Quirky's Ben Kaufman Gets GE to Share Its Patents

Ben Kaufman, 27, is founder of New York-based Quirky, a crowd-sourcing invention company—it builds, markets, and sells devices that have been proposed and worked on by its hundreds of thousands of users, or members. Among its best-known products are a flexible power strip and an egg tray that indicates when eggs are about to go bad. On March 19, Quirky announced its newest product, an air-conditioning window unit that interacts with smartphones. It was conceived by a Quirky member who used to work for the U.S. Department of Energy and built in collaboration with General Electric. Kaufman is also developing a platform to allow aspiring Quirky inventors to peruse patents from big corporations on its site and use them without getting sued—instead, the corporations get a cut. Imagine, for instance, someone realizing that GE’s turbine design would make a really nice blender.