When considering pursuing an invention or idea, the first thing you should
ask is “Can I patent it?”
The fact is, when considering whether to pursue an invention or idea, most
people will start by asking themselves, “How am I going to get this on the
market?”
A patent protects your ideas for a limited amount of time, and prevents
others from making, using, selling, or importing the invention. In essence,
you obtain a monopoly on your invention for the length of the patent term in
exchange for disclosing your idea to the public. Patents are for public
interest, they promote sharing ideas with the public in exchange for legally
enforceable rights to exclude others from copying your idea. For more
information visit : [Invention Protection Law and Research Group]
http://www.inventionprotectionlaw.com

Hi,  Check out our blog post about trademarks for information and related resources. 

You must have actively used the name in business for a period of time before you can apply for a trademark. You will need to register the business name and entity type with your state before you can say you actually have a business. The patent can be applied for any time. I would work on that immediately if there is any possibility of someone seeing and attempting to steal your idea.

Before you get too far along YES you want to file a Provisional Patent Application.. Then, when you have enough money, or partners, you can file the non-provisional. For the benefit of others I will give you LOTS to consider.. I suggest you read it all with Snake Eyed Concentration.. PM me if you have questions.. Do you know about the Provisional Patent Application? It only costs $125 and was designed by Congress to give individual inventors a chance at bringing their inventive ideas to market easily. It is SUPER EASY to do.. To see the top 10 reasons to file a Provisional Patent Application please watch the second video in this blog. http://www.filepatentapplications.com/blog/ If a provisional patent application looks like the right thing for you to do then take a look at another website that shows EXACTLY how to file one using a video format. http://provisionalpatentvideo.com/ If you need to know how to get your product sold on TV or to Costco, or Home Depot, or Target and the like then you might also enjoy reading this information by the Ginsu Knife guy! It is pretty cool. He gives you all his contacts and personal email! http://bit.ly/GinsuKnifeGuy Of course you could ALSO just go to the US Patent Office and figure out how to file a patent yourself. Here is the link.. http://www.uspto.gov/patents/process/index.jsp The flow chart there is pretty nice to give you an idea how to do what you want to do! Their patent search is hard to use and you need special programs to look at the patents… Instead, consider using Google Patent Search! Here is how you can use Google Patent Search to search for an "Oscillating inertial microbalance" http://www.google.com/patents?id=M5GRAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA6&dq=Oscillating+iner... Just type the term you want to search for in the search box. Play with MANY variants of your inventive idea. Also, for a more global patent search look here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/advancedSearch?locale=en_EP Remember... Patents are MOSTLY "Improvements" on other inventions.. So, while you may see something SIMILAR to your inventive idea it does not mean that you cannot patent your IMPROVEMENT.. Example... A tire is an IMPROVEMENT on a wagon wheel. A radial biased ply tire is an IMPROVEMENT on a non radial biased tire. There are over 10,000 patents on tires... Nearly every single one is an improvement! And… a special gift for you is a sample Non Disclosure (also called an NDA) that you would have folks sign when you show them your inventive idea. You can change it up and use others but if you have NOTHING now it is a very good start written by my lawyer who charged me a TON for it! http://www.4lowprice.info/images/NDA_GeneralMutual.doc Thanks, Dave My source??? I have some patents... http://www.take5inc.com/dave-korpi-patents/