Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone I’m JD Houvener your host of the bold today’s show review the inventor entrepreneur or a business owner get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place well we’re here on a Friday we have finished up a five-part series on the soccer ball looking at all the way back from when we started with you know the pre-medieval e days and kicking a soccer ball made of human skull or animal skin and pig bladder we’ve come a long way all right to where we are today and using nice synthetic materials in a very nice format to limit the amount of seams it’s watertight it’s got foam to really have good cushion and control today we’re going to look at the very latest I’ve got two patents that have just issued this year in 2018 on soccer ball technology and the first one let’s get right to it is front was granted this March and you can see from the image here that it’s actually I’ve got some interesting pockets little recesses in the sub-layer where it’s filled with gel a gel format instead of a rigid structure like like a plastic or polymer it allows for increased flexibility and so the inventor here has put in you know a interesting has done a good job in putting into the claim language very flexible claim terms that allow form a plurality of these pockets you know he’s called them I believe you’ve said recesses in the claims where the material is is a gel as opposed to like I said a solid substance which will allow the ball in the pentagon’s or in the larger shaped panels to have much more flexor to them this will allow the foot the ball when they collide to have better deformation and therefore more control as the ball travels so I’m excited to see if this is going to actually roll out into a ball get accredited and get put into maybe the next World Cup in 2022 and this year also was a second patent issued on the soccer ball this one originated the country of Taiwan and was filed under a a foreign patent here in the US which just got issued as I said this year in March as well this one day before the patent we just looked at for the the gel what this patent does it’s got lighting it’s really neat I mean it’s got to add some weight and it likely is not going to have as much you know playability this is more for the novelty the fact you can have lights in the ball but in theory you could play this in the dark the inventor here has done a nice job of making a symmetrical core with six different output sort of reaching through the core of the ball giving a lighted display and at least six spots on the ball and it’s it’s not like they’re having a round and curved you know a bubble effect right at the surface of the ball the ball is a complete perfect sphere in theory the lights are actually below the surface and so you can see with a nice cut view how the structure works and how they actually able to set up some of that in the ball as a mechanical engineer I tend to think about some of the problems they may have in terms of fatigue or damage if a ball were kicked too hard but they may have already taken that into account and what’s interesting about patent laws that is going to cover a lot of different iterations not just a the first version if the claims are written properly it’s going to cover lots of different materials different types of lights and bulbs and wiring and even batteries as it was it may be the case so I hope this has been enjoyable series for you I’ve learned a lot about soccer balls and doing my own research hope you’ve enjoyed it as well if you have any questions about being mentioned you’re working on maybe you’ve got a patent idea involving a different sports article or complete a different product you can always give us a call at
our patent attorneys are always going to do a free 30-minute consultation for those qualified inventors that have thought through the process and are ready to sit down with an attorney I’m your host JD Houvener of the bold today show have a great weekend everybody go big go bold [Music]
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