definitely reinforces what Fraser says is the importance for an educational shift from learning to remember to learning to use and understand.

[thanks, Michael]

Palo Alto-based Legal Force, an online marketplace for patents, has launched.   The site, in comparison to Google patent search, allows for bidding on patents, and includes contact information for inventors and attorneys.

Patents are an emerging asset class, according to Nathan Myhrvold, who founded Intellectual Ventures to invest in invention and patents. [BW article here.]

Another player in the emerging patent space is Ocean Tomo, a sort of investment bank for patent transactions.

I just watched Scoble’s video about Urban Seeder, a new website in beta that invents a new paradigm for technology to assist meeting people you see in the real world. Urban Seeder was born out of a year long thesis project by its founder, who researched how people flirt and find love. It’s an interesting approach, since most consumer entrepreneurial ventures are born out of the instinct of its creators, and not a deep analysis of consumer behavior. (Large corporations, on the other hand, often have reams of market research and consumer insights data to support the viability and potential of a new product or service, as a way to mitigate risk.)

It’s clear that the founder’s research indicated there was a need for a method to safely allow relationships to seed and grow anonymously, and offer a way to seed a relationship more effectively than a casual passing, which can be a missed opportunity, and less forward than giving out a phone number.

However, does the site go too far in its attempt to alter conventional flirting behavior? The site will sell personalized and wearable patterned clothes and accessories that are recognizable by other users of the service, for example, and if you have an interest in meeting the person, you can take their picture and the service will recognize the pattern and point you to the person’s online space. How strange of a behavior is that? Will you really want to take a picture of someone, because you hope to meet them, and not have the guts to introduce yourself?

Or, you can give out seed cards, which have a code that directs you to a private and personal online space, which includes where you will be on a given night. But, do you really want to respond, or go to a physical place where the giver of the seed card will be, without knowing what the person looks like? (the site seems to favor anonymously giving out seed cards, and yes, I know that’s a superficial question, but I would bet a very real issue. There’s a reason why Hot or Not is so successful.)

This leads me to ponder a fundamental innovation question: Is it possible for an innovative solution to be too unfamiliar to be widely adopted, even if it’s clearly better than its current competition? For example, I think the Segway is an incredibly good way for people to commute within cities. It’s possible to travel at a much faster pace and to travel a farther distance than walking. It doesn’t require finding a parking space, or sitting in traffic for extended periods of time, as you often must do with a car, and it produces no harmful emissions. Yet, it has not been widely adopted. To what extent is this a question of affordability vs. marketing or a challenge of altering behavior? (another example of an innovative product that significantly improves life is Tivo, which has taken ten years to be widely adopted vs. Google, which arguably was adopted extremely quickly, because it offered an incremental and not revolutionary innovation.)

Also interesting to me is Urban Seeder’s use of video to demonstrate how the service can be used. Video can be an extremely effective way to communicate how innovative concepts function.

Check out Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2006 here.

Google launched a patent search product this week. The data is sourced from the official U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but the UI is significantly better than the government sponsored site. Its designed to sort through the approximately 7 million U.S. patents by a number of criteria, including key words, filing date, issue date, patent number, and inventor.

Check out creativity guru Roger von Oech’s new creativity tool, a ball that consists of 30 magnetic design blocks, so you can transform it into numerous shapes. Check out the Whacks video here. It’s $19.77 on Amazon.

Also, Roger recently launched a blog, a must read!

[UPDATE: I had the great privilege of meeting Roger this afternoon - what a blast to the mind! THANKS Roger for the meeting - it was great to meet you - and I think the Ball of Whacks is going to create BIG problems.  It’s strangely addictive.  I can’t stop playing with it! To prove that it stimulates creativity, I will start a post now featuring a whacky idea playing with the ball inspired.  Stay tuned.]

A friend of mine said this weekend that the things I have on SHARKRIDE! are “weird.” (I have good ears.)

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it was at first greeted sceptically. The head of the telegraph company Western Union labeled it an “electrical toy.”

Nolan Bushnell, the legendary founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese, told me that when he originally pitched the concept of Chuck E Cheese, most thought it ridiculous: “Why would people want to go to a restaurant with a huge RAT mascot?!” It was one of the fastest growing restaurant concepts of all time.

When Ruth Handler saw a doll of an alluring adult woman, essentially a perverted plaything for men, on a vacation in Switzerland, she immediately sensed opportunity. But her colleagues at Mattel were skeptical, “Why would a parent buy a doll with BREASTS?” “Children play with baby dolls - not adult sex toys!” More than a billion barbies have been sold.

Most people thought Ted Turner was crazy when he launched a 24 hour news channel. “Most people poo pood the idea,” he says.

Who would have thought that yet another search engine in 1999 would be a success, with AOL Search, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Go To (Overture), Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek, HotBot, LookSmart, MSN Search, Magellan, Web Crawler etc. already competing? Google couldn’t even license its search technology, so it was forced to go at it alone. Of course, in hindsight, Google’s technology was vastly superior, and the “simplicity” of its search page and purity of its results garnered incredible loyalty.

Beanie Babies?? An under-stuffed animal that looks like “road kill,” Ty Warner was told, “would never sell.” He’s now worth $4.5 billion.

So, are your innovative ideas “weird,” or “visionary?” (…or perhaps both?)

Whether the patent system fuels or stifles innovation is highly debatable, and I think it depends too on the industry.  For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, where it can cost more than $100 million to develop a drug, I think IP protection is vital to encourage investment in new products.  But, does Friendster really deserve patent protection for social networking?

The US Patent Office is developing a wiki to solicit public feedback on the merit of pending applications, which has promising implications for greater efficiency in the system.

Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today, and has devised a new way of viewing its displays with a range of themed ‘Collections’ on its website. The collections suggest a number of personal journeys you could take, reflecting different moods and enthusiasms, and offers you the chance to create your own collection. [Thanks, Reynold D’Silva]