As a product designer it’s basically a foregone conclusion that I had to watch the premiere of ABC’s new Simon Cowell-produced show, “American Inventor“. So that’s what I did.

True to expectation, there were plenty of non-inventive offerings which were pretty obviously ideas generated only to get the participants on television. There was also manufactured drahma, bleeped words, behind the scenes tears and all the rest. But there wouldn’t be a show if there weren’t some worthwhile ideas to pursue in future episodes, so they found a few of those too. More interesting to me, however, is hearing how much money some people spend to develop their ideas.

One idea in particular, the Sand Bag Shovel, comes to mind. The inventor, Mark Martinez, said he’d spent $20,000 to reach a point that seemed to me to be pretty early in development. I certainly hope that included a full-blown utility patent. Even so, I couldn’t help but think he paid twice what he should have … assuming the basic idea he demonstrated was his alone (a safe assumption I believe). No wonder Western corporations are taking their R&D overseas.

{Favorite line: “I don’t know how you make it, I’m just the inventor.”}

Here I was just telling the marketing and branding folks to check out the corporate tie-ins on these things (reLink), when sure enough along comes Vinyl Pulse posting an entry today (Link) specifically dealing with corporate-sponsored trexi’s … in this case, Coca-Cola’s “We All Speak Football” Trexi Series.

Hey. Is that a Nike logo I see buried in the graphics?

{Image source: Vinyl Pulse}

I just received word that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be licensing some of its work to be used within the Second Life virtual world. From a blog posting over on The Daily Graze (Link):

Today he was given the green light by both the SF MoMA and the New Media Consortium to act as curator for the first show at the Aho Museum and Gallery we are building in their Virtual Campus. This is officially licensed art from a selection of works in the Art as Experiment, Art as Experience and Making Sense of Modern Art collections.

This is great news in my opinion. In order for virtual spaces to be taken seriously by the general public, they really do need to take meatspace seriously as well; which – as most of you have probably figured out – means to me recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property rights (even if it means living with some crappy laws for the time being).

I’ll have to try to stop in and take a look for myself. In the meantime, there’s a Flickr image set available which I’ll be checking. Stop by The Daily Graze for a link to the set and some other relevant sites.

If there was one arcade game at which I had some skill, it was Defender. It was by far my favorite videogame and I wasted too many quarters on that one. It’s been more than 20 years yet I can still recount the sounds it makes (a testament to how loud those things could be). So it’s with some obvious skeptism that I read about Diary Defender, a game developed as part of the marketing strategy for Proctor & Gamble’s Vicks First Defence product offering. From the report over on iMedia Connection (Link):

Inbox was asked to come up with the online campaign and in particular a viral game to spread the word about this new and exciting product. Using the Diary Defender theme, we came up with the idea of a game that echoes the classic arcade game Defender.

And what do reviewers have to say? Well, the creative director at Freestyle Interactive sounds to me like someone who understands games. The other reviewer, a director from Razorfish, has me thinking they’ve seen their best days after that gusher of useless praise.

Having just tried it myself, all I’ll say is that I’d rather play Calderoids, an aesthetically attractive game based on “Asteroids” … without the marketing message.

I’m not sure if this is the same device I discussed in my earlier post (reLink) on Microsoft’s real-to-virtual interface technology but I suspect it is. No matter. This one is much more fun to watch.

{Video Copyright © Andreas}