success

how you’ll feel once your idea takes off

Do you have an invention success story that you would like to share? Let us know, email us with your success stories at success@ipexx.com. Below are a few recent articles we hope will inspire you to realize the possibilities of your own idea.

INVENTOR CREATES PRODUCT TO HELP THE BLIND

Visionary Inventor – By Fortune

He revolutionized the way that many blind people read when he invented a machine that scanned printed material and read it aloud, and when Ray Kurzweil sold the device to Xerox for $6 million, he could have retired and lived comfortably off the proceeds. Instead, the restless, ebullient MIT trained engineer and entrepreneur continues to create new products, through a venture that projects $15 million in sales for 2005.

After selling his Reading Machine to Xerox in 1980, Kurzweil grew frustrated by what he saw as the company's increasing emphasis on using the scanning and character-recognition technologies he had developed for purposes that had little to do with the blind. So he founded Kurzweil Educational Systems in Bedford, Mass., in 1996. It quickly developed a new software-based, print-to-speech technology for a new reader for the blind. The Kurzweil 1000 program, which runs on any computer equipped with a scanner, is a more advanced and significantly smaller version of the original reader, which was the size of a washing machine. The new program also lets users access web repositories and convert texts into mp3 audio files. The product sold so well that Kurzweil's company turned a profit its first year. "This application of artificial intelligence really excites me," says Kurzweil, now 57. With only one rival (Freedom Scientific, based in St. Petersburg) offering a similar product and only two firms offering add-on programs for Windows, Kurzweil Educational Systems claims to control 50% of the market.

Kurzweil has developed a spinoff product, the Kurzweil 3000, to help those with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder read and study independently. It translates text into spoken words while simultaneously highlighting on a computer screen the sentences that are being read. With the federal No Child Left Behind Act requiring schools to better educate the rising number of students diagnosed with learning disabilities, some 20,000 schools have purchased a Kurzweil 3000. It costs from $1,500 to $2,700, depending on the number of users and the scanning capabilities.

To help students studying English as a second language, Kurzweil's firm has adapted his software to read languages including French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Ultimately he plans to create customized programs for each language, to target the nearly four million school-age ESL students in the U.S.

Within a few years, Kurzweil also expects to start introducing portable devices for disabled customers. By 2010 he envisions pocket-sized reading machines as well as tiny gadgets that will translate spoken words to text for the hearing impaired—essentially providing subtitles for the world. "Technology," he says, "can prevent a disability from causing an actual handicap."

CAT LOVER TURNED INVENTOR

New Inventor Has Doorstep Cats Love – Palm Beach Post

Remember in that first Alien movie when that killer face-sucking monster embryo bursts out of its shell to attach itself to astronaut John Hurt's face with a wet splat?

I thought of that scene when Stuart inventor Gary Van Vliet held what appeared to be a face-sucking Alien embryo in his hand and smacked it onto a sliding glass door, where it stuck like epoxy.

And here the analogy fails.

Alien embryos grow up to be acid-drooling monsters that erupt from your chest and eat you.

Van Vliet's glass-sucking plastic starfish is a locking device that allows sliding glass doors and windows to open for pets or ventilation while preventing intruder entry. You may see Van Vliet in August when he goes on QVC shopping network and begins hawking the SecureIt gloppy thing.

"I got the idea two years ago," the 44-year-old builder said, "when I was at my mom's house in a body cast recovering from a pretty serious motor scooter accident that hospitalized me for three months."

His mother's two cats were forever wanting in and out of the sliding glass doors. Cat wants in. Cat wants out. Times two.

"It was a pain," Van Vliet said. "She could leave the door cracked, but would have to remember to lock it if she left the house. She did have one of those locking sticks you insert into the crack, but that didn't allow for adjustment, plus you have to stoop to put it in or take it out."

What was needed, June Wheelwright's son decided, was a simple but sturdy doodad in decorator colors that would jam the sliding glass partitions at an opening big enough to allow pets to pass, but too narrow for a house breaker to get in.

"I experimented with acrylic stoppers and suction cups of various sizes and shapes," he said. "They worked, but weren't very attractive. I even tried molding them over sea shells."

Van Vliet showed me some of the earlier models. They were pretty ugly.

The end product is nifty - kind of a jelly starfish-looking dealie, 3 inches across with a suction cup base. Slap that baby to a pane of glass and it won't come off until it thunders.

"Try and pull that off," Van Vliet challenged. Not only could I not force the sliding door open against the SecureIt, I must have pulled with 50 or 60 pounds of force without making it release its suction grip against the glass. And yet by lifting a tab and breaking the suction seal, the device came off easy as pie.

"Ordinarily, you risk breaking a nail inserting your fingers into the door catch," he said. "With the SecureIt, you have a door handle for kids, or you can set it high out of reach of toddlers. You have a lot of versatility."

And, of course, decorator colors in blue, mint green, rose, yellow and clear.

Expect to see Van Vliet and a hyper-caffeinated QVC host demonstrating the door stopper on cable television the first week of August:

"It lets the cat in and out and keeps your home safe! Use it on any slick surface to hang towels, plants and small criminals from the neck until they are dead! Comes in decorator colors and works on any sliding window or door. The SecureIt doubles as a door handle placed high out of reach of toddlers, or placed low so kids can use it without leaving messy fingerprints! It's attractive! It's affordable! It adopts orphans and endows colleges."

Next month, Van Vliet flies to Westchester, Pa., where he will take a QVC class in product presentation. Then, he explained, the inventor and host will tape a presentation, receive a critique from a panel and work on patter and poise until they go live the first week of August.

Delivery of Van Vliet's and Wheelwright's first batch of 5,400 SecureIts is expected next week. Van Vliet took me into a bedroom where he slid up a window until it was stopped by another SecureIt. The window was opened just high enough for a cat to come in and out. The lower part of the screen was slit to make it feline permeable. "Mom leaves the window cracked for cats, but without breaking the window, nobody gets in."

Unless, of course, your cat burglar is an actual cat.

PLASTER TURN INVENTOR WINS NATIONAL PRIZE

Inventor Wins National Prize – Evening Gazette

A bright spark Teesside businessman is today the proud winner of a national award. Glenn Melvin, the Stokesley-based plasterer turned inventor, was honoured for developing Wall-Reform, a thermally efficient insulating plaster/render product.

He collected the Orange Award for Bright Business at The National Business Awards at Grosvenor House in London last night. The award was presented by Alastair MacLeod, vice president Business Solutions Orange UK before a gathering of more than 1,200 business leaders, parliamentarians and other VIPs.

Wall Reform can be used internally or externally and is applied in the same way as ordinary plaster or render.

It is being marketed as a more economical method of insulation initially aimed at the 7m solid wall properties not being insulated due to cost.

It also has damp proofing qualities.