Wash your clothes at home with... air

Very soon, you won't have to bother to fill up your washer with hot water to wash your laundry. Or any water, for that matter. Sanyo Electric Co. has developed a totally cool household washing machine: It uses air to wash clothes. The washer, called Aqua, is the first drum-type household washing machine to use air, specifically ozone, to keep clothes clean. With "air wash," air containing ozone is sprayed on items inside the machine's drum. According to Sanyo, Aqua's technology can easily handle items that are difficult to clean with water at home or items with noticeable odors, such as from cigarette smoke, sweat, pets, etc...

As no water is used in the process, it could save you a nice chunk on your water heating bills. This will become even more relevant in the context of the advancing world water crisis in a not-so-distant future.

Furthermore, Aqua's cleaning and drying cycles will have no impact on the environment. That is because ozone is made purely with oxygen and electricity, and it is converted into pure oxygen at the end of the cycles. Nice!

Aqua will debut on the Japanese market on March 11, 2006, and will retail for ¥250,000 (or US$ 2,155 at ¥110 to the dollar). Ouch, but I'm sure the prices will come down within a couple of years. The machine has a washing capacity of nine kilograms (20 lbs) and a drying capacity of six kilograms (you do the math :)).

Now THAT is an innovation (at least in your average consumer household). Check out the details here. I think it was not an accident that it was developed in Japan, where they have to deal with scarcity in most natural resources on a daily basis.

What's Wrong with the Patent System

It's not a secret that the U.S. patent system is in serious trouble. Professor Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and Professor Adam B.Jaffe of Brandeis University provide some explanations to when, why, and how it all went wrong in "Innovations and Its Discontents", the book they co-authored and published late last year (October 2004). Professor Josh Lerner discussed some of the issues covered in the book in this interview.

According to the interview, between 1983 and 2002, the number of patents granted annually soared from 62,000 to 177,000. Swamped with about 350,000 patent applications each year, examiners are overwhelmed and unable to devote enough time to check out the validity of each one. The results? Such patents were issued as a "sealed crustless sandwich" filled with peanut butter and jelly; another for a “Method for Swinging on a Swing.” You be the judge. As many practitioners put it, the current patent system has created two sets of competitors — those who actually invent and make a product, and the so-called "paper competitors" who have intellectual property rights but aren’t involved in the industry in any real sense. Not good news for true inventors and innovators.

In their book, the authors offer three recommendations on how to fix the broken patent system, which you can find out here.

OK, gotta go finish my patent application about my "method of updating your blogs on your PDA while bungee jumping".

Introduction

Welcome to INVENT-o-SCOPE

I'm an aspiring inventor, and, besides thinking up various widgets, I'm very interested in the inventing process itself, its algorythms, if any, its alchemy, and the thought process behind it. So this blog, more than anything, is an 'thinking-outloud' exploration.