inventionMail.com Web Site Overview

Ok, so it's another late night and I decided to write a few lines about where we have got to with the development of the inventionMail website. So far we have the following areas of the website working nicely:

Video

Got automatic conversion of flash video format working, user upload working and the nice new player working. I truly hope that this becomes a useful way for inventors to pitch their inventions to prospective investors or buyers. We'll be doing loads of work to encourage potential investors to come and look at these video presentations. We also want to publish a guide to let inventors know the do's and don'ts when it comes to presenting not just their inventions but also themselves to the world. Maybe there is a member who can write up an article to help with this? We are also very aware of the potential bandwidth that this could use and will have to keep a close eye on this.

Groups

This is another facility that we hope will prove to be of huge benefit to members, allowing them to manage their projects and truly bring distributed teams together. I can already see the potential for researchers around the world coming together to develop their ideas further using their combined knowledge. All of the inventionMail.com team are tremendously excited by the potential that this has to accelerate the development of ideas. We hope that our members will give lots of feedback as to how they use this and how they would like to see it develop. You can also add sub-groups within your groups and decide which members, if any, of your main group are allowed to be part of the sub-group. This could be useful for different departments within your university that need their own group but you still want to be able to manage all members by keeping them as part of your main university group. Or an inventor could add a sub-group for design, another for patent, etc, thus keeping different project discussions limited to people that should only see that part of the project. That reminds me.... we need to write a good user-guide for this area as well......

Email Facilities

This is still not quite where we want it, but hopefully we will get there very soon. I think having your own inventionMail.com email address will be quite cool. It only needs a tiny bit of development to complete some areas of automation and it will pretty much be there.

Private Messaging

This allows members to send private messages to each other, along with setting up folders to store messages and make organisation easier. This seems to be working well. 

Articles and Guides

I recently put quite a few articles up, but this really is an area where the members will hopefully contribute to their community. We have created this area so that articles can be edited by the members. Hopefully this will not be abused but instead be used by members of the community to ensure that the information presented is correct and of benefit to the community. I would love to see some experts in various fields publishing some useful guides and I have no doubt that a lot of our members can contribute some enormous benefit to the community by sharing some of their experiences.

Forums

The forums are funtional, although I think a slight tweak is needed on the styling, but it all works as it should. Perhaps the addition of a 'flag this content as offensive' button could be useful - you never know what some people will want to put online.

Buddy List

The functionality of this seems to be fine, although I would like to get the look of it simplified a bit. Adding 'buddies' seems to work fine and there is some good functionality built in, such as linking to buddies posts. Also, if you invite someone to join the site then they are automatically added to your buddy list!

Subscriptions

Again, this seems to be working fine. This also has the potential to allow members to interact with the website without logging in - for example, you receive an email to say there is a new reply to a forum topic that you started. The email you get will tell you what the new comment says. Instead of going to the site, logging in, navigating to the comment and then posting a reply, you could simply reply to the email with your comment and the site will automatically add your comment - easy! I like the idea of this functionality - perhaps if we don't get around to it right away then you can all let us know if you would like this functionality to be prioritised. Personally, I love this idea!

BlogStamp

Working with the developer (mostly asking nicely and making a few suggestions) to try and get this facility available for all sorts of content and tidy up the presentation a bit. At present it works great for giving content a timestamp. This is another idea that we are really excited about. The idea is for members to be able to write content, such as the details of their invention, and submit it with a timestamp request. This then allows a viewer of such content to get an absolute date and time of when the content was published.

What is the point of this? Well, part of protecting your idea is establishing that you were the first to have that idea. This is designed to give absolute and unquestionable evidence of when you published your idea. Sure, it is not designed to replace a patent, but that can get quite expensive and this should prove to be a very effective method of at least establishing prior Rights. We will be putting considerable effort into this facility and hope to get it working for all sorts of content and get some key organisations to test and make sure it does what it is supposed to do.

If there are any members out there who feel that they could provide useful assistance to the developer then he might well be interested (let me know Matt). There is much more to write about, but I think I deserve a break and there is a great movie about to start! Please feel free to post comments about the above and let us know your thoughts. We want this community to be everything it can be, and that will rely on our members playing an active role in building their own inventors community.