Yet Another Opportunity Lost

When I was a kid, I built a ton of models – plastic replica airplanes, cars, ships and tanks, mostly. 

One of the keys to building a good model was getting a thin coating of glue on the surfaces that were to be joined together; toluol-based model glue operates by chemically melting plastic surfaces to basically “weld” them together. 

This was back about the time that felt-tipped markers first came on the  market.  I thought “Hmmm – how about if you could put glue in a felt-tip marker to guarantee a super-thin coating of glue?”

Not being a chemical engineer, that was about as far as it went – but when I was in my mid-teens, I saw that someone had indeed invented the glue pen. 

I’ve had a few other such ideas – including, I have to say, this one:

“Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap. Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data with users reporting camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers via the iPhone or their web-based application…

So close, but yet so far, again.

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