Aaron Campbell

Areas Aaron Campbell is Knowledgeable in:

Techniques Aaron Campbell Uses:

Aaron Campbell's Problem Solving Skills:

1. Technical translation. I show people with little tech knowledge how to understand technical things.
2. Music. I hear songs and memorize the lyrics forever. I know what "good music" is.
3. Soccer/Football. I have "field sense" and know when x player will be at y location
4. Name Generation. I come up with creative and innovative names for companies.
5. Happiness. I can intuit what makes people happy, then show them.
6. Innovation collaboration. I get people to solve problems with each other.
7. Sales. I can sell a moraine to a motivated Inuit.
8. Energy Conservation. I am an Energy Star certified energy consultant.
9. Raw idea generation. I can come up with 4.5 novel ideas every day for 60 days.
10. Business formation. I came up with the idea for your company in 1997, called it "Anythink". 300 innovations.

Aaron Campbell's Problem Solving Experience:

1. On a 90 degree July day at the summer camp I was the educational director at, I needed to calm 75 eight year olds down enough to teach them about ecology. They were hot and cranky and unable to focus. I realized the floor was smooth cement that had been in the shade all day and had them all lay down flat on the floor while I told them an astrological myth. Some fell asleep, almost all were quiet and calm, with some saying it was their favorite moment at camp. They were certainly dirtier, but also certainly easier to teach.
2. While trying out online dating back in 2004 I realized i didn't own a digital camera or a digitized picture of myself. I put a piece of clear plastic film on my scanner and took a number of interestingly distorted photos of myself. I eventually used those photos to woo my future wife, Elise.
3. While innovating for my company Anythink (which became Rocketforge), I realized that trash cans at certain bus stops were overflowing, where other bus stops had no trash at all. I devised a system of weight sensors and wifi transmitters (piggybacking on upcoming arrival time LED readout transmitters) to send data to Waste Management so trash collectors would know which bins were full when they made rounds. The idea came to me only months before the city of Barcelona, Spain decided to do the very thing.
4. For my wedding, I needed something to do for people who didn't want to dance at the reception. I asked my contractor friend for scraps of wood and created three different 400% games: Boggle (out of 4x4 square cut cedar posts), Jenga (out of cut scrap oak), and Scrabble (scrap plywood). I burned the letters for Boggle and Scrabble with a woodburning kit, painstakingly matching all fonts and proper kerning. The 400% Jenga has "magnetic poetry" words and phrases on the sides so each game creates a poem. They are now building blocks for my daughter Piper.
5. I needed to charge my iphone while in my 1984 Mercedes that has a broken 12v cigarette connection. I got a 12v solar trickle charger from VW (came free with certain cars to be parked in storage), spliced a female-female 12v junction, and connected it to a Radio Shack "iGo" adapter with appropriate iTip. This I called the "Campbell Charger" and it's on my blog "ideafirehose.blogspot.com".
6. My 2 month old daughter had a hard time falling asleep. She would only sleep when on her mother's lap, making night times tough. I combined the rocking motion of a mini-trampoline exerciser and the snuggly warmth of a baby carrier and now our baby always falls immediately asleep with me holding her while getting exercise on the trampoline. 3 happy people.
7. My father (an inventor at Battelle NW labs in Richland before his death) asked me how I would get a small drill inside a wall to move around. I brought back a rat tail from the canyon near our house and showed him that you could pull the tendon in the tail and it would curl. I said you could put 4 "tendons" around an axis and using a marionette joystick (and plastic bead toys drilled out) and it would move the drill around like a snake. It worked. I was 11 years old.
8. I was working for a local car dealership selling VW and Audi when I realized the dealership could make much more money promoting themselves as being the most eco-friendly dealership in town. I went to a number of alternative energy conferences, started the cans & bottles recycling program, and advertised in a local green magazine. The dealership is now the area's greenest dealership and makes more money selling more cars due to that fact.
9. I have a "million dollar idea" every few days, leading me to come up with the very idea of "ideaconnection.com" back in the late 90's. I called it "Anythink" but the domain had been taken. I brought 5 clever people together so we could solve business problems for companies in packages. Rather than patenting the idea itself, we planned to simply sell the idea (on honor!) for a much smaller amount of money, going with volume over greed.
10. It was nearly impossible to find anyone to help improve my household energy performance who knew more than his/her particular field when it came to energy conservation. I read a lot, got professionally trained by the EPA, became an apprentice home inspector and eventually started my own energy conservation company "Campbell Energy LLC". Currently making a living.