Tag Archives: dogs

Innovation Goes to the Dogs?

Innovation Going to the Dogs?

In case you missed it, a team from Scandinavia thinks that they’ve nearly cracked no, not the human-computer interface, but the dog-computer interface, so that some day soon we might in fact be able to understand man’s best friend.

What does the dog say?

Well, this question begs another question, do we really care? Or do we really want to hear it all of the time?

They’ve launched an IndieGoGo campaign and have already exceeded their campaign funding goal, so I guess they’ll be moving their research and product development on to the next stage.

So, what do you think, if they push the product to the finish line, will it be an invention or an innovation?


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Innovation or Invention? – Dog Washing Machine

Innovation or Invention? - Dog Washing MachineI saw the second picture in this article (of a dog washing machine in Japan) over my wife’s shoulder during a leisurely reading of the Sunday Seattle Times yesterday. I think it was in the Parade magazine, and as I started writing this article I found the same picture posted two years ago here, so it became clear that this idea – a dog and cat washing machine – has been already productized and in use for at least a year in Japan. But then I found the first picture in this article (which looks a lot like my daughter’s dog) in an article about the Dog-o-Matic that appeared in The Daily Mail back in 2009, meaning some inventive Brit appears to have beat out someone from Japan by nearly a year.

Dog Washing Machine - JapanNow, I can say with reasonable certainty that very few dog or cat owners really enjoy giving Fido or Princess a bath, and so the idea of a machine that you lead Fido or Princess into and shut the door and push a button to accomplish the job, sounds very appealing. It can be an incredibly messy operation fraught with danger and frustration (thus the rise of self-service dog washing places), but when you look at the first picture, is the emotional trauma of the experience something that dog or cat owners (or dogs/cats for that matter) could endure over the long term?

Hmmm…

Looking at these images, they remind me of an experience my wife and I (or mostly my wife) had in an automatically cleaned public restroom at a train station in Versailles, France that was just about as traumatic. But that’s a story for another day…

So, what do you think? Invention or innovation?

Is this something that will catch on with dog owners around the world?

I’ll leave you with a video of the Japanese version in use:

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