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Sprechen Sie Inventing?
From the minds of two Austrian inventors comes a website to help inventors commercialize their products.
Marijan Jordan and Gerhard Muthenthaler last year launched Inpama.com, which allows inventors to post and market their inventions using Inpama’s website and search optimization tools.
“Throughout our long careers as invention advisers and marketers, we have always stood behind the case that there are no inexpensive ways for market commercialization,” Jordan says.
Jordan and Muthenthaler call Inpama a “do-it-yourself” website for inventors.
The site shares some similarities to U.S.-based NventNode, an online inventors notebook and marketing platform Inventors Digest covered in the February 2011 edition (Shifting to Digital Mode – ‘Innovation Simplified’ with NventNode).
Indeed, Inpama.com claims to have “lots of page impressions” because it bought old invention-related sites such as pl-x.com and 1000inventions.com.
“Every inventor who invites someone to his invention helps the invention next to him,” says Isabel Fadigas de Souza, who runs marketing for Inpama. “That’s what every inventor tells us in meetings and at tradeshows, ‘We should all work together.’
The site is in English because “we want to reach as much inventors and inventor seekers as we can, and increase their exposure and possibilities of business,” Fadigas de Souza adds.
If you already have your own site, you can link at Inpama. Registration is free. Any visitor can contact those on the site. Inventors have the option to remain anonymous.
Sounds good. But we still had questions, which Fadigas de Souza was happy to answer:
ID: What intellectual property safeguards are in place? Does the site offer cautionary language for those who lack patents? Posting to your site would constitute public disclosure, which would obviate any foreign patent filing rights and start the clock ticking on when an inventor could file a U.S. patent.
Inpama: Since inpama.com only accepts patented ideas, there are no IP safeguards in place. The site does state that only patented ideas are accepted. Inventors can choose themselves how much information they wish to post on their inpama.com invention page. Because patents issued in the U.S. and Europe are already publicly disclosed on their respective patent office databases, posting on inpama.com does not alter the amount of publicly disclosed information that is already available.
ID: Who are the inventor-friendly companies in your database? That wasn’t readily transparent on your site. We’d be interested to know who and how many invention-seeking companies you have.
Inpama: We are constantly contacting inventions seekers, i.e., manufacturers, entrepreneurs and investors, in different countries. Also, the website founders already have a strong network that uses the website too.
Our strongest partner is a shop in Berlin called Erfinderladen, which translates to “Inventors Shop.” Inventions and prototypes are sold at this shop, which offers inventors a direct access to the consumer market.
Visit http://erfinderladen-berlin.de/. It has gotten a great deal of press coverage, including the Financial Times Germany.
ID: What is your revenue model?
Inpama: Our revenue model, like most other free sites such as YouTube and Facebook, is based on ad-generated links, i.e., GoogleAds.
We are a new website to help inventors market their ideas with no fees or barriers.
We’re on Facebook – just search for “Inpama.”
And a quick word about our blog (http://blog.inpama.com/). We invite people to write articles about any invention-related topic that they find interesting and helpful. Inventors Digest is already on our blog list of “Useful Websites for Inventors.”
Editor’s note: This article appears in the May 2011 print edition.
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