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I recently picked a friend of mine up for lunch at Logitech’s Squeezebox offices in Mountain View, CA.  He gave me a tour of the latest Squeezebox products, which are a devices that play digital music though an 802.11 connection.  You can put a Squeezebox in any room in your house and get high-quality wireless music.  However, since all of my music was on iTunes, I decided instead to pick up an AirPort Express, which extended the reach of my AirPort and let me play iTunes music from my Macbook Pro in my bedroom on my stereo in the family room through AirTunes.

Then another friend of mine raved about the Amazon Kindle.  It has changed his life, and this is only version 1.0!  Perhaps I will pick one up at v2.0.  Finally, another friend told me about the Chumby.  The Chumby is a multi-purpose home appliance that serves as an alarm, a music player, and thermometer.  It is a cool looking device, and it’s only $180.  Sweet.

Apple has announced its 3G iPhone, which will finally make surfing the web with a phone something that doesn’t make me want to pull out my hair (what’s left of it, at least).  The alphabet soup of Wi-Fi, RFID, GPS, 3G, GPRS, CDMA/GSM, and WiMAX is converging into a wireless melting pot of data and location goodness.  And the Squeezebox, AirPort Express/AirTunes, Kindle, Chumby, and iPhone are just touching the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Try this though experiment — what could you do if you embeded the ability to data (sending and receiving) or broadcast location into every device in your life (home, shopping, work).  Chumby did just this with the alarm clock.  I will touch on a few ideas (the result of 10 minutes of brainstorming).  Would love to hear your crazy ideas, too.

Ideas.

1.  The wireless shopping cart.

While much has been written about putting RFID tags on every piece of food to improve the efficiency of the supply chain, there is a much simpler place to start.  By simply putting the same cheap tags on each shopping cart, a retailer could map consumer flows through the store.  They could match time spent in certain locations with actual purchase data and run A/B tests to determine appropriate pricing and product placement.  

Once all products are tagged, the shopping cart could add a simple screen to show the buyer a list of what’s in the cart and the current balance.  It would also be great to get some navigation assistance based on things like “The South Beach Diet,” “organic”, etc.

2.  Eye in your pocket — wireless casino chips.

Casinos talk about the eye in the sky (closed circuit cameras put in place to monitor gamblers).  A buddy of mine, Terry Noonan, suggested this idea to me several years ago (on a business trip to Las Vegas, it turns out) — what if you put an RFID chip in casino chips?  You could actually track the flow of money throughout your casino.  It would be a nice addition to having pit bosses use back-of-the-envelope estimates about the average size and duration of your betting — particularly when gamblers get up and move around.  Casinos would also have a definitive estimate of chips leaving the casino, which would limit fraud.

3.  The friend navigation system.

You know the navigation system in your car?  The one that helps you find places?  I want one of those for my friends.  Someone should use Facebook Connect and the GPS in the new iPhone to help me get directions to where my friends currently are.  Of course, this doesn’t work great until all of your friends have GPS-enabled phones.  But that’s not too far away.

4.  The really smart fridge.

It would be nice for manufacturers to include expiration data in the RFID tags for food.  They should also work with appliance vendors so that consumers get a benefit, beyond lower prices due to efficiency gains from better supply chain management.

It would be really great if my fridge could tell me when food items have gone bad and need to be replaced.  I would also love to see a mashup of what’s in my fridge with a “what can you make with the ingredients you have in your home” utilities on the web.  So use RFID to know what I have and use an XML data feed from some food site to do a mash-up on my refrigerator screen about the recipes that fit what’s in the cupboard and fridge.