Ever "invent" anything that somebody else later made a reality?

[Dunawake]

@DiggitCamara

Yeah. Rub it in.

Don’t worry, at $1500/keyboard, they’re going to be making about as much money off of it as you are.

[MaxTheVool]

@Gus Gusterson

My brother invented Tivo in 1995. He wanted me to make a prototype but I told him that it would cost too much to produce with the hardware available at the time, so nobody would buy it. In retrospect, I was probably right. Tivo is still not a profitable business. Besides, someone else was probably already working on it at the time.

I also invented TiVo. Although, really, what makes TiVo so good is not the idea but the implementation.

[Busy_Scissors]

@Jurph

In 2003, I arrived in D.C. after three years in Dayton. I was briefly obsessed with traffic; anyone who has lived near D.C. can understand why. I realized that all of the people in D.C. drive while talking on their cell phones, and that cell towers are constantly handling dozens or hundreds of phones’ traffic at once.

I realized that two or three towers listening for the same phone’s unique identifier could be used with high-precision maps to triangulate the position (and over time, velocity) of that phone. The provider of cellular service could plot velocity tracks of different cellular phones in different colors on a map: gray for stationary, green for faster than 50mph, yellow for 35-50mph, orange for 20-35mph, and red for under 20mph. Plotting the 1,000 most recent tracks in an area using that color scheme would show a map of commuter routes and a real-time graph of flow speed. Add to it the bonus that if there’s an accident, many more cell phones will be used in the vicinity of the accident, leading to better data at trouble spots.

In 2006 or so, Slashdot covered a company that made a business model out of my idea. I could have sold the patent for at least 6 figures. Argh.

A friend of my wife’s has done exactly this in the UK, or something close to it, and judging by the size of their house I’d say 6 figures about covers it. AFAIK their company uses cellphone tracking to map accidents or traffic jams on the motorways of the UK.

[Busy_Scissors]

David Foster Wallace also invented tivo in ‘infinte jest’; I thought it was the worst part of the book at the time, couldn’t understand what the big deal was :smack:

[qubed]

@hajario

Friendster was the first social network site in that model. It started in March of '02.

Meh, try Six Degrees which was founded in 1997.

[Waenara]

@Max Torque

Fine, I’ll spill the beans: I’m hard to awaken, and once I’ve learned how to turn off an alarm clock, I’ll do it in my sleep. To combat that, my idea is a clock with a keypad on top and a random number generator built into it. When the alarm goes off, the clock generates a random three digit number and displays it on the clock face. The person must enter that three digit number for the clock to switch off. This means that the person must actually open their eyes to view the display and be sufficiently awake to read and enter the code, which is something that I have not so far seen in any available alarm clock.

PatternClock is similar, except it uses a random sequence of flashing lights, instead of random numbers.

Edited to add: It doesn’t look like they’re in production yet - it only has a link to “preorder”.

[pprgrl]

When I was 16 or so I invented a TV remote that had a charging stand and a page button like a cordless phone, so not only would you never have to buy batteries again but you’d also be able to make the remote beep when you couldn’t find it. A couple of years ago a roommate of mine got really excited by the idea and wanted to finance it, but he discovered that one of the TV companies (Samsung, I think) already had a patent on it.

[LouisB]

I absolutely invented and made drawings for a hydraulic boat steering system at a time when cables were the only thing available; if I had known how to actually manufacture and market the thing, who knows what might have happened.

[athelas]

Back when I was about 12, we had a pair of parakeets, and occasionally I’d let them out of their cage to let them fly around a bit. It was fun training them to return to my finger, but unfortunately parakeets pooped once every 10 minutes or so, rendering the room a mess. So, I made “bird diapers” out of paper towels and tape, which sorked decently well. And now, of course, somebody’s selling 'em.