Hope springs eternal--and maternal--at inventor Showcase.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: SMALL [biz]

Kyle Myhra is only 17 but already a seasoned inventor with stories of fleeting successes and momentary setbacks. Two years ago he made it onto ABC's" American Inventor" with his dog fan-a fan that plugs into your car's cigarette lighter and hooks onto the window to give your dog a steady breeze of outside air while you run errands.

Brilliant

Except that the fan had the troublesome side effect of running down a car's battery. But that didn't deter Myhra. The Broomfield High junior was back with another invention at another venue: the fourth annual Inventor Showcase, Nov. 10 at the Cable Center on the University of Denver campus.

Hosted by the DaVinci Institute, an area futurist think tank, the event attracted 29 inventors whose creations were divided up to be rated by about 60 judges, including me.

Myhra's new invention: the Spot Sucker cleaning system.

It was clear young Myhra had demonstrated this product many times. He dribbled some red wine on a white cloth and then put a small detergent-soaked foam pad under the fabric. With a short tug, a portable suction device sucked the detergent from the pad, through the fabric and ... voila! The white fabric was spotless again.

Myhra has a patent filed but not yet granted for the Spot Sucker. In the meantime he has a "proof of concept," a designation that allows him to demonstrate the feasibility of his product without having an expensive prototype made. For now, his suction device is a repurposed wine-bottle vacuum sealer.

"Our hopes are to license it to a cleaning company so we're not making chemicals in our garage," said his mom, Coleen Myhra. "But if push comes to shove, we might not be opposed to that."

Judges were given clipboards with their exhibit assignments and asked to rate the inventions in four areas on a scale of one to 10: ingeniousness, aesthetics, alignment with the industry it's in, and its "cool factor."

Next for me was Envysion, a Web-based video surveillance product based in Louisville that happens to be the Tech Startup of the Month in this issue of ColoradoBiz.

Envysion's client base already includes 600 Chipotle restaurants.

"Could I use it to keep tabs on my dogs and chickens?" 1 asked Robert Hagens, Envysion's chief technical officer. A fox had invaded my chicken coop a few weeks back. Miraculously, there hadn't been any casualties, but...