DUBLIN, IRELAND (Team Geared Up) - The Water-Buoy, a flotation device for your keys has appeared on Springwise, one of my favourite sites for ideas.

As featured on BBC’s Dragons’ Den last night, young entrepreneur James Halliburton is bringing an innovative solution to market for boaters who are worried about losing valuable items overboard

It works very much like a hydrostatic release on a lifejacket. At a certain water pressure it pops open a valve releasing gas. The impressive thing here is, this tiny keyring can lift 1kg.

Once the Waterbuoy hits the water, the gas inflates the balloon and the submerged item is pulled up to the water’s surface. Aiding retrieval at night, an integrated LED light switches on and keeps flashing for 24 hours.

Much like Alex’s dark thoughts about his Life Bag being used on long flights, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if this went off in your pocket on a dance floor.

-Robin-

(Image Credit: Images from Water-Buoy, montage made by Springwise)

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - Call in the crowd! Artificial intelligence is now being used in the form of Amazon Mechanical Turk to track Steve’s position. The idea is to complete simple tasks that people do better than computers by splitting up the images into tiny squares and getting 1000s of humans to remotely check them. Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.

You will be shown a single satellite image. The task is to flag any satellite images which contain foreign objects that may resemble Steve’s airplane or parts of a plane. Steve’s plane will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan.

-Robin-