DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Robert Yonover held his sea rescue invention yesterday at the Hawaii Venture Capital Association's "Toward a Better Mousetrap" luncheon at the Plaza Club . The floating signal device is designed to help rescuers locate a sailor who is washed overboard.
A better way
Inventors seek funding
to build their dreams
A handful of Hawaii inventors yesterday listed what they said are international problems for which they have the solutions.
In the half-century since automatic electric coffee makers were invented, there hasn't been one yet that properly brews coffee. Not until a Hawaii invention, its creator said.
Airmen and sailors routinely drown at sea because nobody can see them floating, but a local inventor has a life-saving solution.
Eye doctors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on unnecessarily complicated machines that tell them whether patients need spectacles, while a local firm has a cheap hand-held device that does the job.
And drinking water plants waste millions on inefficient filtering systems, but a Big Island firm has the solution.
The inventors got the chance to tell their stories at a luncheon meeting of the Hawaii Venture Capital Association, billed as "Toward a Better Mousetrap."
After the association warned that it does not endorse any statements made at its meetings by people seeking financial backers -- a warning voiced at every HVCA meeting -- the inventors swung into their pitches.
First up was Don Yancey, manager of Daphne LLC, which is developing the "Daphne Pocket Auto Refractor." He described a hand-held device to measure the optics of the eye that indicates in seconds whether a person needs corrective lenses and what the correct prescription would be.
"It's somewhat analogous to the electronic ear thermometer," Yancey said. While eye doctors typically spend $8,000 to $10,000 for a machine that is complicated and hard to use, the pocket device is estimated to cost about $125 and could drop to $50 or less once it catches on, Yancey said.
His downtown Honolulu firm is seeking $2.8 million in development capital to get the device to the point where it can be licensed to manufacturers, he said.
David Tarnas, a representative of Kamuela-based Phase Inc., talked about his company's development of a "dewatering centrifuge" for the drinking-water process. The Big Island firm, headed by Curtis Kirker, Berkeley Fuller and Matilda Thompson, specializes in the creation of water and wastewater technology.
Company officials toured Western states and went to 40 water-processing plants asking managers to identify the weak links in their systems. One was the centrifuge which, late in the water-handling process, separates water from the sludge that has been filtered from it.
The other was filtering screens or membranes that get clogged and need to be "back-washed" every so often to clean them, Tarnas said.
His company designed solutions to both problems and is gearing up to sell them to municipal wastewater systems, small community drinking-water plants, large-animal farms, commercial laundries and other big water processors.
"We really are driven by an environmental mission," Tarnas said, but later in the session he said his firm really has a "double-green" approach, keeping the world green and dragging in lots of green -- money -- for its investors.
Phase has raised $1.2 million and wants to attract another $4 million over the next two years.
Next came the coffee man, Harry Jefferson, founder of Coffee Brewers International in Honolulu, which he said has developed the only electric coffee brewer in the world that makes coffee in the proper manner for the best taste.
His patented "Jefferson Brewing and Steeping System" does it right, he said. The system he devised and developed with the help of Dale W. Ploeger of SRI International takes into account that there are some 800 chemical compounds in coffee and if they are not handed properly the coffee will be bitter. He said his company has patents in the United States and in 20 other countries and has tried out the system with taste tests by more than 200 people.
Ninety percent said they can tell the difference in taste from different ways coffee is brewed and that they have distinct preferences for how long they want their coffee brewed. The longer the brewing time, the more bitter the coffee, he said.
Jefferson couldn't demonstrate his point because there was no electrical outlet available in the Plaza Club meeting room for his machine, but he explained how it works.
All coffee makers use 55-year-old technology, which involves putting cold water into a container.
It flows down a tube and around a heating unit which brings it to 212 degrees F., creating a steam bubble that forces the hot water up another tube so it can drip down through the coffee.
That's wrong, Jefferson said, because the water isn't hot enough when it hits the coffee and it takes too long to completely wet the coffee. It works all right for one or two cups but a batch of 10-12 cups will come out bitter, he said.
In his system, all the water goes first into a pressure system where it is brought up to heat and infused into the coffee. The drinker then uses controls on the machine to set the brewing time by regulating the flow rate, producing sweet or bitter coffee on demand.
He expects his units to sell for about $25 for a one-cup portable machine up to $200 for the "bells and whistles" model with its own grinder and lots of extras.
Jefferson said investors already have put in $250,000 and he provided $250,000 himself in cash and loans to the company. To get to the point where he can arrange for manufacturing under license, he needs another $250,000, he said.
The most colorful presentation was that of Robert N. Yonover, whose Sea Rescue Corp. relies on a color, orange, for its "survival technology," he said. Most downed pilots and overboard sailors drown because they are hard to see. His solution is a yards-long, food-wide strip of thin orange buoyant plastic, fitted with thin floating ribs that keep it flat on the surface.
The Navy has recognized it as "the only passive and continuous signaling device," because it doesn't involve flares or smoke and has no batteries or electronics to go wrong, he said. His business has received $2 million from the Department of Defense in assistance and orders. Every submarine in the Navy will have two of the devices, one for the first sailor to go over the side and one for the last, he said.
Yonover said it can be seen from a mile away from 1,500 feet in the air. Military acceptance of that level for his "rescue streamer" was great because it started out as "a little thing I made in my lanai and my wife told me to go and get a real job," Yonover said.
He has been working with the Air Force to develop a model that can be spotted at night by infrared cameras. He also has a little version that can be hung out the window of a car to let rescue crews spot a disabled vehicle at the side of a highway.
He hasn't stopped with the streamer. Another invention he wants to see sewed into every sailor's pocket is a pair of automatically inflating balloons, joined by a strap, that turn into instant water wings when the sailor falls into the water.
He is also working on an small airborne video camera that would fly up behind a fishing boat so the skipper can look a long way out for schools of tuna.
