ideas

Baseball Card Business Cards

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You know what’s missing on (most) business cards?  Pictures of the person.  How are you supposed to link the name and face?  And let’s say you have a bunch of applicants for a job you are filling, do you want to sort through reams of resumes?  Does anyone actually read a resume anymore?  It’s too long!  Just give me a list of where you’ve worked and a fancy title, and explain the rest in person!

While I’m in Africa, someone should make a business around these, baseball card business cards.  Now the picture is a quick mock-up.  A real designer should make the template.  On the back, I imagine a quick blurb, followed by a table of years and positions held at other companies.  Like the stuff already on your resume, but without all the filler.

Sure, some say that this will only advantage the beautiful more.  But in today’s society, people need to have the skill to fake looking good in a profile picture.  Take a picture from one of those angles that makes you look reasonable!  You know the one.  And chances are a beautiful person hasn’t even considered those kind of angles, let alone know they exist.  And making bad things look good is just another skill you can bring up to beat out the beautiful people in the interview.

All-pay Auctions for Charity

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An all-pay auction is an auction in which all bidders pay, even if they do not end up winning.

Watch this:

So by auctioning a dollar, one can make more than a dollar.  Why don’t charities use this to help raise money for their causes?  People who give to charities are already motivated by goodwill, karma, or tax-incentives, so why not exploit that motivation even further to win an auction?

My idea:  upbid.org.  Charities list items, users bid on items, but all the bids that are made are paid to the charity.  Bids can be tax-deductible (if the charity if 501c3).  Even people who think they have a legitimate case for collecting donations (like Kickstarter type projects) could list items.  Would organizations end up raising more?  I’d like to see.  If only I could code…

“I Don’t Need a Bag.”

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How many times do you actually need a plastic or paper bag when buying something?  Take for example, a sub from Subway or hamburger from Wendy’s.  Or, when you are just buying some cheese from the grocery store.  Or, one or two items from any store.  The only time I can think of is if you get french fries, because apparently our fry-containing technology has not progressed since 1950.

If companies defaulted to not bagging instead of automatically bagging for one item, both business owners and environmentalists could be happy.  How much money could companies save if they didn’t have to give a bag away for each single-item purchases?  How many bags could be saved if we didn’t use them to carry single-item purchases?

It’d be an easy way for companies to claim ‘greenness’, and save me from having to ask not to have my item bagged every time.  Because isn’t that what we’re all working toward?  Not having to talk to anyone anymore in daily transactions?