Although the theory sounds great, many challenges exist to making this a true help to inventors.

1) Navigating the course of taking a concept or idea through the creation-manufacturing stage, is a very difficult one. The idea that a community of people who have been down this road could help (another inventor), and to imply this is as part of your mantra is irresponsible in my opinion.

Many people within the community that will try and help (for free) have good intentions but are simply not qualified or experienced enough to give the proper advice, and this will hurt more than it helps most. You would need a VERY accurate and thought out rating system to ensure that good advice floats to the top. Please ensure this is a feature or your site.

2) As much as the creation stage is crucial to a products success, equally as important is the manufacturing/sales/marketing stage.

For most products to be successful they need to be manufactured in a quantity sufficient to bring the cost in line with what that market will accept. To suggest or even hope that an ecommerce platform on this site will provide enough volume to satisfy this VERY crucial stage is wishful thinking.
I wish Incuby luck in this area - I truly do - but odds are against it.

3) Protection of members and their ideas needs to go beyond legal paper that means absolute zero in other countries.

Every year my former compnay would launch somewhere between 6 and 18 products on various scales. These products were all inventions that we invested anywhere from 6-18 months of development and $100K-400K of our owners funds (on each). Most of these products were manufactured off-shore and were protected by every means possible.

That still didn’t stop multitudes of knock-offs from appearing, not to mention our own contracted plants from attemting to steal from us. The reality is that our North American aws are not respected in other cultures, and will never be. It cost us time, money, lost sales, etc…to protect our products. A community that is open for anyone to join will be composed of fakers, scammers, imposters, etc..which will be impossible to police - even with one heck of a ratings system.

As members get scammed the community will crumble from lack of trust. You will need to seriously consider all of this while building your community. It’s one thing to talk to inventors and interested parties, while completing your research into building your community, but you need to expand much farther beyond this to understand the scope of what happens globally to protect your community.

4) Inventors are often people that don’t know when to quit, which is why they can ruin themselves financially in the process. A site like Incuby could lend up hurting more people than it helps, and that would be sad.

Polling and rating systems aside, there are simply those folks that believe their great idea is the next hoola-hoop, when it is anything but. Incuby will need to find away to help these folks see reality or lend up community of dreamers and schemers.

I’m not sure how you do this and still encourage anyone with an idea to join the community, but as someone who refuses work from the majority of inventors that come to me, this should be a huge concern.

Geat ideas and concepts are only great if the thoughts are complete. You have a good idea and a good concept, but your thoughts are not yet complete, keep on truckin’ and maybe you’ll get there.

Thanks for the followup. I really hope you guys do succeed. Comparing to alphaWorks really isn’t the point, though, is it. It’s not about whether you are posting neeto invention #9 and alphaWorks is posting XML parser #207. It’s about how you are going to get inventors to consistently provide interesting content.

An idea box - even a really pretty one like yours with all the nifty social networking widgets - is an idea box. There are fundamental social/business/property issues which are incredibly - I mean incredibly - difficult to navigate. From what we can see here, you’ve addressed presentation nicely. What have you done to change the social economics and company barriers to providing invention content that isn’t mostly crap and isn’t tipping the hand of someone who wants to exploit that invention?

There have been a few attempts to do this from actual venture capital firms - and at least there you’d think that inventors would have beat a path to their door just for the shot at getting noticed. Nope.

This is a hard space. Nice effort. I’d pay your guys just to do work like that on my sites.

We actually based them on the sounds from Mario Brothers and edited them ourselves. We thought it was a cool sound and since we’re all huge fans of Nintendo, we felt it would be a nice way to pay a tribute to them.

Nothing was stolen, just inspired by.

Chewey:
Here is my contact info:

Sarah Foster, Community Director
210-582-5895
info-at-incuby-dot-com

sean percival:
Thanks for your comment.
incuby was designed to help inventors with the roadblocks they encounter when trying to sell their idea. We were really overwhelmed with the array of inventions we found while touring the inventor groups. Everything from melanin filled lenses to stop macular degeneration to THE CHUGGLER, a beer bong morphed together with a 32oz mug. These type of inventors feel the opposite about being protective about their projects, they want as many people (and other inventors) to find out about them.

Our website’s main focus, when we first created it, was to serve as a place for inventors to show their inventions to each other to either spawn collaborations or for constructive criticism. As we spoke to more inventors and saw how unique some of their inventions were, we felt it was a no-brainer to give them each ecommerce capabilities so they could sell to the public.

For the inventor who may have some hesitation and does not have anything even close to a patent, we have formed a strategic partnership with a legal company to offer provisional patents. They’re not as elaborate as full patents, but for a minimal expense and time they will have some documentation on their idea.

Andy, anthropocentric:
Wow! We really had not thought about that at all (and actually still don’t). Your comments remind me of when a psychiatrist holds up an inkblot test and asks the patient “what do you see?” Usually their answer reflects what they are either thinking about at that moment or accustomed to think Thanks for the advice but I don’t think we’ll be changing our logo.

Sami:
I’m glad you liked our company’s name, it came to us after long deliberations. One thing we all agreed on was staying away from the letter r as an ending.

Steve:
ideawicket is a bit different to incuby. Our main goal for the site is to have an ecosystem of inventors and gadget makers. As we all know the web is big enough for many companies, especially with you being based in India.

Enkaedu:
Thanks for your comments about our design! You rejuvenated our design team with those remarks. In respects to your comments about IBM, I feel alphaworks is too technical to be compared with incuby. We’re not looking for the next Multi-Source File Delivery System, we have our eyes on everyday inventions that are unknown to web browsers until they visit incuby.com.

Heri:
We’re banking on visitors coming when there are thousands of inventions/gadgets. That’s why we took the grassroots approach and toured inventor groups around the US. We manually signed them up and they’re just waiting for the site to be released. Hopefully you’ll come to visit us soon.

Kurt and Derrich:
Please give us a call or email: info-at-incuby-dot-com.

Larrian
Exactly, a percentage of the sale. We feel it is a great formula in order to keep it free until the inventor makes a sale. For the inventors who have many inventions or want an account with more options (more pictures, featured, etc…), we offer a pro account – ala flickr.

Thank you all again for your comments! We are really working hard to make incuby work in order to put expensive tradeshows and invention marketing companies out of commission and bring the power back to the inventor.

Sarah Foster, Community Director

@Drama 2.0 — the name’s a play on incubator, not incubi. See the wikipedia definition: “In economics and management, incubation refers to the support provided by business incubators in the development phase of startups when entrepreneurs work on the launch of their companies.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(demon)

Hilarious comment, anthro. Total @$$#0Le.

Anyone hazard a guess on when high-quality graphical social media components on a web site no longer qualify as noteworthy or business-worthy?

As one of the guys who built alphaWorks, helped with Innocentive, and has spent 20 years focused on the problem of socializing inventions, I can say with no fear of being the “we tried it in the 60’s and it didn’t work” curmudgeon that the site is the least important factor in solving the issue of inventions not getting to the right audiences.

Problem #1: Inventors don’t post, and often can’t. Innocentive and others have felt the pain of trying to get people to submit stuff to their system. alphaWorks solved this for IBM by hiring a raft of full-time people who did nothing but tour IBM’s 8 research labs looking for stuff to post on http://www.ibm.com/alphaworks. This is not one of those areas where “if we build it, they will post” applies. Even when an individual is interested in posting, that person is more often than not - if he or she is doing work of high potential - inside an organization that wouldn’t allow posting to an external site without permission.

Problem #2: 95% of everything is crap. Slogging through the brain dead stuff for the diamond in the rough is…um…boring for most people.

Problem #3: Anyone here regularly troll the US PTO web site looking for stuff to invest in? I know maybe one guy who does so regularly, and he does it mainly to find stories of stupid patents.

Bottom line: Inventions are not like getting a date after your recent divorce. It’s not a Match.com kinda thing. And while some inventions are very exciting, the process of reading them in raw post form is not sexy.

Who’s knows what the next big one is, if I did I sure wouldn’t be leaving it as a comment on Techcrunch, but the barrier to entry and market saturation in social networking is so immense that it amazes me that people are still trying to get in. The more resources and money that get dumped into companies like this the larger the bubble (and its eventual 2.0 burst) becomes.