Thanks for the input Pat. Yeah, don't know what happened to my line breaks, and I was too lazy to figure it out (html?). Negative? That was me being positive! ;) My "manifesto" was a response to looking over 20 odd CH ideas that were in my opinion pure crap. I'm more of a hardware products guy (being an electronics/electromechanical engineer), as my job involves finding faults in other people's designs a fixing them. I agree patents are not the end all and do all, however every VC that I've dealt with will not give me a cent without them. I agree CH's crowdsourcing model is more appropriate to software and web based products and services, but they still need to be viable, have a revenue model, and lastly, they must make sense! I'm keeping my product ideas under wraps until I can find some protection for them - even if that means keeping some aspects (my firmware for eg) proprietary. As always, a few million in sales is worth more than a patent lying fallow, so actually building and selling a product that's hard to copy is another possible method (which is easier to do with a web based service.). cheers!