Inventors at Their Finest

Have you ever thought about inventing? Have you ever thought about coming up with an awesome invention? We asked some of the greatest inventors to share a little bit about their products and life.

As you can see, being an inventor can be successful. Here are some of their thoughts.

I have a product called PaintSmart-Trayz. It is a vertical paint tray that hangs on an extension ladder vertically or a step ladder horizontally. It holds twice as much paint as a traditional tray, 2 brushes and a 9" roller. It also has a drain spout for easy clean up.

I am a Woman Owned Business and the product is being made in the US – Canton, Ohio. I am looking for distribution throughout the US & Canada. We actually started production of this product in May of this year and sales are coming along.

Carolyn Keane www.PaintSmart-Trayz.com

Our business is based on my US Patent 6542091 and will transform the 140 year old, QWERTY keyboard into ten simple keys right on the tips of your fingers, mainly for mobile technology and to make it much easier to touch-type on small devices without looking. The principal is to hold one key, just like a shift key, and press another. This provides one hundred keystrokes and enough to duplicate the functions of a standard keyboard. Our first product is a wraparound membrane keyboard for an Xbox 360 video game controller called the "TextSkin". The Textskin adds ten buttons directly under the player's fingertips so that a gamer has access to any keystroke and can text message conveniently without looking away from the screen. Our goal is to make it possible for text intensive games to be played on a console game machine.

Additional possible applications for this technology are systems for the vision impaired and also for the standard PC in a variety of situations. It can be used for cell phones, typing with gloves and also on the steering wheel of vehicles for police or military applications. We can provide more efficient input so that you can do much more without clusters of tiny buttons, pressing keys over and over again or scrolling through menus. Ten keys can do it all. It is 2009, so get ready for ten!

Wayne Rasanen www.in10did.com

I invented the game Blurt! (Over a million copies sold) in 1994. This year it celebrates its 15th year on the market. In 1990 I co-invented the game TriBond, which has sold over 3 million copies. I co-developed the game Mad Gab (Mattel), the Crazy Chins play kits (Dynamix), and several upcoming releases from Daddy-O Games. I am also the author of Timeless Toys (Andrews-McMeel) and the WHAM-O Super-Book (Chronicle Books).

Tim Walsh www.theplaymakers.com