Just a little update on the progress of my latest invention zkimmer. It is a concept built on map tiling but using publication graphics rather than map graphics… its working great.
Since I did the patent 4 months ago we know have some real support from an industry veteran and talking to big names in the newspaper and magazine publishing businesses.
As things develop we’ll keep you informed.
Update: 4/4/08 - Visitors please note… a new zkimmer site is up please have a look at http://db.zkimmer.com
I don’t know about you but one of the big frustrations about technology is that nothing equals the organic feel of a pen and paper. Even then US letter size paper is sooooooo restrictive and investing the time to somehow get it into a digital form for archiving, retrieval, reference and sharing just perpetuates the great divide between the organic and creative inspiring analog and the powerful, shareable, flexible and retrievable nature of digital idea capturing.
Enter the idea of a Muse Station™.
Simply it’s the use of:
a large drawing tablet (mine is 19”x24”) with
a sketching clipboard (Pearl Art & Craft have one for $10 that fits these size tablets that is 23”x26”). I keep the tablet by my bed so I see it when I first get up and its easy enough to use in the car, sitting in the lounge etc.
I use the station for capturing and refining ideas and concepts and fleshing them out. The large white space is inspiring and allows continual refinement and development of ideas.
Here is a picture of a concept outline I started on:
And another pic with a link to the sketch clipboard at Pearl art and craft.
The next stage of the project is getting this analog concept capturing into digital form which is the next phase of the project… Ill link the next episode to this article for those interested.
I wanted to clarify my idea which I have patent pending and am now in alpha.
It is to do a truly live (as in realtime) audio feed to a blog site with chat based feedback… its for when bloggers are at their computer… and they wish to welcome visitors as they come to their site…
Here is how it works:
A widget on the bloggers desktop goes to “live” when the widget senses that the blogger is using the computer. The widget can be set to do not disturb or bust also. A swf player on the blog page goes to “live” mode and waits for a visitor to open the page… upon opening the page a cue is sent to the bloggers computer in realtime with the ip of the visitors computer. The blogger can can have a script to read or can just say “hi, my name is xx im available if you want to discuss any article.”
There is a simple universal chat app on the page… one that shows the typing of all visitors to the page as they add comments in real time.
The blogger answers via streaming mp3 voice and the visitor comments via chat.
I am working on a simple streaming media server edition and also a plugin for skype.
What do you think of my idea?
Back in 1995 an opportunity came up to do a world first… combine a popular computer game AND digital music onto one CD. The game was an unlockable Uniloc-enabled copy of shoot-em-up DOOM and the music of the popular pop group Kulcha.
The idea was that the CD was purchased for the music and every buyer would get the opportunity to install and try the game DOOM as an added bonus. The game would only work for the first few levels of the game but would have to be purchased by getting an unlock code over the phone to play the game fully. It really worked well because the same kids that got into Kulcha aslo were only starting to get into computer games.
The album was set to be released by Warner Music but there was one big problem. When a CD player started playing it would try to play the game data which sounded like million gnats flying out your speakers and did real speaker damage.
A simple invention that I unfortunately never patented was the idea of hiding the game data from the CD players index, thereby tricking the player to see the fist track as the fisrt music track rather than the data. It worked. And the Kulcha CD was a success.
The CD was used as a lead component in a presentation to visiting Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, and resulted in an invitation to Ric to come visit the fortune 100 company later that year.
From the Uniloc website:
Device locking was invented by Uniloc’s founder, Ric Richardson, in 1992. Uniloc was subsequently granted the seminal device locking patent in 1996: US 5,490,216; System for Software Registration.
Today, Uniloc has over 10 related patents pending which leverage the power of device locking into several new markets and applications.
This is my first and most well known patent written back in 1992 in Australia and granted in the US in 1996. The patent covers the concept of locking a specific software licesne to a specific machine. This approach has been used by most of the world’s top software publishers and is even beginning to be used to secure financial and banking web transactions.
Ric has been working on businesses that exploit the patent ever since he invented the concept in 1992.
Seth Godin captures the thoughts of Jon a New Zealander that there is a very real tendency to gravitate to a warm blooded human voice wherever possible. Then I got to thinking….
What if a blogger featured a constant realtime feed to their blog, where a visitors presence was notified to the blogger (by a door open chime like in a store front) and they introduced themselves to the visitor and invited a chat or better still a skype conf… and as soon as the demand exceeded the bloggers capacity to support additional blog concierges could take over… got me thinking… maybe I can get a prototype going… please comment here if you would like to try something like this out… Im willing to do the work if there is enough interest.
I came up with a simple fix for addressing the ongoing problem of side mirror blind spots… see the attached photo… the problem to date is that the only way to see the “blind-spot” (ie the area beside a moving car that most side mirrors cant display) is to place a little spherical bubble mirror some place on the side mirror. The mini mirror is too small to see properly and does not give a clear image of what is beside you… as the example drawing shows, by simply adding an angled extension to the existing side mirror the problem is solved simply and elegantly.. plus its easy to manufacture…. the solution also doesnt change the magnification ratio or depth of field for the driver looking at the mirror. All in all it’s a simple approach that seems not to have been done before.
