eevBLAB #50 - Great Idea At The Wrong Time! 

During the first neural nets craze of the early 1990's I came up with a way to convert trained neural nets (which were computationally expensive to run) into fuzzy logic (which even an 8-bit processor could run). Started the whole patent thing, and even found a sponsor/investor who funded the process in exchange for a non-exclusive license and a 90-day head start. As the patent process went on I had to develop ever more complicated demos to ensure we were far enough in front of any possible competition. Unfortunately, the state of the art for neural nets was also advancing, and it soon became clear my technique would only apply to limited (and less interesting) classes of neural nets. I soon gave up on the patent, and decided to write it up as a paper for publication. Which was not accepted by any of the handful of journals in the field at the time. Still, to this day I track the progress in neural networks, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, and I continue to ponder ways to "unravel" neural nets to "see" what they have learned, and to convert it to other forms that may be easier to execute. I've reached the point where I'm beginning to think I'll have to train a neural net to do the job. Which likely won't be patentable.

"Patent attorneys take a good idea and turn it into gibberish and incomprehensible diagrams and stuff like that". Dave, that's one of the best descriptions that I've ever heard, brilliant! :D

I have only one patent story: I used to work at a bus company back in the late 1990s. We had a daytime running lights option. It was simple - there were relays in parallel with each section of the headlight switch, and when the engine was on, these relays were switched. Car companies were also adding daytime running lights. GM experimented with a system that used relays to switch the headlights to a series circuit for DRL operation. A small company got a patent on that, and wanted to sell licenses to use that circuit. I believe they were practicing for a confrontation with GM when they visited us. I showed them our schematic and explained that we weren't running our headlights in series. They left, but sent me another letter about how they would sell us a license to do what we weren't doing. I asked our VP of engineering how they could patent something as obvious as using relays to change from a parallel circuit to a series circuit. (I didn't know at the time my objection was codified as not being "obvious to anyone skilled in the art") He replied: A good patent attorney could patent air; the problem would be defending that patent. I don't think GM paid them anything, and every car I've seen uses PWM or a series resistor for daytime running lights. There may be some that simply turn on the headlights as well. (Sorry for the long comment)

I think you missed the correct choice: iSweat.

Patents, temporary monopolies that are granted to inventors to prevent big companies from ripping them off. Before there were patents, every inventor tried to keep everything in secret to prevent getting ripped off. If a big company figured out how something worked, they flooded the marked and the original inventor did lose. But to get that patent, you had to document the invention. That was the original idea. But the time has passed and the big companies learnt to abuse that system. They hoard patents, don't or very seldom use them against their competitors. They tend to cross-license them instead, opening the market for them and keeping it closed for the smaller competitors. They pay their employees (the real inventors!) one dollar (in addition to their normal salary) and that's it. I know a few people who had great ideas and patented them, all of them payed more for the paper than they got in return. Sometimes the companies just wait until the patent expires and then produce the thing. In the beginning there were limitations what could be patented. It had to be a real invention, a thing that doesn't exist in nature and is a solution to a common problem that wasn't obvious for anyone before (no prior art). Logic and math was excluded, so no software patents. And the patent application was checked by people at the patent office and if there were obvious errors, it got rejected. But all this has changed, now every patent is accepted. Let the courts and lawyers fix the problems afterwards. And this can take longer then the average small inventor could financially and personally withstand. There is not much left of the original idea. And then there are countries where people intermingle patent laws, copyright laws and trademark laws and call everything IP (Intellectual Property). This makes it even worse for a non-lawyer to understand all this. Especially because engineers/inventors are the exact opposite of lawyers. All engineers I know absolutely hate paperwork (if it isn't technical documentation), it only hinders technical progress. Just some thoughts.

Back in '94, I was a rectangle salesman. I put in many long hours to make a living, but on my free time, I liked to invent and build things. I was struck by a transcendent idea one day, combining my passion for inventing and my deep well of knowledge about polygons: rectangles but with smoothed out corners. I set to work immediately, carefully sanding corners on hundreds - perhaps thousands - of rectangles until I almost passed out from exhaustion. In the end, only a single perfect product was yielded, but that was enough. With my prototype in hand and the concept proven, I thought winning a patent would be dead-easy, but I put that off. I was far too excited (and ambitious) and set off to shop my technology around at all the tech companies I could, including some which now stand as giants in the industry. Apple was first, followed by Samsung, and soon after, countless industry leaders whose names and faces I cannot even recall. I blazed across the world. I even inspired some dudes to create the spec for Cascading Style Sheets, but they said their ultimate goal of putting my "round rectangles" to use would have to wait until their technology matured. While I generated some buzz and even had real interest in my work expressed by people like the CSS guys, no one was committing to a licensing deal, no matter how much I talked up the potential for my invention and showed off its many benefits over existing rectangle technology. In the end, I didn't even bother patenting anything. What was the point? As it would turn out, I was too far ahead of my time. Many years later, Samsung and then Apple phones were coming out - using my rectangles, dammit! It would turn out that Apple had stolen my idea and patented it as their own. My invention made them and others billions and allowed them to grow into the powerhouse companies they are today. As for me, I moved on from job to job, selling standard shapes of various geometries, but I never found my fortune. Let this be a lesson to all, lest you become a rectangular peg for a round hole.

PodSweat was a horrible name Dave. Sounds disgusting. GymPod would be better.

Comic Sans, I see

"That half of a muffin tasted great." - Indeed, everyone knows that free food tastes better.

Poor Mrs EEV!

Great video, Patents are tricky! What a patent really does is get you to extract your genius idea out onto paper, and if you don't/not able to commercially exploit it (within a time frame) - somebody else (seeing it), will! This ensures that your idea doesn't die with you, and society will still benefit from it :) or is it :( If your idea is deemed of state military value - it will be made secret, and depending upon state funding - you may, or may not, be allowed to continue - possibly stuck indefinitely! Whilst having its own problems - industrial secrets are the way many, even very large companies, go - it avoids these hassles. Best wishes.

In the early 2000s, feature phones had apps... little java applets. Remember snake and the other games?

Well I have come up with about a dozen ideas that turned out to already exist: - Modular plug-in block - App that notifies you about people you could like in your surroundings - Floors that generate electricity from you walking over them - Device to measure density - Raincoat for your shoes - Rain protection for glasses - Planning routes based on tourist sights - Sudoku solver or hinter

Crazy to think 2007 is more than 10 years ago. It's the year I graduated from college, and it does not feel like it's that long ago.

Could've been a Kickstarter nowadays. Would've made millions.

Been down the exact same road in the mid 1970's with a hydraulic coupling device. Took out provisional patent for which I paid a patent lawyer, then went to a large multinational and tried to sell them the idea, they said it was worthless to them and less than a year later they started to market an almost identical product. I did not have the money to sue them and back then in the UK. no win no fee for lawyers did not exist.

Upcoming channel: EEVFit fitness with dave.

Speaking of great ideas at the wrong time: I wrote down my idea in 1976 and saved it in my work place desk drawer, because it was outside of my employer’s business area. I finally about 4 or 5 years ago saw some lab prototypes published that implemented the same idea. It still does not appear to be in mass production, though. It was about enhanced efficiency for solar cells by stacking materials that were converting different wavelength radiation.

I can almost hear it... "and now 2031 Situps...*music starts.... dumz dumz dumz..." 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Talking about bad timing: writing VB6 apps in 2007.

As a little kid in 1975 I got my first digital watch, so I thought about the segmented display, and how you could make the whole alphabet. I came up with the 16-segment British flag display. Then I saw a picture of one in a magazine exactly 2 weeks later. A few years later I invented interleaved memory. I wasn't familiar with mainframes and it wasn't used in home computers yet.

A while back I had the idea of using your smartphone as a receipt tracking device (no need for a paper copy if it could be transmitted via NFC to your smart phone). I looked into it a bit and found that Walmart had a similar patent already. Within 12 months Apple Pay, and Android Pay were announced...

You are always answering people replays, nice guy!

You could now do this with just a web app and the SpeechSynthesis API in Javascript which by default will use the Google Assistant / Siri voices. I haven't tested iOS but on Android it won't even interrupt your music. Probably only take 10 minutes, then another 30-60 minutes to add some extra features for customs workouts etc.

SUCCESS STORY 1: A little inventor in the USA can sometimes beat a big company. Years ago, an engineer I met designed a product and was producing it from his kitchen table, with wife and daughter's help . They were living off the proceeds. He saw in a trade magazine that Hughes (Aircraft) Electronics company offered a product for sale that infringed his patent. Since he was living off the proceeds, he was able for very little attorney money to get a restraint of trade order. That stopped Hughes in its tracks. I have some probably patentable ideas but like companies I have worked for did with their ideas, I'll forgo the patent, produce the item and maybe make a few bucks. There are too many smart people who can infringe a patent. I think, patents for the most part, make money for the attorneys and "Invention" companies.

Your idea Dave, and the many great ideas posted in the comments, are far better than most kickstarter projects, bad timing or not! Had you published this during the home exercise craze that grew during the pandemic you just might be a millionaire!!!

I realize this is "out of development", but just as a point of interest, as long as any special frames (tags &c) are stripped, MP3 frames (the fixed-size units that make up MP3 files) are quite independent and can actually be concatenated directly to form a well-formed MP3 file. So if you had pre-encoded the voice files as MP3, you could probably have just concatenated everything directly without having to do any MP3 encoding or decoding, and probably not even have to ship LAME with the program at all.

I wrote Symbian app in 2002, you could do it at home. So apps were available long before.

BlackBerry and Windows Mobile-based phones existed before the iPhone was released. They certainly supported "apps" but they were basically only used by business people and nerds.

Someone needs to take Mrs eevblog samples and make a dubstep mix

I mowed lawns as a 13yr old back in the early 70s to earn $ to buy components in my electronics hobby. I was messing around one day with a length of nylon fishing line tied to a stick and noticed how it cut long grass if you whipped at it. Later I was given an old small 12volt motor to play with as people knew about my hobby. Motor had a disc pulley that i attached 4 short lengths of heavy line to & mounted it disc downward on a basic wood frame with an old small pram wheel at the front to take the weight. I had to beg for an car battery to run the thing. I was impressed how well cut long grass without becoming choked up like a normal mower. I showed it to adults, my father especially and others but no body wanted to know and in the end after being told off for wasting my time, i gave up....

His terrible code is comedy gold for anyone vaguely familiar with programming.

Here's an idea that would have me universally hated. Back then, you should of patented the program, then re-worked it as an anti-piracy apparatus. Sell the software to the RIAA, which when installed on a persons PC who is filesharing (pirates can be tricked into installing anything), the program will fill all their shared mp3's with anti-pirate messages. The RIAA might of paid big bucks for that.

If anyone found they were infringing on your patent they would have just changed their implementation and moved on. But it was a very nice solution. Using the ID tags was a nice idea. Thanks for sharing your experience. :)

Dave you don't have a crap voice you have a nice voice and I love your accent. Everybody thinks their voice is crap when they listen to themselves through a recording.

This is actually still a good idea.. If you rewrote this for any of the modern smartphones, it would probably sell.. I'd expand the scope from just exercises to basically any activity where you want instruction or motivation.. There are so many APIs these days such as Text-to-Speech, that would make development easier..

Great idea, LOL @ Mrs EEV voice recordings :o)

The $80 would have been better spent on forty more muffins.

Keep in mind that as a successful filed provisional patent on record - you have grounds to deny any subsequent applications that may include your IP from filing and enacting a similar patent, on the grounds of ‘your date of first filing’. Of course the new guy can offer to buy your PP, then you’re both happy.

Software patent... Dave you are everything that you are against.

Alternate dumbbell curls Bent knee, flat bench, leg raisers Arm blaster curls Tubular Bells

Back in 2006 I wrote an exercise program for the Nintendo DS, all it did was keep track of what I needed to to. I used the touch screen to check things off as I did them. Oh, and I could even play MP3s with it.

A friend of mine was a patent attorney and in 1987 we started writing a patent on RFID in manufacturing as inventory control. We stopped because the technology wasn't there at the time and we didn't want to keep paying fees till it was. Probably a bad idea.

About a year before the VR headsets started coming around I was about to file a utility patent on the concept, the general style of a headset, split screens, adjustable IPD, etc. Figured I had a feeling the technology would be something big and if I had the utility patent on the general concept might be able to make a few bucks, since I lack the technical know how to build a headset myself. Never quite got around to it, and abandoned the idea all together when I realized that a large company could just give me the finger and steal it essentially. Since I barely had the cash to file all of the paperwork, what chance could I have had suing a large company to get my dues. So I let it be and moved on.

My sweat ate so many things under Apple warranty, I might be why they ditched the headphone jack. Anything to force sweaty people to sweat on their own Bluetooth gear.

While your specific application may not have had the desired market, I do believe there could be a compelling use for the tag modifying aspect of the code for the entertainment industry. For example, coordinating music with a light show or even pyrotechnics in a more automated method.

Well, at least somebody can now point at this as prior art if they run into a patent troll claiming all or part of your processes.

I wish I will be lucky like you and have a wonderful helping wife like Mrs.EEV

I have to disagree with you on something. Smartphones and Apps both definitely existed for years before the iPhone came out. For me there was Simbian and then Windows Mobile. I had all sorts of apps for those covering pretty much every category. Maybe Apple brought the concept of an app store to phones? That pretty much existed in the desktop already though. The first I remember was the Lindows store. I don't think many people used it but it did exist. The one thing Apple really did, and the only significant thing IMHO was to make it popular.

Map My Run app inserts your mileage and time while you are listening to music. I think it just pauses your music momentarily and the resumes as soon as the microsoft sammy is done talking. It may actually mix the audio, but from memory it pauses.

Who needs voices in your MP3 when you can have them in your head?

I came up with an idea to make a patch panel with a power supply nuilt in. It would have conencted to the ports on a CCTV DVR via BNC connectors then RJ45 connectors to send to the cameras. At the other end would be a matching Balun to connect the camera, or a series of cameras designed to run from it directly. I did some reasearch online and found that IP Cameras were on their way to popularity so i never did anything with it.

FAILURE STORY 1: A man who owned a liquor store designed a board game. It cost him the equivalent of about 2 years of my annual salary at the time to patent his idea. He secured a patent. He tried to sell the idea but nobody was interested. He papered his wall with it.

Thank you for your interesting Story

Actually palm/handspring smart phones had a large, active application market before the iPhone was even released.

Why not make this an open source app project? I'd love to contribute!

One of the other aspects of Patent Protection is that invariably a certain Nation simply doesn't care and openly produces a One Hung Low version as a knock off. To chase up any compensation is in almost every case simply too expensive other than perhaps putting a system in place that prevents the import with instant destruction upon arrival and sale of such goods...

11:45, that where you are somewhat wrong dave, pocket pc smartphones were alive and had thousands of apps

Wow... Not a fan of patents, especially software ones, but the reality of the legal situation is still pretty sketchy. Law. The ultimate pay to win system huh. XD I mean, does that strike anyone else as dodgy? ... That lawsuits effectively go to whoever has the deepest pockets seems to make a bit of a mockery of the idea that any of it is about 'justice'. The big companies with deep pockets win. Everyone else loses. The only situation where it means much to file a lawsuit is if one large company is going after another equally large company... Bleh.

Hey, back in the day it was possible to make J2ME (java for mobile) apps for feature phones and write applications in C++ for Symbian!

At :25 with the editing I thought you said "penetration". LOL

Nice story! Made me laugh :)

Kudos for trying, Dave. Most people don’t even do that.

Thank you for sharing Dave. I only use a spreadsheet on my phone as my exercise program/ progress.

When I was a student I wrote a script that generated audio with correctly timed tones to beep and count sets and reps, including breaks between sets. It was to slow me down as lifting weights too fast is a common bad habit. As you can guess, the only part of me that got any exercise was my typin' fingers.

Wow... interesting story!

Long time viewer, first time commenter , Your antics never cease to amaze me :D

A few years ago I was helping a friend of mine to develop a teleprompter for the iPod. We came up with the name 'PodPrompt' and he submitted a request to trademark that name. With very little time left to raise an objection, Apple did. As we weren't so big as Apple we didn't try to pursue it and called it something less controversial. I'm just wondering if Apple would have raised the same objection to Podsweat as it has the P word in it.

I actually use MapMyRide for cycling, which has some similar ideas. It'll speak your progress, calories burned/heartrate etc, and duck out any audio playing in the background. A bit different, but I believe the related MapMyFitness apps will provide similar instructions during workouts. Of course, they're using a newer speech synthesizer, there's built-in support for Bluetooth monitoring devices, that kind of thing, so it's actually a bit better. I've found references indicating it dates back to 2005, though not what the functionality was like at the time.

I actually would have used this way back when. I used to use running podcasts that were hand produced in the same style

I don't know at what point the iphones refused to play mp3s at all but I know they did. Just remember my friend at school telling me with excitement about his amazing work-around and when I told him to get a normal phone witout stupid restrictions like that, he didn't like me very much.

I'd imagine that early iphones were still using the non mp3 audio format.

No country should grant a patent for the default idea(s) a person skilled in the art comes up with facing that specific problem.

I had a bunch of J2ME apps on my pre-smartphone phone. The main thing was you could only run one at a time.

Pod, sweat and tears! There.. you just needed a better name for it!

5:08 Funny thing about joining MP3 files together .... are you a Unix/Linux guy? Get two test MP3 files and simply append one to the other with cat. No really. 😏👉 The power of "redundant" headers.

here in my country, some times i came with some "clever" solution to an everyday situation and friend sugested to patented it. but we are 3million market, and ideas are locally oriented so i let them .

Very interesting video ! I'm among the very few who are still carrying a dedicated mp3 player. This saves up a lot on phone battery! However, I would not be a user of such tool to embed instructions in my mp3 files haha.

I carry a clipboard with excel spreadsheets on them to keep track of my weight, reps and sets throughout the week. Every two weeks I bump the weights by one notch if I can double my reps from the previous 2 weeks period. It works really well, you get some strange looks by the once a week club members, but it doesn't matter you don't track things to look cool. This is interesting, but seems like more trouble than its worth, at least for me.

That's ok Dave. In college I made a 3d model in Blender, in 2002, of a phone, that was a *VERY* similar phone shape that Apple and Samsung have spent billions on deciding who had the idea first for. XD (I still have the file, possibly on CD, with the timestamp, but alas, no physical proof besides me own memory and data. :( )

There was some prior art. Philips patented something very similar in 1999. Not MP3, but audio files that were downloaded to a portable unit from a PC. Exactly same market.

Your comment about the gym got me thinking - I thought I saw you a little while ago at one near Norwest Business Park but wasn't sure? Would have said hi, but I couldn't be sure haha

Ha! Right now I'm working on a similar idea for FitBit OS. It's pretty different (no voice) but it will use MP3's as part of how it works. And that's about all I can say ;)

Oh my, that "select case" was cringe, just use some math. ix = Floor(num / 100.0)*100 appendfilename voicepath + format(ix,"000") + ".wav" num = num - ix Well, but it works for a prototype, I guess.

I guess you could somehow roll that stuff into an iphone app. May be actually easier to do. You could have like a thing where the gym inputs some data to a central server and the users have to specify what user they are...

Interestingly about the same time just a little bit earlier in 2003-2005 as a kid I was looking at cell phones and corded phones and really expensive devices that let you tie an analog phone into an audio system. What started as a little adapter to connect a RJ-9 handset into audio devices became modified with the capability to connect into a cell phone with a 2.5mm cable. Basic concept was there you would either be able to use a handset with a cell phone or with an audio system or cell phone with an audio system or an analog phone with an audio system or perhaps interconnect analog to cellular. It was basically a simple analog wire adapter but the idea was there and I'm sure I could've improved upon it and kept the price reasonable. Telephone hybrids have been around for a while for Radio stations and I was seeing the upcoming need to interconnect cell phones to audio equipment. so at Boy Scout camp in 2005 I was working as a kitchen assistant and my parents were running the kitchen somebody somehow connected and I was informed that they knew patents and stuff. So not ever meeting this person just through that grapevine, I sent out my idea and it came back to me that nothing was patentable and it wasn't even worth it. another words I gave up not even meeting the person. And the idea was 5 to 10 years before it's time, and only naturally would've incorporated Bluetooth at some point. A few years later I think two manufacturers came out with a box to interface and a few years beyond that Bluetooth was the next big thing and everything in the industry went Bluetooth hybrids in probably about 2015-2016. Before finally going Internet-based replacement real time ISDN links. I still have the adapter and it still works for its intended function somewhat. It probably needed some circuit filtering as I had some level issues between cellular and an RJ-9 handset but it did work connecting into a soundboard. And then the iPhone came out and it decided to use the TRRS jack and with a readily available camcorder AV cable could easily be interfaced with the soundboard even though many people to this day haven't figured that out and by $50-$100+ boxes for what can be accomplished with a resistor a capacitor and the cable. In some ways I'm glad that we standardized it means that any phone with a headset jack and be instantly wired into a sound system with the right cable, unless you have an iPhone with only a lightning port… Oh yeah and there was even a rise of retro handsets for a while, those were fun when they came out I was thinking I have an adapter that can use off-the-shelf standard handsets.

12:45 - You saw the iPhone and its apps? then why didn't you appify your program? doh! 😋😊😊

At least Hollywood has represented the theme a few times. There’s “Flash of Genius” when Detroit automakers are made to compensate for the idea for the intermittent windshield wiper and in “Tucker:_The_Man_and_His_Dream” about the independent car marker though never successful because of the ruthlessness within the industry, many of his car’s safety aspects were revolutionary.

well at least no-one else can patent that now.

Dave, I always knew you had something to do with fitness. Great stuff!

@ 2 minutes in video i was convinced that you tried to patent workout audiobooks.

A lot of really good stuff never makes it to the market because of this crap, if anything the current system is holding civilization back and most of us can thank the big monolithic corporations for it.

"Pure wankery" - Where I work it's called "Documentation" 😁

4:39 "This is Microsoft Sam. Your computers default voice" or something like that. So you basically wrote an mp3 Tag editor which puts the comment tag as voice in front of it. Nice work doing this in VB6. BTW. As far as i know there are some methods to get VB6 running in Win10. Some "Enterprise" Software written in this language is still around...

SUCCESS STORY 2: A CNC company I worked for mounted a video monitor on a metal swing arm attached to the milling machines we sold. We did not patent the idea. Our logic was "this is intuitive, how else would a designer mount a display on a machine? Why patent the idea? Everyone does it this way". We merrily manufactured and sold our machines. But alas, someone did patent the idea of a monitor on an arm, sued "everybody" and won large patent infringement judgements against them all including my company. Afterward, Ha$ Ha$ Ha$ Ha$ Ha$ they said on the way to the bank.

It was a neat idea. I must say that mrs. Eevblog voice sounds very professional. Did you use some audio effects? It sounds like there is some reverb in her voice recording.

Here's the reference to your "Underwater sensor and data sensing and recording apparatus" patent for Thales: patents.justia.com/patent/20050249040 I was with Scientific Atlanta in San Diego and was out at the facility near Sydney in the late 90s working on a proposal with the number two guy there who was in charge of R&D (initials FMD) to bid on a Fast Time Analyzer System (FTAS) for sonobuoys which allowed the tapes from P-3Cs to be processed between missions. Scientific Atlanta was the world leader in this technology, so we could have teamed with any of the Australian sonar companies. As part of the proposal process, we went out to Adelaide to meet with some lab people who were well connected to program. After the meeting, I had the opportunity to ask one of the lead technical people how he felt about Thales (I think they were still Thomson Marconi at the time). He told me he thought the French were a bunch of wankers. None of the people in my group had ever heard this term before and we were split on whether this was just bad or really bad! So I asked the secretary on the way out and she turned pretty red and we had our answer...

A few years ago i had one ideia to turn normal screens into pseudo 3d screens using some sensors, and a few days later (i'm not making this up) nintendo patented the same ideia

"iSweat" might have worked a little better for a name back then with the iEverything that everything was getting named.

Wow the podsweat website still exits, albeit somewhat broken (as in links)