AbsolutelyNew Blog

RIP inventor Robert Rines

We wanted to pay brief tribute to an inventor you’ve likely never heard of: Robert Harvey Rines of Boston, who died last week at the age of 87.

Perhaps known best for his outlandish pursuits of the Loch Ness monster—not that people would have knocked him had his inventive Nessie perfume actually attracted the mythical creature—Rines is one of those day-in, day-out tinkerers & toilers who profoundly impacted many of us by way of his 800+ patents and other actions in support of invention. Among the reasons we pause to reflect, he:

• Developed electronic gear that improved the resolution of radar and sonar, which in turn has been used in everything from ultrasounds to Patriot missiles to finding the Titanic wreck
  
• Furthered innovation as a patent examiner in the 1940s and later as a member of the Department of Commerce’s Technical Advisory Board
  
• Founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center to train law students on intellectual property law
  
• Helped the Taiwanese and later Chinese governments establish initial patent review processes where there had previously been none
  
• Provided experienced-based input and insight to Congress when it re-wrote patent laws in 2000
  

So RIP Robert Rines. We appreciate your passion, your commitment, your contributions, and yes, your quirkiness too. You did Nessie proud... even if your trained dolphins with cameras never caught the creature on film.

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.

The best inventions of 2009

What do you think are the best, most revolutionary new products of 2009?

We’ve got some picks of our own... but we’ll keep them to ourselves right now and wait to hear back from the editors are Popular Science – they’re gearing up to answer this question for the magazine’s annual “Best of What’s New” awards. PopSci’s now accepting applications for a range of categories including everything from Gadgets to Home Technology to Recreation.

If you’ve commercialized a truly revolutionary invention – PopSci doesn’t give out awards for evolutionary products, no matter how absolutely awesome they may be – definitely consider applying. Note: your invention must either be available for purchase by 9.30.2009 or a future sales date must be formally announced by 9.30.2009.

And if you’re not yet ready for this year’s competition, that’s OK too. The important thing is that you’re acting to advance your invention, to make it big next year. For inspiration, here’s a link to last year’s winners. Pictured above right is one of 2008’s picks: the sweet-looking, compact, and reportedly very easy-to-operate Icon A5 seaplane.

Invention lessons from Billy Mays (1958-2009)

The invention world has lost one of its greatest champions: TV pitchman Billy Mays died unexpectedly over the weekend.
 
We sometimes laughed at Billy’s larger-than-life style, but we also greatly respected the fact that he got behind so many individuals' inventions early on... and used a louder-than-life selling approach to make them very big hits. From OxiClean to Mighty Putty to Mighty Mend-It, Billy’s fingerprints (and signature hand gestures) are all over the success.
 
In tribute to Billy Mays, here are three lessons learned from the black beareded, blue-shirted master (and yes, we’re tempted to write in ALL CAPS... but Billy was really much more nuanced than that once you study him carefully):

1. Convey your benefits. Billy understood that most people don’t want to hear about the 19 different features of an inventive new product -- they want to hear the top 3 benefits they’ll experience, with tangible examples to drive the message home. What’s more, Bill always made sure to show at least one dramatic visual torture test to close the sale. Remember when he poured OxiClean powder into iodine water and the liquid turned from red to clear before your eyes? When Billy Mays sold it, you knew the exact benefits you’d get. You should do likewise as you sell your product.

2. Test it. In his Discovery Channel TV show Pitchmen, Billy and his co-host made sure to put each invention through its paces before deciding how to proceed. For a salon product, he gave it to women at a nearby salon in exchange for their candid feedback. For a cleaning product, he asked a professional housecleaner to evaluate it. To be sure, we’re fans of deeper research than the show depicted, but we appreciate the realities of a TV show... and we appreciate the broader point that Billy made sure to dig in and learn before moving into selling. Everyone out there should follow such a path.

3. Be passionate. Within the advertising world, Billy’s critics (yes, there were a few) accused him of “yelling not selling.” But the fact is, Billy effectively sold a whole lot of products. It’s the only reason he was able to stay in the business. Why was he so good, even when he was so loud? Among other reasons, because shoppers saw his loudness, his boldness, and his conviction for what it really was: genuine passion. We’re not saying everyone should try to mimic Billy’s style; however, being passionate about your product will only serve to excite others too. And isn’t that what selling is all about?

The UPC... reinvented

Earlier this month we wrote about the ubiquitous UPC barcode turning 35. We’ve since learned that a whole new treatment of barcodes will likely reach stores soon – this one with multiple sets of bars stacked together.

What’s going on? Why the reinvention? Quite simply, in the spirit of continuous improvement, the new GS1 “DataBars” hold a lot more info in a lot less space. This means:

1. All your Chiquita bananas (and other individual fruits & veggies too) may soon sport stylin’ DataBars in addition to the oval blue banana stickers we all know and love. So no more “price check on aisle 4” for that Bosc pear or Rhubarb you’re buying.

2. You can be alerted if something you’re buying is at or past the expiration date, because this info too can be embedded into the DataBar. (In fact, they can be embedded with just about any info, from group lot data to individual serial numbers).

3. In synch with a movement from newspaper to online coupons, you’ll soon be able to easily send electronic coupons to your cell phone and then redeem them by waving your phone over the checkout scanner—the new DataBars are small enough to fit all the necessary redemption info on your screen.

Good invention is good. Good inventions made better – that’s the stuff that really gets our hearts racing.

For more info, click here for a recent New York Times article on these new barcodes.

Today in invention history

We’re always on the lookout for new tools that can help us with invention – be it to enable product development efforts, to inform market research analysis, or simply to motivate us even more about this space we love so much.

In that last area of motivating, we found and wanted to share a fun tool we discovered on the History Channel’s UK website: a “This Day in History” page. Enter a date (month and day) and it will recap all the monumental things that occurred in history on that date. Today, for example, simply within the world of invention and innovation:

April 14, 1970: The Apollo 13 explosion took place. We’re big fans of the movie, but even bigger fans of the “let’s work the problem” spirit demonstrated by the inventive scientists who rolled up their sleeves, brainstormed, bootstrapped, and ultimately did “invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole” to bring our boys safely back to earth.

April 14, 1927: The first Volvo automobile rolled off the assembly line in Sweden. Years in the making, it wasn’t nearly as safe as the Volvos we all know today, but it lay down a foundation for a new movement in crash-resistant cars. Many a lives have since been saved by Volvo’s boxy inventions.

April 14, 1912: The ill-fated Titanic hit that iceberg. Not the world’s finest hour in invention. Yet the legacy has been of great consequence: it led to extensive efforts to invent more secure vessels, parts and configurations. And it broadened the use of then-breakthrough wireless telegraphy devices for communications and the issuing of distress calls.

We’re already looking forward to looking up more stuff tomorrow. But more importantly, what are you doing to add to today’s inventive history? It’s not too late.

What inspires you?

One of the many cool things about invention is that you can find inspiration anywhere, any time, in just about any thing.

That’s why we enjoyed reading about a coffee-drinking doctor (of metallurgy) who looked at the oily film atop yesterday’s coffee and was inspired to develop a new form of biodiesel.

Really. Yesterday’s joe inspired the University of Nevada at Reno’s Dr. Manoranjan Misra, along with two colleagues, to ponder, then explore, and ultimately figure out how to convert used coffee grounds into fuel. Real fuel. To power real cars. And as if that weren’t cool enough, there’s more:

• This new fuel burns with a faint coffee scent (decaf coffee, we guess), compared to other biodiesels and regular gasoline that don’t always smell so nice.
• Whereas other plant-based biodiesel sources like soy use up land and the actual plant, the coffee biodiesel only uses the leftovers that would otherwise be thrown out.
• The coffee biodiesel performs well – no sacrificing on quality here – and would likely cost an estimated $1/gallon to make at a medium-sized processing facility.

Does this mean you'll be able to fill 'er up in more ways than one when you visit your local Starbucks? Only time will tell. We do know that the Starbucks folks in Reno were happy to give the docs used grounds for their research.

To learn more, click here to read The Economist coverage of this story.

The President's "Inventive" Rallying Cry

We have a new US President today.

Putting the politics aside, we were energized to hear President Obama in his inaugural address speak explicitly of our nation’s inventive spirit as a highly valuable resource that cannot be underestimated, nor underutilized, in these difficult times. What he said:

“We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.... Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed, than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat... that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

(You can click here for a full transcript of his speech).

What do you take from these words from our new Inventor-In-Chief? Are you any more (or less) motivated to pursue your invention success? And does President Obama’s call to action lead you to see your invention within a broader context, as part of a broader solution for creating a better nation or world?

And the next big housewares will be....

We just got back from NYC, where we gave a bunch of magazine editors a preview of inventive new household goods we’ll be showcasing at the ginormous International Housewares Show in March.

After a bumpy overnight flight back, we’re a little tired.  But we’re also totally energized.  Why?  Because we had a chance to see a number of other companies’ newest products – they too were trying to grab media attention – and most of their “new” products didn't Wow! us.  We saw a lot of existing things that will be made available in new colors, and small improvements (ie: a slightly smaller iron or slightly more advanced rice cooker) that will certainly serve people well but likely won’t spark shoppers to get truly excited.

In contrast, the inventive goods we put forth – each created by an independent inventor to address a real challenge or problem – go beyond slight improvements to move the needle in a big way.  We think this is ultimately why they’ll be successful.

What’s the point?  It’s not to toot our horn – it’s to toot yours.  Keep inventing.  Highly inventive goods do stand out... and do make a difference.  Perhaps this is why a CBS-FM radio personality, within hours of meeting with us, felt compelled to write us up on his blog. You can click here to check it out.