Tom Buchok

Recurse Center alumnus.

Ideas that I’m excited about

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only you have.

I’ve recently contributed to two crowd-funded projects that I am excited about. I love that these ideas are decidedly not my idea, and that they are providing solutions to problems outside of my day-to-day, maybe even my year-to-year.

When I arrive at an idea by myself, it is almost always related to digital media and technology. I don’t feel that they are necessarily bad ideas, just it feels like same idea each time.

From this frustration comes my inspiration to contribute to the following two projects.

They are both based out of Barcelona, using technology in a thoughtful way, and are run by some friends or contacts I made while living in Spain.

Uniqbrow

View on Indiegogo

Uniqbrow hopes to solve a common sunglasses problem: your stylish shades diminish in coolness because it’s your only pair!

The product allows you to purchase a single set of lenses and swap out many different Uniqbrow frames – not dissimilar from Modify Watches.

I wear prescription sunglasses and I like them a lot. But my biggest issue is I cannot drop a few hundred bucks each time I want a new style of sunglasses.

As Uniqbrow grows, perhaps we can all be a bit cooler and have some more scratch for other stuff we enjoy, like fish sandwiches.

(Uniqbrow has some line abut fish sandwiches on their site. I’m pretty sure it’s a poor translation – fish sandwich sounds kind of gnarly in English, no?)

StormFly

View on Kickstarter

I was convinced by the video for StormFly – anything posing as an alternative to cloud computing makes me a bit skeptical.

Despite the fact that I try to store virtually nothing on my machine – between Git, Spotify, Gmail, etc. there’s really nothing to store – I’m not necessarily the normal consumer in the computing world.

StormFly offers a bootable USB 3.0 Linux OS that allows for professionals or children – or anyone else – to basically wear their computer on their wrist. All that’s required is, essentially, a “host” computer.

Take a look at their Kickstarter page to get an idea of the market they’re after.

===

Those are that latest ideas that aren’t mine that I’m excited about. It’s nice to be thinking a bit about stuff that’s not “World Wide Web online ads that are interactive and have brains!” – or whatever the latest thing I’ve conjured up is.