Website Pitches Scientific Solutions In Search of Problems

ananyo writes "In this age of social media, innovators eager to develop high-tech products are tapping into the wisdom of crowds to solve problems, with crowdsourcing sites such as Innocentive and Kaggle offering cash prizes for answers to science or data questions. The launch this week of a site called Marblar is turning this model on its head. Marblar gives scientists a space to tout solutions that have yet to find their problem (it's not in beta, despite the redirect). Members, who can come from any background, are invited to publicly discuss potential uses for patented discoveries made in research laboratories that as yet may not have led to real-world applications. Every suggestion at Marblar is posted on a public forum alongside video interviews with the scientists and explanations of their work. Website visitors suggest applications and vote them up and down, and the scientists behind the discovery are encouraged to take part in the discussion. Popular suggestions are recognized with a points system (denoted by marbles — hence the name) and, in some cases, small cash prizes. A trial run seems to have been pretty successful."

Comments

Is a new use grounds for a new patent claim?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Is this just a giveaway to the patent owners?

Re:Is a new use grounds for a new patent claim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which would you rather see: patents being licensed to the benefit of the licensor and licensee, or unlicensed patents falling into the hands of patent trolls to be used for litigation at a later date?

The former is probably more viable to the economy, even if the patents are flimsy, because it offers greater predictability. It may also serve to drive royalties down since alternative solutions to problems will gain better recognition. There is also a potential to expose patents based upon trivial ideas or prior art since there will be more eyes examining them.

Re:Would crowdsourcing really work?

[xs650]

I'm a little skeptic too, but they don't need an intelligent crowd, they only need a crowd with the right intelligent person in the crowd.

wait... what?

[viperidaenz]

How did they file a patent for an invention if they don't know what they're inventing?

Re:wait... what?

[nnnnnnn]

See Gorilla Glass

----Corning experimented with chemically strengthened glass in 1960, as part of an initiative called "Project Muscle". Within a few years it had developed what it named "Chemcor" glass. Corning could find no practical use for the glass at the time and the predecessor of "Gorilla Glass" was never put into mass production, excepting its use in approximately one hundred 1968 Dodge Dart and Plymouth Barracuda race cars, where the reduced weight was key.[5]

In 2006, while developing the first iPhone, Apple discovered that keys placed in a pocket with the prototype could scratch its hard plastic surface – and resolved to find a glass sufficiently scratch-resistant to eliminate the problem.[6][7] When Steve Jobs subsequently contacted Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning told him of the material the company had developed in the 1960s and subsequently mothballed. Despite the CEO's initial concern over whether the company could manufacture sufficient quantities for the product debut, Jobs convinced Weeks to produce the glass, and Corning's factory in Harrodsburg, Kentucky supplied the screens for the product's release in June 2007.[5] Corning further developed the material for a variety of smartphones and other consumer electronics devices for a range of companies.[8][3][9]

Re:wisdom of crowds

[nnnnnnn]

Right, because 1 person is better than a 1000 at problem solving and arriving at the correct solution. Are you that 1 person by any chance?

----At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, eight hundred people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the mean of all eight hundred guesses, at 1197 pounds, was closer than any of the individual guesses to the true weight of 1198 pounds.[4] This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the mean centered near the true mean of the quantity to be estimated.[3]

----"Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" was a simple show in terms of structure....she could poll the studio audience, which would immediately cast its votes by computer. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.

----The sociologist Kate H. Gordon asked two hundred students to rank items by weight, and found that the group's "estimate" was 94 percent accurate, which was better than all but five of the individual guesses. In another experiment students were asked to look at ten piles of buckshot—each a slightly different size than the rest—that had been glued to a piece of white cardboard, and rank them by size. This time, the group's guess was 94.5 percent accurate. A classic demonstration of group intelligence is the jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment, in which invariably the group's estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran the experiment in his class with a jar that held 850 beans, the group estimate was 871. Only one of the fifty-six people in the class made a better guess.

I don't get you

[Taco Cowboy]

Which would you rather see: patents being licensed to the benefit of the licensor and licensee, or unlicensed patents falling into the hands of patent trolls to be used for litigation at a later date?

What makes you think that the patents in question won't fall into the hands of patent trolls at a later date?

Take this scenario for example -

I have 3 patents under my name, and I am earning some royalties out of the patents that I owned.

I feel that my patents can do more but unfortunately I can't think of anything else right now.

So ... I tout my patents on Marblar and I, the patent holders, got free suggestions from visitors to the site.

I shift through all those suggestions and found some gems. I immediately start to license my patents to cover the new fields that I hadn't thought of.

Who's winning? Me, the patent holder.

I'm making more money.

Who's losing? The world - now that someone out there has to pay more to do stuffs that was used to do without having to pay anybody.

And that's not all ...

Because my patents are worth MORE with the new applications, some patent troll offers to pay me a lot more for my 3 patents.

I took the $$ and they got my patents, and they immediately file lawsuits against any Tom, Dick and Harry that they can locate.

The existence of Marblar isn't going to help protect patents from patent trolls. It may have an adverse effect - by making patents worth more, and thus, more inventors might start considering selling their patents to the patent trolls.

Marblar!

[wonkey_monkey]

Marblar sounds like a great marblar. I was just talking to Marblar the other marblar, who has always wanted a marblar for his marblar.