Saturday, October 25, 2008

From pure research into business...

Ok, putting up graphs would be alot of work for the blog. Alot of cutting and pasting anyways. The following link will take you to the results and important details of both the 2007 EPA P3 experiment and my 2008 master's thesis research:

http://www.liquidassetdevelopment.com/index.cfm?fa=detail

Now, after returning from the EPA conference in Washington DC in April, I went ahead and applied for a US patent and an international "pre-patent" under IPT rules. Basically an IPT application is necessary before applying for a patent in countries that have signed the IPT. And of course you pay an extra couple of thousand for the convenience.

Despite what you think, the review process does not begin right away. Your application sits in queue for "a while". I applied for my patent in July 2007 and the USPTO began officially reviewing it in December 2007. They do send you a letter telling you that the official review process has begun and they also post your application, including your claims, drawings, etc up on the internet. Fortunately, my formulas aren't up on the internet.

Unfortunately, in August 2008 our hero did get word that his IPT application was rejected. But that doesn't mean that the US patent gets rejected automatically. Sometimes the same person reviews both apps, sometimes not. Either way, I know some of the criteria that they may be using as a gauge to determine how patentable my idea is.

What is also fortunately for me is that I applied when I did. The U. of Alabama Tuscaloosa expressed their intentions at a NCIIA conference a few months after I filed my application to look into filing their own application for a pervious concrete water filter.

So the patent pending status of my filter will drag on at the speed of bureacracy. Oh well, no news is good news, right?

On the business end, back in the fall of 2007 I had my first crack at a "non-disclosure act" (NDA) with an incubator in Highlands Ranch, CO. Unfortunately, when it came down to the details of the NDA, my attorney and I only had two questions and they wouldn't even address those two questions.

BIG RED FLAG !!!!!!!!!

No one doing a deal with you should be so resistant to answering a few questions.

But I did manage to score a NDA through an old China contact who lives in Australia. He is associated with a guy named Heinz Dahl, who apparently is a pretty big name in Australian and now global wind power. He was even a keynote speaker at the most recent World Wind Energy conference in Toronto, Canada and is currently the President of the World Wind Energy Association.
Not too shabby for a snowboarder, eh? So Liquid Asset Development LLC has a toehold in Australia. This icebreaker has segued into interest from Doug Cisneros, who deals in the food trade between the US and the Middle East and a VC representative in Shanghai, China named Larry Sather who I also met while living in China.

So while no money has been made yet, contacts are being made and interest is being expressed.

This interest has required me to come up with a business plan and revenue projection. I'll post the biz plan in a seperate blog entry, but due to many zeroes and minuses on the revenue projection, I'll keep that to myself ;-)))))

No comments: