I thought I'd start a new thread on the topic about the silly ideas. I was thinking of the way that a lot of tech or scientific types often throw out ideas that they think are superfluous or "silly" that are then picked up by marketing types who go on to make fortunes. This often leaves the originator of the idea a little angry and/or bitter. The most famous example is the Rubic cube which was an architect's concept to teach his students to think in 3D. A marketing type picked up on it and Rubic himself never saw a red cent. I've heard rumours that Benton never actually made any money out of the rainbow technique - Chemical Bank held the patent on it. From what I've heard (could be wrong) Benton was not happy about this. At a lesser level, I remember pulling over on a drive from San Francisco to LA around '88 or so, several times to check the map. "Wouldn't it be nice", I thought, "if you could have an onboard computer display that showed a map of the area you were in with a red dot or something to show your position on the map and a line to show your best route." We didn't have GPS's then but I believe boats had something called LORAN? that could give your position from a satellite. Anyway, the first time I saw this, about 1998, in a taxi, I yelled, "I invented that!"
I was wondering what everyone thought about the idea that the tech person never goes on to develop the idea, but an astute marketing person does. Is it fair that the tech who invented it is now shut out of the income? I mention this here because I think that holographers are going to come across this more and more, if they haven't already.
This sort of thing happens all the time. People come up with ideas and either don't have the technical or marketing expertise to make a product out of them. I believe that it also happens that people do have that expertise but it doesn't occur to them how big such a product could be. In my mind the latter is partly marketing expertise because you have to have that sort of mentality to recognize when you've got something sellable.
It happened to me too. Back in '91 I had an idea for a peer-to-peer file sharing application (didn't call it that then, but that's what it was) and didn't pursue it beyond the initial proof of concept stage. Had I known that the Internet was coming to the masses I might have.
Something everyone should keep in mind is that every time you say "I wish I had X" or "I wish (insert product name) did X" you've just identified a product of some kind. There's a good chance that other people will feel the same way (unless you're a complete freak). Write down the idea and pursue it at least on paper.
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If someone says it can't be done but they haven't tried it, don't believe them. http://www.dragonseye.com/Holography
Well, here we are. I too have had many such ideas, some of which I wrote down in "note books" that I have been keeping for over 20 years. Seems Holographers are idea generators but for one reason or another were not able to bring to fruitation the idea.
I have a proposal for the PCG. Why not start a facet of the group that helps promote an idea, holographic or not, into realized income. We could work collectively, speeding the development and marketing. We could have a contract with the members that want to partake with non-disclosure. The contract could also outline the distribution of the income if it comes to light. The idea generator would get the largest percentage with a small percentage going to each of the other participating members and a small percentage going to the group to help further subsequent ideas. This may help fund our holography.
Actually it was the Swedish inventer Håkan Lans who turned the gps system into what it is today. He invented a computer link 22 years ago, called Self Organising Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) datalink, that made it possible not only to see where you are yourself but also where everybody else is, their identities and vectors. He had the patent and worked at it for 18 years but had to give up the patent after request from the UN, so STDMA could turn into a world standard. He was part of inventing the computer mouse, but he sold the patent to Houston Instruments and made no money. The american Douglas Engelbart got the patent for the computer mouse. Nevertheless Lans made a fortune since he invented and got the patent for computer color graphics. One cool thing is that when he was 18 he made a submarine that could dive 110 meters (360 feet).
I thought the Xerox Palo Alto Reseach center invented the mouse?
Interesting about the patent for computer color graphics. Do you mean he invented the RGB pixel system where each pixel is represented by a certain number of bytes divided by three. I used to program the individual pixels in DOS twenty odd years ago using ASM86 and C. Programming Microsoft pixels with it's convoluted logical structure was an excercise in patience. As I remember there were four levels with basic schemes in which you ANDed or ORerd or EXCLSIVE_ORred the various levels to fill the palettes and then you transferred the byte to the appropriate memory-mapped screen location. The way I heard it, Gates was primarily interested in business applications and thought that business types would think of graphics as trivial. When the Apple was getting so popular as a graphics machine, he sort of forced a graphics engine into the BIOS with this terribly convoluted scheme.
