Idea: MeVo
So I’m on the second season of 24 and I was contemplating the show the other day. This lead me to think about things of a counterintelligence nature such as the common practice of “wearing a wire.” And then I got to thinking, why can’t normal people wear a wire every day around the clock? In fact, why can’t you have the equivalent of Tivo for your own personal day-to-day interactions? And not so much to secretly gather intelligence or hold people to their word (although it could be very useful for that) but to be able to rewind, replay, or store pieces of your daily life for replay, analysis, or sharing with others.
I imagine this device would be a discreet wearable piece of consumer electronics about the size of the new iPod Shuffle. It would have an embedded microphone, some flash and a minimalistic user interface similar to the iPod Shuffle. The MeVo as I am calling it for purposes of discussion would record the conversations and events of the user’s day on a continuous loop. If the user wanted to save a piece of conversation, the user could repeatedly press a button on the interface indicating the amount of conversation he/she wished to save, say in increments of 10 minutes or so. A confirmation beep would indicate that this piece of the conversation has been stored to a special area of flash. The remaining flash would then be used to resume continuous looped recording of the user’s day. Perhaps a deluxe model would allow immediate review of the conversation with an attachable headphone and rewind/fast-forward buttons. Now if I could only figure out a way to get the MeVo pause button to bring life to a stand-still while I go to the fridge to grab a beer…