The iToilet!
It was George Costanza’s ticket to fame and fortune; an iPhone application that could use GPS to locate the nearest toilet wherever a user might be in the world.
However, as viewers of the show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would know all too well, George (Jason Alexander) lost half of his riches when he invested his money with Bernie Madoff.
The iToilet served as a key chronological update for the “Seinfeld” universe in a fictional reunion show taking place on this past season’s finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which centers around “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David. David and his writers used the concept of the iToilet to link “Seinfeld,” which went off the air in 1998, to the modern world, giving an idea of what beloved characters Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine would be up to in the late 2000’s.
In addition to being a funny bit, it also popped a question in my mind....Why didn't I think of that???
There are lots of developers out there that are raking in a nice amount of money and popularity from creating applications that are nowhere near as useful as the fictional iToilet. For instance, I recently visited my brother down in Tampa Bay, and two of his friends came over to watch a football game. While we were watching the New York Giants dispose of the Dallas Cowboys, his two friends broke out their iPhones to gleefully display some apps they have; one of them showed an app of a bikini-clad woman washing the screen with a window washer to "clean" the screen. The other had a Zippo lighter application, where you can actually flick the phone itself to snap the cap back onto the virtual lighter.
It just goes to show that it doesn't take oodles of creative genius to make some waves in the iPhone app world. If I spent about 5-10 minutes to think on it, I'd imagine I could come up with something as snazzy as a Zippo lighter app (the old melon is churning as I write this). It might take a longer period of thought to come up with something as useful as the iToilet, but if I put my mind to it, I don't think it's completely out of the question. Until then, keep those apps rollin'!