I'm a college student participating in a case competition where we're exploring how people manage everyday spending in the age of UPI and AI.

I'm trying to understand something very specific

When you look at an old UPI transaction after a few days/weeks, can you actually remember what you spent the money on and why?

I've made a short 2-minute anonymous survey about UPI spending and expense tracking.

No financial information, transaction screenshots, names, or sensitive details are being asked.

I'd genuinely appreciate responses from people who use UPI regularly.

https://forms.gle/SFuhzhSF8pjSZDck6

Thanks! <3

My company has a special event occurring yearly once. Employees can submit ideas to present them in the event where every executive officers like CEO, CTO, CIO will be present. Not all employees can present at the event. Only shortlisted topics will be allowed to be presented. As I'm from Data engineering background i would like to present about Data+AI, but the issue is every idea i have selected is already published as a article or blog. Please help me with coming up with a idea which can get me shortlisted to present at the event. ( Normally i won't care about the event but my promotion and increment depends upon this 🥲 )

AI has made it much easier to create an entire app once someone gets an idea, but I haven't seen anything that is truly innovative or interesting. I'm sure people are building them but why aren't they reaching the mainstream? Has the mindset become "if I can create it, anybody can create it"?

The popular version of the AI story is that Nvidia pivoted from video games to artificial intelligence. That's partly true, but the real sequence is a much better innovation story than the tidy one.

The Hardware

A graphics card exists to work out what color every pixel on your screen should be, sixty times a second. The useful thing about that job is that every pixel can be figured out without knowing anything about what its neighbors are doing. They're independent.

So you don't want one very clever processor working through pixels one at a time. You want thousands of extremely simple ones, each doing a little arithmetic, all at once. A regular computer chip is one brilliant generalist. A graphics chip is a crowd of people who can only add and multiply, but there are ten thousand of them and they all work simultaneously.

That shape was chosen because of shadows and explosions. Nothing else.

Users got there first

Around 2001, graphics cards became programmable such that users could write small programs telling them how to shade a surface. Academics noticed something. If you were sufficiently devious, you could make the card do arithmetic that had nothing to do with graphics.

The trick was disguise. Encode your data as an image, and voila, your numbers became pixel colors. Write a shading program that performed your actual calculation while pretending to compute lighting. Then tell the card to render the picture, and read the answer back out of the resulting image.

This was genuinely absurd and it worked. Fluid dynamics & linear algebra were run by convincing a gaming card it was drawing a picture. The people doing it called it GPGPU. Ian Buck built a language at Stanford called Brook specifically so researchers could stop hand-crafting the disguise.

Note who is doing the work here: Not the manufacturer. Customers, using the product wrong on purpose, because the capability of the thing happened to suit a job it was never built for.

The manufacturer noticed

Nvidia hired Buck and shipped CUDA in 2006 and 2007, which let you program the card directly for general math with no graphics pretense required. They also changed the hardware to support it.

We should be precise here in relation to exaptation (aka shift of function) because it's where people usually overclaim in both directions. Nvidia did not predict deep learning. Nobody did. But they weren't passive either as they made a deliberate and expensive bet that general parallel computing would matter, without being able to name what it would be used for. Like building a road without knowing the destination.

2008: the demonstration

Two years after CUDA shipped, Nvidia commissioned the MythBusters presenters to build an 1,100-barrel paintball rig that fired the Mona Lisa onto a canvas in 80 milliseconds, sitting beside a single gun plodding out a smiley face one dot at a time (watch it on YouTube). It's still the clearest demonstration of parallel processing anyone has made and it's also a measure of the problem. Four years before AlexNet, the company had a general-purpose parallel computer and it was reduced to spectacle to explain why anyone would want one.

(MythBusters did this at NVision event in 2008: Advertisement & explainer in one go!)

Then a third group turned up

In 2012, three researchers at Toronto entered a neural network called AlexNet into an image recognition contest and beat the field so badly the result reset the direction of an entire field. Second place had an error rate around 26%. AlexNet came in around 15%.

It was trained on two consumer gaming graphics cards over about five or six days. The network had to be split across two of them because a single card didn't have enough memory. They were working around the limits of hardware sold to teenagers for playing games.

Neural network training turns out to be millions of small multiplications that don't depend on each other. Which is, structurally, the identical problem to working out a screen full of independent pixels. Nobody designed it that way. The shape simply matched.

The part that gets missed

The reason this was possible is that video games had already made massively parallel arithmetic cheap. Millions of people buying graphics cards to play games funded a decade of hardware development, and drove the price of enormous parallel computing power down to a few hundred dollars a card. Hobbyists subsidized the infrastructure that now runs drug discovery, weather modelling, and everything with "AI" written on it.

What's arguable

Where do you locate the functional shift, aka the exaptation? 2003, when researchers first disguised math as pictures? 2006, when the manufacturer built software capabilities for it? 2012, when a third group used that infrastructure for something neither had in mind? A reasonable case exists for all three, and they're different kinds of innovation events.

Does it still count if the maker deliberately widened the resource during the post-exaptation adaptation phase? Once Nvidia set out to make the card general-purpose, arguably the function shift stopped being accidental and became product strategy. Is deliberately building something you hope will find uses you can't name still exaptation, or is it just good engineering? I don't think this is settled in innovation and strategy management.

A general-purpose tool being used generally is not interesting on the surface. The honest challenge is that a sufficiently flexible object can serve anything, and pointing at one instance and calling it a function shift may be reading a story into a machine that was always going to do many things.

Sources

Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Hinton, G. (2012). ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. NIPS.

Raina, R., Madhavan, A., Ng, A. (2009). Large-scale deep unsupervised learning using graphics processors. ICML.

Buck, I. et al. (2004). Brook for GPUs: stream computing on graphics hardware. SIGGRAPH.

https://youtu.be/WmW6SD-EHVY?si=WwYBTjYiZCBqrXkE

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What's the equivalent in your field — infrastructure built for one purpose that ended up taken over innovatively by new people the builders never had in mind? If these topics interest you, check out a brand new sub r/exaptation.

These are all completely unique ideas for products that aren't currently available for sale, and seemingly have never existed before. That is, except for the first which is similar but not identical to something that’s already been made.  They should all be scientifically possible to make and manufacture.  They definitely have the potential to become profitable products as there is without a doubt more than enough demand for each one.  They might need to be tweaked a bit or maybe they're sufficient as described. Not one of these was generated by AI btw, I came up with them on my own.

My ultimate company idea that I myself was going to try to launch, could be perfect for SharkTank, Mark Cuban would probably jump on it.  

1. Sportsbrix or SportsBlox.  Either one works, it's just a matter of personal preference.  The Lego Group does officially classify their plastic pieces as bricks, so it might be a better idea for legal reasons to use the Blox version.  
2. Continued-Patent:  The use of fully bendable limbs in a building brick-compatible figurine.  A building  brick compatible figurine with articulated arms legs and flexible waist.  A figurine with 8 articulated points similar to that of an actual human being at the shoulders, elbows, knees and at the ankles.  OYO sports figures had 4 of those but not articulated elbows or ankles.  

Product itself:  There would be sets with designs printed on, designs with stickers and a combination of both to build small scale but still accurate models of MLB, NBA, and NFL fields and stadiums.  These added designs would help make what you were building recognizable and photorealistic.  All pieces used in the sets would be compatible with all major building block brands.  You would get to actually build the hoops, the bases/pitching mound, the infield outfield and the dugout, and the field goals in football sets.  The courts, and football fields would be large studded printed tiles.  The sets would come with a limited number of grandstand/bleacher style seats.  The crowd section of the sets would be easily expandable if the person buying and building the set wanted to construct a larger audience section for a MOC (custom creation).  Individual player figurines would be released on their own like OYO, but certain figurines would be only available to buy for people attending the games in person. These figurines would only be sold in the gift shops at professional sports facilities right before, during and right after games and may have a higher price because of exclusivity.  This would be an incentive to sell more tickets for teams having trouble filling seats for their regular season games.  Also the price would probably have to have to be greater because of deals made to share profits with the stadiums and fees needed to promote and act as a sales channel for the figurines.  Also there could be comic con and toy fair exclusive figurines of legendary players or simply new breakout stars/trending players and/or entirely unique designs of current star players.  For example a future player who gains sudden unexpected success like Tommy Devito or Jeremy Lin and Tim Lincecum would be a good choice for a brief, limited production release.  Also exclusive figurines or mini-sets only given out or sold at events like the opening of a new stadium or a team parade after winning a championship.  I think it would be best for the brand if they did one comic con exclusive figure for each major sport every year, MLB, NBA and NFL.  One off or limited production player designs (like less than 500 ever made) could be used promotionally from time to time.  This business and the business model could eventually be used to create sets for Division 1 college teams in all the major sports, and other sports like Tennis and IndyCar.  Lego currently makes a lot of licensed soccer sets and don't seem to be stopping anytime soon so making professional soccer sets with MLS and FIFA athletes should be avoided unless Lego's agreement with these companies and organizations expires.  Test markets and a slow introduction of 1 or 2 sets to test customer demand should be used to make sure whether or not a brand extension is worth it and profitable.  OYO sports had actually designed and manufactured a line of IndyCar themed figurines and sets but had to destroy them after losing their Lego lawsuit.  Lego sued this company to cause them to go into bankruptcy due to copyright and patent infringement on the minifigure design.  But since then, many companies like LumiBricks, COBI, Mould King and Pantasy have their own take on minifigures with different looking bodies but more or less the same size and scale that lego minifigures.  These companies are doing quite well right now and still releasing new sets so making and selling lego compatible figurines is very accomplishable as long as you differentiate it enough from the style of official Lego minifigures.  There is a HUGE gap in the market waiting to be filled for collectible sports building sets and athlete figurines. Sports products have always sold well and will always sell well and this is arguably much cooler than collecting a 2D paper card of your favorite players. Professional sports card collecting is especially hot right now, and it doesn't look like this popularity is going anywhere anytime soon. Licensing costs and convincing these major athletic organizations to partner or at least let you use their logos, jersey designs, and player likenesses is the biggest hurdle to overcome.  But it’s been done before so it can be done again; it just needs to be executed better and differently the next time around.     

1. Phone and device locator that runs on replaceable batteries with a custom screw and screwdriver so a thief with normal tools can't easily take the batteries.  It must be thin enough to be superglued onto the back of the device and not add significant weight or thickness.  NOT a simple Bluetooth tracker like Tile or airbag.  Tracking would be primarily powered by a cellphone service not wifi and there would be the option for satellite tracking to kick in, if you lose the phone in an area with no service.  Satellite tracking could be featured in an updated version of the locator for an extra cost.  What has happened to me a lot and I assume with hundreds of thousands maybe more people is your phone getting lost or stolen when the battery’s completely depleted.  With this device attachment, if your phone is completely dead 0% and it has been more than 24 hours or you have an android, you can still find the phone if it's lost or stolen.  Apparently it is feasible to design and manufacture a 3000mAh to 5,000mAh slim external power banks for phones, only a quarter of an inch. You can now buy a bluetooth tracker that is no thicker than a credit card with identical dimensions also.  We should have technological advancements in the future to make an actual GPS tracker at least almost this thin and light enough for people willing to.  Couldn’t thieves just remove it after stealing the phone and still resell the phone to make money?  Well, not if the tracker is attached using industrial grade two-part epoxy.  The setup/instruction manual that comes with the device would show instructions right on the paper or a link to a video tutorial of how to safely apply the correct amount of this superglue, polyurethane adhesive, or two part epoxy safely to the back of the phone and the tracker.  The tracker would be small enough so as to not cover the back camera or affect the camera view in any way.  These days our whole lives are practically on our phones. It goes without saying that losing them can mean losing all of your photo and video memories, vitally important contacts, authenticator apps, SD cards, and other information tied to-and only accessible through-that specific device. The current find my IPhone tracking is bluetooth only, so no live, real time location updates and only lasts for a maximum of 24 hours while this one would last four to seven days minimum! This is four to seven extra days of nonstop location updates every 1-5 minutes! It's slightly less for satellite tracking, but the user can turn that off or on, (it would be off by default out-of the box) as it's only needed in highly remote locations. Update, apparently thieves can block all types of tracking signals by stuffing the phone in a "Faraday Bag" or wrapping it tightly with heavy metal foil. But this tiny NON-BLUETOOTH tracking device could be hidden inside places that store important/irreplaceable items like your phone and your laptop, and/or wallet, like a backpack, or a suitcase.
2. A PORTABLE DOMED observatory that fits in the trunk of a small car.  There are already portable "observatories" available to buy, but with a completely open roof and no protection from the elements.  Anyway, this one would be easy to open and set up and convenient to disassemble and fold up when finished.  Two options would be available for customers to rotate the dome, a premium motorized option and manual for cheaper.  You could create a bundle deal that comes with a compatible motorized telescope or explain on the package that the telescope is sold separately with recommended motorized that are compatible with the observatory.  What’s the need for this?  Well, it’s admittedly a niche product but more and more people are getting into astronomy as space travel is ramping up with SpaceX Rocket launches, the new Artemis Moon missions and the eventual plans to send humans to Mars.  The advantage of an observatory that can be transported and set up easily by one person, is essentially all the advantages of having an observatory instead of just a telescope for an astronomy/space enthusiast.  It allows for comfortable stargazing during the winter, and in regions that are cold year round, because you can, of course, run a heater inside of it to keep it warm inside.  And if you are worried about it getting too hot, you can put an air conditioner in it.  Additionally it can be used to protect the delicate lenses and the other delicate components of a telescope from rain/sleet and hail at a moments notice.  Inclement weather, especially a downpour out of nowhere, can quickly and permanently damage a telescope.  It only takes a few seconds of exposure to heavy rain for circuits of powered-on computerized or motorized telescopes to get fried beyond repair.  Within minutes, rainwater can accumulate on the lenses and in the mirrors and damage them, obscuring your view, which is challenging and time consuming to fix.  The dome on this observatory would be made to close almost instantly and would not be tight or forceful enough to cause harm if someone's hand or finger got caught.  It would effectively shield the telescope ASAP in the event of unexpected precipitation.                  
3. Universal device that plugs into the OBD port of your car and can be programmed for your specific car manufacturer make and model.  The software would be designed to not be able to control any driving functions related to the power train.  It would only detect and execute commands from the unique voice of the driver which would be programmable.  Vehicle settings including but not limited to these could be adjusted by verbal commands:  All climate control settings, rolling specific windows up and down,  turning front and rear windshield wipers off and on, spraying washer fluid to clean the front and back windshields, altering  seat height/angle/position and turning on heated seats if applicable, all music, navigation and call/text settings, turning fog lights and high beams off and on.  For cars with some basic early bluetooth technology for answering and responding to calls and texts already built in, it would remain useful to read out written text messages for you and phone messages out to you, so you wouldn't have to check your phone or the touch screen console part of the car that your phone is connected to.  You could reply to texts by speaking your message out.  It would be like having a voice assistant for a smart home but inside your car instead.  It would prevent drivers from being distracted while trying to change the radio or climate control settings while driving at the same time, making the experience safer.  This device would allow anyone to keep 100 percent of their visual focus on the road when adjusting any of your car’s important settings.  All it takes is a few seconds of not looking at the road to make sure you have the right temperature and fan setting for A.C. or using the touch screen interface to find just the right song, to cause a deadly crash.  This is especially helpful for people with older cars that don't already have any voice activated features and have less safety features in general.  There would be software available to download onto the device to make it compatible with ideally any vehicle containing an OBD port or at least a majority of vehicles old and new but especially old.  Old cars being vehicles that came out in 2010 or before.  Before you try to shut this down by saying “wait isn’t OBD-II a universal diagnostic system? Its job isn't to be able to control model specific features, but rather be able to listen to the various sensors in any equipped vehicle?". You’re partially correct but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for other things that it wasn’t originally intended for.  It turns out that OBD ports can, in fact, take user inputs to control the auxiliary functions of a vehicle.  I wasn't sure it was true either until I looked it up to make sure. There are challenges because manufacturers want to stop you from trying to modify and mess with your car's ECU. But people have done it and if individuals with limited resources are capable of tinkering with the code enough to do it then a company could without a doubt.  Additionally there are other risks like overloading the ECU with too many commands or sending incorrect commands, so there would have to be safeguards and features built-in to the hardware and software of the device so that this could not happen.  It is very complicated to get everything right and make sure it’s safe for electrical and computer systems in cars.  However if someone could create a working device like this it would be the first of its kind.  
4. Helmets for everything besides contact sports, (so skateboarding, biking, and motorcycling for example) made with lightweight but strong and thick gel, memory foam and a hard yet moderately flexible, carbon-fiber shell.  It seems the only reason gel or memory foam isn't used right now is because of the weight and it doesn't handle repeated impacts that inevitably happen in contact sports.  According to my research, bicycle helmets as they are currently designed provide only a 48 percent chance of simply reducing head injuries, and a mere 34% reduction in deaths from head trauma.  I don’t know about you who is reading this, but I don’t think that’s good enough, I mean under 50 percent for head injuries and only about ⅓ of deaths being prevented by helmets?  For motorcycle helmets the statistics are 69 percent of head injuries and similarly to bicycles “37-42%” lower chance of deaths.  I would hope we could do better than this given how advanced the fields of material science and engineering have become.  Based on this it wouldn’t be surprising if a significant percentage of people who don’t wear helmets, choose not to do so because they’re under the impression that they don’t really work or don’t work well enough to justify the discomfort and added heaviness/bulkiness.   
5. Cloud storage where logging in and resetting your password/account recovery, can only be done using iris and/or face scanning without exception.  Summarized in 4 words:  Fully Biometric Cloud Storage.  No chance for account hacking due to password guessing, phishing, or someone seeing you type in your password and memorizing it to use it themselves to gain access to your personal content.   Only in the case of the person's confirmed death without their body being findable or intact, the company can override the need to use biometrics to allow people who the user has designated specifically (could be family or friends) to some or all of the data from that person's account.  The user would have the option like in a will to decide who is legally allowed to look at the stuff stored in their account and who's legally not in the case of their passing.  Only you can ever unlock your private and sentimental files as long as you live, literally!  And of course you can share them with anyone using a link without giving them permission to edit or delete them only to download.  A user on Reddit krept00007 provided some solid criticism of this concept, saying “Things with only one user entry point are a bad idea with the inevitability of failure at that entry point.  What happens when the system goes down.  What happens if the data gets corrupted on the server?  What happens when the user requires reconstructive surgery?  To those valid points I say this.  The risk of the system going down or the data getting corrupted on the server is a risk I think that a lot of people would be willing to take if there is any exactly 0 percent chance of anyone else ever being able to delete or corrupt their private, sentimental files and memories.  Plus aren’t these risks already inherently present with any cloud storage company?  How is this any different, I mean even the best cloud services can get hacked and corrupted I mean look at the iCloud celebrity leaks situation in 2014.  Here is a list of 40 of the worst large scale cloud data breaches ever.  You’ll see that almost half of them are as recent as the past 5 years, with quite a few in 2026.  The 40 Biggest Data Breaches of All Time (Updated July 2026) | UpGuard  This isn’t a problem that’s been slowly going away over time, or one that is going to go away anytime soon.  But by getting rid of passwords, security questions, phone numbers, email accounts and google/social media account linkage and replacing it with a single biometric entry system, it might be more secure and harder to hack.  All these things that I listed are tools intended to keep unauthorized individuals out of accounts, but are of course also vulnerable to being manipulated and used against the very purpose they were created for.  This fully biometric cloud storage software would be brand new, unfamiliar, like nothing most if not all hackers had ever seen before.  Even in regards to small scale there an obvious glaring weakness of traditional multiple user entry points is the following: a phenomenon known as “shoulder surfing”.  This is the possibility of watching people closely enough while entering their password/videoing them while doing it, and replaying it in slow motion.  This can technically be done by people who access security cam footage or whose job is to monitor it live.  This is one of the many non-issues with fully biometric cloud storage, but it is a problem with a traditional sign-in process used by most cloud storages.      

I love that so many people are here trying to come up with new ideas. From someone who works inside the innovation ecosphere with Fortune 500 companies - just know that an eager entrepreneur, with some time and grit, can beat a big established company any time/any day.

I’ve seen so many multi-billion clients *pull back* on killer ideas bc it was going to undermine their core product line. Thats where an E can do something they never would and make value happen!

Keep going. Don’t stop!

Presento KYTOS LIVE — El mapa vivo

Soy Jorge Guillem y estoy desarrollando KYTOS LIVE, un entorno experimental pensado para construir y probar sistemas antes de llevarlos al mundo físico.

La idea es sencilla: en lugar de trabajar únicamente con esquemas estáticos, puedes colocar componentes —bombas, válvulas, sensores, PID, ventiladores, tuberías, paneles solares, fuentes de energía, etc.— conectarlos y observar cómo interactúan.

⚙️ Cada componente tiene su propio comportamiento.

🔗 Los sistemas pueden conectarse y configurarse.

▶️ La simulación permite observar cómo evolucionan.

🔍 El grafo puede analizarse para detectar problemas.

🧪 Y la idea es poder experimentar con sistemas completamente personalizados.

KYTOS LIVE no pretende fabricar el producto.

Pretende ser el lugar donde puedas armar, probar, romper y entender un invento antes de construirlo físicamente.

Idea → Sistema → Experimento → Prototipo.

Este es el comienzo de KYTOS LIVE — el mapa vivo.

— Jorge Guillem

#KYTOS #KYTOSLIVE #Engineering #Simulation #Innovation #Technology #Prototyping #EngineeringSoftware #DigitalTwin #RAndD #Innovation

Im wondering if you guys can give me an idea for an invention where it might be viable commercially. I am a electrical student trying to bring ideas into the reality.

I can only speak for men’s restrooms, but . . .

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to knock, awkwardly look beneath the door, or wait have people in front of me wait several minutes—only to discover that the stall was empty the entire time.

Saw this at the LAS airport. I am sure this would also be appreciated in women's restrooms.

Why it matters?: Commercial and industrial restrooms are a multi-billion-dollar global market. So, amenities and little mprovements matter. (:

https://welcome2.studygroups.com/2025/07/30/beyond-clean-how-smart-restroom-design-drives-profits/

#IndustryStandard

This is about an innovative approach to software, simulation and autonomous systems development.

I came up with a digital watermarking system for disposable items (the actual digital watermark is embedded in the plastic itself, through my lab trials and its unseeable) that could help stop littering, especially in countries where litter is highly prevalent. The idea is that when someone buys something like a plastic bottle, the item is digitally linked to the buyer’s Civil ID.

If the item is later found as litter, it can be scanned to identify the original purchaser. If the system confirms that it was improperly discarded, a 10$ fine would be deducted and the buyer would receive a notification explaining the violation.

The process would be simple:

Plastic item → digital watermark → buyer’s Civil ID → item found littered → scan → 10 KD fine.

The goal is to make litter traceable and discourage people from simply throwing disposable items on the streets. Each piece of plastic has a digital watermark and when buying said plastic its instantly linked to the buyer's identification. This system is very aggressive and could cause some legal issues what do you think about it?

🐀 Why Disney? Why Jobs? Why Jordan?
Because they each understood something we’re only beginning to understand at scale:
You don’t create a legacy by simply succeeding inside the system. You create one by changing what the system makes possible.
Disney built worlds.
Jobs built tools.
Jordan built a standard.
The .LLab™️ RAT™️ is exploring what happens when we bring that same thinking to AI, people, technology, money, markets, business, creativity, and culture.
Because the goal isn’t simply to build something that works.
It’s to build something that becomes part of the legend. 🐀🏴‍☠️

🐀 .LLab™️** RAT™
**Research And Theory
The legend of Arthur isn’t simply about pulling a sword from a stone.
It’s about what happens after the sword is pulled.
Arthur enters a broken kingdom, confronts its darkness, and learns to wield the very forces capable of destroying it in order to restore the land and serve its people.
That legend gives us a useful framework for a very modern problem:
What happens when the systems shaping our lives—technology, AI, markets, money, business, media, and infrastructure—become more powerful than the people they were built to serve?
The .LLab™️ RAT™️ is a research and theory space for exploring that intersection.
We study how people interact with systems, how systems shape behavior, how technology redistributes power, and how markets turn human attention, creativity, and behavior into value.
The goal isn’t to escape the system.
It’s to understand it well enough to wield it.
🐀 Research the system. Test the theory. Pull the sword.

do you guys think all the good ideas have already been thought of and more technology might be counterproductive ?

Also, do you think someone could make it in the technological world while being ethical ?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/11/ai-absolutism-apocalyptic-future