Posts Tagged: "toys"

Since America’s earliest days, many creative and innovative toys have come through the consumer marketplace. Many have become so iconic they are now household names and synonymous with a moment in time for America’s youth. Some of the most popular of these toys continue to show up year after year under Christmas trees and – you guessed it – were…

Since America’s earliest days, a lot of creative and innovative toys have come through the consumer marketplace. Many becoming so iconic they have become household names and synonymous with a moment in time for America’s youth. Some of the most popular of these toys that continue to show up year after year under Christmas trees were patented… It wouldn’t be a traditional Christmas at IPWatchdog unless we spent some time profiling some cool innovations that relate to the holiday season. So today, I return to one of our all time favorite articles. Five years ago we published The Top 10 Most Iconic (and Patented) Toys and last year we published The Most Iconic (and Patented) Games. With Christmas firmly in mind, it is time to revisit and expand these lists. When initially published some truly iconic classic toys and games were inexplicably left missing. So, with the hours winding down before Santa Claus makes his way down chimneys across the world, join us as we look back at some of the most popular toys and games of all time, as well as the patents behind them.

The technology covered by the ‘073 patent has been incorporated into the series of Bakugan rollable toys developed by Spin Master and released in 2007 in conjunction with the Japanese-Canadian anime adventure series Bakugan Battle Brawlers. According to Spin Master’s complaint, the Bakugan toy series has been a major success for the company, earning $1 billion in sales in just over a decade. Bakugan is a combination of the Japanese words for “to explode” (baku) and “sphere” (gan) and Spin Master’s toys were designed to be spherical, rollable toys which would “explode” into a character when the toy came into contact with a magnetic component. Spin Master’s toys remained popular through a number of Bakugan spin-off series and the company planned to reboot the toy brand for release along with a new anime series to be released in the 2019-20 time frame.

Chinese toymaker VTech recently settled charges with the FTC in the first-ever case involving internet-connected toys. VTech became a victim of cyber attackers back in 2015, when hackers got access to the company’s online database and compromised accounts of over 11 million, which included data for about 6.37 million children… Today, the key to compliance when dealing with IoT is to “know thyself,” Bahar explained. In other words, take the time to understand what truly is in these smart components, not only from a technical perspective but a legal one. In addition, make sure to make good on your promises. If you tell consumers that you are protecting their data or their privacy in certain ways, make sure you are making good on that commitment.

While engaging in a manner most likely to lead to success is critical for any company, it is even more important for toy entrepreneurs for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, all too frequently costly mistakes are made. Here are five mistakes that I see toy companies make far too often… One of the ultimate ironies is that many toy companies spend most of the time coming up with the perfect name for their company but then don’t take the necessary steps to secure that name. Usually, companies either fail to run a trademark search or wait too long to file the trademark. The best time to discover a trademark issue for your name of choice is at the outset because any conflict can easily be resolved by picking a new name; and trust me while that may not seem desirable in the long run it will save you a lot of time and money.

One of the more attention-grabbing offerings in this field was Mattel’s ThingMaker 3D printing system for creating custom toys at home. The system includes the ThingMaker 3D Studio digital platform, accessible through the ThingMaker Design App, for creating original toy designs which are wirelessly sent to the ThingMaker for printing.