More on solving problems

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, we are in boat country – aka Padre Island, Texas. Boats of all sizes, shapes, power, sail, you name it. ICE runs one with four 300′s strapped on the transom for drug interdiction. There are vintage sail boats with tons of teak, to glossy new carbon fiber jobs that don’t float, they fly. All of this floating hobby shop needs care and feeding and that’s the rub. In the way of canvas shops, there is only one, and it’s mostly tied up with work for the oil field rigs. There is no one doing teak and/or trim maintenance – sand down the old, apply up to 6-8 coats of spar varnish over the course of several days. Hard work that needs to be done often in the salt air environment around here. Forget about getting custom stainless steel work done. Shops just don’t exist; the same with sand blasting and powder-coating. So boaters most have to draw on the assets of Galveston, TX , not exactly a hop skip and a jump away.

We were fortunate to find a single person company that maintains boats to the owner’s specs. The owner Matthew, also races J24 class boats for fun. His business just had the best quarter ever. And this is while many in other parts of the US are going boo-hoo, “we can’t find work.” His wife just went from a full-time teaching job to part time to help him out in the business of maintaining mainly sailboats for other people, from cleaning bottoms, to installing new rigging to providing sailing lessons. Matthew does it all.

So what’s the point? Business is booming in this part of the country. Oil is still king, and it supports many hobbies, from golfing to boating to fishing to? All require gear, and gear needs repair and maintenance. For those will to work, to start new businesses, the opportunities abound. You just have to do it. Hank (BTW, gas is $3.08/gal, and diesel $3.81.)

Problems to be solved are everywhere

We recently returned to our winter digs on Padre Island, Corpus Christi, Texas. Getting “stuff” back on our sailboat, a 27′ Hunter, was a priority. I made a short video (below) of the installation at the Nav Station/Helm to house a smart phone running a compass app, and an iPad running an external GPS and navigational software. The kind of parts I used are off-the-shelf and solve a problem – for me at least. Bringing a 1983 sailboat into the digital age we now enjoy. Problems such as this exist all over the world and are waiting for entrepreneurs to solve them. More on this tomorrow. Hank

Have A Happy Friday: Flying With Hawks

What all entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be should do to relax: Hank

For those readers who think being an entrepreneur is tough, how about the following: From here: Parahawking is an activity that combines paragliding with falconry. Birds of prey are trained to fly with paragliders, guiding them to thermals for in-flight rewards and performing aerobatic manoeuvres.   Wiki   Location: Phewa Lake, Pokhara Nepal   Map   Video provided by Yokota Saburo.

Crackle, Snap & Pop

Newspapers such as The New York Times and WSJ are starting to advocate that existing TV entertainment models such as cable and certainly over-the-air are quickly becoming relics of the past. The newer generations have grown up using their Smart Phones for just about everything and see/have no need for fixed land-line phones or big buck entertainment. As part of the entitlement generation(s), they want their entertainment when they want it, how they want it — and on the cheap. Keep in mind this generation is willing to pay ultra bucks to get into a club to drink grossly overpriced libations and have their hearing destroyed by mindless “music” that makes no sense to a thinking person at all.  But I digress.

As a result, an increasing number of  consumers are turning off the Comcasts and Time-Warner cable spigots, keeping only their internet connections from which they demand infinite bandwidth at minimum cost – go figure. In the place of the previous virtual entertainment monopolies, up have and are still springing internet-based providers of previous network-based entertainment and video. Think Blockbuster, and now Netflix, Redbox and yes, Hulu for video-based entertainment. A great competitor, www.zediva.com has had its lights turned off  by the MPAA for a business model that was too close to home for them – $1.00 streaming recent videos > they were even available in Redbox channels.

Crackle (Background on Crackle from Crunchbase is here   is one such substitute and is an offshoot of Sony. Another, a local to the Lafayette, Indiana area is from Frontier.com and is called myfitv for I assume “my frontier internet tv.  (see logo @ right.) Crackle is a viable alternative to Hulu; myfitv is a viable alternative to a “rent as you watch” streaming entertainment provider. It’s up to you, the reader, to check them out to see if both, either, or neither are for you. And of course there’s always YouTube, Amazon, and iTunes. So much to watch and so little time. Hank

Her Campus:

Female college student’s on-line magazine start-up has been profitable since its launch in 2010.

“Stephanie, Windsor, and Annie met while undergraduates at Harvard through running Harvard College’s lifestyle and fashion online magazine. Through their work on this student publication, they saw the potential for something even bigger and better, and spent spring 2009 developing the business plan for Her Campus. After countless nights working in Harvard’s Quincy House dining hall until 3AM (or later!), they went on to enter and win the i3 Innovation Challenge, Harvard College’s business plan competition, in March 2009.”

With branches open on 180 campuses across the nation, the number is growing daily.  Revenue is earned through advertisements, and they’ve attracted some big hitters.   The site highlights important topics to college women   Students can read about college fashion and beauty tips or get advice on sexual health and relationships, plus a lot more. Unlike traditional magazines, Her Campus has the ability to tailor the articles for each campus.   Purdue has student writers, including our own ENTR 200 student Leta Stevens, who contribute local news to the magazine weekly.  Take a look at the Campus Celebrity chosen for this week (me!):  http://www.hercampus.com/school/purdue/beth-carrol

Stephanie, Windsor, and Annie have been named to:
BusinessWeek’s 25 Under 25 Best Young Entrepreneurs
Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 Coolest Young Entrepreneurs
Glamour Magazine’s 20 Amazing Young Women
The Boston Globe’s 25 Most Stylish Bostonians

2096 Bottles of Beer (Root that is) On the Wall

Lafayette has its heart in the right place. And so do a couple of entrepreneurs. Hank

Shitty Jobs: Steve That Is

Steve Jobs has been buried. The drum beat about what a great ____________ (fill in the blank) he was goes on. However, such hyperbole fails to recognize the dark side of the co-founder of Apple. Equally important lessons about what NOT TO DO/BE as an aspiring entrepreneur may be learned from his flip side. Read about the Shitty Jobs here: Hank

Have A Happy Friday: Biker & Babe

You supply the caption. Hank

Einstein Is Greatest Rock Star!

This week I visited my local dentist for a filling and cleaning – all routine. The dental hygienist, Lisa, mentioned that her son has MS and is confined to a wheelchair. She went on to say, that a firm out of Kokomo, Indiana named AndyMark was working on equipping his wheelchair with a system that would sense his movements and propel his chair in the desired direction almost as if by ESP. She knew that Andy had worked at Delphi which went out of business. I knew further, that Kokomo was a depressed area where economic development people were doing their best to support the hundreds of engineers thrown out of work by plant shutdowns. Seems that AndyMark is in the business of providing robot parts. Robots+engineers+problem (control wheelchair)=Opportunity for entrepreneurs. Makes sense. However, there’s lots more to the story.

On their home page (see previous link), there is a book “The New Cool” listed.  It’s a story about high school seniors drawn together by an astonishing teacher to do battle on the field of robotic competition, their highs and their lows, and how they are exceedingly better because of their robotic frays. It’s about “how the students obtained the best out of themselves”. There is a FB page here that explains the concept better than I could ever. From the FB link, I picked up on the embedded video below from which the title of today’s blog was obtained. The video, while entertaining, has enormous depth of meaning for all of us. View it. My thanks to Lisa for the insight a casual conversation in a dental chair lead to. Hank

Are ideas opportunities?

I believe opportunities are floating around out there, waiting for anyone to realize.  Some people are better at recognizing them than others.  Few will seize them and manage to create a successful business venture.   Have you ever thought of an idea before someone else made lots of money with the same idea?  Here are two different sets of inventors who simultaneously have come up with a solution to the same problem.   Whether both idea’s will result in a business opportunity will depend upon their ability to raise enough capital, how quickly they get it to market, and if they have the marketing finesse to create awareness and demand for their finished product.

 Problem:  Riding a bicycle at night is dangerous due to poor visibility.  Solution:  Lighted rims.

Project Aura:  Jonathan Ota and Ethan Frier, two industrial design sophomores from Carnegie Mellon University are currently using a research grant to develop their Aura system.  ”We wanted to make a cool product that people will want to use, and in the process of using it, will make them safer,” said Ota.  Aura incorporates six groups of three tri-color LEDs embedded into both rims, which are powered by a dynamo generator built into the front hub. The rims start out appearing as two red circles when the bicycle is moving slowly, but transition through to white as it gathers speed.

Aura Video:  http://player.testing3.vimeo.com/23544972

Revolights: At the same time, inventor Kent Frankovich and partners Adam Pettler and Jim Houk are working on their Revolights system. It consists of two hoop-like assemblies each containing eight LEDs, that clip onto a bicycle’s existing rims. Powered by hub-mounted lithium-ion battery packs, the lights blink on and off at a rate set by the speed at which the wheels are turning.  Unlike Aura, which is meant to be used in conjunction with regular head- and taillights, Revolights is intended to serve as such lights. The system is designed not only to provide side illumination, but also to project light in front of and behind the bicycle.

Revolights video:  http://vimeo.com/27280439

Revolights partners have raised over $200,000 through innovative fundraising on a website called Kickstarter.  If you invest in their product, you get cool rewards like t-shirts with their logo on it.  Investing more than $200 will get you a free set of Revolights before the product goes to market.   Revolights will retail for $220, and plan to be available in stores by the end of this year.  Do the creators of Aura still have an opportunity?

Beth Carroll