Years. for one oklahoma particular company, it took just months. how? one part inspiration, one part sheer force of will. the people behind the zom took their idea for locating a lost cell phone and turned it into a ces success story like no other. one year ago, lori peneck, mother of three, and an entrepreneur with what she knew was a great idea was packing her bags to go to the consumer electronics show or ces for the very first time. i love technology and love gadgets. and so i would watch it every year and think, that would be so incredible to get to go to ces. just a few months before, lori had an oprah-induced epiphany on the treadmill. one of my girlfriends told me her husband had lost another iphone. i started thinking, you know, there s got to be a way that we
Could come up with something. with help from her husband, her aha moment quickly moved from idea to business. everyone that i would share the idea with got really excited and said we ve never seen anything like it. do you know how large the market is for something like this? this is a global business you re talking about. so when i got over that shock, we started to concentrate on what it would take. in that moment the zomm was born. named for zachary, olivia, and madison s mom. the concept for the zomm was a simple wireless leash to help locate those impossible-to-find cell phones. although they had a great idea, lori and henry s next challenge was figuring out how to make it work. the thing is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are. which wasn t too hard for us to do because we didn t know anything about technology. so that s when we searched out the best who we thought was in the world in bluetooth technology. just as the zomm development team was coming together, lori
Without sleep and just wrote it. wrote everything that zomm was going to be. what it was going it. do the benefits, et cetera, et cetera handed it in, and thinking, well, you know, this is kind of a shot in the dark. lori s gut feeling was right. the zomm won the prestigious ces innovation award. their next problem, the zomm was still just an idea. they had no product. on one hand we had outside professionals say, yes, this is a very innovative product. but on the flip side of that, we were also had one of those shocking type feelings that, oh, my goodness, we have to really hunker down and get our product developed because one of the requirements was that we had to have a working demo for the consumer electronics show. so how do you get a tech product from can sent to realty in just three months? if you follow the model of henry and lori penix, you set seemingly impossible goals. we wanted to set a goal out there. we wanted to make it lofty.
Came across an application for the 2010 ces innovation awards. i got on ces web site, and i started reading, trying to figure out exactly, you know, what you would do at ces, and what it takes to be there. that s when my wife sent me an e-mail and said there s a contest at ces for the most innovative product. she goes, it would be really great if we could ender it that. i did a lot of research and tried to make sure it was a unique idea. and i just kind of had this feeling in my gut that we were going to win. but before they could even think about winning, lori and henry had to go through the rigorous process of applying for the award. and they only had 48 hours to get it done. they wanted a picture of the zomm, everything to enter this contest. so we wound up creating this wood chip that looked similar to a zomm, painted it as best we could, and sent that in as our specimen. we sat in our home for 24 hours