Idea Play: What to do with a door?

Ideas come from interesting places. One Friday afternoon, when most of the week's work was done and everyone was primarily focused on getting home to their families, three friends engaged in an idle conversation to extend the lunch hour just a few more moments before getting the last e-mails of the week out. Someone looked at the refrigerator in the break room and said,

"Isn't it funny how much room there is on the door? You could fit a lot of monitor on the front, couldn't you. What if we could put together an intelligent touch panel that fits on the door of a refrigerator?"

It was a neat idea. And as we talked about it, we quickly realized that one of the biggest problems with family computers is where on earth to put it? Most homes with children have a shortage of safe spaces to put a computer - and yet most families are well served by easy access to the kinds of applications that are regularly served up by iPhones, the Internet and Blackberries. With a large touch screen in the kitchen - the center of the home, it would be incredibly useful to have a synced up family calendar, photo and artwork displays, contact databases, the weather, grocery lists, to-do lists...the list is seemingly endless.

But...what if this screen could also show you what is inside the refrigerator? By connecting the screen to inexpensive internal cameras, you could let family members check what's in the fridge without ever opening the door. (This idea appealed quite a bit to the guy with teen-age sons. He describes them as spending long meditative periods with the door open, letting all the cold air out and driving up the electric bills.) We could call this product something like "InFridge".

At the very least, it's a very environmently friendly idea - energy savings, etc. But what if we combine this idea with a visual search functionality. Take a look at this article about a potential visual search product from Microsoft called Kumo.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/160629/does_microsofts_kumo_hera
ld_an_era_of_visual_search.html

If InFridge has the ability to identify vegetables and various grocery items using a search engine like Microsoft Kumo and if we also add wireless internet connectivity, what could we do then?

Well, I can check what is in my refrigerator from work -hmmm. That may be borderline useless information...or it may be a new form of meditation for bored workers. But what if we share this information with Peapod or walmart or Jewel Osco?

Can we automate grocery buying based on what is in the refrigerator? I don't like grocery shopping so I would do it. How about if Google gives Infridge device at reduced cost to every home owner. They can then use this information to place advertisements on Infridge. Jewel Osco, Safeway, Peapod can have use this information to manage their inventory.

Can we call it Just In Time Inventory management?

Interesting - does this prompt any thinking from this roundtable?