When my computer is not working, life is miserable. Unfortunately, over the past few months, my computer has crashed nearly every day. To make matters worse, the expert technicians could not recreate my problems, so they could not fix the underlying issue.
What if your computer had a TiVo-like device that recorded all of your activities and allowed you to replay them later?
According to an interesting New York Times article, a new product called ReplayDirector does exactly that. It allows you to replay the events leading to a computer crash, enabling technicians to recreate the problem. The idea was devised when the inventor Jonathan Lindo asked the question, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”
Once again, this is a great example of analogy-driven innovation – taking an idea from one industry and applying it to another.