Wherever I go, it seems someone has seen me coming.

I've eaten crunchy walleyed pike on a stick in Minneapolis, spicy chicken wings in Buffalo and sugary beignets in New Orleans. I've rented a bicycle in Amsterdam, paid the fare for a cable car ride in San Francisco and bought a ticket for a seaplane to fly from Miami to Bimini. I've purchased yarn made from lobster and shrimp shells on Cape Cod, acquired a hat made of palm fronds in Key West, secured a cuckoo clock in Germany's Black Forest and ordered a beer in the bar where Hemingway hung out in Pamplona.

This is not to say that my experiences are particularly exotic, nor my consumption especially conspicuous. But recalling where I've gone and what I've gotten points to a universal condition: People everywhere are constantly figuring out more and better ways to help us spend our money.

From soft-serve ice cream to Microsoft, businesses begin as ideas. The challenge is coming up with something new and useful-or at least enticing. (Who knew we needed a $5 cup of coffee?)

So we started thinking: What's next? What are the best business opportunities in Southwest Florida that no one has taken advantage of yet?

We asked some bright business people in Southwest Florida. Their almost-unanimous response: "If I knew, do you think I'd be telling you so you could print it in your magazine?"

But we persisted.

Need a lift?

J.D. Clinton, a wine lover and trustee of the Naples Winter Wine Festival, suggests creating a foldable motor scooter and offering a kind of designated-driver service. When someone who's been dining out realizes that it might not be safe to drive home but doesn't want to call a cab and have to return the next day to retrieve his or her car, "Drive You"-what Clinton would name the service-would provide a welcome alternative.

"You get the call, you drive the scooter to the restaurant, you fold it up and put it in the trunk of the car and drive the car home," Clinton explains. "Then you get paid, you get the scooter, unfold it and drive on to the next call."

The scooter would have to be small enough to fit into a car trunk, and the service would work better when the weather is clear. "But the basic concept is sound," Clinton says.

Not long after Clinton told us his idea, we mentioned it to someone else. "Isn't that funny," the person said. "I have a friend who just got back from London, and she mentioned a service just like that. I think it's called Scooterman."

Sure enough, Scooterman has developed a scooter that snaps apart into four pieces to fit easily into a car trunk and, for £2.50 (about $5) per five minutes, will dispatch a driver to fetch you and your car home in any of five cities in England. The company also sells the scooters from $2,300 to $2,700 apiece, depending on their power.

Clinton wasn't aware that Scooterman had beaten him to market, but he wasn't surprised. "Interesting to see," he says. "I think most ideas are really not new."

He may be right, but the field is wide open for unique takes on time-tested products and services.

The Nel-Sun Float Lift is a recent entry. It's a solar-powered boat lift, without the view-obstructing frame, that is easily installed where most lifts cannot be, says creator Ben Nelson Jr., owner of Nelson Marine Construction Inc. in Bonita Springs.

Several years ago, his team was trying to place boat lifts in a lakefront community adjacent to an old rock quarry. The water was very deep and dropped off quickly, the bottom was rock and the lake elevation changed drastically-six to 10 feet-from season to season. None of the lifts for these situations was ideal.

"I wanted one that incorporated the simplicity and reliability of a standard four-post cable lift, had zero profile (so you can't see the mechanism), could be installed in extremely deep or fairly shallow water, had a full walk-around floating dock and was solar-powered," Nelson says.

He made the first drawings, began the patent process through an agreement with Quality Boat Lifts, and then built, sold and installed the first prototype. Now, Nelson Marine looks forward to signing a licensing agreement with Quality Boat Lifts and promoting the solar-powered lift nationwide.

Street sense

Most people see traffic as a nuisance. Gretchen Harper, a bookkeeper at a Fort Myers accounting firm, sees it as potentially life-threatening.

Her husband used to work for a hospital as a neonatal transport driver, and he often told harrowing stories about getting stuck in a jam when an infant's life hung in the balance. "By the time drivers heard the sirens or saw the ambulance, [he] was right [behind] them. I think a lot of that is because of the physical roadways-not being able to pass, not having time or room to pull out or move over," she says.

Her solution: equip every vehicle with an automatic receiver to alert drivers when an emergency vehicle is approaching, well before the sirens are in earshot. The device would be wired to the speakers in the vehicle, triggered to sound a warning when an emergency vehicle on a call is nearby, and would automatically override the radio or CD to play, "Emergency vehicle approaching. Please use caution."

All vehicles, including motorcycles, could be retrofitted for the safety device. "It would be a major undertaking to enforce, but [the extra seconds could make] it a real lifesaver," Harper says.

Girish Joshi, a business analyst in Fort Myers, has another idea for car and driver: Parking garages with tiers of service, from park-it-yourself to valet, with features ranging from car washing to filling the tank to providing porters for your luggage or shopping bags.

"I notice how many businesses, while profitable, have apparently given up on innovation. Hybridizing businesses [or] services is an easy way to create new revenue streams," Joshi says.

In his service-driven parking garage, spaces would be tiered as well. For additional fees you could get a space that's wider, in a preferred location or away from other cars. While the business model would work well in cities, "Naples is a viable market with the garage going up at Waterside and shoppers already spending money on luxury goods," he says. "If I owned one of the Bentleys in the lot, I'd pay a premium to park it away from the pickups."