San Antonio, Texas based Incuby is aiming to build a community where inventors can display their inventions to the general public, entrepreneurs and investors.
In developing the site, the team behind Incuby have toured the United States meeting with different inventor groups. They found that inventors are tired of the high costs associated with travelling and presenting at trade shows and are ready for “a place of their own on the web”.
The site is still in development and will move to a closed beta test in the coming weeks with a broad number of inventors already signed up to test the site.
The focus is creating an environment where inventors can coexist and communicate online with each other, while presenting their innovations. Through ecommerce enabled profiles, each inventor will be able to manage their product’s sales while adhering to a customer feedback system that is similar to eBay.
Shopping inventions does share similarities with the financing and development path of Web 2.0 startups. In truth the only real differences are tangible vs intangible IP and that tangible invention patents and trademarks prevent the same ideas being copied over and over again like they are in Web 2.0, for example with social bookmarking sites and Digg clones.
Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas that work best. Incuby is a simple yet solid idea that has the potential of going far. If I was an inventor myself, I’d be signing up as soon as it launched.
Love the idea. There is potential
hopefully, they will partner with an ecommerce giant to help sell the items to wholesalers, or perhaps eventually expand into an ecommerce site where individuals can buy directly.
if these guys read their own press maybe they can provide some contact info here in the comments so people can contact them about working with them - sounds like a great oppty.
Cool idea
Only problem is inventors are very protective about their projects. I’m not sure how much they share. Also the “submit you idea” thing worries me a bit. This industry is full of companies that scam poor people into the ground. Still interesting though…
Hopefully they will change the logo, it looks like an a**hole. Or maybe that’s to imply that that’s where a lot of ideas come from.
no companies will sign NDA. Even if you invent something new. Companies will steal it and do reverse engineering. They will make product ten times better than your orginal invention. Stick with classic patent style.
haha! Logo does look like an a**hole!
agree, that logo is a litttttle “starfish”
Finally a decen start-up name. Don’t know why but I really like the name. INCUBY!
dum.. dum,dum.. Woh! (and repeat). Headphones required. Good idea, not sure about the music.
Starting a social network right now is like starting a dial up provider in 2002, a webmail company in 2003, or a VOIP company in 2006.
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.
this is already being done by http://www.ideawicket.com
Snore.
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.
Having said all that in the previous post, and the a##hole symbol logo aside, I wish we had these guys on the alphaWorks team when we were building it. Terrific web design and multimedia chops.
Anyone hazard a guess on when high-quality graphical social media components on a web site no longer qualify as noteworthy or business-worthy?
“this is already being done by http://www.ideawicket.com” - So we have a lot of Search Engines, why we couldn`t have a lot of “Social Networking For Inventions” )))
this wont work. inventors will come if there are millions of visitors - and visitors will come if there are thousands of inventions&gadgets. a chicken and egg problem. i am not sure even what a visitor will get from this. is there some sort of interactivity or is it just some “showing off” ?
As an inventor and an employee at a new media business in San Antonio, I’d like to meet with the Incuby founders. If they read these comments, please provide a way for people to contact you (as Chewey also mentioned). Thanks.
Wow. I’m happy to see another San Antonio site pop up on the radar. First BlogCatalog, now this. Only 4,230,412 more to go to catch up with Austin, and slightly less than that to catch up with everyone else.
Hilarious comment, anthro. Total @$$#0Le.
So how is the site making any money? Do they get a percentage of the sale of an invention? I dont get where the revenue is going to come from…just ads?
I’m assuming that the name “Incuby” is intended to be pronounced the same as the word “incubi” (plural of incubus). This was probably not the most clever name to choose:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(demon)
Did anyone else notice that nearly all of the sounds (like the cutesy hopping/ the coin “cha-ring!”) in the Incuby flash intro were taken (stolen?) from Nintendo’s Mario Kart series?
@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.”
Well first I would like to thank everybody for their questions and comments. They really do help us greatly in this development period. I’ll try to answer as thorough as possible.
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:
Thanks for the advice but I don’t think we’ll be changing our logo.
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
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
Brian:
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.
@ comment #4
maybe someone can use the site to invent a new logo for them ; )
@ Sarah - there is a group in the bay area (and I think they have an arm in Sacramento) that’s just for inventors run by a guy named Andrew Krauss. It’s a non-profit that seems to have a pretty good following:
http://www.inventorsalliance.org/ possible potential partner for your group.
It’s too bad the logo draws that association for so many, as it’s apparent from the rest of the design that they didn’t just pull it out of their arse.
Thank you Amy, we’ll contact them!
Sarah,
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.
Well thanks, I guess a plug for them wouldn’t hurt - http://www.4mercury.com
damn..i came up with this idea in the shower several months ago. i do like the 70s inspired, web 2.0 logo mashup. it alludes to some mysteriour creatue or substance about to emerge from an oriface.
I love the website & love the concept. However those sounds were 100% from Mario Brothers, can’t hear where any custom sound was created. I was really expecting for a turtle shell to come flying across the screen. Great idea wish it the best of luck.
As someone who previously worked for a company that turned inventors’ concepts into successful consumer goods, I’d like to throw in my two cents on Incuby.
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.
NAMESTEALER ! -.-
NExt time google it b4 u came up with this shit.
When u google “Incuby” IT WAS ME noone else.
Now i losse my reputation and my nickname which i was so proud of
I’m soo fucking pissed !
We started a similar venture, http://ideatango.com, 10 months ago. Like Incuby, we help inventors bring new products to market and we already have hundreds of registered users and thousands of newsletter subscribers. Our site, although similar in many ways, has some differences from incuby. But I’ll let you figure those out…
Even if you overlook the unfortunate connection to supernatural molestation, this name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like a buttered marble, does it?