Entrepreneur Quotes

An excellent list of quotes from entrepreneurs and/or on entrepreneurship: Top 20 Entrepreneurship Quotes.

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Fore Inventors Only — Golf Channel

In case you missed it, the Golf Channel has a new show “Fore Inventors Only” directed towards inventors of golf related inventions. 

[It] will uncover the next big thing in golf. Aspiring inventors will showcase their inventions and compete for prizes as they attempt to be the last person standing in the competition. This series will give inventors the opportunity to share their designs with the world, and at the culmination, one product or idea will be selected as the top invention…

The prize package includes: shelf-space for the winning invention within a major national golf-retail outlet; a Golf Channel-produced infomercial; air time for the infomercial on Golf Channel.

More than a thousand inventors auditioned, 103 made it onto the show, and now they are in the process of narrowing the field down 39 inventions that will advance to the “field testing stage” of the competition.  It looks like the most recent episode (covering day two of the narrowing) will be reshown tonight, Saturday and Sunday.  Here’s a link to the Tivo “record this show” page.  The live finale, where the winner is announced, will be September 4. 

What interests me about this show the most is the fact that a local Boise inventor (Dean Thompson, Z Factor Sports, U.S. Patent No. 6,893,356) made the second day cuts, making it into the final 39 and the “field testing stage.”  The Golf Channel page spotlighting his invention can be found here.Additional information about his product can be found at www.perfectputtingmachine.com.  Good luck Dean!

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Our tribute to the working man…Mr. et al.

Viewing our first design in the wtfpatents.com store, I can’t help but think of those Errol Morris ads for Miller High Life from a few years ago. For instance: http://www.errolmorris.com/commercials/miller.html

The design is our tribute to the working man. The average Joe who always gets demoted to “et al.” status on patents while his boss gets his name listed first. Here’s to you Mr. et al.

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“What the Funny…Patents” blog (wtfpatents.com) goes live

For a few years we have irregularly updated one of our side projects…the patent humor site “IP Funny.” Thanks to those of you who have put up with our childish senses of humor (and provided your own funny patents for us to post) over the past couple years.

Recently, we decided it was time to finally get the project its own domain, namely www.wtfpatents.com. The “What the Funny…Patents” site is up already. As soon as I get caught up at home and work, maybe I’ll start irregularly posting again. [The RSS feed remains the same, no need to update.]

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Black History Month: Jack Johnson Patents

A couple of years ago (2005) I had a post entitled Ken Burns and patents which discussed a Ken Burns documentary on Jack Johnson, the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World.  Mr. Johnson was also an inventor, having three issued patents.

My (and my readers’) research turned up the patent numbers of two of the three patents … but that third one has never been found.   Perhaps one of my 2007 readers can find it (or somehow confirm there are just two).

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Diet Coke, Mentos and Lawyers

In a Special Report for BusinessWeek.com, Rachel King describes how a lawyer and a professional juggler became a sensation—and led one of the world’s biggest companies to embrace viral marketing.

One November afternoon in 2005, lawyer Stephen Voltz traveled to the tiny town of Buckfield, Me., to watch his friend, professional juggler Fritz Grobe, perform in a sketch comedy show. While Grobe prepared for that evening’s show at the Oddfellow Theater, Voltz passed the time by dropping Mentos candy into Diet Coke bottles. Just as another friend had predicted, the bottle exploded, releasing a fountain of soda. After doing this experiment several times, both Voltz and Grobe became so intrigued by the effect that they decided to record a video for a segment on that evening’s show. "We kept thinking, are we crazy or is this cool?" says Voltz.

Click here to watch the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video.

Voltz, ever the lawyer, isn’t releasing any financial details of the deal. "I haven’t felt the impact financially," he says. But, he says, he has felt a huge difference in terms of notoriety. For the future, both Voltz and Grobe are brimming with ideas, and they’re eager to continue working with Coke, Mentos, and other companies to create quality online video content. As for Coke, the company says it will continue to spend more ad dollars online. "We really do take it in a serious way and we are absolutely committed to reinventing marketing," says Kopp. "Our percent of ad spending is following consumers online." Voltz says he’s amazed at the potential that viral online videos have created, not only for himself but for his many friends who do sketch comedy. "You don’t have to wait for a Hollywood studio," he says. "Now, if you have work that resonates with others, it’s a lot easier to get to your audience."

Some lawyers are amazing. Others just have amazing clients.

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Pupa, larva and other life stages of inventors

OK…so pupa and larva aren’t two of them, but Bill Meade of BasicIP has the beginnings of an excellent post series up at Rethink(IP).  Entitled "The Six Life Stages of Inventors," it (thusfar) is a fascinating read (Life Stage #1, Life Stage #2).  The series should be required reading for every corporate patent committee.  I won’t ruin the series for you, but will tease you with his six life stages: 

1. Discovery
2. Calibration
3. Status-seeking
4. Mentoring
5. Sensing
6. Senescence

Image via here.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, innovation, inventor, startup

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Invention Promotion Scams and other articles

Interesting article up at LegalZoom:  Invention Submission Companies: Scams or Valuable Services?

LegalZoom (they were a sponsor at BlawgThink, if I remember right) sounds like an interesting concept…trying to find cost effective ways (including helping people do it themselves) to bring legal services to those who can’t afford legal services. 

Other IP articles on the LegalZoom site include:

• Joint Ownership of Patents: A to Z
• Young Inventors…Tomorrow’s Millionaires
• Supreme Court OKs New Product Development Using Patents
• Inventors who lost the race to the patent office
• How Marketing Strategies and Business Models Sunk Peer-to-Peer Technologies in Grokster
• Britney Spears’ Battle Over Song Rights
• Do you lose your copyright when your work is translated?
• Let’s Get Ready to Rumble: Trademarking Your Catch Phrase
• FedEx Furious Over Hand-Crafted Furniture
• Resolving Domain Name Disputes Online: Lay Claim to Your Domain

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the articles: http://www.legalzoom.com/articles/category.asp?iCategory=3

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National Inventor of the Year

The IPO recently presented their National Inventor of the Year Award.  The winner?  The five scientists who discovered and developed Zetia® (ezetimibe), a cholesterol lowering drug.  Congrats to the winners.  See the IPO press release for more details.

[by the way:  w00t!  700th post!]

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Black American Inventors

Sorry I’m late in posting this..but the Patent Pending blog (written by my law partner Robert Shaver) has had some really great posts about famous black American inventors in the past few weeks (February was Black History Month…).  Here are a couple of said posts:  Jerry M. Certain and Issac Johnson.  Bob is quite the bicycle history nut…if your a bicyclist, you might check out Bob’s blog.

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