Eric Peterson: There was no shortage of worthy entrants at last November’s Colorado Inventor
Showcase at the Daniels Cable Center at the University of Denver. The DaVinci
Institute event featured innovations in everything from tailgate parties to
robots, with the judges picking four concepts — Optibike, LucidLights, OmniluX
and Txtbus — as the cream of the crop.
ColoradoBiz was media sponsor for the event and participated in the judging.
Inventor of the Year
Jim Turner
Optibike, Boulder
www.optibike.com
Jim Turner’s résumé reads like a good book. Before he invented Optibike —
a.k.a. "the Ferrari of the electric bike industry" — in 1997, Turner was a
professional motocross racer (and Canadian champion) as a teenager in the 1970s
before getting his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the latter at Stanford
University in mechanical engineering. In 1984, he traded Palo Alto for Detroit
and a job at Ford Motor Co.
That lasted only two years. "I didn’t like the corporate life," Turner said.
"Ford didn’t seem too interested in innovation." So he returned to California,
this time to Santa Cruz, and took a job at a small company where he designed a
chemical dispenser that became an industry standard. He also got into bicycles,
going as far as getting rid of his car in 1987 to commute exclusively on his
bike.
In 1990, Turner took a job in Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry after
an around-the-world bicycle trip with his wife, Susan, was cut short, and
designed a wafer-cutting machine that became another industry standard.
But his entrepreneurial urges led him to start a company of his own seven
years later. "I had a few criteria," Turner said. "I wanted to use the skills I
had, and I wanted to affect people directly. I also wanted to make a positive
impact on the environment.
"I’m also really stubborn," he added. It took a decade — including
post-dot-bomb funding issues and a near miss with Lee Iacocca’s electric bike
company — but Turner’s stubbornness is now paying off, thanks in part to
$3-a-gallon gas.
Since 2006, he has sold more than 75 Optibikes at $5,500
to $8,000 a pop. The bikes — which are fully functional road bikes with an
electric motor that can propel the rider at a top speed of about 30 miles an
hour — have a range of 25 to 100 miles on about 5 cents of electricity from an
ordinary wall outlet.
"Our 2008 models are moving the standard way beyond what anybody’s doing
now," Turner said.
Consumer product of the Year
LucidLights
www.lucidlights.net
Englewood
Inventor: John Craig
On Oct. 1, 2006, John Craig and his wife, E.J., were at a Styx and REO
Speedwagon concert at Coors Amphitheatre when the LucidLights vision sprouted
wings. The couple saw all of the glow-in-the-dark necklaces and blinking LED
(light emitting diodes) souvenirs for sale and cigarette lighters coming out for
the encore. "We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if the LEDs would spell out Styx
and REO Speedwagon?’" E.J. said.
John already had a concept for a handheld row of programmable LEDs and put
together a prototype within a week. Thanks to built-in sensors, the device could
be programmed to hypnotically spell out colorful words as you wave it from side
to side, whether the phrase is "Obama 2008," "Trick or Treat," "Go Broncos," or
the complete lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven." Animated graphics — such as virtual
Zippo lighters opening and flicking aflame — can also be programmed. The plan is
to sell them preprogrammed for specific events, such as football games or
concerts, then allowing buyers to program in their own personal messages at
home.
"There are no moving parts," John said. "All of the work is done
mathematically. Whether you swing it fast or slow, it paints the picture. People
stop in their tracks."
With several prototype models in hand and a patent pending, LucidLights is in
fundraising mode at the moment, with a target rollout later in 2008. ("We really
want to have an American flag model for the Democratic National Convention,"
E.J. said.) LucidLights will retail for $49 to $149, and target not only
event-goers but the public safety, education and advertising markets as well.
E.J., a writer and independent publisher, and John, a veteran programmer and
prolific author of programming books, "merged" their families in 2005, and have
five kids aged 9 to 21. "We have a pretty busy home office," E.J. said.
Commercial product of the Year
OmniluX www.omniluxinc.com
Highlands
Ranch
Inventor: Enrique Gutiérrez
After working for Motorola in Chicago until 1995 — and before working toward
a "paradigm shift" in lighting — Enrique Gutiérrez started his own company and
moved to Colorado in 1999. Because his company, Technu, owned several factories
in Mexico, people pitched him "goofy ideas" all the time. In 2004, an inventor
approached Gutiérrez with a product, the Safe-T-Scan. It was a knockoff of the
inventor’s patented concept of a flashlight that sprayed light from side to side
rather than focus all of it dead ahead. The inventor had recently won a lawsuit
against the Chinese manufacturer — but not before 50,000 units were sold at $50
a pop in just a few months. He had no finances.
"I thought it was a really hokey idea," Gutiérrez said. "Then I had the
opportunity to use it on a pitch-black night looking for something." Not only
did he find what he was looking for, he bought the patent from the inventor,
significantly improved upon the concept, and has now filed several more patents.
Using about half the energy of typical lighting, OmniluX’s technology is based
on blinking light emitting diodes (LEDs), moving mirrors and a frictionless
"resonant engine."
The end result? OmniluX’s technology makes "light work a little bit harder,"
Gutiérrez said. "We’re literally reshaping light. We’re creating rectangular and
curved beam patterns. Now you can just light the sidewalk, not the grass or the
street."
"The basic design of the light bulb hasn’t changed in 100 years," Gutiérrez
said. "But today there’s this huge movement toward better light bulbs. Australia
has been talking about a ban on incandescent bulbs." OmniluX’s business plan
calls for entry into the exterior lighting market in 2008 and other lighting
markets (including headlights and commercial lighting) in the longer term.
In the end, OmniluX’s cutting-edge lighting must be seen to be believed.
Related Gutiérrez: "David Keith, a professor in CU’s lighting department, said
to me, ‘There are no words to describe it. The terminology doesn’t exist.’"
Software Product of the Year
Txtbus
www.txtbus.net
Boulder
Inventor:
Friedrick Schweitzer
Friedrick Schweitzer moved from Montana to Colorado in 2003 for Air Force
Academy boot camp. A year later, he transferred to CU-Boulder. A year later, he
started OR Peer, a medical training and reference software company, with his
father, an anesthesiologist in Billings, Mont. Then he hit a four-point buck and
totaled his car.
Schweitzer decided to rely exclusively on his student bus pass for
transportation. "It was a lot harder than I thought it would be," he said. So
Schweitzer, now 23 and still car-free, set up a text-messaging system to remind
himself when his bus was coming. His friends liked it and he helped them set it
up before officially founding Txtbus in September 2006.
RTD users can simply text-message the letters "RTD" followed by the route
number, and Txtbus responds with the appropriate schedule information, with a
short advertisement at the end. "It really puts you in control of your
public-transportation trip," Schweitzer said. Beyond metro Denver, Txtbus has
also programmed the schedules to bus routes in Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and
other markets.
The advertising-based model is a result of not being able to open discussions
of providing the service to RTD, Schweitzer said. "We never made any headway
with them," he said. "They actually gave me a cease-and-desist order (for
guerrilla marketing on their buses)."
But after Txtbus went live in Boulder last August, about 2,000 users used the
service more than 20,000 times in the first three months. Schweitzer hopes to go
back to RTD armed with the growing user base and start marketing in San
Francisco and Chicago soon, where dozens of routes are driven by buses with GPS
equipment that tracks their location in real time.
Schweitzer is now taking a break from CU to run OR Peer and Txtbus full-time,
while running yet another company, BarHop (see www.barhoponline.com), he started last
fall.
More Recognition
Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Parker Semler
(age 14) of Parker’s Pesky Pets created, remote-controlled robot squirrels to
help get Fido his exercise.
Honorable Mentions: Tensegrity Prosthetics (Inventor: Jerome Rifkin),
innovative prosthetic feet; Quality Home Living (Inventor: Tim Butler),
motorized storage boxes for wheelchairs; and Chronicle Graphics (Inventor: Jim
Black), desktop animation software.