www.inventorvic.com.au

IDEAS CLUB ( Bendigo )

The Inventors Association of Australia (Vic) Postal address: 191 Wattle Valley Rd. Camber-well Vic. 3124 Phone President 0418538604 Email: president@inventorvic.com.au

Product Videos For Inventors GARY HEGEDUS PRODUCTIONS

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Proud sponsor of the IAA VIC. 56 Smedley Road Park Orchards Vic.

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Videos are one of the most useful tools for the inventor wanting to ad-vertise or launch a product. They can

be sent via email, opened in web-sites and played on laptop com-

puters or ipads.

Tel: 98762860 Mob: 0408 994 040

Patent tutorial

Ben is a patent expert with real-world experience as an engineer in manufac-turing. His ability to create and strengthen his clients' patent and de-sign position is what makes him a much sought after industry professional. With a unique combination of practical engineering skills and patent expertise, Ben has a refreshingly practical, results-driven approach to intellectual prop-erty law.

Thank you again Ben for your presenta-tion and for leaving copies of the book-let “A pocket guide to patents, designs and trade marks”.

Main Meeting

P eter O’Shannessy chaired the meeting and congratulated the winners of Inventor of the Year competition which was

held at our Christmas break up in De-cember last year.

Archie Grogan received 3rd prize for his one minute Christmas tree, John

Maltzhan came second with his Coola-mon shopping stroller and Rod Sheppard capped off a good year with his product Pump Defenda taking out the first prize.

Rod told us how he had leveraged the

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Wed. Mar. 5th 2014

45 Miller Cres.

Mount Waverley

7.30pm

Contents Page

1. Sponsors, Patent Attorney, Main Meeting.

2. Lauren Reilly, Colgate electric toothbrush

3. Innovation and entrepreneurship, animated videos of inventions, Christmas breakup

4. Winners of Inventor of the Year competition

Ben Mott talking to Rod Sheppard and Ian

Watkins during supper

Inventor of the Year 2013 - Rod Sheppard

with his trophy for “Pump Defenda”

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award by contacting his database of 150 journalists and media contacts and he recruited another person who had around 300. Press publicity was assured until Nelson Man-della passed away and took up all the news space. After a week Rod tried again and was blocked by GMH announcing it was quitting manufacturing in Australia so bad timing prevented some good publicity and Rod ended up with one radio interview and a Weekly Times article.

Rod is trying hard to work out deals with the CFA, pump manufacturers, community groups and anyone else he can find. He said with sales you know nothing so you might as well try everything.

IAA(Vic) membership is growing

Peter shared some new membership figures which showed that it had risen around 16% for the last twelve months to 84 financial members and that we can look forward to add-ing around $2,000 to our bank balance this year. There were 12 new visitors at the February meeting which is a record.

Guest speaker Lauren Rielly

Lauren was introduced with a long bio of impressive cre-dentials. Lauren’s first invention was a cat’s collar at age 11 for which she received a Science Talent Search award. She also was enterprising and sold four leaf clovers as a child out the front of her flat and at 22 she started her first ven-ture Global Contact Solutions which was a database mar-keting company. Her father was an inventor and entrepre-neur and she learned many skills from him later in her life (because she did not grow up with him).

Electric toothbrush

Lauren told us some great stories about her dad Greg McDougal who invented an electric toothbrush which was marketed around the globe by Colgate and was the biggest seller globally for over a decade. Greg moved to Hong Kong from Australia when Lauren was little where he could util-

ise the marketing and distribution companies there and go over the border to China where he could get design and manufacturing help.

She said on several occasions when her father needed money for travel he used to spend all night designing products for the dental or hair care industries and the next day would knock on doors floor by floor with the aim of selling all the rights to his product to a distributor which was usually successful, something we inventors in Australia only dream about.

Another skill Greg developed was to sit at the bar in the lobby area of major hotels when there was a big confer-ence event and talk to executives from Germany, UK, USA and other countries who were attending about the prob-lems in their industries, what they wished they had, what they could not achieve and used this underground infor-mation for more inventions or products which is how he got the idea for a better electric toothbrush.

He found out that they needed a battery operated toothbrush, more powerful than the electric one and that

cost much less so it could be sold at a lower price point. After finishing the designs and packaging he made thir-teen trips to America without a secure order so he pres-sured them by signing over non-exclusive distribution rights to other countries one by one until they finally made a decision. Colgate then became the world distribu-tor making hundreds of thousands of toothbrushes each month for around ten years.

Innovation

Lauren decided after having started and sold her own company to study for her masters at Swinburne in Innova-tion and Entrepreneurship to learn how to be a better entrepreneur. She completed that at age 27 and has been lecturing on and off at Swinburne since then.

She told us of a recent discovery world wide that defined innovation as two separate streams, one being invention and the other entrepreneurship which are totally different to each other and how innovation is so vitally important for business, government and entire countries.

Lauren has travelled the world looking at how entrepre-neurship operates in many countries and now has a won-derful perspective of the inventor, the investor, the politi-cian, mentor and educator and how they interact in the business ecosystem which has led her to her next venture which is Startup Crowdfunding.

Lauren believes that entrepreneurship helps to increase quality of life through all the new things that develop from it. Her new venture Startup Crowd Funding will

Lauren Rielly talking about inventing, inventions and financing

them www.laurenrielly.com

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models.

Videos of animations and the Christmas Party

We thanked Lauren and after a few more questions the end of year movie about what we had achieved was played which you can watch here End-of-year-message.

While we were playing videos we decided to play Rod Sheppard’s video of his Pump Defenda from his website which incorporated an actual video with a whiteboard animation. Peter went through on the whiteboard how to do an animation video when using an online company. Quotes can be obtained from websites like Elance and after selecting your best quote you communicate via email and the job is only paid for when it is finished. After that we played Rob Wallace’s video about his prod-uct the Flying Carpet which is an airplane boarding sys-tem using a carpet based seating system. This was an-other very professionally produced animation video. Sugru giveaway

Sugru -a space age, rubber super-glue or moldable sili-cone that cures in air and sticks really well was distrib-uted out to members so they could mold a product and present it at the next meeting to compete for a prize. Peter emailed the inventor in the UK to invite her to speak at our meeting if ever she was in Melbourne and she sent over a box of samples for us to use. We will take some photos at the next meeting and send them to her for the company facebook page. 2013 Christmas party and Inventor of the Year

You can watch the video of our end of the year competi-tion and party where we introduced all of the inventors and their inventions and voted on them while enjoying a three course meal for our Christmas breakup.

The inventions were: 1. Perpetual Motion Machine by Sam Spataro which

is a valve he invented that allowed a float to enter a water column so that he could harvest the en-ergy from the float rising through the water and when the float reached the top it would roll out into a holding bay which dropped the floats down to the bottom of the water chamber again using gravity. His idea is that gravity and floatation are free energy sources that could be extracted by someone with the knowledge. Sam needs an inves-tor to build the equipment on a larger scale.

2. Hideaway laundry basket by Bernard McCann

enable more entrepreneurs to develop and grow.

Three types of crowd funding

We are familiar with pledge based crowd funding from companies like Kickstarter and Ipledg where an inventor offers rewards to people who pledge money towards their venture so they can afford to produce it. Lauren explained that there are two other types of crowd funding one of which is debt based where loans and micro loans are given that are repaid and recycled, and the second is equity based where your customer is an investor.

She told us that you can design an investable business, but that most inventors have “Inventor Syndrome” where they fall in love with their product and she made the analogy that you cannot tell anyone that they have an ugly baby. This is a dilemma for investors and entrepreneurs because the inventor is very passionate about their idea while the

investor is more objective and getting the two to cooper-ate effectively is a challenge.

98% of pitches fail

The world statistics are that 98% of pitches from startup businesses to investors fail which Lauren believes is a huge loss to entrepreneurship and her new venture Startup Crowd Funding will address that by teaching people how to design their business to be ready for an investor. She advised us that at the moment it is illegal for anyone to post their business on the internet to advertise for in-vestors and that the laws are in the process of changing to allow that to happen which will become a revolution in the way entrepreneurs can obtain investment money. There were many good questions from members about the way Lauren’s crowdfunding platform will operate and her answers were greatly appreciated.

Lauren will return next month to go over in more detail how to make your business investable which is more about how to get real value out of the business so that it will re-turn money to investors than about increasing the market-ing of the business. This will be important to inventors so that they can plan from the beginning how their product will succeed and then put their inventive efforts into the right areas of their invention.

Lauren has a seminar coming up “How to design an investi-ble business” on 29th March for anyone interested.

Lauren said the secret to attracting an investor is to pro-vide value and then you will have leverage and power. So we need to find out where the value is in our business

Rod Sheppard with the winning Pump Defenda

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which was a flat storage area that can be mounted to the front of the washing machine and is only about 50mm thick. The square storage compartment had a base that attached to the washing machine and a lid that opened onto the floor when it was re-leased with a collapsible, fabric and wire laundry

basket that sprung up from the lid to full height. This removable basket takes up very little room when being stored and yet can take a full load of washing to the line.

3. Rod Sheppard had two products entered, the first of which was his versatile Eco Switch, two power leads joined in a “Y” with a switch on one lead and a plug

and socket on the other so that appliances could be connected to the socket and the switch positioned in a convenient position up off the floor so it could eas-ily switch all appliances off when leaving the room.

4. Coolamon shopping stroller was entered by John Maltzhan which is a modern, collapsible child and baby stroller with enough storage room for a week’s shopping as well as the baby bag. It is safer than swapping children from the car to the shopping trol-ley and from the house to the car while carrying a heavy load of shopping because the baby can be car-ried with the shopping and be safe at all times. It can also utilize fast clip-on tyres that enable it to pass over sand at the beach making it an all-terrain stroller as well.

5. The One Minute Christmas tree by Archie Grogan which hangs flat on a wall instead of standing up on the floor thus saving a lot a space yet it still looks great. The tree is made from synthetic grass and has LED lights operated by a battery pack plus decora-tions and can be folded out of the box and hung on the wall in about 30 seconds. It is ideal for apartment

living, is safer around children with no electric leads and cannot be knocked over plus it hangs on a stan-dard picture frame hook and folds back flat again in its box for quick and easy storage.

6. Pump Defenda is another invention by Rod Sheppard which consists of a spray nozzle mounted at the top of a stem that is connected to the output of a pump so that the pressure causes a circular spray of water around the pump to keep the pump cool during a bushfire where radiant heat and embers can cause pump failure just when it is needed the most. It is also good for transfer pumps in rural areas to protect the surrounding grass from sparks that may be emit-ted from the pump while it is operating.

7. nCounters Bio Feedback rehabilitation devices by Peter Barrett give feedback to the patient who is re-covering from injury or stroke or other debilitating health issues and who cannot identify if they are ap-plying enough weight to the areas they are trying to normalize. The bio feedback tells them when they are moving in the best way without them having to guess so that rehabilitation time is decreased consid-erably. Peter has attachments for knees, sitting, walking, elbows etc. that are all part of his product.

John Maltzhan came second with Coolamon stroller

The winner Rod Sheppard with Pump Defenda

Third place went to Auchie Grogan with the One Minute

Christmas Tree