As large corporations spend billions of dollars for R&D, but often fail to come up with innovations that match the hype, we steer our attention towards the place from where the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergei Brin started their careers. This magical place, the Garage, where astounding technologies and great personalities were born… These personalities then moved on with their technologies to bigger, fancier buildings, but the Garage was never left empty.

The Garage continues to be populated with passionate inventors working furiously toward the next big breakthrough. Though personalities like Jobs, Gates, Sergei and Brin are rare, exciting innovations are not, as we discover year after year. People come out with ‘WOW!’ products which are frequently very simple and relatively inexpensive, but are nevertheless very useful and potentially great…

A few days ago, I read a piece in Popular Mechanics about the annual Maker Faire bonanza, which is one such event that attracts fantastic ‘Garage Inventions’, some of which are superior to their well-known predecessors and unlike them are very wallet friendly. This year Maker Faire had its share of exhilarating stuff like algae-gargline biofuel pumps and fire-breathing robots, along with inventions which had the potential of kicking out well-established offerings of huge corporations. A few examples…

There was Tony De Rose’s Open source multi-touch table, which is a laptop-powered version of Microsoft’s much-hyped Surface but costs way less at $500, that includes $100 towards the cost of the maple used in the table. Next was Chris Benton’s Hand-built UAV Sharpshooters which consisted of a bunch of cameras and remote-control circuitry rigged to drug-store frame kites. The contraption keeps taking pictures on its own till the battery or the memory is exhausted… and the best part is it costs a lot less than renting a helicopter to take those snaps. Then there was Doug Lonner’s Solar-Powered Stirling Engine (a closed-cycle piston heat engine). It’s a breakthrough gadget powered by the sun, to which one should add that it can handle torque up to 70 rpms without using the valves that are required for Sterling power.

These are just a few of the amazing new products on display, a number of which offer customers a better and cheaper alternative. We are now witnessing a rapid rise of the small inventors. The Internet boom is helping them like never before. The Internet has opened up the field by making information freely available. Inventors now have access to a number of tools and resources. They can communicate with their peers, share information, access databases and in turn, reach out to the world with their ideas, something they could only dream of doing before. As the Internet levels the field, it’s big time for the small inventors!