Sunday, September 30, 2012

Cool Ideas - TeachersPayTeachers.Com

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.


Deanna Jump is not a trust fund baby. She never married into money and she has never won the lottery. But in the past year-and-a-half, the 43-year-old kindergarten teacher in Warner Robins, Ga., has earned more than $1 million. Her unlikely strategy: selling catchy kindergarten lesson plans to other teachers.
Jump is just one of some 15,000 teachers currently marketing their original classroom materials through the online marketplace, TeachersPayTeachers. Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”

To be fair, no one else on TPT has been as wildly successful as Jump, but at least two other teachers have earned $300,000, and 23 others have earned over $100,000, according to site founder Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he adds.
Edelman, a former New York middle school English teacher, launched TPT in 2006 after sinking grueling hours into planning his own classes. “Every night, I would spend two or three hours, at least—and then Sundays I would spend all day and all night preparing and correcting papers,” he says. To get ahead, Edelman and his colleagues swapped ideas and lesson plans. They also perused online sites for helpful resources, but found only sub-par, outdated materials.

After four years in the classroom, Edelman hit upon the idea for an online lesson-plan marketplace. “I thought teachers would be more incentivized to post their best stuff and to create even higher quality materials if they had the opportunity to get paid for them,” says Edelman, who now lives in Fontainebleau, France, south of Paris. “I had no clue what I was doing, but I knew it was a really good idea, so I just found my way,” he says, noting he has no tech background. “I read books. I cashed out my retirement fund and sold my car and my motorcycle and got enough money together—around $10,000—to hire a programmer to build the first version of the site.”

Soon after the launch, New York-based publisher Scholastic bought the site for what Edelman says was a low six-figure sum. Over the next few years, TPT continued growing, though not fast enough to hold Scholastic’s interest. Edelman bought the site back in 2009. “Scholastic—being a big, publicly traded company—wanted instant gratification, YouTube-like, explosive growth,” he says. “They were going to close [the site] down, but I fought really hard to get them to let me buy it back.”

Little by little, TPT began gaining steam. “With marketplaces, it’s that chicken-and-egg thing,” says Edelman. “Until you have lots of products, you don’t have lots of buyers.” Today the site has 1.1 million active members and over the past year has seen enormous growth. Last month alone, TPT grossed $2.5 million in sales, up from $305,000 in August 2011. It has 10 employees working in customer service. Teachers pay an annual premium membership fee of $59.95 to sell materials on the site, and TPT takes a 15 percent cut of most sales. (Teachers can sell materials without a premium membership, but TPT’s share then rises to 40 percent of a sale.)

Jump admits that her own success is partly due to keeping a popular blog that helps direct readers to her TPT materials. TPT’s “Follow Me” button has also been a boon. “I have over 16,000 followers,” she says. “So every time I post a new product, an e-mail goes out to those people and—literally within an hour—I’m selling, selling, selling.”

In the past three months, Jump, who earns $55,000 per year teaching, has collected $213,000 in TPT sales. She says the money has not changed how she lives day-to-day. If anything, Jump says, she’s working harder than ever, putting about 40 hours a week into TPT projects, apart from her regular teaching schedule. So far, she’s used the money to pay off bills, send her daughter to college, and buy a handicapped-accessible van for her quadriplegic brother.

“When I realized that we could buy that van and it wouldn’t be a financial hardship for my family, that was really something,” she says. “But we really haven’t changed our lifestyle. I drive a Kia, okay? I’m just trying to keep it real.”

[Via - BusinessWeek.com]

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Cool Inventions The Roll-It

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http://theroll-it.com/

Much of Gary Peterson's summer was spent cruising the toothpaste aisles at various Fred Meyer stores. There, displayed near the brushes and floss sits his baby: the Roll-It, a snail-shaped device that aims to squeeze every bit of paste from a tube.

The gadget made it into 132 Fred Meyer stores in June, but staying there meant selling at least 480. Without an ad campaign or any marketing, 590 reached check-out stands that month.

It's nearly unheard of for a first-time inventor to land in a major retailer's health and beauty care aisle, a highly competitive category dominated by multinational corporations. And yet for Peterson, 71, the work has just begun. He not only faces competition from the Johnson & Johnsons of the world, but also an ever-growing roster of rival inventors and inventor-aimed businesses, some willing to scam or lift from creatives as they travel the confusing, and sometimes costly, road to market.

atent and trademark experts agree inventors face more risks today, leaving many, including Peterson, feeling they must hold on tight to their ideas and go it alone. But most experts say the only way to generate real buzz and sustainable sales for a product is to hand it off to the experts at manufacturing, distributing and marketing.

Peterson, who builds gutters for a living, admits being overwhelmed by the nine-month process he faced to gain entry into Fred Meyer. And yet he still spends many nights at his dining room table slipping Roll-Its into little plastic bags and stapling on its bare-bones, red-white-and-blue label, in pursuit of an even bigger quarry: The Kroger Co. The Cincinnati-based chain operates 2,460 supermarkets under several banners, including QFC and Portland-based Fred Meyer.

"I do gutter work and climb on roofs every day, but I can't do that forever," said Peterson, who with his wife is raising 10-year-old twin grandchildren. "If we're going to get into Kroger, we'll need consistency."
Consistency and, as it turns out, a little bravery. And better yet, a willingness to let go.

[Via - The Oregonian]

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Monday, September 17, 2012

Hot Startups - BlockAvenue.Com

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.



http://blockavenue.com

Restaurants, hotels, doctors, supermarkets, books, gadgets, even the employer you love to hate – if you’re in the habit of writing reviews or doling out five-star ratings when you feel like it, you know that with the Internet, thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifre are so many ways to do just that. Now, imagine Yelp on the street where you live, and that will be equivalent to Block Avenue.

Block Avenue is a Cambridge startup that collects opinions about the block or street you live on. Block Avenue has broken down the United States into 1.89 billion squares, each square with 300 feet on each side. Data about each block includes whether there’s a public transport system, bike-sharing/car-sharing locations; amenities like nature parks, fitness gyms, supermarkets, dry cleaners, hospitals, restaurants and schools; sex offenders who live on the block, including recent crimes. Based on the collected information, Block Avenue’s software algorithm automatically as signs a grade from A through F which shows up as you zoom in and out of Block Avenue’s map.

Site visitors can also write their own reviews of blocks they live on or known to them and add more information, including noise, traffic levels, cleanliness, overall community spirit and anything that cannot be found on Block Avenue’s database. Additional user reviews and ratings will, of course, affect the automatic grades assigned to each block.

Slated to launch next week, the company will be concentrating on the cities of Boston, New York and Washington, D. C. Founder Tony Longo says that during the site’s testing this summer, more than 2,000 reviews had already been pitched in by users hailing from the aforementioned cities.

Longo plans to include U.S. Census data onto Block Avenue’s maps, such as race, average age, income and ethnicity, which may not make a lot of people happy. As well, the rating system may spark a bit of a controversy e specially since most homeowners who intend to sell their homes wouldn’t admit to living on a block with a rating of D or F. As a result, real estate brokers may come up with sugary reviews of blocks they represent, and a natural tendency for inflated ratings is a possibility. Longo, however, promises to keep a close eye on real estate developers, agents and property administrators.

The company aims to make money via advertising, licensing data to real estate sites and selling services to real estate professionals to allow them to create reports about particular neighborhoods for their clients.

For someone looking to buy or rent a place or for tourists looking for places to stay while in the area, Block Avenue’s data will come in handy, says Longo.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Cool Startups - Dijit.Com

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.


http://www.dijit.com/

It’s time to literally reinvent the TV guide.

So says Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Dijit Media, the Silicon Valley startup behind the iPad app NextGuide. NextGuide is a personalized guide that informs its users of available shows on TV or online based on their preprogrammed genres of interest or their friends’ favorites. NextGuide aspires to foster a content-based experience among its users as opposed to channel-based, which is what traditional grid-based TV guides offer.

NextGuide brings together TV and movie listings from pay-TV services such as Tribune Movie Services, Netflix and iTunes. The guide can be sorted by show, type, channel or any keywords. NextGuide also allows DirecTV customers the freedom to initiate recordings on their DVRs. The same feature will be provided for subscribers of cable companies this fall.

What makes NextGuide unique from other TV guide apps is its mosaic-like interface made out of mov ies and TV shows a user is interested in. Each screen is representative of a particular category such as sports, drama or comedy. All a user needs to do is slide from one screen to another to browse through available listings. As well, NextGuide users have the option to form their own categories such as “Basketball,” “California,” or “Katy Perry.” The app then sends out alerts whenever new episodes of similar content become available.

NextGuide’s social media functionality evaluates a user’s Facebook friends’ interests and that of the user to make recommendations. And if content is available via Netflix, a video stream can kick off.

NextGuide can be downloaded for free at the App Store, and Dijit makes money through transaction fees for routing users to paid iTunes or Netflix content, promotion of TV shows through content advertising and data and analytics sales.

As Toeman puts it, the biggest pain from knowing about a TV show is figuring out how to watch it. With NextGuide is an app anybody can use to add it into a playlist. The user doesn’t even have to know which channel the show is on.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Cool Startups - ContractGurus.Com

Hot Tips - The Best Free Business Tool You (Probably) Don't Know About.



http://contractgurus.com/

For the average Joe, reading through contracts and legal agreements can be a headache, mostly because of legalese that, to him, doesn't always make any sense. But a contract is legal and binding, and affixing one's signature without fully understanding what it contains (the fine print, most especially) can result in dire consequences. Hiring a lawyer to translate said document in layman's terms can be costly.

Contract Gurus is an Austin startup that provides fast and cheap contract reviews for families and businesses. Mike Kiamanesh, Contract Gurus' founder, is an entrepreneur, not a lawyer, who didn't always find the idea of spending money to hire a lawyer of his own appealing. Contract Gurus provides a hassle-free way to translate legal agreements and contracts into simple English, ensuring that the necessary information for clients to carry out informed legal decisions are captured.

To get started, clients either fax a co py of their contracts to the company or upload them online via contractgurus.com. Contract Gurus currently has more than 20 lawyers to review the contracts. A contract's contents will be summarized and important components color coded. Aspects of the contract that need to be revised will be highlighted in red. Depending on the rate, Contract Gurus provides a 24-hour turnaround.

The company's press release states that Contract Gurus supplies general contract information on frequently encountered legal issues. Kiamanesh emphasizes though that the service it provides isn't legal advice and there is no attorney-client relationship.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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