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Entrepreneurism runs in Melody Hsieh’s blood. Her parents operated an auto parts factory in Taiwan, where she once worked at the age of 8.
“I learned early in life that hard work and smart work are the essential ingredients to running a successful business,” she said.
So after college in 2000, Hsieh decided to start a company, with family money, that sold scooters. By 2003, sales at her ASA Products surged to $3 million.
But in the next three years, annual sales quickly plummeted to $300,000. “My mistake was that I had no long-term strategy to build my brand,” she said. “I was just pursuing a hot trend, and not paying attention to competition, customer service or marketing.”
In 2006, she took a hiatus from her company and went back to school for her MBA. In late 2006, she relaunched a new product — Mobo Cruisers — a line of three-wheeled cruisers for kids and adults. “This time I applied what I learned in school about marketing, operations and research before I launched the brand,” said Hsieh.
Today, Mobo Cruisers is sold through Target and Toys “R” Us and expanding into Canada. Hsieh, who’s a new mom to her three-month-old son, said she’s busier than ever now. “Women can do it. It’s hard but you don’t have to give up one role for the other,” she said. “Have a routine that works for you and stick to it.”
[Via - CNNMoney, HT - Easy Money]
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Imagine American Idol on Facebook. Yes, not on TV, but on Facebook. Further still, imagine American Idol without Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson and Steve Tyler, but just the American population spotting the next big singing sensation.
Impossible? Not quite.
Brett Marl of Fame.Me is looking to up the game by bringing a contest like American Idol to the Facebook generation, more like turning an interactive TV show into an even more interactive, accessible website. If that sounds a lot like YouTube to you, consider this: 60 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute of the day so that getting spotted in a crowd like that is like finding a needle in a haystack ā but probably not if you’re a kitten or an adorable baby with a toothless grin.
FameMe is structured like a contest. The judges are people at home, sitting in front of their computers, with three chances to vote for their favorite performers dai ly. FameMe makes full use of existing social media, Facebook and probably Twitter in the future, for both contestants and supporters to campaign for votes.
Fame.Me is only four months old, but Marl and his team are confident the site will be the next big thing.
[HT - Unusual Business]
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If you’re normal as normal can be and you have an extra room or space in your company, chances are all you have in there are empty boxes or broken equipment. How about renting it out to rake in some extra cash?
In a different scenario, imagine yourself a small business owner needing to conduct a meeting in a place with special equipment and/or infrastructure beyond your budget, or a freelancer in need of a temporary workspace. How does booking a workspace on a daily, weekly, monthly basis when you need it, where you need it at a price you can afford sound?
This, basically, is the idea behind startup eWorky - to function as collaborative search platform for people on the lookout for workspace. eWorky has a big community of companies offering diverse types of workspace for various types of professions.
Finding available workspace with eWorky is less complicated than online car reservation. All you need to do is sign up, log into your account and search for the space you need in your area. If you’re looking to rent in another city, simply scroll to your city of choice and browse through available listings. As soon as you find what you need, book and pay for the workspace online.
If you’re a property manager wishing to provide workspace, eWorky allows you to advertise your place for free. Make sure to be descriptive of your property. And that should include its size, furniture available, amenities such as Wi-Fi, how to access the space, vacancies and promos for customers with multiple and/or long-term bookings. Once a customer agrees with your specified terms, payment is deposited directly to your account.
[Via - Online Business Ideas]
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Before Apple released the iPad 2, Garrett Gee made a lucky guess. āI knew it was going to have a camera, and because of that I just imagined that there would be a blog post or something similar on the top 10 new apps for the iPad 2,ā he says.
Gee wasnāt just the average college student geeking out. A student at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, he is one of the founders of Scan (scan.me), which allows iPad, iPhone and Droid users to scan quick-response (QR) codes.
Geeās push to get his hands on the iPad 2 and get it to his iOS developer was motivated by his desire for Scan to be the first QR-scanner app available specifically for the deviceāthereby earning a spot on those top 10 lists. Thanks to two sleepless nights, he succeeded.
Geeās path from student to entrepreneur started in 2009, when he received a smartphone for Christmas. With that device, the then-freshman scanned his first QR code and realized there could be apps and software that were less clunky and easier to use. At a web-design conference, he met Twitter creative director Doug Bowman, who encouraged him to pursue his idea.
Gee recruited classmates Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley to help launch Scan in February 2011. The idea was to use simple online and mobile tools to give users a better option for scanning QR codes, and to offer a polished option for businesses that wanted to create those codes.
āThere are many, many sites where you can go and create your own QR code,ā Gee concedes. āRemember when Facebook and Twitter were first getting popular, and businesses large and small all hopped on and started creating Twitter accounts and Facebook pages? They didnāt really know how or why; they were just doing it because they thought it was important. Itās been the same story with QR codes. People see them popping up all over the place, and theyāre like, āYeah, we should probably use QR codes for our marketing.āā
Gee, Ouimet and Turley took second place in BYUās business plan competition in April 2011āa status they parlayed into funding. After 16 trips to pitch to investors such as Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures and the co-owner of the Boston Celtics, they had $1.5 million. Gee waded through the offers while balancing school and travel as a forward on BYUās semiprofessional soccer team, often taking conference calls in airport bathrooms along the way.
The team used that capital to build a platform and user base that earned Scan 10 million downloads in the first year. The actual scans derived from those downloads grew from 12 million to 21 million between September and October 2011. The next move is to develop a monetization plan. Today the software to read or create codes is free of charge; future options will include premium content and mobile-commerce templates.
Gee, now 25, is working toward graduating from BYU. For now, the dual student-CEO role is serving him well. āPeople relate to the student world quite well,ā he says. āYou could say I play the āstudent cardā quite often when Iām meeting with big companies. It definitely scores me empathy points.ā
[Via - YoungEntrepreneur.Com]
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Hypertension, or high blood pressure, can be a killer condition. It can lead to a whole host of potentially fatal diseases like kidney failure, heart attack or stroke. Hypertension can be caused by obesity, heredity, a high-salt diet, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, etc. While heredity is something a person doesn’t have control over, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle and a high-salt diet are some things a person can control.
More than home-prepared foods, restaurant and processed foods are unquestionably saltier. So for people, especially the ageing population with escalating health concerns, who need to lower their salt intake, the Salinity Monitor Spoon recently launched by Japanese Compact Impact measures the salinity of soups and sauces at temperatures between 140F (60C) and 176F (80C). The spoon is put into the soup or other liquid foods, and the gauge on the spoon indicates whether the food’s saltin ess is between 0.6% and 0.8%, 0.9% and 1.1% or 1.2% and above. This way, the user can decide how much of the food to consume. The Salinity Monitor Spoon is currently pegged at US $58.
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