A few years ago, a woman from LA emailed me asking if I could give her feedback on an invention she had involving MP3 players. After my assurance that I wasn't going to steal her idea, she told me she was an aerobics instuctor who had noticed she could control the rhythm of her students' workouts with the tempo (beats per minute) of the music she was playing. Pre-selecting songs with the proper tempos was a tedious and imprecise science, though, and she often couldn't get exactly the tempo she wanted.
Her idea was to create an MP3 player that could detect and alter BPM without affecting pitch, the same way audio software programs such as Ableton Live or PCDJ work. She'd be able to plug the player into speakers in the front of her aerobics class and use a dial to up the tempo and control her students' pace, and hoped to make some money from her idea as well.
I'm fairly sure she wrote me in 2002/2003, but evidently Apple beat her to the punch, patenting the concept in 2004, and will probably use it to build on its Nike+Apple Sports Kit. It just goes to show... it's one thing to have an ingenious idea, and another to patent it. Maybe I should finally get around to patenting that idea for attaching a compact digital LCD projector to portable video players...
