There were once two guys who became hugely rich by building and selling the most famous microcomputer ever built.
They made the mistake of showing this computer, before they had put it on the market, to a guy from Commodore.
They were well gutted when the Commodore PET showed many of the characteristics of their computer.
MORAL: A Good Thing Is Soon Snapped Up
To avoid the "trusting too much" trap we often try to keep things to ourselves. Sometimes sharing ideas is a better way forward don't you think? Thinking of some of the sharing that led to many Silicon Valley successes.
At the start of this month I was making this point and used an idea for monitoring energy consumption as an example in discussions with an IP law solicitor.
Before smart meters arrive in all of our houses: It would be possible to capture an image of a meter and, through local capabilities or transmitting an [(optionally) low resolution] image to a server, the current meter reading could be stored and used. iPhone and Android apps came to mind as did embodiments where the user's identity-related-information, location and other info is sent to a server for processing.
This was immediately labelled as potentially patentable - but the main point was that it is the sort of capability that would enable a range of interesting software applications - and their rapid migration to hardware through XMOS chips or similar as more smart meters arrive...
I have insufficient time and seed funds to move ahead with such things just now, so the example only served to make my point: Avoiding a patent application and making a public disclosure of the "MeterSnapApp" imaging idea above would enable many more innovative software players to enter the market and use that MeterSnapApp as part of their solution.
That was the thought anyway... It could be that this imaging idea has already been patented and this is just the thought experiment that it was intended to be...
I think that's a really good idea, Jon. It does seem remarkable that, after all these years, remote reading of meters is still beyond us. Yours seems a miles simpler apporach than the kind of work being heavily over-funded by governments' 'smart-meter' programmes.