Betsy Ravreby Kaufman is what some might call the accidental inventor.Buy today and get your delivery for £25 on a range of ceramic tile
for your home. While many people spend their lives trying to develop
the next big thing, Betsy was simply making a purchase at Bed, Bath and
Beyond when she tripped upon an opportunity that would change her life.
“When I got my sales receipt,” Betsy explained, “I glanced at
the back and noticed a headline that said, ‘Have a great dorm idea?’
And it gave a web address where customers like me could send in new
product ideas. My son was still in college and I’d been in so many
dorms,All our plastic moulds are vacuum formed using food safe plastic. I was sure I could come up with something.”
So
Betsy went to the website, which led her to Edison Nation, a company
that partners with retailers and manufacturers to develop new products.
She submitted three ideas for items she knew her son could use -- and
paid an entry fee of $25 for each one.
“I wouldn’t have sent
money to just anyone. There are a lot of scams out there. But I read
that Edison Nation produces a show for PBS called "Everyday Edisons"
and, as a former television reporter and anchor, that struck a chord
with me.”
The staff of "Everyday Edisons" had taken their own
big idea to the next level. As they were producing the show, they
realized that lots of great designs were slipping through the cracks.
So they began creating searches for regular people like Betsy who
happen to have really good ideas, but maybe not the time or money to
bring them to market.
“Once you submit your concept,” Betsy
continued, “it goes through a series of steps and that can take months.
So one day I was checking on my dorm entries, and I noticed they were
looking for ideas for “As Seen On TV,” the company behind lots of the
infomercials that air late at night. I always loved laughing at those.
I’d watch them when I’d get home from work, after doing the 11 o’clock
show. And I had a cupboard full of things that they were selling --
Chia Pets, the Clapper. And a few days later, it hit me.”
“I
called my husband and said, ‘I just came up with a winning idea for the
“As Seen On TV” search.’ He said, ‘That’s nice dear, but could you
call me after I finish this sales call?’ And I called my friend Anne
and she said, ‘That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’ But I thought,
'For $25, what have I got to lose?'"
So once again, Betsy
wrote up a description and paid the fee, this time for something she
called “Egg Toss.” She envisioned the kind of plastic egg one might buy
at Easter to fill with candy -- shaped like a real egg -- but made of
two heat-resistant pieces that would twist apart.
“I was
thinking about all the eggs I boil for Passover Seders,” Betsy said.
“Every year I bring at least 30 hard-boiled eggs to someone’s home, and
just as I think I finally have them all peeled and looking perfect, my
thumb gouges into one! And I have to start boiling again.We mainly
supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china.”
“I
thought, 'What if I could crack open an egg, pour it into a
heat-resistant form -- and then when it’s hardboiled, just pop it out?'
That way, I could even add things like scallions, tomatoes and
seasonings, and every egg would come out perfect.”
That was in
October 2009. As Betsy made her way through the holidays and continued
to tell her friends and family about her exciting new idea, she’d watch
as they’d roll their eyes.Our aim is to supply air purifier
which will best perform to the customer's individual requirements.
Until, of course, she received an email from Edison Nation, saying they
had a sponsor who was interested.
As the internet — and in due
course the worldwide web — developed, more kinds of (increasingly
mobile) computing devices became connected, and web servers delivered
ever richer content with which they could interact. Although this first
internet/web revolution changed the world profoundly, the next
disruptive development, in which the majority of internet traffic will
be generated by 'things' rather than by human-operated computers, has
the potential to change it even more.
However, as the
aforementioned book discusses at length, there's many a slip between a
potential brave new technological world and a reality that could
improve the quality of life of a significant proportion of humankind.
Whether the Internet of Things comes to pass in a satisfying way will
depend critically on how the emerging M2M ecosystem is architected.
A
point worth stressing is that data transfer patterns in the M2M-driven
Internet of Things will differ fundamentally from those in the classic
'human-to-human' (H2H) internet. M2M communications will feature
orders of magnitude more nodes than H2H, most of which will create
low-bandwidth, upload-biased traffic. Many M2M applications will need to
deliver and process information in real time, or near-real-time, and
many nodes will have to be extremely low-power or self-powered (eg.
solar powered) devices.
The 'things' in the IoT, or the
'machines' in M2M, are physical entities whose identity, state (or the
state of whose surroundings) is capable of being relayed to an
internet-connected IT infrastructure. Almost anything to which you can
attach a sensor — a cow in a field, a container on a cargo vessel, the
air-conditioning unit in your office, a lamppost in the street — can
become a node in the Internet of Things.
These are the
components of 'things' that gather and/or disseminate data — be it on
location, altitude, velocity, temperature, illumination, motion, power,
humidity, blood sugar, air quality, soil moisture... you name it.We
offers several ways of providing hands free access
to car parks to authorised vehicles. These devices are rarely
'computers' as we generally understand them, although they may contain
many or all of the same elements (processor, memory, storage, inputs
and outputs, OS, software). The key point is that they are increasingly
cheap, plentiful and can communicate, either directly with the
internet or with internet-connected devices.
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