| Babiators: Aviator Sunglasses For Kids Posted: 27 Apr 2012 05:02 AM PDT 
The Huffington Post: Molly told her husband about her idea for safe, durable and stylish sunglasses and he came up with the brand name “Babiators,®” for baby aviators. These cool mini versions of shades aren’t just for style. They actually offer 100 percent protection from both UVA & UVB rays. Today, Babiators can found in more than 250 stores and 15 countries worldwide. After Molly and Ted had fallen in love with their new product idea, they told their friends, Carolyn and Matthew Guard, about it and they all thought it had real potential. They moved at full-throttle speed. They started discussing the idea for Babiators in mid-2010, incorporated Babiators LLC in the fall of 2010 and officially launched the product in May 2011.
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| Shaved Ice + Ice Cream Equals SnoBar Posted: 27 Apr 2012 04:40 AM PDT 
You no longer need scoops to enjoy ice cream. An ice cream bar in LA features paper thin shaved ice cream. SNOBAR™ is the latest dessert revolution of natural, fruity and refreshing ice treats. Compared to normal "shaved ice" in which a frozen brick of water is shaven down and syrup is poured on top, "SNO™" as SNOBAR™ has coined the term, offers a uniquely novel texture and taste. SNOBAR™ uses purified water infused with flavoring before it is flash-frozen to capture a full taste in every spoonful. One way to describe SNO™ is "A feathery, cotton candy-like texture that dissolves in your mouth on contact."
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| The First North Korean Restaurant in Europe Posted: 26 Apr 2012 07:32 PM PDT 
WorldCrunch: The meal is good. It's Korean, nine courses (various mushroom dishes, black chicken soup, traditional barbecue, rice balls for dessert) and nicely presented – but no different or more exotic than you would get at any South Korean restaurant in a large German city. The lady in Korean dress tells me that kimchi (fermented cabbage) ensures longevity. She and her colleagues are ever-present, making small talk, pouring water, clearing and serving – except when they're entertaining us with karaoke, playing the piano, and doing theater skits. I learn they've been stationed in Europe for three years and live nearby, and that they're members of the North Korean elite. If they flee, their families back in North Korea will suffer consequences. But they are still guarded, neighbors have told the Dutch media. The cooks aren't as carefully watched because they have all worked in China, where the North Korean government runs several restaurants in order to bring in foreign currency. Foreign currency is not the point of the Dutch initiative, however, at least according to the person who launched the idea, Remco van Daal. He gives us a tour of the second floor of the cultural center after the meal. Here there's an art gallery featuring the kind of art dictators love: images depicting smiling workers, machine guns. Kim writings are on display in a room with pamphlets, posters and postcards. The items are not presently for sale, van Daal says; he's still working on the merchandizing angle. 
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| Dance Heads Music Video Vending Machine Posted: 26 Apr 2012 04:28 PM PDT 
Dance Heads is a video entertainment vending machine business in a box. It caters to the same crowd as karaoke, but it’s not just a karaoke machine. The system automatically creates professionally produced music videos with your patrons as the stars! The compact and mobile attraction can be used at weddings, parties, corporate events and fairs, or placed permanently in your nightclub, shopping center or amusement park. No matter where you put it, you’ll have a line around the block of people waiting to try it. Users can sing-a-song or just laugh and bob their heads to their favorite pop hits, while external monitors on the machine allow waiting customers to watch the videos come together. Once the recording session is over, each user instantly receives a DVD of his performance for home viewing and sharing with friends. "When we introduced the first Dance Heads machine, for over an hour, the booth was surrounded by a crowd of people and everyone wanted to record their video," said John LeGuen, the owner of four Dance Heads studios. Every Dance Heads partner receives: - Training and training manuals for the booth
- Software updates
- New videos and songs
- Promotion materials for the business
- Technical and administrative support from the professionals of the Central Dance Heads office
For more information about this opportunity, visit www.dh-business.com. Video demo below. 
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| Start a Business: No Idea Required Posted: 26 Apr 2012 04:06 PM PDT 
Inc.: Want to start a company… but you’re short on ideas? There’s an incubator for that. Well, actually, it’s called a “foundry.” What is a foundry? Chicago-based Sandbox Industries recently opened a new start-up foundry in San Francisco. Managing Director Millie Tadewaldt says unlike a traditional incubator that brings in early-stage start-ups already working on idea, Sandbox simply looks for talented people–often with no entrepreneurial experience. It gives them mentorship and capital and tasks them with identifying promising new start-up ideas through testing, market research, focus groups–whatever it takes to figure out which ideas have legs. 
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| Will Write Poetry For Food Posted: 26 Apr 2012 02:53 PM PDT 
NPR: Zach Houston runs his Poem Store (on any given sidewalk) with these items: a manual typewriter, a wooden folding chair, scraps of paper, and a white poster board that reads: “POEMS — Your Topic, Your Price.” Houston usually gets from $2 to $20 for a poem, he says. He’s received a $100 bill more than once. The Oakland, Calif., resident has been composing spontaneous street poems in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2005. Five years ago, it became his main source of income. “I quit my last conventional job on April Fools’ Day, 2007,” says Houston, 29. “They didn’t believe me, because I said I was going to write poems, on the street, with a typewriter — for money.” It was no April Fools’ joke. The background poem is Ode to Salt by Pablo Neruda. 
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| iPad Tattoo Generator: Instattoo Posted: 26 Apr 2012 02:22 PM PDT 
Thinking about getting a tattoo but have no idea what to get? Instattoo is the world’s first tattoo generator. It automatically generates and presents a new unique tattoo with just a single tap! Released yesterday for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, it lets you automatically generate a unique tattoo with just a few taps and swipes, which you can then print out and get transferred to your own body with the aid of a skilled tattoo professional. Video below. This product isn’t really my thing, but it does show how it’s possible to create an app to compliment and transform almost any business. 
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| Rentable Designer Bridal Gowns Posted: 26 Apr 2012 12:58 PM PDT 
Mashable: Nearly Newlywed is a newly launched startup that lets women rent gowns and bridal wear by highly coveted designers, including Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, Rodarte and Carolina Herrera. The social media-powered online boutique lets women pay a fraction of the usual price tag — $10,000 to $15,000 — for designer wedding dresses. The dresses are guaranteed "nearly new," meaning they have only been worn once or twice. The small team based in Brooklyn, N.Y., connects with customers nationally. Utilizing Pinterest, Nearly Newlywed founder Jacqueline Courtney offers personal shopping consultations with soon-to-be brides. Courtney gets to know the brides through their wedding inspiration boards, from which she makes dress recommendations on Pinterest. 
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| Before Disneyland, Tourists Flocked to See Ostriches Posted: 26 Apr 2012 12:01 PM PDT 
Way before Disneyland, an ostrich farm in Pasadena was a huge tourist attraction. Edwin Cawston courted the early-20th-century public’s fascination with exotic foreign creatures when he began raising ostriches, for more than the use of their feathers in the clothing industry. When Cawston brought the enormous, flightless, African birds onto prime real estate in the Arroyo Seco of South Pasadena, Los Angeles County, more than a few observers thought that the looniest bird might be him. But Cawston was determined to showcase struthio camelus, the biggest bird in the world at 8 vertical feet and 350 pounds. The Cawston Ostrich Farm soon became one of the most popular Southern California attractions, drawing millions to watch people ride the birds bareback at a cruising speed of 35 miles per hour. Cawston supplied ostrich plumes for budget-minded consumers as well as fancy feathers for Vaudeville dancers, movie actresses, and even European queens, becoming a great promoter and showman of his time. 
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| Starting Your Retail Biz in a Flea Market Posted: 26 Apr 2012 11:26 AM PDT 
Inc.com. Most street fairs and markets have a very low barrier to entry: You’ll need transit, a table, a tent (for outdoor markets), a cash box and the ability to contribute a small booth rental fee to the market’s organizer (usually $25 to $50 for small communities and $75-$125 for urban fairs). Even if you’re already successfully hawking your wares online, making periodic appearances at craft fairs, art shows, and flea markets can give your business new insight into the market, your regional competition, and local consumers’ evolving desires. Here are a couple Kindle books to get you started: 
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| A Retirement Homes for Chickens Posted: 26 Apr 2012 11:17 AM PDT 
If, like me, you keep track of the price of commercial chicken feed, you know that for some hipsters, raising chickens in your backyard has become an incredibly popular urban hobby. The hobby has continued to grow, evening during the recession, because of the free eggs. The free eggs don’t go on forever, though. At some point, a few years into their lifecycle, chickens stop laying eggs. Unlike real chicken farmers, backyard chicken tenders don’t usually turn their old hens into soup when they stop laying. Instead, they’d like for their chickens to spend their remaining days pecking for bugs and scratching up grass. It’s expensive to feed non-productive chickens, because of the increased demand for feed for backyard chickens. (The circle is vicious, isn’t it.) So what’s an urban chicken “farmer” to do? If they live in Oregon, they might take them to the Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary, a kind of retirement home for farm animals. The NY Times has more on the phenomenon: And the increasingly intimate relationships have led some bird owners to make plans for their chickens' unproductive years. Hence a budding phenomenon: urban chicken retirement. While many Portlanders still pluck aging birds for the broiler, others seek a blissful, pastoral end for them. Because most chickens lay the majority of eggs early in life, and can live about 10 years, the quest for a place where chickens can live out their sunset years has brought a boom to at least two farm animal sanctuaries and led Pete Porath, a self-described chicken slinger, to expand the portion of his business that finds new homes for unwanted birds. "I would say I'm a halfway house for chickens on the move," he said. My chickens don’t really live in the house, btw. 
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| 500 New Fairy Tales Found Posted: 26 Apr 2012 09:47 AM PDT 
Somebody is going to make a killing off this. Think of the books, plays and movies! A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world. While sifting through Von Schönwerth’s work, Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe. Here’s a little bit of of the newly discovered fairy tales, The Turnip Princess: A young prince lost his way in the forest and came to a cave. He passed the night there, and when he awoke there stood next to him an old woman with a bear and a dog. The old witch seemed very beautiful and wished that the prince would stay with her and marry her. He could not endure her, yet could not leave that place. One day, the bear was alone with him and spoke to the prince: “Pull the rusty nail from the wall, so that I shall be delivered, and place it beneath a turnip in the field, and in this way you shall have a beautiful wife.” The prince seized the nail so strongly that the cave shook and the nail cracked loudly like a clap of thunder. Behind him a bear stood up from the ground like a man, bearded and with a crown on his head. Continue reading. Photo by Barbro Bergfeldt/ShutterStock. 
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| Today in Entrepreneurial History: April 26 Posted: 26 Apr 2012 06:16 AM PDT On this day in 1956, the SS Ideal X, the world’s first successful container ship, left Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas. Even if this kind of thing doesn’t fascinate you, be sure to checkout the book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. The shipping container has revolutionized the world you live in. 
More about the book: In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container’s creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible. But the container didn’t just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean’s success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container’s potential. Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world’s workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe. 
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| Market Your eBook Successfully Posted: 26 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT 
So you’ve written an ebook. Now what? It’s time to get the word out and build a strong reader base. Here are four tips to help you build the fan base you need to succeed: Create an ebook blog. Start affliate marketing. Take advantage of social media. Write guest posts.
Click here for more detail on each step. Photo by Elizabeth M 
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| Microloans Making A Big Difference Here In The US Posted: 26 Apr 2012 05:30 AM PDT 
We often hear about the benefits of a microloan overseas, but how do they help American entrepreneurs? Entrepreneur has the story of one woman who found the funding she needed thanks to Accion. What was the application process like? I applied online in late April. That first step was a very nonthreatening one. One of Accion’s loan officers got back to me, and we did a lot of talking by phone. The process was actually not easy. They want you to work for it. I had to put together my loan package, including my business plan, and they requested 100 percent collateral. My father, who’s elderly and lives with me, had paid off the home we all grew up in, so I ended up using that as collateral. What tips can you offer others seeking a microloan? Talking with other local businesspeople and doing your homework and being very realistic about your expectations is key. You also need to make sure you’re aware of your own credit, so get your credit report. It’s true what everyone says about how important a business plan is. It helped me build a foundation for everything else that I put together.
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| Pitch Your Way Into An Education Posted: 26 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT 
CNN Money: One of the hottest proposals for a new — and possibly better — way to pay for college got one of its most important tests one snowy day this winter in a Clarkson University classroom. Clarkson offered the contestants something pretty revolutionary in return. The students with the best business ideas would win full-tuition scholarships to the school — a prize worth more than $37,000 a year. The only catch: The winners have to give Clarkson a 10% stake in their business.
Photo by Ralph Daily 
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