Inventions are not just exclusively linked to Edison or limited to around the turn of the 20th century. There’s a lot of product development currently out there! The following is a random selection of recent weird/interesting/funny products, the only thing they have in common being that their inventors are Dutch.
The flying car, or PAL-V , its brand name. It can be used both as a car and as a personal plane. So, an ideal means of transport… for anyone in a traffic jam? Not really, considering you need a little space for acceleration first. For crossing water it could be a major advantage though. In order to fly-drive away you’ll need a gyrocopter licence and about €300.000 to buy your new pal.
Ecofont. The name says it all: this a piece of software for eco-friendly fonts. The inventors thought about making printing more environmentally friendly and came up with the simple answer to print less. Now how do you do that? The letters of Ecofont have tiny holes in them thus reducing the amount of ink needed for printing by up to 50%. The idea was the winner of the Dutch Accenture Innovation Awards 2011.
The Repudo app. This product claims to be the first to put the digital out in the real world as physical. How? The application for your phone allows you to drop ‘Repudos’ (virtual objects: texts, photos, video and audio files) in any location in the real world. Whoever the Repudo was aimed at (can be one of your contacts, or anyone) needs to go to this location in order to be able to see the multimedia contained in the Repudo. Cool, right? Just wondering if the Repudo on the (uninhabited?) island close to Gabon will ever be picked up…
And as a bonus, 2012 was marked perhaps not really by an invention of the true sort but definitely by an innovation: peanut butter & jelly vodka by the distiller’s Van Gogh Vodka. Van Gogh was around a long time ago, vodka was already considered a neat drink centuries before him, and for about a century peanut butter-jelly has established a firm position at the heart of American cuisine. But to turn PB&J into a vodka flavour you apparently have to be Dutch and been distilling since 1879. The company does more standard flavours too.
What do you think of the above inventions? Do you think they are useful? Will stay around to be widely used in future?