Technology is synonymous with innovation and invention. Sometimes, however, the corporate marketing hype and the hard-sell make it easy to forget that at the heart of every new technological extension is a significant amount of invention.
As companies concentrate on marketing and making sales, the innovation involved in most projects often comes off worse for wear and the inventors are usually pushed into the background. After a while, the vanilla-flavoured technology news diet we are fed daily starts to make us wonder if clever inventions and innovations are capable of surviving outside the corporate iron curtain.
The answer is a resounding "yes". Step beyond the marketing boundaries and there is a wealth of innovation that individuals and users are coming up with daily. Thanks to that other great innovation, the Internet, most of this is online if you have the time to look.
In the can
Take, for example, a recent project posted on a personal homepage that provides step-by-step details on how to turn a standard Pringles can, and a few other odds and ends, into a wireless base station for a laptop. Using off-the-shelf materials such as wire, plastic and an empty Pringles can, the inventor built a unique directional wireless station. Perhaps not the most elegant of devices, but it certainly is cheap.
It restores my faith that innovation is something that anyone can achieve and is not just the domain of the moneyed elite.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
Another example is the in-car-MP3. While MP3 players for cars are now no longer rare, a few years ago when MP3 first made its mark on the Internet, there was a host of users not satisfied with having an enormous MP3 collection on their desktops but also wanted music to drive by. As a result, a sub-culture of in-car-MP3 emerged, with each participant detailing increasingly fantastic ways of porting music to their wheels.
The sheer inventiveness is astounding. One that comes to mind is the combination of a full-blown PC installed in the boot, with a handheld device taped to the dashboard to control the tunes. Of course, having a PC in the boot raises a number of issues, including how to power the unit and what to do when encountering speed bumps at speed. PCs are not built to run off car batteries and they certainly aren`t meant to travel at speed. But the part that really fascinates me is the fact that in order to upload or download songs, the car needed, in essence, its own IP address so that it could be plugged into a network when the driver returned home. And this is a long time before industry pundits were predicting that everything would have an IP address.
Endless possibilities
I also heard recently of a project to turn a standard laser pointer, the type you inevitably see whenever there is a PowerPoint presentation in sight, into a wireless network device. Transmitting data over a laser pointer is both odd and intriguing. Odd because it makes no immediate sense, and intriguing because it turns what previously seemed to be an impenetrable science, into an everyday possibility.
The list of interesting innovations goes on and on, and includes things such as the cellphone built into a car for security purposes, the subculture around re-purposing barcode scanners and jerry-built messaging systems that work off every conceivable device.
Why do they do it? Who knows, but it does indicate that inventiveness is by no means dead. And more importantly, for me, it restores my faith that innovation is something that anyone can achieve and is not just the domain of the moneyed elite. After all, just about every large technology company in existence today began as the brainchild of a couple of bright inventors. Perhaps the inventor of the Pringles can wireless base station will one day be the head of a large corporation making disposable network devices.
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