My Eureka Moment

It happened this morning as I was riding to work.

I had to make an early phone call to San Francisco and I was wondering what would the local time be by the time I would reach office. I was doing some mental mathematics adding and subtracting hours and minutes to the India time when it struck me. Wouldn’t it be better to have a wrist watch that could show global time. Now true you have watches available already in market which have memory to retain multiple times but I was thinking about more of an online watch to which you could make a voice command “Local time NewYork” and it could connect to the Internet get the time and read it back to you.

Think about it. This wrist watch could be Internet ready. It could have a bluetooth transfer facility to sync data with your mobile phone and could perhaps use some sort of a wireless transfer to use your mobile phone to connect to the Internet. You could then have local time from any part of the world. In fact not only the time, it could offer you the local weather reports, stock prices and other applications that your smart phone offers.

In fact the more I thought about it, more ideas started floating in. Perhaps this watch could be envisioned as an extra screen of your mobile phone that could be worn on wrist with a strap and displayed world time, changed wallpapers and perhaps be used as a mirror by holding the phone cam to your face and using the screen on the watch to beam the camera capture. Maybe your girlfriend would then ask you to focus her phone’s camera while she did an outline with her lipstick.

I saw this idea to have significant potential. The size of smart phones is still bulky to carry them comfortably in your pant pockets. Perhaps you could then just rest a tablet phone safely in your bag and let the watch carry out the basic operations for you. The vibrator mode on the watch could alert you of any incoming calls or messages and you could choose to take it or ignore it right from your watch.

I was riding the wave of my imagination and began creating some nice mental specifications to sell it for millions to a potential buyer when I ‘googled’ in to find links to approach and my dreams came crashing.

Someone had already stolen my idea. Damn. I was so close…could have bought that mansion on Malibu and that Ferrari outside it in a week but for some moron who had already ‘thunk’ the thought.

Here is what broke my heart.

This one is being manufactured by LG by the name GD910. It is the 3G watch phone and would perhaps hit the markets on a commercial scale soon. For those, whom I got interested, this GD910 watch phone boasts of a full touch screen, MP3 music player, voice recognition, Stereo Bluetooth, Text to Speech (TTS) engine and 3G support (7.2 Mbps HSDPA). It doesn’t have a built-in camera (as yet) and has a curved tempered glass face, high quality metal casing and is about 13.9mm thick.

I guess I am beaten at the race but then LG guys, if you are listening…maybe if you would have sought my advise I could have made these watches/phones look much better.