partnering

Dear Professor,

Upon reflection, what I linked you to before is obscure. I'm proud of it, and it's representative of some of my larger goals, but that requires explaining, and explaining isn't easy, especially for the listener. Part of my theory of life, and business, is, if you want to make progress, it's best to find some way proceed that's easy. I figure when I achieve that, I'll make progress.

I'm a serial inventor, but I haven't been able to execute, as the expression goes, on anything. Partly, that's because of my disorganized mind, but I have my doubts that's going to change. Anyway, I've been trying to get things to happen by writing people. Currently, I'm sort of focusing on writing to you - that's not all I'm doing, but I'm giving this some time, and I kind of want to see what happens if I work at it some more.

Well, although my first letter was, I think, not terrible, and my reply to your reply was only somewhat terrible, there remains the fact that what I've written to you this far about my work is obscure, or would require explanation. As a result of being aware of that, I've been feeling a measure of despair. Sure, you might invite me to explain ... but what it comes down to is, developing a social media platform, which is my plan, will surely be a challenge.

Actually, I get the feeling many people who succeed in bringing a product to market do it by pretty much getting the job done themselves. Yes, there's always a partnership element, but people are able to form partnerships because they are able to get a lot done themselves. I suspect that's a kind of universal truth. True, it also seems to help when a person is good company, which I'm not, especially. I'm also not particularly good at getting things done. In the way of an aside, one entrepreneur commented that job applicants who have coded something themselves make a good impression, and that was my motivation for really working at the JavaScript for a while.

I'm completely at my limit as far as coding social media goes, and, as I say, I sort of doubt I've move the project along enough to be useful as a partner. Anyone can see it's just going to be too much trouble.

Well, mulling all of this over, and feeling quite at the end of my rope, I remembered the standard question, what can I propose to a potential partner that would be both useful and in any sense easy? And I hit on something. Yikes, forgot what it was for a second. OK, well, one of my longstanding fantasies has been to patent a technology and license it. Of course, I also want to do on line tools, and, from time to time, I think up a feature that seems like it could be unique, obvious, i.e., could possibly be turned into intellectual property.

Part of what I'm trying to do in my designs for the web is make "turning the page" easier. Strangely, I find "next" and "previous" buttons rather difficult to use. Swiping is a lot easier, nicer, but it still requires you to do something every time you want to change the page. Same could be said of reading a book, but I think there's a reason that is actually not the same thing. For, I think, a similar reason, clicking links in text or among groups of images has a more fluid quality, but next and previous links are important. Actually, the pages I linked you to are demonstrations of systems that turn the pages for the reader. You can just sit there and watch the pages go by. If you want to study something, you can pause the action. Having experimented with this, I really do feel it's a nice way to view content.

Hmm, a thought. An actual question I can ask you. This idea of content emerging from the depths of space in the way I demonstrate in that page of photos is pretty much an invention, at least as applied to creating web sites. What do you think about the idea of trying to patent that, as a step towards developing a product? (And then, what kind of help can I get with that ... to whom should I turn - of course, I'm already turning to you - and what should I ask of them?)

Just to wrap up, the idea I had yesterday is an alternative to next/previous links on standard web pages, such as slide shows. In a word, the speed and direction of play would be controlled by the location of the mouse pointer.

Hope this is useful. Still hope to hear from you again.

Tom