Okay…I was listening to it from another room last night, but here are the four remaining inventors (I’m too lazy to look up the names):
Football receiver training pole guy
Baby car safety capsule guy
Double Traction bicycle guy
Word Ace spelling game guy
I still don’t know why they picked the football training thingy, but I can see the others having a shot at the million bucks. The voting went on for two hours last night after the show ended, like on A.I.
Any guesses on who will win? I’m not sure when we’ll find out but I assume it will be this coming Thursday.
The double traction bike has serious safety and liability issues.
The receiver training thing is just stupid.
The two best inventions are the Word Ace and the baby seat. However, the baby seat will cost a TON of money to bring to market, and will be huge and heavy. It also could have some liability issues facing it. WHat happens if a rattle gets dropped and causes it to stick? What if the baby flips over and chokes? Will it move around during regular driving and cause the baby to get carsick? The thing is a rough prototype prettied up for television.
It’s also really only useful for maybe the first year of a kid’s life. And it’ll no doubt be hundreds of dollars and only fit in large minivans and SUvs.
However, I could see them being available for rent from hospitals, and it could be the kind of status thing that rich mothers just have to have. So there’s a potential market there, and the basic concept is pretty cool. So I like it.
The Word Ace is also pretty good, although I don’t quite get what the electronics bring to the game. Couldn’t you play it just as easily with a deck of cards that tell you what you have to spell? Seems like a gimmick. Most electronic games actually have the electronics as part of the game - you have to use timing, or follow a pattern, or something. This is just a synthesized voice reading a script. But the kids like that kind of stuff. So it’s also got potential.
My guess is that the baby seat will win, because the general public is voting and they’re not going to be thinking about things like development costs and product liability. They’ll just go, “oh, that could save lives! And it’s really cool looking. And the inventor deserves it.”
I’d go for the Word Ace. I agree about the baby seat. It would be very costly and wouldn’t fit in a lot of vehicles, and as you said, wouldn’t be of use for very long.
The other two don’t grab me at all.
I still wished they’d picked the SackMaster tool.
I’m torn between the Word Ace and the baby seat. The baby seat is the most sensible one, but the Word Ace guy has the best product sense- his ad was the best, and I liked it when he said “I am Eric, an inventor” (or “I, American Inventor”). I thought that was clever.
Agree that they never should have gotten rid of the Sackmaster guy. It was a far, far better product than the football training tool, which beat it out only because the Sackmaster’s inventor had a cocky attitude and did little to develop his product with $50,000 at his disposal.
Any tool that allows one person to far outperform work that previously required two people to do the same job SHOULD have been championed. It may have been a niche tool with a limited market, but it was one demonstrably better than what I see available out there. It was a better mousetrap.
It was like a giant medicine spoon with a hole at the end. You attached a sand bag to the hole so, when you shoveled and tilted it back, all of the sand automatically went into the bag.
The bathroom clip had a major flaw that could have easily been addressed but wasn’t - it was made of cheap flexible plastic, which made it useless for hanging coats and purses on. Everyone who tried it found that their stuff just bent the flexible hook and it fell off.
Had they made it from light aluminum or a stronger grade of plastic, it wouldn’t have had that major flaw. And then they could have put a better hook on it by making on that swiveled on a bushing so that it could extend out further.
I think the idea of making a ‘bathroom survival kit’ out of the thing was flawed, and done only to make the device more appealing on the TV show. It made the whole thing very bulky, much more expensive, and the little pieces of toilet paper and hand cloths and whatnot meant that you’d have to buy refills after only a couple of uses.
They should have sold it as a very inexpensive device all by itself. A cool-looking little metal clip for the door with a handbag/coat hook that flips out. I can see women especially not wanting to always put their purses down on dirty bathroom floors, so that feature probably had as much appeal as the ability to lock the door. And if they sold it all by itself in a blister pack, it could sell for $3.99 or something and become an impulse buy and something that could be stocked in checkout aisles of grocery stores, gas stations, and places like that.
And the sad thing is, I think that was the inventor’s original, correct vision. But she allowed the needs of the show to drive her product into a direction it shouldn’t have gone.
Absolutely. And I don’t think it was such a niche product, either. Sandbagging is done all over the world by tens of thousands of people every year. And millions of people live in regions where they *might have to sandbag in case of a disaster or especially heavy rains. It could certainly sell in the kinds of quantities that any other disaster preparedness stuff does, and there’s a huge industry around that.
The problem the guy had was that he brought an invention onto the show that was essentially finished. He didn’t need the $50,000. But he did need the exposure. I’ll bet you that device shows up for sale anyhow (unless the show contractually forbids it or something). So he took the $50,000 and essentially blew it, which was a slap in the face to the show, and the judges just couldn’t reward that.
Looking at his site, I realized that the sackmaster is actually very useful for other stuff. Farmers, for example spend a lot of time shovelling feed into pickup trucks and then shoveling it back out again. Get some heavy-duty reusable sacks and use the sackmaster to shovel feed into sacks. Now you can stack them into the truck and unload them much easier. Chaff and grundge don’t fly all over, the feed is protected from the elements, etc. If you go to market and buy feed in bulk, you can use the sackmaster to bag it up rather than dumping it in the pickup.
If you ever need to do landscaping around your house, you’ll find that landscaping companies sell rocks, gravel, and sand in big piles. So you load up your pickup truck, getting it all dirty, and haul it home and then shovel it out onto the garage pad or something, then shovel it back into a wheelbarrow and take it where it needs to go. Instead, take a sackmaster, shovel it into sacks right at the store, and then you can transport the stuff in a car.
And the winner is…Janusz, with the baby safety capsule. The CEO of Evenflo came out to greet him and tell him they’ll work on it with him.
Word Ace guy came in second. Even when a guy from Hasbro came out to tell him they’d work on the product with him, he couldn’t manage to look happy. Sheesh, okay, he lost out on the million bucks from the show, but come on…Hasbro! Isn’t that worth something?
Bike guy was offered a job by some company…? Sorry, memory is fading.
I think the football training guy left with nothing.
Bike guy got an internship with Trek, the bicycle company.
Football guy got a chance to meet Jerry Rice, who made some vague promise about helping him make his dream come true. Ho-hum. I suspect that the producers wanted to come up with a better prize for this guy, but let’s face it, his invention just wasn’t that great.
The Bike Kid was offered an internship at Trek working along side their engineers and industrial designers. Not bad… that should be a great stepping stone for him, and who knows, maybe they’ll manufacture his bike.
Jerry Rice told the football guy that he’d do whatever he could to see The Catch thing brought to market… but I’m not holding my breath. Sounds like they were patronizing him for the sake of the show.
