If she has her way, power cords will be a thing of the past

WASHINGTON — Wireless Internet seemed like science fiction at one point; now, it’s everywhere. And now a California woman wants to make wireless charging just as commonplace.

Meredith Perry, 25, founded the uBeam company, and she’s working to make truly wireless charging a reality.

Right now, a form of wireless charging exists, but you still have to have your device – your phone, tablet or whatever – in contact with a charging pad. What Perry’s working toward is even less restrictive than that – electrical outlets would be replaced by uBeam transmitters.

“You’ll wake up and just go through your day with your device and it will be charging in your house, in your car, at your bus stop, at your gym, in your hotel,” Perry tells USA TODAY. “We want to be absolutely everywhere. And wires won’t be anywhere.”

The transmitter is a thin square that emits ultrasonic frequencies that are picked up by a uBeam receiver shaped like a smartphone case.

Perry tells USA TODAY she wants it to replace all power cords, not just chargers for wireless devices. She’s still a few years from being market-ready, but she’s got faith in her big idea.

“What I’ve seen over the years is people making tiny improvements in existing technology as opposed to saying, ‘Let’s throw this all out and do something new,'” she says.

A lot of serious tech types believe in Perry: Columnist Walter Mossberg challenged her to make a prototype after she won an invention competition as a University of Pennsylvania student; she’s gotten seed money from Mark Cuban, Marissa Mayer and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and a $10 million investment from Upfront Ventures.

David Green a London-based research manager, tells USA TODAY that the demand is there: Pad-based wireless charging was a $213 million market in the U.S. in 2013, but that should grow to about $10 billion in five years.

“I would think the key for uBeam will be to first prove they’re a viable solution, and then tie in with one of the big guys” such as Apple or Google, Green says.

Mark Suster, of Upfront, says that’s in the works.

“There is not a major player out there (in the tech space) that hasn’t spent time trying to see how they can partner with us.”

Suster likens Perry to Apple legend Steve Jobs or Tesla founder Elon Musk in her ability to think big and get people to believe in her.

“She makes you feel that even if what she’s shooting for here is difficult, you want to work with her to get it done.”

Perry’s other ideas are even bigger — someday, if she has her way, we’ll be commuting to work in small blimps and communicating by holograms.

Via Washington's Top News

Google Doodle Celebrates the Inventor of the First Electrical Battery

Today's Google Doodle celebrates Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Gerolamo Umberto Volta, whose exceedingly long name is now remembered in the volt, a measure of the electric charge transmitted between two points. 

Volta and colleague Luigi Galvani first noted the phenomenon while dissecting a frog. When they touched the metal scalpel to the brass mounts connected to the frog, the leg twitched. Galvani and Volta argued over the cause, with Galvani claiming the animal was generating the electricity and Volta saying the frog was simply conducting it. 

This eventually led to the voltaic pile, a stack of alternating zinc and silver discs with a brined cloth between them. Volta showed that the pile could produce electricity, modeling it after a torpedo fish electric organ, according to the American Physical Society. The early crude voltaic pile was eventually refined, forming the foundation of the battery as we know it and making Volta a pioneer in our understanding of electricity. 

Today would have been Volta's 270th birthday, and Google's new hire Mark Holmes wanted to make his project pay appropriate tribute to Volta. 

"I didn't want to settle on using Volta's portrait for the Doodle, especially since most of the world wouldn't recognize him," Holmes tells PM in an email. "Instead I wanted to represent his work, and as a globally significant figure I also wanted give a little life to the Doodle with simple animation that would literally highlight his invention while hopefully inspiring curiosity about it."

He started sketching out the Doodle, taking inspiration from Victorian magazine covers and posters of the time, appreciating their "dimensionality and dynamic layout." He set to work:

After deliberation, Holmes arrived at a simplified design based around those posters.  He set about accentuating them with arc lights, which were one of the few widespread electrical applications at the time. 

"I added electrical gauges, or voltmeters which would animate with the stack," Holmes says. "In keeping with the spirit of my reference, I also wanted a lot of type elements and put in Volta's name and the year he invented the battery."

Eventually, he would jettison the voltmeters because they hadn't been invented yet in Volta's time. He animated the discs to stack up like a voltaic pile, with letters illuminated by arclight growing in strength as more discs are added to the pile. Holmes also added effects to make the creation resemble old newspapers at the time, giving it a vintage look and feel: 

The end result is a pretty impressive tribute to an obscure (to some) figure in the history of science who laid the foundation for the battery, a device we all use today. As you charge your laptop or phone today, think of Volta. 

Via Popular Mechanics

Inventor builds a `Star Trek` medical tricorder-like device to measure vitals


The legendary 'Tricorder' from the movie Star Trek is now a real medical device that can scan your vitals. In 2013, Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian entrepreneur, came up with the idea after his son suffered brain damage from a fall. He then raised US $1.6 billion from through crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo to fund a medical device that worked like the Star Trek tricorder. Brouwer even named it after the grumpy doctor who used in on the iconic show, the "McCoy Home Health Tablet," the CNN reported.

The legendary 'Tricorder' from the movieStar Trek is now a real medical device that can scan your vitals. In 2013, Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian entrepreneur, came up with the idea after his son suffered brain damage from a fall. He then raised US $1.6 billion from through crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo to fund a medical device that worked like the Star Trektricorder. Brouwer even named it after the grumpy doctor who used in on the iconic show, the "McCoy Home Health Tablet," the CNN reported.

The Scanadu Scout, as the device is called, works by placing it on a patient's forehead. In a matter of seconds, a sensor measures vitals such as heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen levels. It even provides a complete ECG reading. The readings are beamed to the connected app on your smartphone via Bluetooth, which then points out any measures that are out of the ordinary. The device is will be shipped to it's backers in march, but won't be available for retail until it clears FDA regulations. You can find out more about the Scanadu Scout here.

Via DNA

'Sock Spot' solves problem of lost socks in dryer

It sticks to the side of the dryer with suction cups and has five clips that hold the single socks until their match is found.

It's a universal problem that most people can relate to. What to do with the lone sock that's left in the dryer?

But one local man has come up with an answer to that question.

As part of a New Year's resolution a few years ago, Niel Pierson created a tool called "The Sock Spot."

"It has been incredibly grueling and arduous, but no regrets," he said with a smile recently at his father's home in Metairie.

The spark of the idea started for Pierson when he was growing up in this house.

"The idea originally was my dad's," he explained. "We had one as a kid, and it was this funky thing that he constructed."

But it wasn't until years later, when his son needed it, that necessity really turned out to be the mother of invention.

"When you can't get something your kid needs, you go a little nuts," Pierson said.

Roman Pierson is 10 years old. He loves loves flags and can name every state capitol. He also has autism, and Pierson said medical bills started piling up.

"When I was no longer able to pay it, when I had done every song and dance for the therapist and had begged and borrowed from my family, we finally hit the wall," he said of the moment he decided he needed to make a change in his life.

And that's what brought Pierson to his New Year's resolution.

He started with his own funky prototype, and turned it into an interactive tool aimed at the whole family.

"The message is of tidiness, organization and to pick up your stuff," he said with a laugh.

It's a simple, but ingenious, idea for that lone sock left in the dryer, and it's called "The Sock Spot."

It sticks to the side of the dryer with suction cups and has five clips that hold the single socks until their match is found.

But Pierson didn't stop there.

"I called my friend Derek Comisky, who's an illustrator, and he's a teacher, actually, at Christian Brothers," Pierson said.

Together, they created a children's book to go along with "The Sock Spot". From there, it turned into a family affair.

"Roman and Paisley have a dog named Meanie Weenie. Meanie Weenie loves dirty socks," Jan Pierson read aloud to the couple's two children.

Both Roman and little sister, Paisley, star in the story. Roman goes on an adventure after their dog takes off with one of his socks.

Along the way, he meets all kinds of helpful Cajun-inspired creatures, including a crawfish and a lazy lizard.

"With names like Couyon, T-Boy, Lay-Zay. Yeah, it's a Louisiana theme," Jan explained.

Of course, the kids have their favorite character.

"It's going to have to be Meanie Weenie," said 8-year-old Paisley. "I'm in love with dogs."

All of the characters are featured on the sock spot clips.

"People lose a lot of socks, so we made big, kid-friendly, cute clips," Neil said.

The Piersons hope that kids will not only be entertained, but also inspired to help out around the house.

"If it starts with socks, maybe it'll spread on to clothing and books," said Jan.

It's working so well, in fact, that the family got their first 3,600 copies of the Sock Spot in August.

"We're in over 40 stores throughout Louisiana," Jan said. "I did a big submission with Barnes and Noble, so we're in the Metairie store and the Mandeville store."

Each purchase helps fund autism research and family support for families with kids like Roman.

"He's come such a long way," Jan said. "Long journey, but he's doing beautifully now."

And, much like Neil's dad inspired him, Paisley loves seeing her dad's idea come to life.

"I'm really proud of him," she said. "It's actually really cool to be a little girl with a dad who made this huge thing."

Via WWLTV

Burn 500 Calories a Day with This New Invention by a NASA Scientist for Weight Loss

Are you already eating well and getting moderate exercise and want to accelerate your calorie-burning efforts―while at rest?! Here’s one idea a NASA scientist came up with that others swear helped them lose weight easily.

Would you like to burn calories like Michael Phelps? According to news reports, while training for the Olympics, Michael Phelps consumed and burned approximately 12,000 calories per day. While a good portion of his calorie burning had to do with his workouts, a NASA scientist says that his swimming in cold water was also a major contributor to the amount of daily calories burned. This observation has led to the invention of The Cold Shoulder Vest that he claims can help a person burn an extra 500 calories per day—just by wearing the vest only 2 hours per day.

The Cold Shoulder Vest is essentially a vest fitted with multiple pockets that contain small freezer bags that when wore against the body, lowers your skin temperature and thereby forces the body to burn calories to generate heat to keep you at your core temperature.

“Your body has to maintain 98.6 degrees in order to be healthy. Your body will go to whatever measures are necessary to keep you at 98.6,” says The Cold Shoulder Vest inventor Dr. Wayne Hayes―a NASA scientist and UC Irvine professor―who explains that by wearing the vest it induces your body to experience mild cold exposure. He also stated that his clinical trials show that wearing his vest can cause the body to burn up to 500 calories per day if you wear it twice a day for one hour each time.

Dr. Hayes’ wife states that although she did not weigh herself while trying out the vest, that she did find that she lost 1 inch around her ribs just by wearing the vest for 2 weeks.

A second claimed benefit to wearing the vest is that it also appears to increase the amount of brown fat in the body which leads to added calorie burning in the body.

“Brown fat burns calories as opposed to white fat which stores calories,” says Dr. Hayes, which he also points out was another reason why Michael Phelps was able to consume and burn so many calories on a daily basis.

s it turns out, however, you can induce this mild cold exposure without the vest by simply doing what one researcher did in the past: drink a gallon of ice cold water a day and take cold showers and cold baths during the day. Mr. Haynes points out that the researcher found that he tripled his weight loss following this regimen. The Cold Shoulder Vest, however, makes the mild cold exposure much more comfortable and easier to do on a daily basis.

Via EMaxHealth

How The Cardboard Box Was Invented

The cardboard box goes largely unappreciated. Yet, it is indispensable to our daily living.

It holds all of our knick-knacks and personal mementos when we move or have things shipped. It holds our breakfast cereal. It has been used for countless children’s art projects; fashioned into a robot head or a horse’s body. Heck, it is even in the International Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York. As with a lot of things that have become commonplace, hardly any thought has been put into how and why it is was invented and by whom. In fact, the history of the cardboard box, besides rarely being talked about, isn’t particularly well documented either. However, cobbled together through several sources, patents and old forgotten texts, we can start to piece together the story of the ubiquitous cardboard box.

It seems the beginnings of cardboard dates back to China, about three or four thousand years ago. During the first and second century B.C., the Chinese of the Han Dynasty would use sheets of treated Mulberry tree bark (the name used for many trees in the genus Moras) to wrap and preserve foods. This fact is unsurprising considering the Chinese are credited with the invention of paper during the Han Dynasty, perhaps even around the same time (the earliest paper ever discovered was an inscription of a map found at Fangmatan in the Gansu province).

Paper, printing, and cardboard slowly made its way west thanks to the silk road and trade among the empires of Europe and China. While cardboard likely ended up in Europe much earlier than the 17th century, the first mention of it comes from a printing manual entitled Mechanick Exercises, which was written by Theodore Low De Vinne (well-known scholarly author of typography) and Joseph Mixon (a printer of maths books and maps, while also believing, rather bizarrely, that the Arctic was devoid of ice because there was sunlight there 24 hours a day). In the manual, it reads:

Scabbord is an old spelling of scabbard or scale-board, which was once a thin strip or scale of sawed wood…. The scabbards mentioned in printers’ grammars of the last century were of cardboard or millboard.

Through this description, it is inferred that cardboard was used as printing material and to be written on, rather than in box form and for storage.

The first documented instance a cardboard box being used was in 1817 for a German board game called “The Game of Besieging,” a popular war strategy game. Some point to an English industrialist named Malcolm Thornhill being the first to make a single-sheet cardboard box, but there is scant evidence of who he was or what he stored in the cardboard box. It would be another forty years before another innovation rocked the cardboard world.

In 1856, Edward Allen and Edward Healey were in the business of selling tall hats. They wanted a material that could act as a linear and keep the shape of the hat, while providing warmth and give. So, they invented corrugated (or pleated) paper. Corrugated paper is a material typically made with unbleached wood fibres with a fluted sheet attached to one or two linear boards. They apparently patented it in England that same year, though English patents from prior 1890 are notoriously difficult to find and most have yet to be digitised, so we weren’t able to read over the patent as we normally would while researching.

Who knows if Albert Jones of New York ever encountered an Allen/Healey tall English hat, but the next fold in the cardboard story belongs to Mr. Jones. In December of 1871, Albert Jones was awarded a patent in the United States for “improvement in paper for packing.” In the patent, he describes a new way of packing that provides easier transportation and prevents breakage of bottles and vials. Says the patent,

The object of this invention is to provide means for securely packing vials and bottles with a single thickness of the packing material between the surface of the article packed; and it consists in paper, card-board, or other suitable material, which is corrugated, crimped, or bossed, so as to present an elastic surface… a protection to the vial, and more effective to prevent breaking than many thicknesses of the same material would be if in a smooth state like ordinary packing-paper.

The patent goes on to make clear that this new packing method isn’t just relegated to vials and bottles, pointing out it could be used for other items, as well as not limited “to any particular material or substance, as there are many substances besides paper or pasteboard which can be corrugated for this purpose.”

A few years after this, the cardboard box that we know and love finally, quite literally, took shape. The Scottish-born Robert Gair owned a paper bag factory in Brooklyn. In 1879, a pressman at his factory didn’t see that the press rule was too high and it reportedly cut through thousands of small seed bags, instead of creasing them, ruining them all before production was stopped and the problem fixed.

Gair looked at this and realised if sharp cutting blades were set a tad higher than creasing blades, they could crease and cut in the same step on the press. While this may seem like an obvious thing, it’s not something any package maker had thought of before. Switching to cardboard, instead of paper, this would revolutionise the making of foldable cardboard boxes. You see, in the old way, to make a single sheet folding box, box makers would first score the sheets using a press, then make the necessary cuts with a guillotine knife by hand. Needless to say, this made mass producing foldable boxes prohibitively expensive.

In Gair’s new process, he simply made dies for his press such that the cutting and creasing were accomplished all in one step. With this modification, he was able to cut about 750 sheets in an hour on his press, producing about the same amount in two and a half hours on one single press as his entire factory used to be capable of producing in a day.

At first, Gair’s mass-produced foldable boxes were mostly used for small items, like tea, tobacco, toothpaste, and cosmetics. In fact, some of Gair’s first clients were the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Colgate, Ponds, and tobacco manufacturer P. Lorillard. However, in 1896, Gair got his biggest client yet for his pre-cut, pre-creased cardboard box — the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, with a two million unit order. With this leap in product packaging, now customers could purchase pre-portioned crackers in a wax-paper lined box that kept the crackers fresh and unbroken. Before this, when buying these crackers, they’d have a store clerk get them from a less moisture and vermin controlled cracker barrel.

From here, sales of such boxes exploded and by the turn of the century, the cardboard box was here to stay. So next time you are loading your closet with cardboard boxes full of old clothes, buying something off of Amazon, or just opening a box of saltine crackers, you can thank a German board game for first commercially using a cardboard box and one of Robert Gair’s employees slipping up, inspiring a small but momentous tweak that made mass-produced, foldable cardboard boxes possible.

Bonus Fact:

Legend has it that Robert Gair’s son, George, named the biscuits that Nabisco were putting in Gair’s cardboard boxes. According to the book Cartons, Crates and Corrugated Board, by Diana Twede, Susan E.M. Selke, Donatien-Pascal Kamdem, and David Shires, Gair’s son told the executives that the biscuits “need a name.” This, supposedly, inspired them to call them “Uneeda Biscuits.”

Via Gizmodo

In a New Marketing World, The Product is the Message

Two revolutions in technology took place over the last 75 years that significantly affected our lives as consumers. They also had a huge impact on the meaning of brands, the influence of advertising, and the commercialization (and over-commercialization) of the world we know. They should come as no surprise—the first was television; the second was the Internet.

However it is not simply the invention of television or the Internet as a new medium that’s of interest; it is how television and the Internet transformed us as consumers. Marshall McLuhan fans will find this discussion familiar. The technology itself isn’t the key part of the story—it’s the effect the medium has on society. The medium is the message. While the effects of television, then the Internet, can be felt in countless aspects of our lives, I’ll confine this current conversation to the consumer-driven portion of our existence.

To start, a brand is, in essence, a promise. It represents a group of people (usually a group, sometimes an individual) that stand for something. In exchange for buying into that brand, the people behind it will deliver that promise. It’s that simple.

An ad‘s goal is to communicate that promise. It strives to effectively relay that message. A successful ad campaign clearly communicates the promise, doing so in a believable way and in a manner that is both captivating and personally meaningful. Sometimes the message is overt, sometimes it’s much less conspicuous. Either can be effective.

Creating and maintaining great brands isn’t easy. Scott Lerman of Lucid Brands has a good description of what’s involved. The establishment of a great brand requires unifying and leveraging "an astounding array of people—leaders, followers, scientists, artists, magicians (consultants), engineers, establishmentarians, and revolutionaries." Because of this, lots of brands are okay. Fewer are good. Relatively few are great. The hallmark of a great brand is that it makes great promises, then over-delivers. Only a small percentage can truly make that claim.

All promises, broken or fulfilled, establish a personal relationship. It’s no different with a brand than with a person. You may notice a difference in discussions with friends about the brands and products they admire. When talking about an okay brand, assuming that they talk about it at all, they’ll talk about the product. When talking about a truly great brand, one to which they pledge allegiance, they talk not just about the product, but also talk about the people behind it, regardless of whether they know who those people are. Because they know there had to be someone who was thinking, who understands us, who cares! The promise wasn’t just on target with their needs, the promise was exceeded. And we, as human beings, love that.

Virtually every brand started life with an elevated sense of enthusiasm—every company was, at one time, a startup. Which means there was a time in every company’s history when a person or small group of people developed a product that they believed in. Once developed, they needed someone to advertise, market and sell it. The sequence started with the product, and led to a need to promote it. Over time those companies grew. To sustain themselves they needed new and improved products to sell. Because of that this sequence was often reversed. To maintain their existence companies needed to advertise, market and sell something. They needed to maintain old promises, create new promises, or a combination of both. To do that they often needed to hire someone to create new products, and often that means a designer.

The reversing of the original sequence accelerated rapidly during the 1950s. With the popularity of television a company was able to advertise a product not just by talking about it in a print or radio ad, they could also show the product in action. By the late 1950s everyone with a TV—and there were many—were seeing the same product at the same time instantly, countrywide. Advertising became persuasive for the consumer, with quantifiable results for the companies paying for those ads. Money spent on advertising resulted in money spent on products. The ability for consumers to become aware of the country’s best-and-brightest products created a wonderful win-win situation. Consumers could excitedly see what they were getting, and companies could more readily sell things consumers were seeing.

What was not so wonderful is what happened next. With the realization that advertising was persuasive, companies were in constant need to advertise their newest and greatest product. They needed to stay ahead of the competition, who were equally good at advertising. Before long the rate of new messaging increased at a pace faster than new products could be invented.

No worries for the companies; many found instant solutions. We-the-people started to see broken or unsubstantiated promises. And often some outrageous claims. Advertising and marketing budgets skyrocketed. Designers were now being funded by marketing groups, and the field of design diverted its attention from innovating to giving the impression of innovation. If a truly new product wasn’t actually available, at least the illusion of new could be presented. Designers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were becoming good at creating sexy renderings of supposedly new-and-improved products. And they became great at rendering products with chrome, artificial wood surfaces, and the addition of artistic sparkle to the products they were presenting. Designers were charged with the task of creating "perceived value"—a term openly used at the time, referring to their goal to make a product look better than it actually was. Design research, by the way, was virtually non-existent. Designers sat at drafting tables, never actually venturing out to meet consumers or view their products in action. That was left to the marketing groups, who would just relay their marketing goals to design teams.

False promises abounded, and by 1960 the Federal Trade Commission had plenty to do. They faced a record volume of cases, with more than a 25% increase from the previous year. How outrageous were the claims? Check Colgate Palmolive’s Rapid Shave commercial from 1960, advertising having cream so amazing it could be used to shave a piece of sandpaper. (Not only was the claim not true, it didn’t make any sense.) Or Listerine’s claims about preventing colds and sore throats. Or General Motor’s now amusing claims in a promotional film for Chevrolet’s 1960 Corvair, showing among other things its off-road and stream-crossing capabilities.

While the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and other agencies stepped in to curtail the amount of false product claims, we continued to be bombarded with deceptive "top down" promises. Big business owned the media. They controlled advertising in print and over the airwaves. When we wanted to learn about a product our primary source of information came from the companies who were making those products. Magazines providing much-needed objective assistance included Consumer Reports, which by 1950 had a subscription base approaching 400,000. But the pace of magazine publication meant reviews were few and far in-between when compared with the number of available products and advertising campaigns of the day.

A few decades later, enter revolution number two: the Internet, and especially the http protocol and the World Wide Web which meant companies could now display pages of information electronically. But one of the life-changing capabilities the Internet now provided was that messaging no longer just belonged to big business—we-the-people could now instantly communicate just as well, not just countrywide but globally. And one of the very early activities people took to on the Internet was advising others on all sorts of topics—person-to-person (or person-to-people) communication. As a result we discovered that we no longer needed to read print ads, product spec sheets or watch television ads to learn about a product; we now had each other. Today, we own the media, and it seems we’re very willing to talk (or write) about everything under the sun. We therefore don’t need advertising or brand names to gain confidence in our purchases, we can look to our peers. People like us are advising us on what to buy, based on their personal experiences with those products.

What does that mean for brand and product advertising? It means the product itself better be great. Not just good, but exceptionally great, because that’s when we make purchase recommendations to each other, or else forewarn others about an unfortunate purchase. As for brand promises, to survive in the critical arena of real-consumers-as-reviewers, products shouldn’t just meet our expectations, they better exceed them.

Today we need to consider that advertising has expanded beyond its traditional boundaries. Our messages are no longer coming from the top down; that changed years ago. The broadened scope of messaging places a company’s responsibility for communication of brand promises on every touch-point a consumer has with that product, first awareness through final disposal.

The expanded scope of advertising is reflected on the 2011 name change of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—"Creativity" was formerly "Advertising." The festival is the largest of its kind, in operation since the late 1950s. Last year for the first time they introduced product design as one of the award categories, highlighting the importance of the product in representing brand values.

Consumers control the media, which means companies need to communicate brand messages through their products and deliver on them. A great product sells itself, while reviews for a bad product counteract even the best advertising efforts. The inclusion of product design by Cannes Lions reinforces the idea that people designing products are, by default, in the advertising business. And while this phenomenon has been with us for some time now, some companies are much better at it than others. Each product and service is a representation of a brand, and even more than that a representation of the people behind that brand. Using Marshall McLuhan’s logic, the product is the medium—therefore, the product is the message.

Dan Formosa, Ph.D., is consultant in design. A member of the team that designed IBM’s first personal computer, he has developed products and services for companies in a wide range of categories, from cars to food, kitchen products to surgical equipment. In 1981 he helped form Smart Design and he recently established two design collectives—4B, focusing on design and gender, and Brainpool, focusing on perception and our emotional connections with products and brands. He is the newly appointed president of the Product Design jury at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. Product Design entries are open until March 27.

Via Fast Co

That Plastic Thing Inside Your Pizza Box Was Invented 30 Years Ago

If you’re one of the 7 billion humans on this planet who enjoys getting pizza delivered to your door, you have a piece of plastic to thank. A piece of plastic? Yes, that circular plastic thing that goes in the middle of a pie to prevent the pizza from sticking to the top of the pizza box. It's called a pizza saver. And it was invented 30 years ago on February 10, 1983 when Carmela Vitale got her patent issued for that piece of plastic.

That tiny little plastic invention has saved humanity from eating smushed and stripped pizza that has half of its cheese ripped off because the pizza got stuck to the cardboard top of the pizza box. Can you imagine eating that type of pizza? Hell, could we even call that pizza anymore? Without the pizza saver, delivery pizza as we know it would look more like blood and guts shmeared onto a giant bread thing. Does that sound appetizing to you? In the power ranking of necessary ingredients to a good pizza delivery, the pizza saver is probably right after cheese and before any topping.

You see, because pizza boxes are typically made from corrugated cardboard boxes that are stiffer than most typical take out containers and are relatively decent at keeping food warm (as the corrugation process adds a sort of air space insulation layer), it has one design flaw: when a hot pizza gets placed inside the box, the top center of the pizza box starts to sag and droop because of the steam. The longer the pizza is in the box, the steamier it gets inside the pizza box and the softer that top middle center of the box gets. You see where this is going. The top of the box sinks and attaches itself to the pizza, flaying the cheese and excising the toppings upon the box's opening. It's messy. It’s sad. It sucks.

Enter the pizza saving genius known as Carmela Vitale from Dix Hills, NY. She filed her patent (#4,498,586) on February 10, 1983 and got it issued on February 12, 1985. In her patent, Vitale detailed the "package saver" (a terrible name for her invention as no one gives a crap about the package, it was the pizza that needed saving), which was a tiny tripod that provided support to the sagging pizza box. It would be placed in the middle of the pie to maintain the structural integrity of the box:

Vitale expressed the need for her pizza saver in the patent application saying that, "there is a tendency of the covers to sag or to be easily depressed at their center portions so that they may damage or mark the pies or cakes during storage or delivery" and that it was necessary to create "a lightweight and inexpensive device" that was made from "one of the plastics which is heat resistant" (she suggested thermo set plastic).

In its preferred form, as illustrated, the saver (1) has spaced vertical legs (2) connected to a cover support (3). The lower portions of the legs (4) have a minimal cross section to minimize any marking of to the protected article (5) and they are also made thin for minimizing the volume of plastic required. The cover support (3) of the saver (1) also preferably has a minimum volume by consisting of a spoke-like arrangement of radially oriented leg supports (6) molded to extend from a central portion (7).

Basically, the tripod look was created to keep the footprint of the pizza saver small which kept the damage to the pizza minimal while also being rock solid in preventing exorcised pizzas. Three dimples on your pizza is much better than splattered guts everywhere. Eventually the pizza saver evolved into a more circular shape with a larger surface area as cutting the support spokes of the original design required nearly the same amount of plastic as the circular pizza saver we know today.

So next time you order pizza, remember the thankless grunt work that the pizza saver does every time to make sure your pizza arrives in good shape. It's basically every pizza's guardian angel.

[About.com, Wikipedia, Image Credit: Paul Orr/Shutterstock]

Via Gizmodo

How to Search for Existing Patents

The web has revolutionized nearly every aspect of human endeavor. The cliché goes that you can do everything from diagnosing medical aliments to investigating your genealogy while sitting at home in your underwear. This is equally true for entrepreneurs, who can perform virtually all of their business activities online.

Using the web can save considerable time and money in launching a new enterprise by providing information not previously or readily available. A good example is the would-be inventor who has created an idea for a product that is sure to make millions.

The internet can help both the novice and seasoned inventor deal with a potential roadblock before too much time and effort is invested. Has someone else already come up with the same or a similar idea? The answer is a patent search of the U.S. Patent Office, either online or in person.

A patentability search is conducted by examining published patents that relate to your own invention to figure out whether your idea has already been patented. You can also see similar inventions, allowing you to improve and refine your own invention without infringing on someone else's patent. And you can do all this before you have spent many hours and thousands of dollars on an idea that you can't patent.

The best and most thorough searches are still performed in person at the library of the USPTO in Arlington, Virginia. For the convenience of the public, the USPTO maintains libraries in major cities around the country, where you can identify patents that sound similar to your idea and examine the patents in hard copy form or on microfilm.

You can also access U.S. patent applications online. Start atuspto.gov/patft. Next, under the heading Related USPTO Services, click on Tools to Help Searching by Patent Classification. You can now start searching. Patent searches may also be done at google.com/patents and at a number of other free sites.

While internet patent searching is a valuable tool, it may be limited by your experience or by the content of some databases. Once your idea passes the preliminary patent search, you may want to hire a professional patent searcher. Some are licensed to practice by the USPTO, which is preferable though more expensive.

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Via Entrepreneur