“You can quote me on that!”

You know that a major part of the Democratic pitch on health insurance reform is how the package will benefit small businesses and startups? Well, it seems a small entrepreneur has taken them up on that. Hours after Vice President Joe Biden dropped the f-bomb in listening range of an [...]

Sheer, complete, unadulterated brilliance. Make the barcode an element of branding and design!

I’ve designed dozens of packages from toys to food and, I must admit, it never occurred to me that the barcode could be a cool part of the packaging. You pay for the damn thing, you download the image, and you paste it [...]

Dry-clean only.
Seriously.
You’ll probably cause a black-out in your neighborhood if you don’t.

A playable electric guitar t-shirt.
Now here’s a product so brilliant that I would never have imagined it in a million years. That’s no ordinary guitar silk-screened on to an overstock Fruit-of-the-Loom t-shirt. You plug it into an amp (no joke) and start strumming away. [...]

Fifteen years ago, I figured out I could clean my keyboard with Play-Doh. Why, oh, why didn’t I add antiseptic, a huge dose of day-glo jimmy juice, and then patent the damn thing?!

Looking a bit like a irradiated version of BOB the blob from Monsters Vs. Aliens, this gob of gook is one of the [...]

James Dyson unveils his newest invention, a fan without blades:

Tags: product development

Need a great product idea? Dress up the old product and call it a day.

For those of us thinking about new product ideas, Haagen Dazs provides yet another case study in astonishingly brilliant and equally astonishingly simplistic product development and marketing genius: Haagen Dazs Five. Haagen Dazs, like other premium product manufacturers, has found life [...]

So why’s the Amazon logo smiling? ‘Cause they just outclassed all their competition yet again.

For all of us in the Internet marketing space, keeping up with Amazon is a mighty tough race. They set the standard in delivery, logistics, and customer satisfaction, which is where they devote all their brand-building efforts, rather than in marketing.
Today, [...]

. . . but I’m sure glad I didn’t because, well, because I’d be dead now.
The bacon double cheeseburger between two Krispy Kreme doughnuts, brought to the good folks of West Springfield, MA, by an entrepreneur from Decatur, Georgia:

Now, Shep Smith seems to have a problem with this, but, really, folks, it is a brilliant [...]

Way, way back in the days of the dinosaurs — 1993, to be precise — I discovered a new Internet app that was making the rounds among us university geeks and geek wannabes. It was called “Mosaic,” a newfangled Web browser doo-dad, and you could only use it on Unix. A few weeks later, I [...]

Would you like a vitamin boost with your pomegranate açai Coke?

Drink dispensers that can serve 100 different drinks and record and transmit all the customer data using RFID.
This will not only allow Coke to test all manner of drink combinations — a veritable bizzarry of soft drinks gone wild — but will turn drink dispenser [...]

This, in my opinion, is the must-watch video for anyone in the product development or invention line. Our book, The Startup Bible, has a lengthy chapter on product development, but I have never seen anything that so perfectly embodies what makes an invention great or how to go about it: game-changing, useful, inexpensive, and, to [...]

Perhaps it’s because I’m hard at work on a book on character as a competetitive advantage; or perhaps it’s because, as a believer in outsourcing, that employees are more trouble than their worth (not really . . . that’s why I just finished a book called The Million Dollar Employee, which is being hatcheted by [...]

Beer-steamed hot dogs. Not your everyday sidewalk Polish or brat.
I have always said and will say again that entrepreneurship is about reaching any one of several dreams — only one of which is getting rich. But if this haute-restrauteur-turned-hotdog vendor ever decides to franchise this idea, well, he’s got more than his share of money [...]

Teenagers send a cheap digital camera into space. Total cost for a walloping set of space pictures: about $200. And a big investment of sweat equity and creativy.
Okay, I can’t predict the future, but if these kids don’t become entrepreneurs or business owners, they’re going to make someone else a pretty hefty pile of money [...]

Google Earth now does oceans. Excuse me while I go waste hours of my precious time.

Tags: 21st century business, analytics, API, business investing, business start up, business start up guide, business startup guide, computers, culture, e-commerce, entrepreneurial, entrepreneurship, facebook, freelance, home based, home office, home-based business, internet, internet business, linkedin, myspace, new business startup, online [...]

Sniper rifle software for the iPod Touch. Twelve bucks at the iTunes store.

Tags: 21st century business, analytics, API, business investing, business start up, business start up guide, business startup guide, computers, culture, e-commerce, entrepreneurial, entrepreneurship, facebook, freelance, home based, home office, home-based business, internet, internet business, linkedin, myspace, new business startup, online business, resource, small [...]

Liquid wood.

Tags: 21st century business, analytics, API, business investing, business start up, business start up guide, business startup guide, computers, culture, e-commerce, entrepreneurial, entrepreneurship, facebook, freelance, home based, home office, home-based business, internet, internet business, linkedin, myspace, new business startup, online business, resource, small busines, small business, small business entrepreneurship, small business startup guide, start [...]

In its January 1 issue, Inc. magazine has a profile of Markus Frind, the Vancouver entrepreneur who with a staff of one (himself) built the most-trafficked dating site in the world generating the most ad revenue of any dating site.
In a lesson to all folks hoping to build the next social network anything, he did [...]

As followers of this blog know, I’ve been covering the decline of the auto industry in view of the future configuration of the auto industry and the opportunities available to far-sighted entrepreneurs here and here. Here’s the main thrust of the argument:
But the current manufacturing structure is best for a world in which the only [...]

Cornstarch bags instead of plastic bags.

Tags: innovation