Bootstrapping a New Technology? 360
djk1024 writes "I've just filed for a patent on a new approach to motion capture that is simple, cheap, easy, accurate, and portable. It's RF-based, accurate to 1 mm, and simple enough that a sophisticated hobbyist could build one in a couple weekends from plans and standard electronics. So now what? I quit my job and have been working on this full-time for the past couple of years; now I'm out of money so can't continue development on my own. I'm also not an electrical or RF guy so I can't carry out my own independent development on the electronics. I'm quite frustrated at this point. I've been in the software development field for over 30 years and have gone through a large number of startups, but always just as the head techie, and always as part of a team. This doing it alone sucks. I would love some advice on how best to go forward."
Sell your patent (Score:5, Insightful)
The buyer may offer you a job, which seems to be what you want.
Know the SCORE (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.score.org/index.html [score.org]
Seriously, get some help. Asking "techies" is, as you probably are quickly finding out, the absolute wrong way to get good business advice.
Re:Sell your patent (Score:2, Insightful)
What buyer? I didn't see mention of any buyer. And if he's seeking a buyer, well, that too takes some know how.
ok (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Get a job (solve cash flow situation first)
2. Preferably somewhere with people you can recruit into your endeavor
3. Recruit people to help you from your job or from anywhere you can find them (meetup?)
4. Find investors if money is needed, or do it organically with money from your own job
5. Finish the prototype/proof of concept
6. Shop around to interested buyers
7. Profit?
Most importantly you need more eyes on what you're doing for the sanity check. People in the business which you will be selling or licensing this to.
Re:Sell your patent (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, instead of trying to at a minimum recover his costs, he's just going to open source something that took countless hours of work.
No, this is *precisely* the kind of thing patents are supposed to protect. I'm sure if you paid him a fair amount of money, he'll grant you the license to open source it yourself if you like.
One question (Score:5, Insightful)
How did you manage to invent this if you're not an electrical or RF guy?
Re:Open source? (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all: you've made at least a few mistakes. The most important is that you apparently quit your day job before you had your first serious customer. Having a brilliant product doesn't mean you can live off it. You need people who buy it. The second mistake is related: once you decide to earn a living off your invention, you should spend at least half of your time selling it, not developing. Third mistake: you're "not an electrical or RF guy", but you're doing this solo?
The best way of selling this would be to have a working demo. Create something with your invention that isn't possible with other solutions, be it technically or budget-wise. Since you seem to have been working on this for a few years and haven't come up with something, you probably need others to do this (or anything else that might spur sales).
Open sourcing your product might do this for you. You will lose the property of the software and/or mechanisms, but you'll still be recognised as the inventor and the expert. This might get you places.
Great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Great idea.
With RF, you also eliminate issues with hiding the normal lights/reflectors with clothing/costumes, etc. As I understand at the moment, motion capture is done with an actor in a leotard to avoid these problems. With RF, you open up new possibilities of filming a real actor in real costume, and being able to motion detect them in real time. I'm not quite sure what you'd do with it, but that's why I'm an engineer and not a "creative" type.
Frankly, you need help. You're not going to successfully develop a product from this on your own. Give up on the "lone wolf" approach - you're not gonna make it.
Find a VC who understands the motion picture industry, and has contacts there. Sell out, keeping whatever percentage you can. Let the VC help you find the managers and developers necessary to take this to the next level - either as a standalone product or a technology for sale.
Alternatively, take what you have to ILM or Pixar or Disney or whoever. You'll have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone to do this; once again, a VC could help you with that.
JMHO.
Customers as your funding (Score:4, Insightful)
partner (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like you need a business partner. I would suggest that you (a) first get a job so that you don't feel like you are strained and that this project is draining the life out of you and (b) need to find someone who is more "business focused" so that they can complement your strengths. No reason that you have to do everything alone. You bring certain strengths to the table and so will someone else. Find someone who is passionate about your idea, share some equity with them, and this can continue as a great project on the weekends until you start making money at it and can afford to have it support you while you work on it full time.
Make a strategic decision to put yourself in a stronger position to succeed. Then working on it won't feel as burdensome and you will have more fun and energy to put back into the project.
Good luck!
Re:One question (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's the Patent #? (Score:1, Insightful)
The patent filing should be public knowledge. Where's the patent #...? You should at least let the /. crowd examine your patent... Unless, of course, you're afraid of it being ripped to shreds...
Re:ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Help will be required (Score:5, Insightful)
You need help for the business side or else someone is going to rip off your idea, make minor changes patent that and commercialize it right out from under you. Since you don't have any staff your the best option might be licensing to someone, but you'll need help to find the right someone. If you don't license you'll need way more people and a VC or other funding source to get it off the ground at any volume. The more revolutionary the product the more you need money to defend it.
SCORE would be a reasonable place to go. Stay well away from 'invention companies' or at least any that demand up front fees. By filing the patent you've started the clock so you are going to have to move fast. Expect to have two jobs for a while until funding comes through - one job makes money to pay the rent and the other is searching for the right way to harvest this technology.
The other option might be a partner - IF you know anyone you can trust from your other startups who can deliver the right expertise.
A quick technical question, could this provide position monitoring for indoor robots or rovers? There's not much in the market, what is there tends to be hacked together and/or expensive.
Re:Sell your patent (Score:1, Insightful)
The poster to whom you responded. I happen to agree with you, in as far as I often 'miss' content that people embed in their post titles. It's a common practice here on slashdot and a little annoying.
Now, if a post does not appear to make sense, I always check the title of the post, in case the post content is run-on text from that.
Find a start-up CEO, a job, and keep working on it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sell your patent (Score:3, Insightful)
The job I quit was as a software architect for Microsoft, so, no, a job isn't what I'm looking for. I had a pretty good one. I'm afraid that I'm addicted to tech startups. I think I've got a pretty important new thing here and I'm concerned about immediate survival mode until I can get this thing to ignition. And I haven't been looking for a buyer as much as development partners and seed funding.
Get a job -- any job -- that pays your bills and gives you enough free time to continue working on your project. Convenience store, fast food, call center, whatever. It's inglorious but it'll do until you can rake in the Big Bucks.
Out of left field (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great idea (Score:1, Insightful)
You must be new here
Solicit for a buyer for the patent (Score:2, Insightful)
The submitter asked for advice. The advice given by the OP is to sell the patent, which implies finding a buyer.
I mean, seriously... it's not that hard to understand. If I suggest to you "Hey dude... sell your car" would you respond with "Sell it? Did I say there was a buyer? How am I going to sell my car if I don't already have a buyer lined up? After all, it's completely impossible to desire to sell something first, then to take the steps necessary to market a given product or service out there, from which a buyer might self-identify. I mean, you can't just put an advertisement in an online service such as Craigslist offering to sell your product when you don't have any buyers!"
Re:ok (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rondam's top ten Geek Business Myths (Score:3, Insightful)
In the same way that banknotes are worthless, it's the ability to swap them for stuff that's important. -1, blindingly obvious.
Re:Patent (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not quite accurate. Patents were created, in part, to give companies an incentive to create new inventions at a time when companies were losing sales to others who were undercutting the original inventor. An inventor needed the monopoly on his invention to help ensure he would make back his initial cost. So "making" was always intended.
Also, the system was intended to encourage publishing. Patents are publicly available, but that wasn't to provide potential makers an out to avoid paying licensing fees. The invention could be improved upon either before expiry, by licensing, or after. Either way the detailed plans would be available.
A: People who start a sentence in the subject (Score:3, Insightful)
and continue it in the body
Q: what's even more annoying than top-posters?
Re:Contradictory? (Score:3, Insightful)
To be honest 1mm accuracy from RF localization sounds waaaaaay unrealistic. Yes I believe it is possible to get it in a clean setup but I don't see how it could work in practice. I really hope he has a silver bullet because otherwise he is wasting his time.