Editor's Note: Daniel Berdichevsky's column will appear every other week in Innovation. Adam Stone and Lija McHugh's column will also appear bi-weekly.

A professor at Stanford once predicted that haircuts would be outsourced to India. You might walk into an empty barbershop, then sit quietly while someone 10,000 miles away gave you a new hairdo for 20 cents — operating the appropriate scissors and razors via the Internet. I remember being skeptical and double-checking whether my professor actually had any hair. (He did.)

Nothing of the sort has ever happened, of course. When Sen. John Kerry railed against the outsourcing of American jobs in last year’s presidential campaign, he didn’t have Ohio’s hair stylists’ voting bloc in mind.

But maybe my professor was on to something. Supercuts doesn’t run a sweatshop full of barbers in Calcutta, but many computer companies do operate low-cost technical support centers in Bangalore.

And delicate surgeries increasingly take place with doctors controlling instruments by computer. I can even design my business card online using a Java applet and someone, somewhere, etches it on paper and ships it to me.

All of which leads me to wonder how many crazy but innovative ideas disappear for a while and then re-surface in new ways.

Here’s an example: In 2000, just before the dot-com bubble burst, I took some time off from Stanford to work as a venture capitalist on behalf of a Japanese company, Casio. (It says something about those days in the Valley that people took me seriously.)

Over the summer one start-up, zBox, came to us for an emergency loan. Its business plan was to distribute a new kind of mailbox to as many people as possible. In exchange for receiving advertisements in their new zBoxes, consumers would get free shipping from participating companies — say, eToys or Pets.com.

The problem was, due to federal laws protecting the postal service, zBoxes couldn’t actually be put up in front of houses. They’d have to be around the side. Nor was it clear that any companies were interested in signing up for what could turn into a very costly program. And who would handle the actual deliveries to the zBoxes? Someone suggested Domino’s Pizza people during less busy hours of the day.

No loan was granted, the company sank and these days you couldn’t even find it with a Google search. zBoxes? Crazy idea? Perhaps. But last week, Amazon.com announced Amazon Prime, a new service in which consumers pay about $70 a year to receive unlimited, free second-day shipping.

Best of all, it comes to your front door. Maybe the folks at zBox were on the right track but were too obsessed with the box itself when the real value of the idea was to get consumers addicted to free shipping from certain companies, making them more loyal customers.

Or maybe Amazon is crazy, too.

Other ideas may not be as crazy; they are just badly marketed. During one of my first days at Casio, someone showed me what looked like an old television set in an empty office. “It’s a two-way TV,” he explained.

To me, a two-way TV is one you can talk through to someone else, like a videophone. I think I’ve seen one at Epcot Center and there’s probably a prototype at a lab on campus somewhere.

However, this two-way TV literally showed TV in two different ways. You could watch it like a normal TV or you could roll down the screen and turn it into a projector for home theater use.

It would be perfect for life in places where space is at a premium, like dorm rooms: watch "Gilmore Girls" privately, then show "American Idol" on the wall for all your friends. However, it flopped, and I haven’t heard of anything like it since. Maybe if it had been called a convertible TV, it would have gone somewhere.

Before encountering all of this, I used to think that most innovations inevitably succeeded. When I heard that Kodak and Fuji were launching APS film to replace 35 mm, I started counting down the days until everyone had APS cameras.

But what really happened? People started buying digital ones instead. Today, no one knows what APS stands for — it’s gone the way of Crystal Pepsi and the Commodore Amiga, two other favorite flops of mine.

Insights like these don’t exactly qualify me to write a column on innovation. My days with Casio weren’t a smashing success, either: Eventually, the company shut down its Silicon Valley office.

I then returned to Stanford after spending some time addicted to coverage of the Florida recount. But I have some credentials: I like gadgets, I majored in STS and I’ve sort of managed a technology lab. I also used to read lots of science fiction and still sometimes try to write it. My rental car today had satellite radio in it — and I was thrilled.

That said, just because I like gadgets doesn’t mean that I always embrace the latest as the greatest. Case in point: Should those remote barbers ever hit it big, I think I’ll just grow out my hair or buy my own set of clippers at Wal-Mart.

If someone’s going to slice off my ear by accident, I’d rather it be me than someone on another continent, thank you very much. Though it occurs to me that when I call 911 in hopes of getting it re-attached, I could very well be talking to an operator in Kazakhstan.

Daniel Berdichevsky, Class of 2002 doesn’t have an iPod and never checks his voicemail, but loves alpacas and happily responds to e-mails at dan@demidec.com.