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Bootstrapping a New Technology?
djk1024 writes "I've just filed for a patent on a new approach to motion capture that is simple, cheap, easy, accurate, and portable. It's RF-based, accurate to 1 mm, and simple enough that a sophisticated hobbyist could build one in a couple weekends from plans and standard electronics. So now what? I quit my job and have been working on this full-time for the past couple of years; now I'm out of money so can't continue development on my own. I'm also not an electrical or RF guy so I can't carry out my own independent development on the electronics. I'm quite frustrated at this point. I've been in the software development field for over 30 years and have gone through a large number of startups, but always just as the head techie, and always as part of a team. This doing it alone sucks. I would love some advice on how best to go forward."
The buyer may offer you a job, which seems to be what you want.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
http://www.score.org/index.html
Seriously, get some help. Asking "techies" is, as you probably are quickly finding out, the absolute wrong way to get good business advice.
Put Linux on it, fire up emacs and send a letter to Microsoft telling them to screw themselves.
Yep, that ought to do it.
If you hadn't patented it, that is. Instead, if a hobbyist tried to do that, you could sue him.
Thanks.
1. Get a job (solve cash flow situation first)
2. Preferably somewhere with people you can recruit into your endeavor
3. Recruit people to help you from your job or from anywhere you can find them (meetup?)
4. Find investors if money is needed, or do it organically with money from your own job
5. Finish the prototype/proof of concept
6. Shop around to interested buyers
7. Profit?
Most importantly you need more eyes on what you're doing for the sanity check. People in the business which you will be selling or licensing this to.
Would you mind just open sourcing this? I've been wanting something like this for a really long time to do an open source movie.
Right now, artists from a lot of different domains can participate in open-source culture. There's open source music, open source art, open source writing, etc. The one 'media' where creators cannot participate in open source is movement -- dance, martial art, acting, miming, etc -- because there's no cheap way to digitize their work. If you open sourced your work you would change things forever. You would be like the guy who invented the computer or the printing press. I know the American dream is to invent something in your basement and become a millionaire, and I'd like that for you, but maybe things are changing in this day and age.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"RF-based, accurate to 1mm" .... "I'm not an electrical or RF guy"
So if you don't know the radio technology, how can you know that it is accurate to 1mm and be able to adequately describe the patent for the application?
I always thought this was insightful, but never could test that belief: Top Ten Geek Business Myths:
Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
The actual blog has much more in-depth explanations of the myths. And, it has a special Bonus Myth!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Read "The Art of the Start", and look at www.svase.org.
How did you manage to invent this if you're not an electrical or RF guy?
Great idea.
With RF, you also eliminate issues with hiding the normal lights/reflectors with clothing/costumes, etc. As I understand at the moment, motion capture is done with an actor in a leotard to avoid these problems. With RF, you open up new possibilities of filming a real actor in real costume, and being able to motion detect them in real time. I'm not quite sure what you'd do with it, but that's why I'm an engineer and not a "creative" type.
Frankly, you need help. You're not going to successfully develop a product from this on your own. Give up on the "lone wolf" approach - you're not gonna make it.
Find a VC who understands the motion picture industry, and has contacts there. Sell out, keeping whatever percentage you can. Let the VC help you find the managers and developers necessary to take this to the next level - either as a standalone product or a technology for sale.
Alternatively, take what you have to ILM or Pixar or Disney or whoever. You'll have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone to do this; once again, a VC could help you with that.
JMHO.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Techies starting companies tend to only focus on the technology as a game changer, without capturing the essence of being an entrepreneur. It sounds trite, but you really have to remember all you are trying to do is sell something to someone that really needs it. So have said that: 1) You've got to know who you are selling to and what you are selling 2) There must be an innovation at the core (you seem to have this) 3) You have to be able to mind everything else, which is why you need at least one trusted partner, and no, that doesn't mean a friend or work colleague - often a huge mistake of choices. Read a lot of what Union Square Ventures have to say: http://unionsquareventures.com/ Now, with the tiny slice of information you've offered, you may have customers in a wide variety of industries, not just entertainment. What about Health Care? How about Sports (teaching golf swings for example). By working up a sales plan (not a technology plan) several times over (there are many processes for doing this, you'll find out) you will get a much better idea of who will really pay as customers to help fund your venture. Customer money is very good money for a start up.
You've spent two years on this, and only now getting into the patent? You should be prepared for disappointment. The odds are very high that someone has already patented your exact idea, especially if it's something that you could figure out with no prior RF electronics experience. It's difficult to let go of something that you've put your heart into for so long, but you need to be prepared to do that if you run into problems. Otherwise it could drag you even further down.
You need help for the business side or else someone is going to rip off your idea, make minor changes patent that and commercialize it right out from under you. Since you don't have any staff your the best option might be licensing to someone, but you'll need help to find the right someone. If you don't license you'll need way more people and a VC or other funding source to get it off the ground at any volume. The more revolutionary the product the more you need money to defend it.
SCORE would be a reasonable place to go. Stay well away from 'invention companies' or at least any that demand up front fees. By filing the patent you've started the clock so you are going to have to move fast. Expect to have two jobs for a while until funding comes through - one job makes money to pay the rent and the other is searching for the right way to harvest this technology.
The other option might be a partner - IF you know anyone you can trust from your other startups who can deliver the right expertise.
A quick technical question, could this provide position monitoring for indoor robots or rovers? There's not much in the market, what is there tends to be hacked together and/or expensive.
So you've got a "great idea" about how to do this but you're "not an RF guy". $50 says your "great idea" is one of the following:
Note that even trying to find your application turns up a number of older apps (2007 and 2004) that seem to have the same idea.
If I had something like this, I would call up Paul Graham at Y Combinator... This is the sort of thing he (angel) invests in.
Disclaimer: I don't have a business relationship with those guys. I just find his articles really insightful and interesting. You might too. Start with this one The 18 mistakes that kill startups ... Being a "Single Founder", like yourself, is his first point.
Good luck! I hope you find a lot of success in this
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
You've 30 years experience, been in several start-ups, and remain clueless about what's next. So you are clearly not the one to drive a new company. Make a "short list" of people you know who were principals of the previous start-ups - people you respect for their business knowledge and accomplishments. Ask them for advice. Do have a working prototype of the invention? Have you done a patent search to see if your invention is novel? If I were you, while I was doing this, I would get a day job, unrelated to your invention, and spend my spare time writing some software (your field) to go with your prototype.
I gave up on reading all the comments. A lot of cynics, and a lot of people knocking the guy. Yet it is people like this who have historically driven so much innovation. So he's focused on product, and not on all the structure around it, which may or may not be his downfall. Is this such a bad thing? It is not a product driven by marketing, but by engineering, and these types of product are becoming harder and harder to come by. To the AC who said "You are at the blunt end of failure and you want help from slashdot." - having a functioning example is far from the blunt end, which is populated by those who can't quite make their products work. Sure, the guy has limited business nous, but at least he knows enough to know he needs help to go further. If one was to take the majority of comments here on slashdot seriously, almost everyone has startling intellect and experience in all fields pertaining to the world.
The Mothership
This is late in the thread, this post will probably not be modded up. I hope you read it nonetheless.
You need PARTNERS! There are four planks to a well-run business, and they are: 1) Technical, 2) Operations/support, 3) Legal, 4) Finance.
You need to 1) Produce the product, 2) Support the product and the staff who do 3) CYA, 4) Count the money made.
It really is as simple as that. Since you provide #1, you either need to provide 2, 3, and 4 yourself, or find others who can provide them. I was in a position like you some 8 years ago. I had some interesting technology for application development that I thought was useful. I tried to go it alone for a year or two, and had only limited success.
But then I took a community business training class called "V3", run through my local college, that taught me the basics of running a startup business. They actually had a worksheet that you could use to evaluate the likelihood of success of your business. It was hard to swallow to realize that my odds of success were somewhere around 8%.
So I realized that I needed partners. And partners I found. Good partners, that, between the 4 partners, actually covered all four bases very nicely. And it's been a very well balanced company - not a single down quarter in 6+ years, and 40% to 70% annual growth.
We chose to grow organically rather than go the sudden rush/VC route, and we've done well with it.
Find partners who are decent, who you can trust, who are motivated and professional. If you do, you'll never regret it.
I wish you the best of luck.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The submitter asked for advice. The advice given by the OP is to sell the patent, which implies finding a buyer.
I mean, seriously... it's not that hard to understand. If I suggest to you "Hey dude... sell your car" would you respond with "Sell it? Did I say there was a buyer? How am I going to sell my car if I don't already have a buyer lined up? After all, it's completely impossible to desire to sell something first, then to take the steps necessary to market a given product or service out there, from which a buyer might self-identify. I mean, you can't just put an advertisement in an online service such as Craigslist offering to sell your product when you don't have any buyers!"
Dennis,
If you would provide an email address, or another way to get in touch with you -- outside this public forum -- I can give you pointers on how to go about this. I have a lot of experience in this area. You are in a unique position in that you have an idea that you believe works -- based on prototypes -- but you lack a business case and at the moment a complete product. What you need to do is basically show people that this is not just an idea and that it is feasible to move forward with this. I understand that you've built a prototype and have a patent but that it is still not engineering proven -- which makes it risky.
There are ways of further developing this, and marketing it to other companies as IP or as a dev kit with licensing/integration option.
You have to dot the i's and cross the tee's before someone will look at it as a viable technology. Doing so may not be as difficult as it seems depending on what you've done so far. To use a familiar analogy: think of it as having built an engine but only having a command line front-end, wrapping a GUI around it may not be technically difficult but it has to be done correctly from a UI perspective for your first demo to wow the user.
You are in a very good position since you've applied for a patent. That makes it easier to talk to other people. I'd also like to remind you to always get an NDA before talking in detail to anyone.
As I said, I'd like to get in touch with you to discuss this further or at least take up an hour or two of your time in exchange for $0.02 of advice.
-Arvin
And this is exactly why I don't thing software patents make any sense.
Part of the problem is that it does not cover an implementation (i.e. a solution to a problem, e.g. a paper clip is an implementation of a solution to keep two pieces of paper temporarily together without damaging them, but there are other ways to do so). Software patents cover only the idea (in this case "we can hold two pieces of paper together without damaging them"). A paperclip is not copyrightable on the other hand. Everyone could copy the paperclip but only sell it freely after the patent on this invention expired. That is a long time ago so now everyone can make paperclips.
Patents are supposed to cover solutions, not problems. An algorithm may be such a solution (e.g. an algorithm to compress audio with relative little loss: the mp3 compression), but then that is a mathematical algorithm and as such not patentable (at least under the original patent agreements - at least in the US it is patentable). This I would seriously call a matter of debate whether such an algorithm should be patentable, as it comes quite close to a technical device. The actual implementation of such a compression algorithm would fall under copyright again. So in the US, mp3 compression is patented, and on top of that implementations are copyrighted. So to use an implementation one would have to get a patent license and a copyright license (and possibly pay for that). Without the patent it would be OK to figure out how the software works (reverse engineering, another thing that was explicitly allowed and even encouraged under the original patent agreements), and then create a separate implementation by yourself. Then you create a new implementation, you have the copyright, but you may have to pay patents still nowadays in the US.
Patents, also software patents, do not contain complete source code as far as I know. These patent an idea (the "single click sales" patent to name an infamous one), just an idea, not an implementation of the idea. Even when a software patent expires there will not be any source code that suddenly appears in the public domain as code falls under copyright.
When open sourcing your software it still falls under copyright. Even if MS would open source Windows and publish the source code, that would not necessarily mean you can copy it and give it to someone else. They can tell you what you can do with it and what not. MS still has the copyright. The Linux kernel is open source and also copyrighted: by many different people, all covered by the GPL allowing copying and redistribution under certain conditions.
in the title
Talk to Bunny:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/
Bunny is the guy who did the incredible XBox reverse engineering way back when. Since then, he's gone on to work for the Chumby guys. He loves open source, is brilliant, has huge experience getting hardware built, and is a pretty cool guy.
Take a look at his blog and read about his experience in China, lining up manufacturers for the Chumby. Also, his discussion of the Shenzhen hardware/software wizards is mind-bending....
You people should encourage entrepreneurship. Not only he had a great idea, he has actually made it real and had the balls to quit his job in pursue of his dream. Way much more that many of the rest here has ever done with their lives.
You have to relax and take a step back. Get yourself out of the day-to-day in order to reevaluate your position.
I would recommend you this book:
Little Black Book of Entrepreneurship
BTW I'm not affiliated or anything. It's just is the best book about the matter I've ever read.
and continue it in the body
Q: what's even more annoying than top-posters?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For a short term solution, I can help you get funding that will probably take you through the next 12 to 18 months if that will help.
For a long term solution, you need to start making contacts with hardware makers and license it out. Unless you know how to run a business, you don't want to run the business. Let someone else run the business and send you a check. One key is to retain a good contract lawyer to look over your contract. A lot of companies will screw you six ways from Sunday if you let them and you can bet that they have lawyers writing their contracts for them. The better companies will fix any contract "problems" your lawyer finds.
Also, watch ABC's Shark Tank (on Sundays or on the ABC site). Watch the show to learn what the investors are looking for and why they offer the deals they offer. One of the lessons you learn each week is: do you want to make $1M or do you want to run your company into the ground. When they ask for 51% of the company they aren't being greedy (well, except for the bald guy in the center). They know that they know how to run the business in a way that will make money and that the business owner does not.
Jeff Miller
http://www.assistsolar.com
http://businesscredittips.weebly.com