Story of The Invention

In search of a Win-Win deal

I have always been an “entrepreneur”. I remember a time when I did not know what that word even meant, but people told me that was what I was… It probably started when I was 3 or 4 years old and living in Costa Rica. The local kids I hung out with use to wash cars windshields and sell “chicklet Gun” to people for pocket change. I thought it was great fun.

When my family moved back to the Salt Lake City, UT, I was in the 1st grade through 5th grade, and would mow lawns, shovel snow, deliver newspapers, sell lemonade and other things to earn money.

During the summertime, when school was out, I would sometime work for my father, who was a gold exploration geologist, and my father’s employer, Occidental Minerals and Petroleum. This work involved hiking through the mountains and taking rock and sediment samples into small bags and marking the locations on a map. We would sometimes use walkie-talkie radios to keep in touch with each other. This was my first exposure to this technology and I really liked the walkie-talkies and they make things much safer for the work. Them, If the rock samples came back good, then sometimes we would stake mining claims on the land for Occidental Minerals be erecting “claim markers” at the corners of each claim. The markers where usually made of PVC Pipe that we would hall to the newly staked mining claims. This summer work took place in Utah, California, New Mexico, Mexico, Nevada and Haiti.

My family would move from Salt Lake City, to Denver for a couple of years, and then settle in Tucson Arizona in 1978, where I attended junior high and Highschool. During high school I worked as a dishwasher and busboy, and I also started to buy and fix used cars for resale. During my high school days I also became “partners” in an existing commercial janitorial service called Sunrise Janitorial Services. I make a deal with the owner, that I would bring in new cleaning accounts, and keep a percent of the monthly cleaning fee for my services. I was able to sign-up many doctor and dentist offices for specialty cleaning services, as well as regular office buildings, restaurants, and even two large health and fitness clubs.

During my high school years, I leave Tucson for the summers and go to work for my Uncle’s John’s Company in St. Louis Mo. He was the owner and founder International Photo Products, which was, at the time one of the largest, through the mail “super-8” home movie film in the United States, and the company sold franchises to set-up local sales offices across the United States.

It was a great learning experience because International Photo Products had all of the components of a nationwide company. It had a franchise sales department, it had a warehouse and a shipping department, it had a phone solicitation room that generated leads for in-home salesmen to sell super-8 home movie equipment to customers, It had a nationwide in-home sales force that would go out to customer’s homes every night and make hour long sale pitches, they even had an company owned “finance company” that would finance the camera sales deals, and then even do debit collection work, if customers did not make their payments on the camera equipment… For a high school aged entrepreneur, there was a lot to learn. I even ran a local Tucson “International Photo Products” franchise during high school, and ran the local Tucson franchise while attending high school.

Things were going great for my Uncle John’s Company. He would “give” the super-8 camera equipment to the customers, in exchange to the through the mail film processing. It was a great deal for everyone. That was until the invention of the VCR and Camcorder… Overnight, the “super-8” home movie was outdated, and International Photo Products began to struggle financially. The Company tried to adapt to selling VCRs and Camcorders, but without the backside film processing of the Super-8 movie film, the company eventually closed. He could no longer offer a real “win-win” deal for the customer…

My Uncle tried to start other businesses after that, but he could never regain the “Magic Win-Win” deal for customers. In fact- just the opposite thing happened. His new “CreditPlus” business was charged and pled guilty to “mail fraud” and he spent a year in prison… This was a learning experience for me too…

The best thing that came out of my time in St. Louis is that I me my wife of 35 years, Joyce on an in-home camera sales appointment working for my Uncle’s Company. I got to the sales appointment late, (due to paper maps) and the 21-year-old Joyce answered the door. I told her I was there for the 8:00 Camera Sales Appointment, so she quickly when and got her Mother. Her Mother came to the door and told me there was a mistake and that her husband did not make such an appointment, they were on a fixed income, and then she closed the door in my face…

That would have pretty much been it for Joyce and I, except that I happen to randomly meet her again a birthday party a few months later. I did not make the connection with our prior meeting, until things started to get serious with our relationship, and it was time go to Joyce’s house and to meet Joyce’s mother and father… That is when the dajavu set-in and I realized that I had meet Joyce and her Mother before…

My family would move from Salt Lake City, to Denver for a couple of years, and then settle in Tucson Arizona in 1978, where I attended junior high and Highschool. During high school, I leave Tucson for the summers and go to work for my Uncle’s John’s Company in St. Louis Mo. I had first been exposed to “hands-on” cell phone was in about 1982, when I working at my Uncle John’s Company in St. Louis Mo. He had some of the first Motorola cell phones mounted in three cars and I was able to use the phones to make calls from time to time. He was also briefly a dealer for the 4 watt vehicle mounted Motorola phones in St. Louis, and I when on some sales calls to new car dealerships, to offer the phones to any potential new car buyers.

After graduating high school I moved to St. Louis to continue to work for my Uncle’s company form about 1984-1986, when, I decided it was time to leave St. Louis, and Joyce soon followed me back to Tucson, where we would get married and we both started to attend Pima Community College. Joyce became a Registered Nurse and I would study drafting and business and then transfer to the University of Arizona and get a General Business degree.

During my college years, I continued to buy and fix-up used cars as a means of financial support. Joyce worked as an LPN until she graduated with her RN. By that time, I had been fixing up cars for several years and has developed some mechanic repair skills. I also took some Real Estate classes and passed my Real Estate Salesperson Exam in Arizona, while I was still attending college.

In College, I also founded “Professional Dental Plans of Arizona”. This was a Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) and I signed agreements with local dentist and orthodontist that would allow me to bring them new customers and no cost, and then offer a discounted price to my dental plan members. This included free exams and x-rays, and cleanings too. It was a win-win deal and the business was featured on the front page of the Tucson Newspaper, as well as the front page of the Arizona Wildcat newspaper. The business operated for a few years and I eventually sold the business and my customer and dentist base to a competing dental plan company, and the merged company, known as “Affordable Dental Group” continued to operate for about 25 years in Tucson.

Although I was a business major, I also took other elective classes. Some of these classes where more technical in nature, such as Basic Drafting and Computer Added Drafting, Basic Computer Software and hardware, and Data Base Programing and Management.

But it was the Database Programing and Management class that really had a big impact on my future. To start with, a group in the class decided to use my Dental Plan as a class project and build a database for the dental plan. The database consisted on all the names and addresses of the dentists and specialists in the plan, and also included all the names and addresses on all the plan members and the payment information on each plan member. Then the database was finished, I could print current membership lists each month and send them the current member lists to the dentists. I could also print the membership cards and send out renal statements to the plan members. It was a very useful class project for the group of students and for the dental plan too.

It was also in college when I was first taught about the benefits of patents and inventions in general… I decided that Patents and inventions offered the opportunity for an incredible “win-win” deal for the consumer. The new technology offered by the invention made the lives better for the customer and probably saved them time and money. Inventions elevated all of society without a foreseeable downside to the customer or the inventor. The electric light, the landline telephone, the automobile and the airplane. All of these elevated society to a new level and everyone was a “winner”!! And after 20 years, the invention becomes public property so everyone can use if freely. What a concept!!

After graduation from the University of Arizona with my General Business degree in 1992, I decided to stop flipping cars and combine my real estate knowledge and my car repair knowledge, and to start buying and selling fix-up houses. I formed the Reed Real Estate Investment Co. and registered with the Better Business Buru of Sothern Arizona. For over 30 years the company has bought, fixed and sold over 200 houses and rental units in Tucson and maintains an “A rating” with the BBB. I liked the fixing of the houses, but my ambitions wanted to make a big business and to find a way to really affect society in a positive way.

During the Time that my family spent living in Haiti and in Costa Rica, I was exposed to some extreme poverty. Some of my local childhood friends were extremally poor and malnourished. At the age of age of 6 or 7, I once gave my friend in Haiti a quarter ($0.25 USD) to buy so food his family made him give it back. I began to realize that my life’s work would be to somehow help these people through a business that offered a “giant sized win-win” deal for everyone.

This desire to offer society a win-win deal in the form of new technologies eventually began to focus on the future of cellular phone technologies, and how I might be able to be a part of the technological revolution that was about to begin in the year 2000 with the public use of GPS.

I had first been exposed to “hands-on” cell phone was in about 1982, when I working at my Uncle John’s Company in St. Louis Mo, as a summer job during High School, and after graduation from high school. He had some of the first Motorola cell phones mounted in three cars and I was able to use the phones to make calls from time to time. He was also briefly a dealer for Motorola phones in St. Louis, and I when on some sales calls to new car dealerships, to offer the phones to any potential new car buyers.

When I returned to Tucson to attend college, I continued my usage and interest in cell phones. At the time there was only one cell phone provider in Tucson (and St. Louis), which was Altel, and there was really only one phone available. This standard car mounded phone was the Motorola car phone, with 4 watts of power. The same phone was available in a portable unit that they called the “Bag Phone”. This Bag Phone had all the car mounted equipment in a “Bag”, along with a big battery, and it had all 4 watts of power… There was also a “suitcase” model available, but it was the same equipment as the Bag Phone, just mounded in a Suitcase. The next portable Motorola phone was the Big Brick phone. The Big Brick phone was a true hand-held wireless communications device, and was a major breakthrough and was the beginning of the personal use of the cell phone. This was a 1-watt phone, and this would be my first cell phone that I owned personally.

However, due to every expensive service, at $1.00 a minute, and the very poor coverage and dropped call problems, I started by trying a “radio call relay” service prior to springing the big money for the Altel Cell phone service. The call relay service was basically a handheld walkie-talkie that had a direct dedicated radio frequency to a live operator that would “patch calls” to and from my handheld wireless communications device. My number was “0-2-0-3”, so when someone called my home phone landline, they would get an answering message that would tell the caller to dial call me at another number, and ask the live operator to be transferred to extension “0-2-0-3”. The live operator would then relay the call to my walkie-talkie device, and I would get a “very loud ring”, and the operators voice would come over the walkie-talkie. “0-2-0-3”- Are you there? You have a call! 0-2-0-3, are you there?” I remember sometimes waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, dreaming someone was calling “0-2-0-3- Are You There? (LOL)” I could place outgoing calls with the operators help too. The radio call relay service actually had better coverage, less dropped calls, and was less than half the cost of real cellular phone service… But, in the end, it was confusing for callers to have to call an operator, and then wait for the operator to relay the call. So, eventually I stayed with Altel for several years.

I continued using cellular phone as a college student to help me buy used car deals. The phones and service were very expensive back then and the service as terrible… Calls would drop constantly, but it was better than no phone at all… or a “pager”… And my phone bill could be as much as $400.00 some months. This was more that my rent or house payments at the time… But if I bought one or two cars a month, it would cover the cost.

In the back on my mind I had a thought of combine with the knowledge that I had learned in college about the computer hardware and software, database programing with my interest in cell phone technologies. I started to wonder if there could be a way to somehow quantify and store the cell phone signal into a database.

Then one day, I was driving home from dropping my wife Joyce off at work, and I got a speeding ticket on a rural road in the middle of nowhere… I was mad about the speeding ticket because I felt there were no speed limit signs posted and I did not know what the speed limit was. When, this got me thinking about how cell phone technologies could help to solve these kind of problems…

I found the book “Patent It Yourself- 1st edition” by Nolo in about 2000 and began to study it intensely. I even had my Secretary- Sandy Dicken read the entire book onto cassette tapes, that I would listen to as I drive in the car. I started to learn about was a Patent was, and what a Provisional Patent was, and then to draft and draw a “disclosure document” that focused on the speed limit sign problem.