Gamestorming

Gamestorming -- The admixture of games and brains to solicit profitable, progressive solutions to real-world problems. My definition to my word (though not the first to think of it).

The Schweeb
Two years and 150,000 submissions later, Google this week announced the final 16 winners of its 10^100 contest to find world-changing ideas. One of the recipients, Schweeb, proposes a human-powered monorail. The idea came from an amusement park in New Zealand where people paid $35 to race each other around tracks. I can see why. Google says this crazy-cool idea gets $1 million of its cash to test the system as public transportation in an urban setting. I can imagine some issues to work on. For one, how do you keep the cars clean in a high-use and public context? Think intimacy with the subway floor. But having said that, please, please, please, build the prototype in Austin. The promo clip is less than a minute. A more interesting clip that includes thoughts by the inventor last four minutes. Both are on YouTube.

Solar Highways
GE has concluded the public voting round on its Ecomagination Challenge. Lots of good ideas here. One that caught my eye, Solar Highways. Here's my favorite pitch from the couple who came up with the proposal, which finished in the 5, 7, and 8 spots in the Challenge. This idea is audacious. It might be impractical from a current engineering standpoint. I can only say that it would be a game-changer for the world if such a thing could come into being. Roads could be our upwardly mobile superhighways instead of motorways to hell (apologies Chris Rea).