Welcome to LightSwitch!

This is LightSwitch!, the blog for the Fort Wayne Inventors Club. The blog supports the club mission and vision by providing another venue to share ideas and experiences. New ideas are often symbolized by a light being turned on, hence the light bulb in the club logo. A LightSwitch! turns that light on, which leads us to the snappy name for our blog. We hope the blog can help flip the invention switch by identifying things members will find useful. If you are interested in contributing to the blog, click here to see the author guidelines.

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Free Help to File a Patent

Pilot Program

One of the consistent challenges faced by club members is to gather the resources to file an application for a US patent. Members are often constrained by finances or confusion about how to find legal assistance. In order to help independent inventors who struggle to find the necessary resources for filing, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) started a pilot program called the Pro Se Assistance Program. The USPTO website describes the program thusly:

The Pro Se Assistance Program is the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s comprehensive pilot to expand outreach to inventors who file patent applications without the assistance of a registered patent attorney or agent (also known as “pro se” filing).

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2016 MARCOM Award

The Fort Wayne Inventors Club website has been honored with a 2016 MARCOM Gold Award. The MARCOM Awards recognize excellence in marketing and communication. The award winning website remodel was a donation to the club by InRef, LLC. There were more than 6,000 entries. Other MARCOM Gold awardees include Johnson & Johnson.

Tech Tour 2016 & Boy Scout Inventor Merit Badge

Hello Everyone! There are a couple of things going on in Fort Wayne that may interest club members. They are Tech Tour 2016 (October 24 – 28, 2016) and the Boy Scout’s Merit Badge College (October 15, 2016) that, for the first time here locally, features an Inventors merit badge. Both events will be discussed at the next Meetup (October 13, 2016). Continue reading →

Focus Group

The Meetup for this week will include a focus group session. This type of session is a tool to gather data in a structured multi-person setting. Focus groups are usually small and moderated by one or two people who keep the group on topic, take notes, and ask questions. The sessions are short and focused on a specific topic.

One of the members is designing a smartphone healthcare app and will use the focus group format to gather ideas about organizing information within the app. Patients and healthcare providers each have different information needs. The session will be used to explore ways to transition the software between views of data important for patients and those important for healthcare providers, without disrupting normal communication during a face-to-face interaction. If you have ideas and want to help out, please join us this Thursday.

PERIDOT, Inc.

Last month, Mr. Dave Hockemeyer, co-owner of PERIDOT, Inc., was the club’s guest speaker. He delivered a powerful presentation and brought several artifacts representing the company’s manufacturing capability. Club members were fully engaged and asking a lot of questions—it was a kind of geek heaven. The presentation was so well received, that we decided to hold our next Meetup at Peridot! That Meetup is this Saturday, October 10, 2015. Continue reading →