Flash for the action cam.

I saw him across a press-packed room, a young man with shoe-polish black hair and eyebrows, manning a small table with a small sign and a small camera, just one among dozens of vendors pitching products that night at the CES preview show in New York. (CES, the Everest of tech shows, opens January 7th in Vegas). But this kid seemed a little hungrier than most, something about the way he was shooting out shy smiles and intermittently bouncing up on his toes. I was intrigued enough to approach (no, not to flirt, though I did try to set him up with an equally bouncy PR rep from Samsung later in the evening).

Turns out, he’s an inventor. Ever spent time with an inventor? They’re this rare subset of humankind determined to get jet packs working while the rest of us scrounge the bottom of our bags for stray subway tokens. High octane personalities to a one.

The story of Marc Barros: three years ago, he was a ski bum slash undergrad at the University of Washington in Seattle. He and a good friend, Jason Green, wanted to quickly shoot and upload thriller videos of themselves doing life-threatening moves on the slopes (in the age of online social networking, differentiation is critical). But, as their website now explains, they had camcorder troubles: “extreme environmental conditions killed the cameras, and the fast-paced action threatened to kill the athletes who fiddled with their camera controls.” So these two guys started rigging up experimental helmet cams and talking to a design group in Portland about creating a light, hands-free video recorder with just one button, the ON one. Three years later, they’ve produced both the microSD-loaded VholdR camcorder, which just won a CES Innovations ‘08 Design Award, and their own new company, Twenty 20, to promote it.

Truth be told, the VholdR isn’t the first flash memory action cam. Oregon Scientific, Samsung, and Logitech all have their own helmet-ready models. Marc’s is a fierce little competitor,though. Imagine what this guy will be doing by the time he’s, I don’t know, 25!

Marc actually reminds me of another camera inventor, Oscar-winning Renaissance man Garrett Brown, who created the Steadicam in the 70’s. When Garrett’s not collecting patents (50 and counting) for FlyCams, DiveCams, MobyCams, and SuperFlyCams, he writes and makes music. Check out this bit from his treatise on the creative process:

There is an anticipatory interval, brief or long, in the course of inventing something desirable, that resembles the pre-coital interval (brief or long) in a sexual relationship.  I have learned, over the years, to savor it as one of the more satisfying pure contemplations in life.  (“The Joy of Inventing” would be laying it on a bit thick, but the foreplay, at least, can be euphoric.) …Intrigued by an unsolved problem, a missing something, a ‘gap’ in life, you may or may not have considered trying to ‘invent’ something; but once an idea, a possible solution, a plausible answer beckons, it will flicker at the back of your head, drawing your attention to itself, like a distant match-flame.  And from that moment on, so help me, endorphins and peptides analogous to the sexual kind, and pheromones from the Muse herself will bind to the old morphine-receptors in your brain to reward thinking about it.

Garrett says we can get that high by paying attention to our own “bin of whims.” I say a mindset that luscious deserves its own Innovations Award.

What’s in your “bin of whims?” Talk about it in the forums.