A five-year-old boy is thought to be the UK’s youngest person to patent an idea after inventing a labour-saving broom to help his father sweep leaves.

Sam Houghton, of Buxton, Derbyshire, was just three when he came up with a double-headed broom to collect large debris and fine dust simultaneously.

Sam, who was inspired by animated inventors Wallace and Gromit and Archie the Inventor from TV series Balamory, said: “I saw my Daddy brushing up and made it. There are two brushes because one gets the big bits and one gets the little bits left behind.

“I don’t know if I want to be an inventor when I grow up but this was fun.”

Sam had been watching his father at work in the back yard, swapping between a large broom, for leaves and twigs, and a small one, for finer particles, when he came up with his idea.

BBC UK

Ever wished you could be in two places at one time? A Japanese scientist has managed it through making a robot that looks and moves exactly like him.

The Geminoid was created by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro using a model of his body and hair actually from his head.

When you poke its face, the robot even frowns like a real human, as it has 50 sensors implanted beneath its skin.

The robot also looks like it can breathe because compressed air is pumped around its body!

BBC

The editors of Entrepreneur.com sifted through hundreds of inventions that became available within the past year to compile a diverse list of innovative, practical and fun products.

1. iPhone - which consumers camped out for prior to its June debut, is the obvious choice for any “Best of 2007″ list. Much more than a phone, it also features an iPod, a camera and the internet, all in one. The multi-touch display allows you to control everything with your fingertips. Zoom in and zoom out on maps to determine your driving route and use the Visual Voicemail to listen to your messages in any order you choose.
2. Kindle - Since it became available in November, Amazon.com has struggled to keep this new electronic reading device in stock. The revolutionary portable reader downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers. The Kindle features a high-resolution electronic paper display that looks like real paper. Readers can choose from more than 90,000 books available in the Kindle store, including new releases and New York Times bestsellers. Aside from the cost of books, which run around $9.99, there are no monthly wireless bills or service commitments.
3. ZPrinter 450 - This device can transform electronic 3D data into colorful, handheld physical models. It can be used to create architectural concepts, landscapes, engineering product designs, electronic entertainment objects and medical information. The ZPrinter 450 is the third 3D printer made by Z Corp. and is touted as the most compatible with contemporary office environments. The ZPrinter 450 breaks down 3D printing into seven easy steps. It also includes automatic setup, power loading and self-monitoring of materials and print status.
4. iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot - iRobot, maker of the Roomba, says it’s the first product designed to make gutter cleaning faster, easier and safer. The robot is controlled by a wireless remote that’s also a detachable handle. The Looj can clean a 60-foot section of gutter in just 10 minutes. It drives under gutter straps while dislodging and eliminating dirt, leaves and debris. The robot works with standard K-style, aluminum, copper, metal or vinyl gutters.
5. QwikGrip - After eight years of development, inventor Leonard Duffy has created the Velcro of the future–a fastening technology that snaps into place and slides into full engagement. His “slidingly engaging” systems are applicable to many industries, including apparel, sports, health care, safety and military. Duffy says his invention can bind a new plastic cast or even take the place of shoe laces. Right now, the fastening technology is on the market as a business-to-business licensing opportunity, though it’ll be available for consumer purchase in 2008.
6. GreenSwitch - Originally, the GreenSwitch system was designed for controlling energy use in hospitals and hotels. After reducing energy costs by 25 to 45 percent in those industries, the technology has now entered the consumer market. The wireless system can reduce home energy consumption by turning off all designated light switches, wall plugs and air conditioning with the flip of a switch. After flipping the switch back on, all plugs and systems return to normal modes. The system can be retrofitted in an existing home or added to a new home during construction.

Entrepreneur Dot Com

It was one “skeeter” bite too many for Austin lawyer Blair Dancy. Dancy’s two young boys had walked in from backyard play covered in mosquito welts from the garden and patio areas. The sight of his bump-covered, itching boys was the last straw and the mother of invention.

Most mainstream solutions on the market only address adult mosquitoes, he says. So, he focused on reducing the number of eggs, larvae and pupae.

Dancy’s trap is designed to be an ideal breeding spot for the Asian tiger and other container- or tree-hole-breeders. When the eggs hatch, the larvae and pupae will not escape. The trap itself is small, unobtrusive and easy to manage.

The trap requires a little water each week and the addition of a few dead leaves occasionally, and homeowners must be cognizant of other breeding areas around the home. Dancy’s trap has a patent pending and sells online at MosquitoSwallow.com. It will be released in some Austin-area garden centers in the coming months. The Web site also offers helpful information for homeowners to minimize the mosquito swarms this summer.

American-Statesman

A new website and media campaign are encouraging children to use their imagination to come up with technological innovations of the future.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is working with the Advertising Council and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in launching the new initiative InventNow.

The program targets kids between 8 and 11 years old. On the program’s website, children can upload their design ideas and share inventions with peers through message boards.

The site also encourages young inventors to protect their ideas by learning about copyrights, trademarks and patents.

Entrepreneur Daily

Pure Digital, which makes disposable cameras sold in drugstores, is launching a new pocket-sized camcorder called Flip Video on Tuesday. The product, which will be available at Target, Costco, Best Buy and on Amazon.com, comes with a USB arm to connect to a personal computer or Mac.

Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of San Francisco-based Pure Digital, said the company hopes to make it easier for people to record and share video online. To that end, the camcorder comes with built-in software that makes it easy for people to upload their videos onto Google-owned YouTube or Grouper, an online video site owned by Sony.

Pure Digital is selling two versions of Flip Video, one that can hold about 30 minutes of video and another that stores an hour. The 30-minute version will cost about $119 while the 60-minute version will sell for around $149. Both devices run on standard AA batteries.

CNN Money

When the air conditioner caught fire three years ago, Kate Khosla thought it was time to pull the plug — literally — on her husband Ron’s efforts to invent a better compressor-condensor-evaporator.

Khosla’s idea was simple: he thought he could build a gizmo that would allow an ordinary air conditioner to take a room’s temperature down as low as 32 degrees. Not all of his prototypes blew up, but neither did any of his early models last long enough to get the job done.

You could find Khosla juggling about a dozen small boxes at the New Paltz post office, sending his patent-pending CoolBot to farmers like himself. With next to no publicity or marketing, the CoolBot is becoming a very hot item. And it’s poised to go more places than the farm. He’s sold about 80 units at $250 a pop and has placed material orders that will allow him to build another 500.

It’s all a marvel to Khosla, who calls himself a “reluctant capitalist” who never intended to sell his invention. He’d thought initially to explain the process to other farmers and let them build their own. That idea didn’t work out, but the Khoslas don’t seem too broken up about it.

Times Herald-Record

Every inventor has a thousand ideas. But it’s the rare one who has 350 of his ideas actually on the market.

Meet Zlatko Zadro, president of Zadro Products in Huntington Beach.

After careers selling large computers and refurbishing real estate, Zadro decided in 1983 to try marketing one of his inventions.

The result is an international company that makes 350 products, many of them patented. It has 40 employees in Huntington Beach and 800 in China. Many inventors can learn from Zadro’s practical approach that focuses on customer needs, not his own desires. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Viagra - Men being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh hamlet where, in 1992 trials, the gravity-defying side effects of a new angina drug first popped up. Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron.
2. LSD - Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world’s first acid hit in 1943, when he touched a smidge of lysergic acid diethylamide, a chemical he had researched for inducing childbirth. He later tried a bigger dose and made another discovery: the bad trip.
3. X-rays - Several 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target. But the x-ray wasn’t discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Röntgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on a wall.
4. Penicillin - Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab wo

rk!

5. Artificial sweeteners - Speaking of botched lab jobs, three leading pseudo-sugars reached human lips only because scientists forgot to wash their hands. Cyclamate (1937) and aspartame (1965) are byproducts of medical research, and saccharin (1879) appeared during a project on coal tar derivatives. Yummy.
6. Microwave ovens - Microwave emitters (or magnetrons) powered Allied radar in WWII. The leap from detecting Nazis to nuking nachos came in 1946, after a magnetron melted a candy bar in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer’s pocket.
7. Brandy - Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - our money’s on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born. Pass the Courvoisier!
8. Vulcanized rubber - Rubber rots badly and smells worse, unless it’s vulcanized. Ancient Mesoamericans had their own version of the process, but Charles Goodyear rediscovered it in 1839 when he unintentionally (well, at least according to most accounts) dropped a rubber-sulfur compound onto a hot stove.
9. Silly Putty - In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn’t come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime.
10. Potato chips - Chef George Crum concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when - to spite a customer who complained that his fries were cut too thick - he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp. Needless to say, the diner couldn’t eat just one.

wired.com

Stephanie Dellamura dreaded taking her toddlers to a public restroom. Visiting parks and fairs was worse, she said. Portable restrooms are often filthy and there’s no place to wash hands. But dirty restrooms weren’t her only worry. Candies and ice cream also made her boy’s hands a sticky mess.

Dellamura searched stores and websites for a product to protect her children, but came up empty-handed. That’s when Dellamura invented Gotta Go Mitts.

Her survey of more than 100 mothers — friends, family, even strangers in bathrooms — showed two out of three said they would buy disposable mittens for their children. The information she collected helped guide the development of Gotta Go Mitts, such as making a small package to fit in a purse or pocket.

A bookstore clerk suggested Tara Monosoff’s “The Mom Inventors Handbook.” It gives readers advice for conducting market research, developing a prototype, manufacturing and marketing a product. Dellamura found the guide practical and inspiring. She followed every step and enjoyed reading about several mom inventors who turned inspiration into action.

Dellamura made the first prototype on her kitchen table. Her mother-in-law and a friend helped cut and sew plastic sandwich bags into child-sized mittens.

Now the finished products, 2.5 million mitts in 125,000 packages, sit in her basement. Dellamura invested more than $17,000 to bring her idea to market, but she expects to start making a profit in fewer than two years — $5 at a time.

Frederick News Post

It all started with an accident. Late one night, while experimenting with a jet pump and a nozzle for a refrigerator cooling system, Lonnie Johnson shot a stream of water clear across his bathroom. Where some people might have seen a mess to clean up, Johnson saw an opportunity. Thus was born the mother of all water guns, the Super Soaker.

After leaving NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982, Johnson built the prototype for what would become the Super Soaker in his basement workshop. He had several false starts, but “a good challenge keeps me going,” he says. Although he applied for his first patent on the water-gun design in 1983, it wasn’t issued until 1987. About that time, he decided to leave the Air Force and work on several private projects, “any one of which might have made it,” says Johnson. But when he left the Air Force, they all fell apart. “There I was with no home, no job and a family of five to support.”

He returned to JPL and began shopping his water gun to toy companies. After two frustrating years, he hit the jackpot with Larami Corp. By that time, he had already sunk close to $15,000 into the project, and his licensing check was only $5,000. But Larami’s goal was to produce 100,000 water guns the following year. In 1990, despite little advertising, the gun — first christened Drencher — became a sellout. Renamed the Super Soaker in 1991, Johnson’s invention became the number-one toy in the country.

Larami has since been sold to Hasbro, but Johnson, who lives in Atlanta, still works with the company on updating the Super Soaker. His quarterly royalties have made him a millionaire, giving him the wherewithal to start his own research-and-development company, which is currently working on energy technology. Before his invention took off, “I had days when I’d stop and think, Why is it taking so long?” says Johnson. “But I never thought about giving up.”

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine

Before long, your cell phone will also be your wallet, keys, and garage-door opener. These mobile applications transform cell phones into life management devices.

www.fastcompany.com

Jim Cairns was a boy, he invented a way to hang pictures in his room without making the holes in the wall that so irritated his mother. He mixed iron powder with paint and spread it on the walls, then he put magnets on his pictures and stuck them to the iron treatment. It worked for a while until the walls started rusting, and his mother was not amused.

But his early urge to push the envelope has served Cairns well in later life. He went on to found Ocean Design Inc., and to invent electric and fiber-optic connectors that have led to more than 50 patents.

Now, Cairns has written a book, “The Inventor’s Pathfinder: A Practical Guide to Successful Inventing,” which encourages people to invent and gives them the steps to follow.

If necessity is the mother of invention, Cairn’s book is no exception. He discovered most books about inventions were written by lawyers and focused on obtaining patents. “There was nothing to walk someone through the process,” Cairns said. “I wanted to provide a road map, a path to follow. Anyone who wants to spend the time to do it right, can.”

Cairns said when he talks to groups, he asks for a show of hands from those who’ve had ideas for inventions. Almost everyone raises a hand. Then, he asks how many did anything with their ideas, and no hands come up. “The beginning inventor’s biggest problem doesn’t seem to be getting interesting ideas; it’s knowing what to do next,” Cairns said.

news-journalonline.com

A Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you all the battery juice you need directly from the air.

How much money could you make from a technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it get? “The sky’s the limit,” says John Shearer, Powercast’s founder and CEO. He estimates shipping “many millions of units” by the end of 2008.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”

money.cnn.com