AbsolutelyNew Blog

The downside of patent applications

CNN reports that patent filings for 2009 are down 2.3% compared to 2008 (485,500 vs. 496,886), citing the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office as the source of its data.

It quotes USPTO director David Kappos as saying the nation’s innovative spirit is stronger now than ever before; however, in speaking with a number of others who work in patents, it highlights three factors leading the decline in applications:

1. Recession, which has led many individuals and companies to delay innovation investments
   
2. High costs to file and maintain a patent, including the costs to defend a patent in court if necessary
   
3. An antiquated U.S. patent process—which the USPTO, its parent Department of Commerce, and the Congress are working to reform—that has led to years-long backlogs in patent reviews.
   

What do you think? For those of you who have refrained from filing to protect an idea, what’s holding you back? And what could help you move forward?

Click here for CNN's full coverage.

Oh, and yes, the patent image above is from Apple's iPhone application.

The hottest holiday invention is….

With day-after-Thanksgivings sales now behind us, the cash register sales data is clear on this year’s hot invention for the holidays: the Zhu Zhu.

What’s a Zhu Zhu? It’s an $8 electronic hamster that moves around and makes noises sort of like a real hamster, but doesn’t require feeding or other care necessary with its living, breathing inspiration. What’s more, maker Cepia LLC has created Zhu Zhu accessories including a skateboard and a car… as well as a hamster wheel and tunnel systems for those who are more traditional with their microchip-driven pets.

Many Walmart and Toys R Us stores are now sold out of Zhu Zhus. Amazon too is reporting very strong sales (especially of the Mr. Squiggles version), while re-sellers are jacking the prices to more than $50. And as we write this, we can’t even access the official Zhu Zhu website because it’s being overwhelmed with traffic.

Other than the website crash, we love this! Because it highlights a few good lessons for just about every inventive person out there:

1. Value price. People today are reluctant to spend big bucks on pricey holiday toys. But a Zhu Zhu at less than $10 feels like a real value. Not every invention can or should be priced nearly this low, but definitely consider your target consumers’ spending abilities and value perceptions as you fully develop and price your creation.

2. Think broadly. If you’ve got a good thing, broaden your line—be it with another version (Mr. Squiggles has hamster pals like Num Num) or accessories like the Zhu Zhu skateboard. Going broader often increases your in-store presence, your product appeal and your total dollar sales.

3. Reach out. With its limited marketing budget, Cepia got creative with its marketing—it posted YouTube videos and distributed free Zhu Zhus to mommy bloggers. This went a long way in getting the word out on their faux-furry invention. Remember: if you get clear on who you want to reach, you’ll then be in a good position to think of unique and inexpensive ways to reach them.

Invention Lessons from the latest Bay Bridge closure

Our nearby SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is closed indefinitely after large metal hunks and poles—pieces installed over Labor Day weekend to fix another serious problem—fell onto rush hour traffic. Beyond making for a nightmarish commute, this closure and its background makes for several useful lessons for inventors and business managers. Among them:

1. Confidence sells. There’s now a growing sense that commuters hastily “bought” Caltrans’ (aka: California’s Department of Transportation) earlier fix because the transit agency so confidently told us it had quickly handled a major crack in the Bridge’s eastern span. With hindsight, this doesn’t necessarily reflect well on Caltrans, nor on area drivers. But it highlights one big point: if you’re confident when you tell people about your idea, product, really you name it, they’re much more likely to believe what you’re saying.

2. Quick fixes often aren’t. Edison didn’t invent the phonograph on his first day in the lab. Because creating an effective solution often takes time. So too does exploring alternative solutions, quality, accuracy, and triple-checking your work when the stakes are high. So as you create and pursue product success, take the time you need when you need it. Rushing is good... when balanced with the smarts to know when not to.

3. Ongoing maintenance matters. It’s not like Caltrans didn’t maintain our beloved Bridge. It’s just that we’re now seeing it could have maintained it better—much better—more proactively. The same is true for people with inventions and/or businesses: you need to keep investing your resources to maintain your patent and/or product line, as it will slowly but surely lose strength if you don’t do so. To be sure, it’s natural to want to pause and enjoy once you’ve achieved some success… but this is a sure-fire way to shortchange that success.

BTW, a few interesting facts about the Bay Bridge:

• When opened in 1936, the entire Bay Area set out to cross it at the same time, leading the San Francisco Chronicle to report it as "the greatest traffic jam in the history of S.F., a dozen old-fashioned New Year's eves thrown into one.”
• Before its latest closure, the double-decker bridge was handling roughly 270,000 vehicles a day, with an average of roughly 4,000 vehicles on it at any given time.
• It’s officially named the James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Bridge, in honor of San Francisco’s 30th mayor, who would go on to be California’s 27th governor… and who, like our current governor, would also grace the big screen in a couple films.

Do hybrids need to fake it?

Getting back to the topic of “Is innovation bad?” for society, we recently learned of a rising tide against new electric and hybrid cars.

People aren’t yet protesting with placards reading “Say No to Prius,” but it seems they are starting to raise a ruckus about how quiet the latest high-tech cars are. You see, they fear pedestrians and children won’t hear them coming, and thus won’t be aware enough to avoid them.

But fear not. For if Toyota can devise a car that parallel parks itself and then uses heat (and solar panels) to keep its cool, you can bet they’re on this. Others including Nissan and BMW / Mini are on it too. And they’ve all turned in one direction for help: to Hollywood and its sound and special effects people. No joke—they’re even working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on this.

It remains TBD if they’ll fake it with old-school auto audio pumped from a speaker in the bumper—would you prefer the purr of a ’68 Corvette or the roar of a recent-year HEMI?—or go in an entirely different direction. Here at the office, we’re torn between going Star Wars or Jetsons, with a few outliers hoping for a little Greased Lightening. What’s your preference?

For more on this, click here for additional news coverage.

Reinvented work spaces

Do your best inventing at home? Or at the office? And why is that?

A growing number of home office workers and tinkerers are finding they can’t keep up their productivity at home. Too many temptations—the Playstation, the kids, those chores that didn’t quite get finished on Sunday—and too little to keep them on track.

That is, until somebody (really somebodies) reinvented work space, creating cubicle farms and work zones that can be rented by the hour, day or month. And these work centers—with names from Office Nomads to The Hive to New Work City, even Cubes&Crayons with on-site childcare—are popping up all over the country as more people are working on their own… yet still wanting to work around others.

Definitely consider googling for one near you if you’re finding that your home environment is inhibiting your invention success.

For more info, click here for additional coverage from Entrepreneur magazine.

BTW, home office workers might also want to check out the Thriving Office, a collection of office sounds (think people, ringing phones and the periodic hum of the copier) developed by one of our clients. Fans have been known to play it during their phone calls to give the impression they’re part of a bigger organization.

Fast Company's 16 noteworthy inventions

Fast Company’s just published a list / slideshow of the “16 Inventions That Boost Habitats, Humanity, Health and Happiness.” It includes a wide range of items—many of them low tech breakthroughs—from around the planet.

Our fave: can’t say, because we see the merits and consequence in just about every one of them. (Must admit, we're scratching our heads as to how the Nike + iPod Sport Kit makes the cut).

Pictured here: the SinkPositive™ sink. It replaces a toilet tank lid to offer touchless hand-washing with clean, supply line water that is then redirected to the toilet bowl for the next flush. The maker’s selling models for $109-129 plus $12 for shipping.

Click here to check out all 16. What do you think? What did the Fast Company folks miss? And what are you doing to be on their list next year?

The latest open innovation winners: Netflix and Phillips

We were very psyched to learn that Netflix this week awarded a $1 million prize to a team of people who invented an algorithm that delivers a 10% improvement in predicting what movies customers will want to see. This ends an open innovation competition that took three years, with 40,000 teams from 186 countries, to break the critical 10% hurdle.

Netflix has already announced a follow-up competition.

Meanwhile Dutch light-bulb maker Phillips may be the winner of a U.S. Department of Energy’s $10 million “L Prize” open innovation competition—yesterday it was the first entry in the government’s contest to invent a more efficient 60-watt bulb. To win, government testing will need to confirm that it meets some very strict criteria including:

• Reproduces the amount and color of light from a 60-watt incandescent bulb, while using only 10 watts of power
  
• Lasts 25,000 hours, which is ~25x longer than a standard bulb
  
• 75% or more of the bulb is made or assembled in the U.S.
  
• Free of the negatives of today’s compact fluorescent bulbs—ie: no polluting mercury
  

Looks like the Dutch may soon get credit for lighting up something other than, well, you know.

More importantly, there are many, many more such contests and prizes out there. So as you’re inventing, especially if you’re working in more advanced or eco-friendly spaces, definitely do your homework on the contests out there. Invention success is a great light at the end of the tunnel… but oh, how much sweeter it would be if you could win big prize money too.

Here are links to newspaper reporting on the Netflix competition and Phillips submission.

The reinvented Amazon and your invention

Did you notice that amazon.com, the company that practically invented online bookselling, has reinvented itself?

The company’s not asking to be called “The online retailer formerly known as a bookseller.” But it’s quietly yet methodically put so much energy into broadening its offerings that, for the first time in its 15-year history, this year amazon’s selling more general merchandise than books, music and movies. In other words, it’s become something of a web Walmart… and more.

This matters to you the inventor for a few key reasons:

1. Walmart may not return your calls (or grant you an appointment), but it’s relatively easy to set up an online store and/or to sell your invention on amazon. In fact, amazon makes it easy to do all this because you’d then be helping bring more people to amazon.

2. Amazon’s become THE online destination shoppers go to for product reviews from real people. So if you believe in your invention and think it provides real value, don’t you want it out there where people can not only buy it but sing its praises very publicly?

3. We don’t recommend producing your invention before confirming there’s a market for it. But if you’ve gone ahead and built inventory, putting it on amazon can be a cheap way to help assess the selling proposition—if it sells well, you’re on to something; if not, you’ve still got work to do. All that said, putting your invention out there too early is risky, so you’d only want to go down this path after thoughtfully weighing the pros & cons.

So, how are you leveraging the reinvented amazon for your invention?

For more info on what amazon’s up to, you can click here for a recent overview in the NY Times (free registration required).

More tips from the Shark Tank

We’ve now seen three episodes of ABC’s Shark Tank. Still love the show, still stand by our August 10 comments about it after its debut episode.

And now that we’ve seen a crop of additional inventors and entrepreneurs enter the tank… many practically eaten alive before a national TV audience… we thought we’d come back to the subject with a few more tips for people trying to sell inventive ideas:

1. Know your ultimate goal. Yes, you want to achieve invention success. But does this mean your #1 priority is to make money, or to establish a business? The two can often be at odds, yet time & again we’re seeing inventors on Shark Tank struggling because they never figured out what they really want. The struggling makes for perfect TV drama, but it's not something you ever want to experience first-hand. Before you engage in any discussions with any companies, let alone try to get on television, take the time to think about what you really, truly want. 

 

2. Know your numbers. You should know the size of your product category, how much it costs to make your product, how many units you’ve sold thus far (if applicable), and so on. If you can’t answer such questions, you’re going to have a very hard time persuading others to give you money. We suspect the sharks actually like these uninformed people—it gives an excuse to tear them apart (again, good drama). But since you don’t want to be shark food, make sure you’ve done your homework and are armed with answers. And stepping back, these answers should help you plot your course of action long before you ever get in front of others.

3. Know your present value. Just about every inventor and entrepreneur on Shark Tank has overvalued his or her proposition. Their common mistake: confusing what they believe an idea may be worth in the future vs. what it's worth now. The distinction really matters. Think about it: would you buy a house based on what it may be worth in 5 years, or based on what it's worth today? Of course you're going to focus on the value today. And businesses are going to think the same way as they consider buying or investing in your idea. So if you’re looking for a deal here & now, you’re going to need to stay more grounded in the present.

Product lessons from the re-re-invention of Brett Farve

Super Bowl winning quarterback Brett Farve is back in the NFL, back from retirement AGAIN to play for the Minnesota Vikings. We all kinda sorta expected this return after his previous tearful retirement and subsequent jubilant return (that time leaving the Green Bay Packers, then joining the NY Jets).

We’ll leave the witty commentary to the guys and gals at SportsCenter. Instead, we’ll focus on lessons for your product based on how Brett Farve has re-invented himself, and then re-invented himself again:

1. Change your look. If your invention sales are stalled, consider how you can change it up. Brett put on a new uniform—going purple after a pro career in shades of green—but you might do yourself some good exploring new packaging. This gives you an excuse to show buyers something new. You’ll likely want to do more than just changing a color: if you’re going to change it up, take the time to consider how you can more clearly convey what your product is and why it’s so special. Also, make sure it’s also going to stand out in its most likely retail environments.

2. Keep what works. Farve is keeping his #4. He’s also keeping his Southern Mississippi charm. And in going with the Vikings, which are rivals of the Packers, he’s sticking with a conference where he’s proven himself. The point: continuous improvement is good, but don’t ever rush to change everything. Instead, think about what elements of your invention are working well, or you believe will work well with a few very small tweaks, and keep them. Leverage them. Build upon them. Don’t throw them out.

3. Know yourself… and know when to walk away. Regardless of whether you think Farve should have stayed in retirement or come back for more, you’ve got to acknowledge he’s rightfully getting heat and ridicule for his multiple retirements and comebacks (Reminds us a lot of Cher). You can avoid this by reflecting upon what’s really right for you and your invention. In doing so, be honest about yourself, your invention and the space around you. And don't rush this either.

4. Have fun. Do we even need to explain this one?