working in shadow markets selling mundane in-person experiences—"$10 to dig a hole in a paddock! $20 to experience an office meeting!"

International crypto off-ramp in DeFi, taking funds and distributing them to traditional banks outside of centralized exchanges. So many on-ramps, so few off-ramps. Lots of compliance headaches but it's a necessity for the industry.

There has been an influx of builders and new construction companies. They are all managing their clients, work, and employees manually due to the lack of digital processes in the industry. There could be an opportunity for a verticalized software solution here—something similar to a CRM, HR, or vendor management software but specific to this industry.

There is too much focus on creating solutions. There needs to be more effort put into understanding problems and their histories. Only after that can we start to attempt to solve them.

Raise awareness around carbon emissions associated with the use of technology. E.g server farms and cloud computing aren't perceived as having an impact on the environment because of our psychological preference to relate to what's directly in front of us. Provide a way to measure someone's carbon footprint based on internet usage. Chrome plugin..

Traditional advertising agencies are a dying breed. They don't hold the same value due to the death of 'creative' advertising and the growth of targeted social advertising. Something needs to change. Time to optimize and automate their current process and distribution.

A global payroll system that reduces friction when hiring international talent. There are many issues arising in this growing domain, the biggest two: local employment law and local vs. international wage expectations including foreign exchange rates. A payroll system built on blockchain that can integrate with tax systems could mitigate this while operating a universal currency. A public ledger for the public sector. 1+1=3

A decentralized learning platform that motivates its students via a crypto rewards scheme. Gamified education with real-world rewards, resulting in students getting paid for learning instead of paying to learn.

A sustainable energy marketplace that removes the friction for individuals contributing power back onto the grid. This would also open up access to sustainable energy for everyday consumers. This process needs to be demystified and accessible in order for it to ever fluctuate.

Modular housing built online. Allow users to select their location for building, and then piece together their home, based on local constraints, from a library of housing modules. E.g in one location a user may have the option to choose a large balcony, another might be able to have an outdoor fireplace area etc. Think IKEA for housing but it's all built by the customer on an online platform.

Weekly, an app that restricts users to sharing a 1-minute weekly update. Born out of the overwhelming nature of existing social networks, this would actually allow people to stay up-to-date with each other. Users would have the ability to react to segments of the update and to watch through someone's past updates. When users haven't given their weekly update, allow people to prompt them for one. Only notify users to check the app once a week, keeping screen time to a minimum.

Digitize the residential real-estate "building inspection" process. Create a platform with flexible but consistent standards with the ability to invite the property owners/sellers and soon-to-be buyers into the service for transparency. Build an API that enables third parties (government, real estate companies, CRMs etc) to pull from for alignment in that stage of the selling process, and to create demand from these stakeholders involved in buying and selling property.

Capitalizing on the need for a new type of affordable accommodation due to COVID, create a cheap, modular backpackers with rooms (or 'pods') that can be recycled, washed, and distributed easily. This could be accompanied by an app that allows people to book them like they would book an Uber. Instead of Airbnb which reuses existing homes, this would create a much denser and affordable option. Building the structures with modular, pre-fabricated 'pods,' there would be a plug-and-play setup that would offer consistent and reliable experiences for its guests.

A photo-series of people melting into and around invisible objects. Using the classic 'perspective warp', each photo would feature a human morphing into an inanimate shape, creating a reversal of more common anthropomorphic photography.

Due to a lack of resources and at-home media production during COVID-19, coupled with a huge demand for digital marketing as brands come to solely rely on it, I expect we’ll see a surge in creativity. Take away what were the key financial differentiators in high-end marketing and we’re left with a more open playing field.

An AI/algorithm that automates the iterative phase of the product design process. Using usability testing analytics such as heat maps, the AI could learn from results and rapidly place/reorder/move UI elements to increase usability. “One should expect any repetitive job that doesn’t involve unexpected situations or social interactions to get automated.”

Find a way to capture the energy generated by natural wildfires and put it onto the grid. This could even be used as a potential way to help fight them.

Our existing road infrastructure was built for human drivers, however, it’s not as effective for autonomous cars/robots. Autonomous cars can be tricked into speeding by simply changing a speed limit road sign — this feels unsafe. Building on the earlier idea of enhancing our surroundings, we could do the same for roads. Instead of having numbers on a road sign, use a digital chip that communicates with vehicles. Just like the cat-eye is used as a very reliable and persistent signifier, create something that can communicate in the same way with robots.

An in-home contained microclimate for keeping compost. Keeping compost in small, city apartments is difficult. How could this be solved and help people be more sustainable in cities? Turn it into the soil for houseplants.

A documentary on the furniture movers in New York. These people are insane and deserve some recognition.

Buy property in Montreal. Third AI hub after silicon valley and NYC. Google just opened up shop there for ‘Stadia.’

Apple U1 chip allows for accuracy in its spacial awareness. Think about ways you can help all this new technology (autonomy, AR devices, IoT etc) be better by enhancing the surroundings as well. Everyone is focused on building for the devices themselves but what if there was a way to enhance them from the outside. E.g placing NFC chips everywhere that help devices recognize their whereabouts.

Portrait series of dogs/pets holding humans on leads. Reverse the scale so that the animals are larger. Show different types of animals and how they match their owners.

Blue-collar workers or ‘tradies’ have no platform to showcase their work history or find new opportunities. Think about vertical ‘service’ marketplaces. Also the shift into the gig-based economy. Create a more dynamic workforce for construction rather than hiring a sole company and relying on them to be good at every facet of the project. It could create a ‘freelance’ model for builders, electricians, and plumbers.

Turn sports players within a league into tokenised online assets that carry value. E.g the better the player, the bigger their market cap within the associated currency. Each league would have its own version of the currency (NBAcoin, NFLcoin etc) and players within that league be allocated a specific amount of the overall market cap. Teams or clubs have a specific amount of currency to spend on players. Or you could create a ‘fantasy’ version of the league and trade players based on that value. Creating an entirely different league that mimics the real league but where players buy and trade players.

Use reinforcement learning by getting someone to continuously select their preferred image from a set within a context such as ‘summer clothes.’ Using image recognition coupled with Google’s backward search API will give an endless stream of images for learning. Frame the public-facing app as a ‘character builder’ — helping people understand their style mixed with professionals that have good taste. Use this data to make a super analytical brand that builds on that. In-store transparency around sales etc. The brand could offer a range of fabrics and base ‘patterns’ the consumers choose from. Just like Squarespace makes everyone a web-designer, the brand could make everyone a fashion designer. Opening up the black box of garment production to everyone. A nice touch could be a subtle print saying “Made by Hamish.”

Healthy supplement lollies. Milk bottle lolly has protein etc. Vitamin jelly babies etc. Could do a food truck but with lollies... Bit creepy maybe.

AI/ML trained by synthetic data sets (rendering virtual images, objects, 3D environments etc). No Mans Sky approach to training AI. Procedurally generate variants of a use case and feed it through an AI algorithm. Bake the correct annotation into the images to save time and labor-intensive manual annotation of the datasets.

Workstation. Think about the way I use Apple Notes as a workstation but combine that with Collective[I]’s deal rooms. A place where you can narrate your schedule and what you need to do. In the example of a sales opportunity — get multiple people on board, drag emails in, create to-dos and assign them to people — create teams within a workstation. Drag and drop interface like notes.

Persona builder. A tool that figures out businesses and/or product persona. This can be done through ML on existing company communications and through getting them to fill out some sort of questionnaire. Use dating apps personality builders as inspiration. Questions such as “what sort of shoes would it wear?”. Once the persona is built, employees can use our product to generate copy/text for specific use cases. By telling our tool the context of the needed content it could write consistent copy for the entire company across all channels. E.g for a product you could allow a dev to say this is a pop up with a negative tone etc. kind of building a design system but for text.

Making retirement attractive. Creating the same vibe a student gets going into a uni hostel as someone should when they go into a retirement home. Taking ideas from eastern culture and how they respect elders. It's social and enjoyable for oldies. Make it seem that way.

Take digital software design/build principles and methodologies and apply then to other industries and/or vice-versa. E.g Git forking when building a house, create a copy of the house and build a segment onto it. This could go as far as building an AI that learns cross-industry at a holistic level.

Make parachutes household items for people that live in apartments.

Blockchain-based collaborative property investment. Allow people to invest in the NZ property market without having to save up 1000’s for a deposit.

Benefit corporation legal model. A company that values transparency, social benefit and well-being while being profitable.

Financial speculation graph. Focused around cryptocurrencies. Because the fluctuation in currency value is primarily from speculation if there was a way to scrape social, news and other forms of ‘chatter’ and turn this into an analytical score it would help in predicting investment opportunities. One example would be to make a list of 20 crypto influencers and score their sentiment on a currency. This would help people see whether the attitude is bearish or bullish.

Electric boats.

Internationalization. Blockchain (bitcoin/cryptocurrency), social media, Transferwise borderless, Monzo, UN, EU, accessibility of travel, global warming, collaborative networks. Minimise the hindrance of having differences across independent countries. Find an issue in those differences and solve it with technology.

The age of the freelancer. Think about how freelancers are replacing full-time employees. How do we create an ecosystem for freelancers across industries that aren’t currently adopting the freelancing method of employment? Currently, there's an influx of recruiters that are trying to utilize networking sites to match people with jobs. What about people matching themselves with projects.. think about the fact that by 2020 40% of the American workforce will be freelancers.

Problem: Business internal hierarchy and the inefficiency of corporate decision making. Think of a way to solve this. Too much effort goes into management, planning, organizing, meetings etc within a business. The actual level of production is low. Can technology replace management and organizers by controlling staff?

Recommended real estate software. Write algorithms based on recent house prices, market fluctuation etc that match specific buyer’s needs and then scrapes online house listings to recommend. This would be ‘smart purchasing’ and would allow a user to look at hot areas etc without having that ‘local’ knowledge. Eg with the case of NZ it would allow foreigners to look into the market from abroad and invest.

Jonah Lomu tribute website.

A way of categorizing social groups. Like the idea behind ‘clique.’ Think about the difficulty of meeting people similar to yourself in foreign countries or cities. If there was a ‘smart’ way of placing users into groups without asking them directly what their interests are. Maybe connect established social channels and then reiterate or confirm what we have learned about the individual. An interesting approach to this might ask them a question like ‘choose a pair of shoes.’ With a flexible API, this service could be used as persona validation when companies are hiring. This could be pitched like so: “everyone now has a degree, certification or some sort of formal training. The technological hiring process is rigorous in checking these details but skips over one crucial factor, personality.”

EX (employee experience) specialist company for large corporations looking to transform the ‘vibe’ internally.

Mens underwear delivery service (B2C). Nice affordable and high quality underwear.

A company that focuses on overcoming the barrier between architects and builders. Potentially offering an amalgamated service of both professions.