The Innovation Capitalist

BUBBAGUM - The Hottest Candy This Halloween

Lately their is a great deal of buzz in the candy world about BUBBAGUM, in fact so much that the Food Network has covered the product several times. This will be one of the hottest items on the shelves for kids who want to wear goofy teeth for Halloween. When they are done showing off their vampire teeth or plain goofy teeth, they can simply chew them up and turn them into a nice chunk of gum. Kudos to Patrick Brittain, the inventor for making chewable teeth fun and innovative.

Bada Beans - Innovation In Coffee Flavoring

Lots of people love flavored coffee. Step into any coffee shop and you will see lots of flavored coffee selections,  and in addition, a rack of flavored syrups waiting on standby to be poured into a cup of Joe. Now, the folks at Bada Beans have developed a product that seems like one of those "why didn't I think of that ideas". They have developed a flavor bean that comes in a tin, similar in size as the famous Altoid tins but with little flavored pellets that you simply drop into a cup of coffee when you have that desire for a flavored cup. Seems like a "no brainer" to me.

Desk and Air Mouse

The folks at Logitech announced that they have introduced "the future of PC Navigation" and released something they call the MX Air Mouse which enables a user to use the mouse on the desk or in the "air". I've tried my share of "air mice" and frankly....I wouldn't call this "innovation" "the future of PC Navigation". How we navigate the PC today is going to be radically different in 5 years and it won't be with an "air mouse".

Artic Skin Innovation

Congrats to Stephen Smith of New Zealand whose recent innovation called Artic Skin won him a Dyson Product Design Award. According to Stephen "The vest is a solution for endurance athletes who need to overcome deydration during competition. It stores drinking water and the vest's fabric absorbs water in its built-in cooling system to prevent athletes from overheating and suffering from dehydration. (photo courtesy of North Shore Times)

Cracked iPhone Gets Expensive - $249 repair bill

From one of my readers...
My iphone screen cracked. My dear husband accidentally dropped it while loading groceries. Called today to find out how much to repair or if it was covered under warranty. $249 to repair. OUCH!!!! He even had a protective case on it. Only a hairline split across the center. If it gets worse I'll just trade it in for another phone from AT&T. They have dozens less than 249 bucks. Phones drop and this one isn't that ergonomic!

Math + Cell Phone = MathPhone

Never mind the iPhone, how boring and old school. How about the MathPhone. That's right. Scientists at University of Haifa have created a cell phone that contains a set of applications that help the next generation of kids learn everything from simple to complex math problems. Now, if only they could create a way so that ones child must solve the math puzzle or problem before they are allowed to make a call or send an SMS.

Car Wax Innovation

The folks at Zaino have had a long time reputation as being a great developer and supplier of oustanding car wax products. Most of the online automobile forum users out there frequenly promote that they use Zaino as the best wax products on the market. Well, recently, Zaino went one step further in providing what may be one of the most innovative car waxes on the planet called Z-CS Clear Seal. 5 minutes with this stuff and about a half hour drying time and you will be convinced that it is truely innovative.

Check Out http://g.ho.st

G.HO.ST is an emerging Web 2.0 company that will start to get traction as they make progress on providing a very rich and deep solution that allows you to take your desktop anywhere. This is one of the better solutions in the Web 2.0 space that I have seen for a while. It's interface is rich and the widgets for the environment are growing. I would recommend you give it a try and would love to hear your feedback. Nice innovation going on there.

Interesting Social Networking Solution For iPhone Users

So now that you have that new iPhone, what more can you do? You might want to give iPling a try. In a nutshell, iPling, according to their site, is a "location based social expansion engine" where you can find and communicate with others in your area that also share your interests. Since I don't have an iPhone, I'm not sure exactly how it works in the context of using an iPhone but with a huge amount of iPhones being sold, my gut tells me that iPling may be onto something very cool. It's in public beta, so if you have an iPhone you might want to give it a try.

Its a StartupWeekend

This weekend, in Boulder, CO a bunch of entrepreneurs will gather to build a company in 3 days. You can learn more about it on this website. The cool thing about this event? Each person will actually get a piece of the action from the winning company. I suspect more of these weekend outings will begin and maybe Andrew Hyde, the inventor of the event will start a franchise? StartupWeekendBoston.com or StartupWeekendNewYork.com ? Hey why not?