Two big ideas

I’ve had a lot of ideas this past week­end, most of them silly and point­less, but two of them stand out as standup ideas that could have a big effect.

Orlando was one of the first cities to adapt the RFID tags for use in tolls on our toll roads. We called it “E-Pass” and it’s been quite suc­cess­ful. Recently the units we have in the car for E-Pass have begun to beep in the vehi­cle to alert us that the account has been charged suc­cess­fully. But what if the units didn’t charge your bank account, instead it plays a short com­mer­cial when­ever you drive through a toll. Thus the adver­tiser is pay­ing for your tolls. Now I real­ize that few adver­tis­ers would pay $0.75 per play, but I still think the idea has merit.

Update: My friends and I kept toss­ing this idea back and forth and the idea has it’s def­i­nite set of prob­lems. The price for ads would be steep. There’s no way to guar­an­tee the dri­ver is lis­ten­ing. The radio could be on or they could muf­fle the speaker. But it isn’t an unsolv­able series of problems.

The other idea is the one I think makes the most sense. Pay­pal has a stran­gle­hold with online pay­ment. A few com­pa­nies have come up and tried to break the grip, Obo­pay is the most recent one I know of. Google Check­out is also gain­ing a fol­low­ing. But the most log­i­cal answer would be for Bank of Amer­ica, or some other big bank in Amer­ica, to start a com­pet­ing com­pany. They could waive the fees for any trans­ac­tion which uses one of their bank accounts and charge fees for those who don’t use their bank. It’s so sim­ple it seems like pure brilliance.