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18. Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models

Objectives

This week’s assignment is to develop a plan for dissemination of my final project. I have to outline future possibilities and describe how to make them probabilities. I also have to prepare drafts of my summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB).

Future possibilities

I made Shoobot as a solution to one of my biggest problems: To clean the 8+ litter boxes at least twice a day. This job as a cat butler also puts a lot of restrictions on my travel plans. There are millions of Cat Humans around the globe and a large number of those have the same issues that I’m facing. A quick search I want to start a business around this project while helping people think about alternative solutions. The cat litter is way cheaper than commercially available ones and is made from waste saw dust from the wood industry. An income can be made through selling products produced by recycled materials like this one.

Dissemination Plan - How to make possibilities to probabilities

A dissemination plan is a plan for disseminating the product information to those who will use it in practice, ie.to raise awareness concerning its desired goals and results and maximise the potential of future commercial exploitation. Basically it is to inform the general public that we are here, we are doing this etc.

Audience

My audience are those with pets who might buy an automatic cat litter box. To find the market share, first I used the popular search engines 1. Google 2. Bing 3. Yahoo The key words I used were “cat litter box”, “Self managing litter box”
Next I have to aggregate this lead data. For this I used 1. sem rush 2. mango tools 3. KW finder. This gave a market share of pet products
Next I want to find the sales demand and market gap for such products for both B2B and Retail. For this I used keyword researcher tool called keywordtool.io
Now when I aggregate this data I can find the total volume. Final purchasing might be around 0.2%-0.8% The best case scenario of purchasing ever is for Apple products-1.1%
I also learned about Sentimental analysis tools and how an emotional reaction can be converted into a possible lead. This is where the brand message becomes very important.

Message

Lock the smell, keep it clean with sustainable materials

Methods

  1. Magazines & Newspapers
    As I have been a journalist I know how a potential story might get picked up by the newspapers. I think I can get some articles featured in some of the popular magazines and newspapers that feature pet stories.
    Creature Companion
    The Hindu
    Times of India
  2. Influencers
    My target consumers follow a lot of online influencers whom I have been following for a while. Getting them to feature my product would be another way.
    Jackson Galaxy
    Kitten Lady
    Cole and marmalade
  3. Veterinary Hospitals A lot of pet parents get the information from the veterinarians and hospitals, so giving them some samples and getting the doctors to talk to the pet parents might be good. I can start with the local hospitals.
    Cochin Pet hospital
    Felican Pet Hospital
  4. Shelters
    Giving the shelters some free samples would not only help them but the parents that wnd up adopting the kittens/cats may get to know about the product through them.
    Paws Thrissur
    Dhyan Foundation
    FRANK
  5. Pet stores
    Getting pet stores to stock up on the product and listing them is also free advertising for the product.
    Heads up for Tails
    Petsworld
    PetSutra

Intellectual Property

All work done by Fab Academy students is backed by the MIT License, which is an Open Source initiative. Anyone can use my documentation from this website without restrictions can use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute and even sell copies of the software. Attending Neil’s session gave me an insight into patents and how ridiculous it is to go for patenting in many cases. I would like people to use my project idea, and would welcome better iterations of it. So I decided to opt for a Creative Commons license. In this link, the Creative Commons Organization has a very easy tool for the user to select the license best suited for one’s need just by responding to a questionnaire.

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I got the following image to download as the output from there and I can use it in my website and presentations.

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Prepare summary slide

I like how the vintage hardbound books look like and decided to use it as the design inspiration for my slide. I also decided to use the ShooBot logo of a cat spraying onto the letter blocks for the slide. As the ShooBot is painted green I picked almost the same colour(which is same as my website theme colour) #145D53 as the base colour of my slide. I wanted it to have a golden trim just like the shoobot has around it and decided to use #CE9B3F as my second colour. I also decided to add a third colour, Red #F80606 for letters.

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Then I considered what content to be added to the slide and decided on the tools/methodologies used, the components inserted other than the name of the product, a brief text on what it does, my details and the photo of the product. I found some illustrations of shopbot, 3d printing etc and used the trace bitmap tool in inkscape and used those images also to slide. Next I changed the colour of these to the three colours i selected for the slide along with black and white. I finally liked how the golden colour looked. 1. Create new file in GIMP. 2. I selected the height 1920 and width 1080 as dimensions for the slide. 3. I Selected the images I wanted to add to the slide- a dummy image for the product, images of 3D Printing, milling etc. 4. Added a dummy for explanation text. 5. Added the logo of Shoobot and creative common license I chose. 6. I named it presentation.png 7. Saved it to the root directory. 8. Pushed it to gitlab.

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Prepare video clip

I used some random videos from my previous assignments and aggregated all in openshot. Joel taught me some basics of Openshot. Next I made a text document containing the narration for the video and placed randomly in the video so I can later change it. 1. Checking the size: I used an online compressing tool to compress the mp4 video 2. I renamed the video to presentation.mp4 3. Saved it to the root. 4. Pushed it to gitlab.