invention

I had an interesting but frustrating discussion recently with Matt Crowe, the founder of Ahhha, a site for "social ideation," as he calls it. It's where people can float ideas for products and either seek help from the people who can actually help make the ideas real or just "claim" the ideas and let others run with them. Everyone who contributes is supposed to get a piece of an idea's financial success.

Crowe hopes that Ahhha will become a place where anyone with the germ of an invention will plant it, and that the community will select and grow the best ideas. A comparison voting system is supposed to help the good ideas bubble up, but currently non-serious and joke ideas flood the site, burying the few good ones on it.

Crowe says, "Nobody has a clue where to go if they have an idea," and that's very true, but I don't think a pure ideas market like this is the way to solve the problem. We already have systems for the registration and protection of intellectual property: Patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, and counterfeit laws are all designed to protect the originators of creative work. Each of these systems may be criticized as being some combination of cumbersome, unfair, or expensive, but I would still submit that the last thing we need is yet another registration system, one where individuals can claim rights to an idea without putting any legal heft or real work behind their claims. Ideas markets are one thing, but helping people actually create products is more valuable. And several sites are doing just that.

Ahhha has some similarities to the gadget manufacturer Quirky, which puts an inventor community in front of its development calendar. Quirky has the smallest of filters to idea submission, but it makes the biggest difference: you have to pony up $10 to submit an idea. Quirky itself builds and sells those concepts that make it through the community voting process. Inventors get a cut of sales. Quirky appears to work only in plastics, so the ideas it can act on are limited.

Other services enable inventors and creators to fund all kinds of projects and find customers for them. For example, see Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where artists and inventors can collect monetary pledges for their projects. Funds pledged are held in escrow until thresholds are reached; then the money gets released to the projects. The people running the projects generally agree to send those who pledged their work output-- music tracks or theater tickets for artistic works; toys or gadgets for hardware projects.

Since pledge-based projects are expected to deliver actual output, the budding entrepreneurs on these services have to do more than have an idea: they have to be able to pitch successfully to the sites' communities. This filter leads to ideas sites filled with workable ideas that need, primarily, money and moral support (pre-orders are very effective in that regard). Pledge sites don't pretend to tell inventors that there's a shortcut to success, but they do add efficiency to part of the financial process.

A Medieval weapon, made with lasers I recently met some inventors working a fun project through the Kickstarter system: Michael Woods and Evan Murphy. They were students together at Caltech a few years ago, and recently realized their post-graduation startup, which made legal discovery software, wasn't going to work out. They dropped back to what they both love: Building stuff. In particular, toy trebuchets. The trebuchet was a siege weapon in Middle Ages. It has a special appeal to geeks, because it blends really interesting physics with a Lord of the Rings aesthetic.

Woods and Murphy wanted to build a quick-to-assemble desktop trebuchet, or "Trebuchette." Existing kits have to be glued together, but since "It's no fun watching glue dry," as Woods told me, they wanted to create a snap-together version. The started Siege Toys to do it.

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If you, on your lesser days, could reach for a thinking cap to make you a little brainier, what would you expect?

Would you expect to solve math problems quicker? Would you imagine that complex scientific puzzlers would suddenly seem like simple amusements? Or would you expect to be able to paint a convincing forgery of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in your three-bedroom ranch house?

I ask because a professor in Sydney, Australia, has created a "thinking cap" and thinks he has the answers to the above questions.

According to AFP, Professor Allan Snyder has been testing his invention … Read more

Until today, I was unaware that engineers at Apple enjoyed spare time.

However, somehow Andrew Carol, one of Apple's software engineers, decided that it was about time he eased back from designing the computer of the future and thought a little about re-creating a computer of the past.

The Antikythera Mechanism, is, allegedly, the oldest version of a scientific computer. The Greeks, who used to be so clever that they never endured too much of a financial crisis, built it around 100 B.C.

Somehow, it disappeared into history's cracks, until it was unearthed from a shipwreck in … Read more

WEST ORANGE, N.J.--I have come to the mountaintop of invention.

Today, this is the Thomas Edison National Historic Park, but for decades, it was the laboratory complex where the great innovator and the many people he employed did their work. For a geek, it doesn't get much better than this.

As part of Road Trip 2010, I'm paying a visit to a complex that, when it was fully operational, comprised dozens of buildings and employed hundreds of people. And I have to say that, while I'm no Edison scholar, this was definitely one of the … Read more

Perhaps retirement doesn't suit former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Just weeks into his post-Sun life, Schwartz offers some delicious anecdotes in a blog post, summarizing Apple's and Microsoft's threats to sue Sun for patent infringement as more about bluster than substance.

But that's not the lesson I learn from Schwartz's commentary.

Instead, what is immediately obvious to me is that a) the technology industry is a morass of conflicting patent claims, b) since there's really no way to completely avoid others' patents the best defense is to have a hefty counterbalancing patent portfolio … Read more

What's more annoying? Batteries or people who sneeze without covering their mouths? Batteries or Jay Leno?

I choose batteries. They always give out at the least opportune moments and I'm always stunned by how much they cost at the local supermarket, or, indeed, the local Apple store.

So I have not been able to resist hitching up my pants with joy on hearing that some very clever engineers at Stanford are working to make your T-shirt, your pants, or, indeed, your favorite purple undies become, well, Energizers.

I am indebted to the fine minds at Engadget who tossed the news my way that Yi Cui of Stanford's Department of Engineering is leading a team that may revolutionize your intimate relationship with your iPhone, BlackBerry, or any other highly personal gadget.

Professor Cui and his team have already turned paper into power with the ingenious (to me, at least) use of ink infused with carbon nanotubes. (I have embedded some evidence.)

Now, they have taken the same principle and applied it to your wardrobe.… Read more

Many things keep us awake at night. Simon Cowell's hair is one. The implausible success of anyone who appears in "Big Brother" is another. But the thing that really keeps us staring into the darkness is technology. How the hell does it work? Simple gadgets like TVs and mice leave us unperturbed. But there are some things that are just beyond reasoning.

Science fiction writer and all-round genius Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." On this one issue, we think he might have been wrong--because it's quite … Read more

You know how annoying it is when you stick your bread in the toaster and accidentally set the dial too high, and when your toast finally pops up, it's darker than you want, or burned?

Granted, most of us over the age of, say, 6 are probably able to handle an ordinary toaster most of the time. But don't you want to watch your toast, well, toasting? Don't you want to see the magic happen?

This concept transparent glass toaster lets you do just that. Or, rather, it wants to let you do just that. Yeah, I … Read more

Just how valuable are the Linux-related patents that Microsoft recently sold?

The Open Invention Network (OIN), a patent defense coalition for Linux whose members include IBM and Red Hat, trumpeted the news that it had bought 22 Linux-related patents from Allied Security Trust (AST) in a bid to protect Linux. Microsoft, which sold the patents to AST, claims the patents "weren't important," as noted in The Wall Street Journal.

Did the OIN get value or garbage?

Microsoft has long presented itself as the looming patent threat to Linux, once claiming that 235 of its patents are violated … Read more