Why doesn’t someone invent clothing with very small, powerful magnetic material woven in? That way all the clothes teenagers leave strewn about the house could be automatically pulled toward a designated laundry basket.

Or what about a central trash system, like central plumbing, where all refuse gets whisked away to some underground recycling facility inhabited only by the alligators of urban mythology. Someone should definitely invent that, too.

These technologies would make our personal lives easier. And what about life at work? As a small business owner, I admit I have benefited from some great technologies that help me do things quicker and better. But by nature I’m never really satisfied. I want more. And there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Here are a few technologies I feel could help business owners run their businesses more profitably. Would someone please get to work on them?

1. Google Reports

Hey, Google! Want to really take over the world? Once you’re done with that little phone project, why don’t you turn your attention to reports. You guys are experts in search, right? Well, help us search our databases! All the software applications we buy seem to make this a mystery. We get canned reports that don’t answer all of our questions. We don’t have time to figure out how to create our own reports. We don’t want to mess with report writers. And we don’t want to pay those overpriced consultants to write reports for us. We’re simple-minded folk. Reporting is a major pain in the butt.

Give us a report interface like Google’s home page. Let us type in a few keywords, like “John” and “March sales,” and let us see a report of John’s sales for March. Or “overdue orders” and let us see at a glance where we’re behind. I understand that each application…