| The Inventors Round Table Posted: 06 May 2011 11:00 AM PDT 
Barry Slayford, the inventor of the arson-proof mailbox in the UK, has spent the past 12 years working on a center that will help bring inventors together so they can innovate. It is destined to become a one-stop place for inventors to receive advice, support, and the space they need to innovate. Mr Slayford said: "This is something we have been working on for the last 12 years. It is about 2,000 square feet and will be on Station Road in South Norwood, 100 yards from Norwood Junction Train Station. "It is going to be a meeting place for inventors so they can help each other to work on their inventions. "There will be offices and a board room for meeting manufacturers and people involved in the invention. There will be research facilities so they can do proper research and workshops so they can make prototypes." Mr Slayford has set up the centre because he feels there is no real support or advice for inventors in the UK. He has a lot of experience in the field and is happy to advise anyone who has an idea or new invention. The key to the whole process is "Research". He said: "I have invented a number of things, my claim to fame was my first invention which was an arson proof letter box." Mr Slayford had a disgruntled tenant try and set his premises on fire by pouring petrol through his letter box. The result was the Safe 'T' Letterbox which deposits any liquid poured through it back on the street. He said: "Inventors come across a problem and they endeavour to solve it and that is what I did."
Photo from Round Table of Inventors Via Croydon Guardian 
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| South African Business Women Doing For Themselves Posted: 06 May 2011 10:30 AM PDT 
Women in business are receiving empowerment everywhere in the world, including South Africa. Nicci Columbine is one of those women. She is drawing on the resources offered through the Businesswomen’s Association to help her succeed, reports FM. Columbine's motivation for creating her own business was to become empowered. "I wanted to realise my full potential but I was undermined in my previous job. Self-realisation comes only through experience, and that is what entrepreneurship has given me." Her experience affirms some of the conclusions drawn in a recent study by FNB that tested the perceptions about women-owned businesses. It proves that many commonly held beliefs are myths. Of the established businesses in SA, 38% are owned by women . They are already an important part of the entrepreneurial landscape, Myres says. But in spite of this, the assumption made is that their businesses are "less serious". FNB's research polled 870 "high-potential" women entrepreneurs by means of an online survey. Its results show that about 40% of business owners say the motivation for starting their own enterprises was a lack of career opportunities. Women believe their chances of moving into senior positions are limited, says Myres. Businesswomen's Association president Kunyalala Maphisa says women choose to run their own enterprises because of the flexibility this provides. They also leave the business world because they have hit a glass ceiling.
Screenshot from Businesswomen’s Association 
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| A Lot Of Opportunity For Little Thai Entrepreneur Posted: 06 May 2011 10:00 AM PDT 
What do you do when people love your food? Package it and sell it in stores, so more people can buy it. It sounds like a good next-step approach for any good restaurant entrepreneur. So far that approach is also working well for Rod Jiang, reports Times Colonist. Three varieties of pre-cooked chicken and rice curry dishes are hitting the shelves at more than 60 grocery stores, convenience stores and gas bars across the Island this week, including the Fairway Market and Country Grocer chains. The chicken-curry entrées do not require refrigeration. The food is prepared in a factory in Jiang’s native Thailand which uses thermal packaging technology and an extreme heat and cold cooking process that eliminates bacteria and gives the product an 18-month shelf life. Each box contains a tray of rice and a bag of either green, red or yellow curry chicken. Consumers can heat the two parts in a microwave in under three minutes. “My goal has always been to make Thai food delicious, nutritious, affordable and accessible,” said Jiang. “We have done that in Victoria in our restaurants and now we want to make it available to people in their homes.”
Image from Little Thai Place 
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| Mining Social Media For Stock Trends Posted: 06 May 2011 08:39 AM PDT 
Need to know where the stock market is going? Do as the pros do and search through Tweets. USA Today reports there is a new trend rising among the people who work on Wall Street. They are using computer programs to analyze the messages posted on social media websites to determine how well a stock is going to do. Human emotions, such as greed and fear, have always moved markets. Money can be made betting with or against the crowd, so measuring the mood of the masses online can be just as valuable as tracking price-to-earnings ratios, corporate profits and interest rates. The new trend on Wall Street for deciphering if the populace and investing public is in a positive or negative state of mind is computer-driven text analysis of the millions of real-time tweets and posts that flood social-networking sites. Online surveillance of social-networking sites is emerging as a must-have tool for hedge funds, big banks, high-frequency traders and black-box investment firms that run money via computer programs. The goal: to gather market intelligence from previously untapped sources. This emerging tool works something like this: Are you feeling glum, fearful or anxious today? Or are you in a calm, happy, optimistic mood? If you share your state of mind with the digital world via a tweet on Twitter or a soul-baring post on Facebook, Wall Street probably knows how you — and millions of other people — are feeling, too, thanks to its growing use of linguistic analysis of online posts. This incoming psychological snapshot of the Twitterati, digerati and average Joe could prompt a computer program interpreting the data at a hedge fund to place a trade without human intervention in an attempt to profit from the information.
Photo by Dell 
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| Today in Entrepreneurial History: May 6 Posted: 06 May 2011 07:16 AM PDT 
How they kept the ice frozen at the ice rink in 1844 is fascinating: The rink was based on a concrete surface, with layers of earth, cow hair and timber planks. Atop these were laid oval copper pipes carrying a solution of glycerine with ether, nitrogen peroxide and water. The pipes were covered by water and the solution was pumped through, freezing the water into ice. Gamgee had discovered the process while attempting to develop a method to freeze meat for import from Australia and New Zealand, and had patented it as early as 1870. Photo by allyaubry. 
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