Thermally Conductive Plastic compounds

If you are working on sensitive electronic components you might consider using a thermally conductive plastic compounds to transfer heat away. High heat levels can often either disable or destroy an electronic component. When used properly a thermally conductive plastic part can be used to minimize the number of parts in an assembly and reduce the entire weight of the assembly. Unlike metal, thermally conductive plastic parts can be processed with injection molding or extruding into sheet or tape form.

Sales Leads Worth Your Time

The brand promise we stand by at Inventables is "Sales Leads Worth Your Time". We have chosen this promise because we believe our business will only be successful if the vendors that list their products on our site increase their sales by working with us. We understand that every lead is not going to turn into new business but we hope to introduce only the ones that have a good shot.

In this blog post I'll explain how "Sales leads worth your time" has helped shape our product development on Inventables.com

1. We qualify each sales lead and offer the opportunity to buy the sales lead AFTER the vendor gets a chance to review the qualifications and the inquiry. This means vendors are not just buying a name and an email address they are purchasing a lead that has been qualified and they have read a description of what the potential business opportunity is. By letting vendors review leads BEFORE they pay it reduces the risk that marketing dollars start chasing dead ends.

2. As of 2/2/2010 we are offering a money back guarantee on any lead purchased from our site. If the lead was not "worth your time" we will offer a 100% money back guarantee. We are doing this because we think it's critically important to put our money where our mouth is and back up "sales leads worth your time" with some cold hard cash. We plan to keep this policy in place unless it gets abused in which case we will be forced to make an adjustment.

3. We are building the site in such a way that it gets "smarter" the more it is used. This means features like "You might also like" are constantly changing as more people use the site. We are collecting all sorts of usage data that help us predict what buyers might be interested in and the corresponding sales leads that vendors will find valuable. Over time as the sites usage grows these algorithms will improve the "signal to noise" ratio on our site meaning the probability of finding what you need will increase.

4. Listing your product on Inventables is free. We don't charge any up front listing fees because it would not help us deliver sales leads worth your time.

We understand that this approach is not conventional so we're excited to hear your comments and feedback.

ORD Camp 2010 was a success!

Inventables teamed up with the folks over at Google Chicago to put on ORD Camp 2010. If you're not sure what goes on engineering wise at Google Chicago you might check out the work they are doing with The Data Liberation Front. They focus on making it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.

We had about ~100 people doing interesting work in a wide range of technology-related disciplines, plus a handful of influential people in related areas. The event brought together the technical community in the Midwest (along with a few visitors from the coasts) to create new connections and collaborations. Inspired by Foo Camp, people demonstrated their work in fields such as web services, data visualization, open source programming, mechanical engineering, customer service, usability, computer security, hardware hacking, and other emerging technologies. There was a lot of sharing of work in progress, academic research, and even some Gypsy Jazz lessons. The one thing that all invitees had in common was that they were exceptionally passionate about what they do. We had the founder and CTO of Groupon, a guy that works on Mac OSX, a lead engineer from Twitter and much, much, more.

A few example talks included:
A history and demo of text adventure games that are now called Interactive Fiction by Ben Collins-Sussman of Google. If you're interested in reliving the days of Text Adventures on your Apple IIe or you're discovering it for the first time Ben did a nice round-up on the ORD Camp site.

Patrick McCarthy of Roth Mobot gave a cool talk on hacking toys and circuit bending. Circuit bending is the art of recycling discarded consumer electronics, usually children’s toys, guitar effects units, inexpensive battery-powered musical instruments, portable CD players, etc. to create unique musical instruments.

Here's a video demo:


Jason Huggins creator of Selenium and Sauce Labs hacked on his Arduino Orb. You can hook it up to your Selenium tests and watch it change from Red to Green when your build passes. The concept behind the ORB is it translates information or a data stream into format that conveys useful information in a glance. Check out his demo:


Lastly Jason Tillery gave a talk about the Rio Javascript Framework he extracted from Mocklinkr for developing other similar applications. The framework was also used to build Thinklinkr.

It was clear that the Chicago Engineering and Tech community is strong, vibrant, and growing. We hope that more people start to come out of the woodwork in 2011.

Check out the tweets from the event with the #ordcamp hash tag.

LED Light Diffusing Plastic Compounds

Plastic compounding is a way to enhance plastic for use in products. The process is done by a company called a "plastic compounder" who mixes plastic like a "chef" would mix ingredients. Engineers at the plastic compounding company mix plastic formulations by mixing or/and blending polymers and additives by heating them up until they "flow" in a molten state. Machines called co-kneaders and twin screws (co- and counter rotating) as well internal mixers are the most common used compounders in the plastic industry.



This is one example of a specialty plastic that is created using the compounding plastic.

Embed Inventables Products Widget

Today we launched a feature that makes it really easy to embed any of the products on Inventables into your own website or blog. To use it simply copy and paste the code snippet and you're done. The embedded products will look like this:



You can add additional text, information, or formatting to match your own site. Let us know what you think!

TEDx Windy City

In 2005 Zach Kaplan (me) the CEO of Inventables was invited to give a TED talk at the conference in Monterey California. In those days Inventables had launched a product called DesignAid that was similar to jelly of the month club but instead of jelly our subscribers got samples of innovative materials and technologies.

This year Zach has been invited back to TED but this time it's TEDx Windy City sponsored by the Museum of Science and Industry, Pivotal Productions, and hosted at Flashpoint Academy.

Other speakers include Donald Marinelli, Head of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and Dawn Hancock, Creative Director and Owner of Firebelly Design and the Moderator is Dr. Rabiah Mayas, Science Director of the Center for the Advancement of Science Education at the Museum of Science and Industry.

In the spirit of the TED tradition there will be a few amazing performances by the circuit bending duo of RothMobot.

We're hiring! Ruby on Rails - Software Engineers

We believe the best software is written by intentionally small teams that know how to make the impossible possible. We use agile software development techniques to relentlessly focus our coding efforts on solving our business goals. We pair program, and we follow the red-green-refactor loop relentlessly. We deliver early and often. We believe that these practices lead to higher code quality. The team includes our Lead Developer, who is an agilist with a passion for building products that people love to use and a UI Designer, with a passion for usability.

You’ll be our 7th full time employee so we’re looking for someone that wants to work in a VC funded startup that was formerly bootstrapped. You have a passion for web development, are self-motivated, and enjoy working in a user-focused, highly intelligent, entrepreneurial environment. We look for aptitude not experience but you probably have experience working with dynamic languages, are ruthless about testing & refactoring, and bring superior programming skills in the following areas:

Ruby, Rails
Object-oriented programming
BDD/TDD, Agile practices
Pair programming
Javascript, CSS, AJAX
Linux server/stack administration (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc)

Full details are here:
http://www.inventablescorporate.com/careers/positions-available/software-engineer/