Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
 


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Birth of a Notion.

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half-siblings   Sometimes ideas are just in the air. And until there's a way of searching for "a site just like the one I'm thinking of," sites will co-evolve, maybe with slightly different spins.

http://idealist.blinkr.net/
    Ideas, photo-illustrated by their posters, gather votes and comments.

http://www.openinvo.com/
    Emily Lutzker's startup hopes to function as a protected marketplace between idea owners and idea seekers.

http://www.quirky.com/
    With counters, timeouts, and money all over the site (including $10 inventors pay to post their ideas and a networking scheme they call "social sales"), Ben Kaufman's '09 startup does a great job mixing marketing, crowdsourcing, and greed.

http://www.inventnow.org/
    Kids' outreach from the US Patent and Trademark Office, the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, and the Ad Council.

http://www.kickstarter.com/
    Select projects to pledge to from an illustrated list; select the amount to pledge; get a gift or some form of participation back.

http://whynot.net
    The halfbakery cloning experiment that got away.

http://www.managemyideas.com/
    A collaboration platform that finances itself by showing ads to the people in your social network while you and they collaborate on developing ideas.

http://www.innocentive.com/
    High-end bounties posted by companies looking for innovations. The site makes a credible attempt at protecting the intellectual property of the large corporations looking for solutions.

http://website.lineone.net/~sobriety/
    Chris Kuan writes: "If shouldexist is the halfbakery's good twin, then surely Chindogu is the slightly demented older brother who's kept in the back room." Too true.

http://www.total.net/~fishnet/index.html
    "For Sale By Mental Patient" spreads out existentialist, beautifully warped wares like "TIME REMOVING SOAP!!", "BARKLESS TOMATO!!!*" or "NAP SACK!!!!".

http://www.ideavolcano.com
    A British blog that accepts submissions via email and hosts comments on them. Unlike the halfbakery, the people who run it have started some companies themselves, and may actually know what they're talking about.

http://www.globalideasbank.org
    The halfbakery's rich philantrophist British uncle. Categorized, strongly moderated, voted on from 0 to 10, with a 1000 pound prize for the best non-technological idea, given each June 1st.

http://www.premisespremises.com
    An idea blog with asking prices and legal protection - making it possible to prove that your idea was posted at a certain date, and to track who has viewed it. Discussions of the individual ideas have been outsourced to quicktopic.com.

http://www.cambrianhouse.com/
    Cambrian House bills itself as the "Home of Crowdsourcing", and is hosting voting and discussion threads on ideas with a view towards implementing, marketing, and profiting from them. Like many such sites, the encouraging copy is heavy on the "Wisdom of Crowds" and light on realism or results.

http://www.yet2.com
    Aiming to create a global business-to-business market for technology, this slick startup has scored $20m in funding and charges mostly medium- to large corporations for listing their licensable technology.

http://www.ideaken.com/
    As of late 2010, the Asian partner of yet2.com. A challenges-seek-solvers market with enterprise potential (companies can limit solvers to their employees).

http://www.e-dea.com/
    A free, largely empty, searchable, categorized database, paired with two attempts to sell webspace for $10/year for hosting your own trademark or patent-related site.

http://www.invent.org/collegiate/
    US Collegiate inventors' competition. Since 1991, fully enrolled college or university students have been competing for prize money, alone or in teams of up to three.

http://www.creativitypool.com
    A moderated idea database that supports submissions, searches, and voting for ideas, with banner ads and many cool text effects.

http://www.idea-a-day.com
    Small, short, strongly moderated, beautifully worded and laid out, and ready for re-publication as a book.

http://www.ideasbychuck.com/
    Charles McCarthy's ideas (he seems to have about one attack per week), peppered with mildly topical soft-core porn and relentless self-promotion.

http://www.twoideas.org/
    Hoping to do idea-a-day one better (we'll have to talk about that), Seattle writer Jon Lasser posts his ideas, puns and theories.

http://www.unventions.co.uk/
    Cléon Daniel's blog and drawings settle at the edge between invention and metaphor.

http://www.ideastorm.com/
    A Dell corporate database of categorized and voted-on ideas (for Dell products), open to general posts, comments, and voting; moderated, based on code from salesforce.com.

http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com
    A small university spin-off that used to market web software and has no relation to this web site other than by name.

http://half-bakedbaker.blogspot.com/
    A food blogger from Alabama, also unrelated to this website other than in spirit. Or stomach.

http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/priorart
    The Prior-Art-O-Matic from Kevan Davis.

http://www.totallyabsurd.com
    Under the subtitle "America's Goofiest Patents", artist and marketing consultant Ted VanCleave comments on illustrations from old and new weird patents.

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
    Corporate; hosted by salesforce.com. This one has a team of domain experts at starbucks reading and responding. The site has a lot of duplicates, but works well in general.

   
spinoffs   Halfbakery-related side projects that have sprung up over time.

http://twitter.com/bakesperson
    Halfbakery quotes and idea summaries, recent-ish, regular-ish, selected at whim.

http://halfbakers.multiply.com/
    An invitation-only multiply social club for current and former halfbakers. Contact po or DrCurry to join.

http://underdone.multiply.com/
    Public forum for news and commentary.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cark/
    Call Ambulance, Repair Kitchen, the yahoo-hosted halfbakery recipe group.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/inglybinglydingly/
    Flickr photo group for halfbakers

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=halfbakery&submitform=search
    Mycroft is a collection of plugins for the Mozilla browser's search bar. Thanks to Roleo Hibachi, one of the thousands of available plugins searches the halfbakery! Search for "halfbakery" on the mycroft site to install it. (On a Mac, fn-click to change search engines.)

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Halfopoly
    Wagster has follwed through with his idea for a "Halfopoly" layout in spite of [_sctld_] posting a very similar idea earlier. Go coevolution! Designs: Board, 50x50cm board at 180 dpi, Board in A4 segments: 1, 2, 3, 4 from wagster, and generic board game assembly instructions for parts 1-4 from our very own Steve DeGroof.

http://aphorism-game.blogspot.com/
    The Aphorism Game Show, hosted by freerunner.

http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/overbaked/
    Overbaked, the unmoderated mailing list established by RayfordSteele.

telnet://irc.worldonline.nl:6667
    (Or if that server refuses, irc.worldonline.be.) Look for channel #halfbakery on zippyanna's server.

http://wiw.org/~absterge/HB/hbreportintro.html
    The first research paper on the halfbakery by nick_n_uit; thanks to absterge for the hosting.

   
patents   Sites focusing on intellectual property, patents, and patent searches, both serious and silly.

http://www.uspto.gov/patft
    US Patent and Trademark Office's searchable patent database.

http://www.delphion.com
    US, European, Japanese patent database search that seems faster than the USPTO site.

http://ep.espacenet.com/
    European Patent Office, with database search including worldwide patents.

http://www.priorartdatabase.com/
    Browsable and, to a limited degree, searchable documents submitted by companies and gathered from the world at large; full access costs extra.

http://www.researchdisclosure.com/
    Research Disclosure magazine publishes, for a fee, ideas in a way that holds up legally as prior art; patent offices subscribe to this. They're British, they've been doing it for 35 years, they have merely contact information on the web (but not archives) - this is as stuffy as it gets. But if you're looking for a quick, cheap, solid way of preventing your ideas from being patented, this is probably it.

http://www.patentlysilly.com/
    Beautifully laid-out site highlights absurd, useless, or obvious recent patents.

http://wwww.totallyabsurd.com/
    Same shtick, but the patents are older, and there's more advertising.

   
friends of
halfbakery
  I have met these people and would post bail for them. They're funny and richly creative and they've been at it for years.

http://sorabji.com/
    New York artist, pianist, web person Mark Thomas.

http://www.plover.com/
    Mark Jason Dominus' plentiful Universe of Discourse

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/
    Cosma Shalizi, Rennaissance man.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/
    John Lawler, associate professor of Linguistics at U Michigan.

http://www.crypto.com/
    Matt Blaze, cryptophotomacrographer.

   
mutually
yours
  These are homepages and blogs of halfbakery users and other inventive people. (Usually, people link to their home page from their profile page, but sometimes it's nice to have them all in one place.) Send e-mail to bakesperson@gmail.com if you belong on this list.

http://iotd.patrickandrews.com/
    Patrick Andrews' "Invention of the Day" blog, not to be confused with idea-a-day. Given this impressive collection of halfbaked inventions, he doesn't really need an account here, but we're glad to have him anyway.

http://www.stinz.com/
    Comic artist Donna Barr (of "Desert Peach" fame) is a halfbakery user. Hey, go back to work!

http://www.tvwritersvault.com/
    (Formerly realityshowpitch.tv.) A site that specializes in bringing writers and buyers of new reality TV shows together.

http://www.abettermousetrap.co.uk/
    Consultancy run by two British technologists who help companies and inventors evaluate and improve ideas.

http://sneaker.nl/
    Peter Sneekes's lively XSL-ized weblog and homepage.

http://www.deepfun.com/weblog/
    Bernie DeKoven's Fun-Filled Weblog

http://www.dafydd.net/
    Dafydd Ll. L. Rees, a Welsh software engineer and halfbakery contributor.

http://www.ee0r.com/
    Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evans, technical writer, inventor.

http://www.coolstop.com/
    A portal that values creativity and attitude; in spite of the "cool" verbiage I'm pleased to have been recommended by it.

http://www.calamondin.com/
    Not a kumquat.

http://www.monstro.com/
    Because some of your finer moments occur somewhere else.

http://www.webmonkey.com/
    Monkey see, monkey bite.

http://www.purecontent.blogspot.com/
    "Looking at more stuff. Thinking about it harder."

http://www.waltzer.net/
    Charming Irish DJ bloke's weblog.

http://www.explodingdog.com/
    sam draws pictures

http://www.gusset.net/
    Kylie Gusset's weblog, pink and pastel blue.

http://reinder.rustema.nl/
    ReindeR Rustema, a media consultant and Halfbakery contributor.

http://www.syntelos.com/
    John Pritchard's projects

http://www.tonyaustin.com/
    A web programmer from Kent. (Sounds like it should be the first line of a limerick, doesn't it?)

http://www.improbable.com/
    The Annals of Improbable Research, awarders of the prestigious Ig Nobel prize.