Here are two pain points I found today. Hopefully, there will be (or there are) affordable solutions for them.

Pain point 1: A low-effort device for meta-observations

Meta-cognition – the act of thinking/feeling about what one is thinking/feeling – is a nice ability. For example, we think about our biases, recognize our emotions, and reflect on our problem-solving approaches (either concurrently or post-hoc). These activities are pretty rewarding when performed.

An instantiation of meta-cognition is meta-observation. How can we observe us when we are observing something else?

First, why is that nice? It has something to do with why you look at yourself in a Zoom meeting. Maybe we are curious about how other people look at us. Maybe seeing ourselves from the third perspective helps us learn something about how we are using and treating our bodies. Perhaps everyone wants to optimize how they use their body. Then meta-observation should help.

So, how is it being done? If we want to simply observe our postures during some activities, we put a phone somewhere and record ourselves. But that would be disruptive to our activities, which can ruin the moment. Non-disruptive ways are setting cameras in the space or hiring someone to film us, which is obviously expensive and problematic. The phones and smartwatches are pretty nice because they are cheap and track stuff pretty well. But they can’t be scaled to taking images of ourselves yet.

My suggestion: A very silent and small-sized drone that can (1) navigate nicely in living environments and (2) follow the target IN AN ETHICAL WAY.

Pain point 2: Too many photos taken on smartphone

My mom takes many photos and videos. Her ideal storage would be around 1-2TB if I try to be optimistic. Of course, Google Photos and the like have a pricing plan to extend to 2TB. But it costs ~$10/month. I am curious about how far can we go without any payments?

GitHub seems to have pretty big free storage, given individual files are small enough. Amazon Photos has unlimited photo storage for Prime members (but not videos). Dropbox has 2 GB free, Google Photos has 15GB free, and so on. The problems are: (1) these storages are fragmented in many apps, and (2) these policies change once in a while. My mom just cares about her photos and videos being saved so that when she misses me at any version of myself in life, she can look it up.

How can be abstract away all these hassles and ship a $0/month 2TB media storage to my mom? How big is the free-lunch RAID we can build?