by Sebastian Haley, January 22, 2012,  VentureBeat

Like any news blog, VentureBeat gets a lot of spam. Sometimes it’s a long-lost relative from the Philippines who just needs us to send them $10,000 in unmarked bills so that we can claim our inheritance. More recently, “VISA” is claiming our credit cards have been suspended and that all we need to do to lift the restriction is disclose our social security number and mother’s maiden number to an unidentified Hotmail address. But every once in a while, an actual person with a story to tell finds their way to us. Enter Bill Chrouch, an ex-convict who is looking for funding for the 15,128 inventions he came up with while incarcerated.

The following human interest piece consists of excerpts from a series of emails between myself and Chrouch, Some minor grammatical editing was done for readability.

‎”“A rundown of my past includes a lot of time in jail and prison plus lots of charges that were from my old ways of thinking,” Chrouch wrote. “Over the years living the life of a criminal was hard on me and my family, and also a real eye opener cause that’s just not how I want to spend my life. A couple of years back I was sitting in my room locked down for around 20 hours a day, and I started thinking about ways I could make money and not have to commit crimes. I let my creativeness and my time mix and I would come up with ideas on new products just by studying my surroundings and creating new things in my mind. I was able to really think outside of the box cause I didn’t have all the stress a free person had. I came up with anything and everything including toys, websites/apps, green tech, tools, personal care products, to animal products and a lot of things in between. I understand that not every one of those ideas are great ideas, but I do however believe that there are quite a few of them that I know are good.” READ...