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Showing posts from April, 2011

My first book published on Amazon Kindle

The provisional patent Fallacy.. and why it’s all good news is my first published book on Amazon. I’d love to hand out some discount coupons to many of you so you can have a look without the full retail expense of USD$9.99 but Amazon doesn't cater to that service unlike iTunes unfortunately. What’s the book about? Basically it addresses what I feel is the fallacy that you have to pay for what amounts to a full patent application just to get patent protection while you explore the invention and its opportunities. The whole idea of the provisional patent was for you to find out if you have a commercially viable idea BEFORE you have the full expense of a patent… but somehow this wonderful provision by the patent office has been completely nullified by the practise of submitting provisional patents that have taken as much work as full applications to produce… this is bunkum! As a taster I have included the first chapter here for you to read if you think you may like to downlo

Innovation Festival–My privilege to help kick-off

Just now I got back from doing the keynote speech for the Innovation Festival that will run over the next month in the North Coast area of New South Wales. As usual I tried to make the talk about the audience and not just Ric pushing one of his pet agenda’s and it seemed to work well. We explored two areas around innovation: Answering the question “What is innovation?” and; For maximum innovation how important it is to do what you do best and find team mates and partners who compliment your strengths to bring maximum impact to your innovations. In one interesting section of the talk I asked the audience to tell us about the top two problems they have in their business… I was really surprised to find that many of the answers showed that people were really actively solving problems for their businesses and most were really clued in on how to get solutions. One lady taught health and safety using mannequins to simulate CPR as she travelled around Australia and her bigges

A new patent licensing model – SELL A BOOK!

Traditional patent licensing is a pretty complicated and long winded affair.  Some big hearted souls even go through the cost, expense and work of a patent only to end up making it public domain… good for them but not really the point of getting patent protection. So what can be done to make money from your invention that fills the space between full commercial licenses and giving away licences. Here is my idea: Include a licence with the cost of purchasing a book. Wha? Yes, include the cost of a patent licence when you sell a book about your invention. Still confused?   Think about this. Besides the few dozen companies that may ultimately pay  a decent royalty for your invention there may be literally thousands of people who may want to use your idea for their own project. How do you give them a relatively cheap way to licence your patent AND give them all the info they need to understand and implement your patent? The answer is obvious when you think about it. An eBook.

Collaberative Location finding for mobile devices

Over a week ago a gentleman approached me about his idea of an application to help people collaborate and share information and a common phone based experience while sharing the same event or location. The idea really needed a way of using a combination of location data to refine how each device determines its location. The result of that session was a collaborative location finding system that I am in the middle of doing a provisional filing for... its one of those things that you think would be pretty obvious but no one seems to have done. I will supply more details once the business paperwork and prov patent filing are complete, but it's really exciting.

LESANZ dinner guest speaker

LESANZ is the License Executives Association of Australia and New Zealand, but as the world chairman of the Society agreed with me, it’s more likely Society of Professionals who make a living from Intellectual Property… I had no idea who was going to be in the room when I came to speak. During the day leading up to speaking I found out that Judge Randall Rader (from the Uniloc appeal court hearing) was going to be in the audience as was going to be most of Sydney’s IP elite. The location was just spectacular. With the backdrop of the City’s Woolloomooloo district and surrounded by excellent art I waffled on about some of the stories from my Uniloc days, some recent work with Fortescue Metals and some ideas about how to capitalize on Australia’s heritage as a nation of tinkerers and how rosy the future is when we have to rely on the collective Australian brain when our back yard of minerals starts to run out or lose it’s attractiveness. What a great night.

My mate Matt–Entrepreneur of the year

Last Thursday, after running late to be a panel member at the SydStart conference in Sydney, I sat down next to monster entrepreneur Matt Barrie (on stage), only to find his face looking up at me from the panel table. What a great achievement... good on you Matt. Matt and I started our friendship/ rivalry back in 2010 at the Funding Connect event in the Quay in Sydney... a good natured argument broke out about how Aussies are not aware of their strengths because our culture teaches us to think of ourselves as the same as everybody else... Matt's argument was "everyone can do what he did... it's easy". The audience sided with me that “no... sorry we are not all super proactive leader types”... and “no... most of us need to partner with guys like Matt to make something really happen...”… since then a lot of others have sided with my side of the argument to the amusement of most people that know Matt and I. As a result Matt wrote this little ditty on the copy of the
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