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There's no shortage out there of DIY kits for making casts of a baby's feet and hands, but Otete & Anyo has come up with an innovative variation on the theme that can serve as a lifelong stamp and keepsake. The words "otete” and “anyo" signify a baby's hand and foot in Japanese, and Tokyo-based design firm Kawamura Hideo Activity has tapped those terms for its original stamps of babies' hand- and footprints. The engraved prints can be used not only as stamps for papers and letters, but also as lifelong mementos suitable for birthday presents, baby gifts and more. Parents or other gift-givers begin by making an ink print of baby's hands and feet in 127-by-89-mm size. They then email those prints to Otete & Anyo, which engraves them in real size. A solid black hand grip makes stamping easy, while a paulownia wood box embellished with the print is used for storage. Baby's name and birthday, meanwhile, are engraved on the back of the stamp for posterity. Launched last week, the stamps are priced at JPY 8,800 each plus shipping. With a solid, lasting alternative to most baby casts and a globally attractive design and packaging, Otete & Anyo stamps seem likely to do well around the world. Baby and children's products retailers: one to bring to the doting families near you? (Related: Rice babies, weighed to measure.) Website: www.otetetoanyo.com |
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Roughly a third of the average person's workday is lost to interruptions, according to SET Consulting, and one of the primary culprits is email. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of a new tool from the Maryland company that protects users from all but the most important messages. Now in beta, AwayFind is a web application that continually scans the user's email for new messages. When something timely and important arrives—according to criteria set by the user—AwayFind notifies them by phone, SMS, IM or Twitter, or it can delegate the message to someone else. AwayFind can also send custom auto response messages to different people and at a frequency set by the user. With support for all IMAP-based email providers, including Gmail and many Microsoft Exchange installations, AwayFind will soon offer native Microsoft Exchange support and full compatibility with Yahoo and Hotmail. In addition to the web-based service, a plugin is also available for Firefox and Chrome. AwayFind is free during its beta period, but ultimately SET plans to charge for certain features. AwayFind users have already escaped from 2,108,668 unimportant emails, the company says. One to try out on your own inbox—or partner with on the next version...? Website: www.awayfind.com |
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Back in October we covered SeatGeek, the free service that helps users find tickets to concerts and sporting events when they're at their lowest price. Recently the company launched a new feature aimed at season ticket holders that helps them price, sell and manage their entire ticket investment. TicketPortfolio is a web-based application that allows season ticket holders to treat their tickets much like a portfolio of stocks. Specifically, the service leverages SeatGeek’s extensive database of historical transaction data, market-based pricing capabilities and forecasting technology to give ticket holders a real-time snapshot of their portfolio and a way to track its fluctuating value over the course of the season. With an intuitive online interface, users can easily manage and plan how they would like to use their tickets. Selling recommendations—powered by SeatGeek’s patent-pending forecasting algorithm—are available on a game-by-game basis and are accompanied by direct links to the top secondary markets, including StubHub, RazorGator and TicketsNow. New York-based SeatGeek offers a free, two-week trial on TicketPortfolio; thereafter, it's USD 15 per month. Given the investment they represent, treating season tickets like assets in a portfolio makes good sense, particularly when combined with a fresh shot of pricing transparency. What other consumer investments could benefit from the centralized view of a portfolio approach...? (Related: Ticketing marketplace makes prices negotiable — Used cars & price transparency.) Website: seatgeek.com/ticketportfolio Spotted by: Arie Abecassis |
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In stores this month: a clothes iron for men. Dutch electronics giant Philips felt that men wanted a more robust, heavy-duty tool to tackle hampers of laundry. Something with a larger grip and a more masculine look. So it created the GC4490, which offers 'more power, more steam, more performance'. Philips describes the iron's sleek yet rugged design and stresses its technical specifications, seemingly in an attempt to convince men that they're buying a power tool or new gadget instead of a garment care appliance. Like a new hammer drill, the iron comes in a solid case. It will retail for EUR 79,99. On the surface, this is just another marketing gimmick. But Philips may have found a real gap in the appliance market. The man-iron is a mirror image of the tools for women we wrote about a few years back. Sure, a woman is perfectly capable of using a hammer that was originally designed for men's larger hands. But comfort and performance might be improved by using one that was designed with women in mind. No reason the same doesn't apply to men and irons. We'll leave the sexual politics debate to other bloggers; meanwhile, this could be the ultimate Father's Day gift ;-) Website: www.philips.com |
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The virtual ink had barely dried on our recent story about AtYourSide in Shanghai when word reached us of another personal guide service, again with an event-driven angle: Africa Talking, a South African concierge service that's ideally positioned to benefit from all the visitors to next month's World Cup. Africa Talking is a 24/7 concierge service for visitors to South Africa with dedicated travel, entertainment and emergency assistance. Upon arrival at any South African international airport, members receive a free Nokia 1208 mobile phone, complete with an Africa Talking SIM card and talktime. They can then use that phone during the course of their stay for help planning and arranging travel and entertainment throughout the country. Directions, rentals, tickets, reservations and all kinds of attraction advice are available from Africa Talking via its phones, which can be used for personal calls as well; in fact, users can save up to 70 percent of their roaming costs when they use their Africa Talking phone, the company says. In emergencies, meanwhile, the Africa Talking mobile phone serves as a tracking device that lets the Cape Town-based company immediately recognize users and see where they are, enabling it to quickly provide directions, dispatch a taxi or arrange emergency assistance. Last but not least, at the conclusion of any trip, users can drop off their used handsets at the airport; from there, they will be resold, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to a local South Africa charity. Membership in Africa Talking ranges from GBP 29 for a single trip to GBP 169 for multiple trips over the course of a year. Concierge and guide services can make good sense at any time of year, of course—particularly for business travellers—but large, international events increase the potential demand many times over. Those in major host countries around the globe: one to emulate for the masses of visitors coming soon to an event near you...? Website: www.africatalking.co.uk Spotted by: Raymond Kollau |
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When we wrote about the Evening Breeze bed almost a year ago, it was sold as an integrated four-poster unit with built-in sustainable cooling. Aiming to give buyers more flexibility, Evening Breeze now offers a stand-alone canopy that can be used to cool any bed. Launched last fall, the Evening Breeze Canopi features an integrated ventilation system that gently directs sustainably cooled air over any bed without any noise or draft. As with the Evening Breeze original, the Canopi's climate system uses the environmentally friendly R-410A refrigerant; it also uses at least 60 percent less energy than traditional air conditioning systems. Not only that, but a room's windows can even be left open for freshness since the cooling is focused so directly on the sleeper. Whereas the Evening Breeze original was aimed primarily at tropical hoteliers, the Canopi is available to consumers as well through select retailers in the Netherlands Antilles, Belgium and the Netherlands. Pricing is (a rather steep) EUR 3,599, including installation. Hoteliers and retailers alike: time to help cool off green-minded consumers in your part of the overheated world...? Website: www.evening-breeze.com This post is sponsored by PG&E (the Pacific Gas and Electric Company) as part of their wider focus on fighting climate change. As always, Springwise is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity—PG&E asked us to write about energy conservation, but had no further involvement in the content of this or other posts. Check out PG&E's We Can Do This website for more, including a feature on the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., a sustainable brewery. |
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They keep popping up: online-offline hybrids that combine electronic communication with tangible objects. The latest to appear on our radar? Chicago-based Life Tokens, which lets consumers express their emotions via coded tokens that are sent anonymously through the mail, and that link to personal online messages. Each token features a graphic on the front that encapsulates a specific emotion, and a 6-digit code on the back that, when entered by the recipient on Life Tokens' website, reveals the identity of the sender along with a personal message. Life Tokens sent within the United States are priced at USD 5 which includes domestic shipping. International shipping is also available. In an era dominated by electronic communication, consumers are increasingly embracing concepts that facilitate tangible 'real world' connections. One to emulate on a niche basis, such as catering for business users, marketing initiatives, or perhaps with a naughty twist? ;-) (Related: Online network for tweens requires offline introductions — Printed greeting cards with a digital twist.) Website: www.lifetokens.com Spotted by: Erica Walker |
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A splash of colour and design can go a long way toward beautifying a grey, ugly space, as Carspaze and Style-your-garage have already shown. Now aiming to do something similar for the slums of Rio de Janeiro through large, community-driven murals, the Favela Painting project also goes several steps further by incorporating training and employment for local residents. The brainchild of Dutch artist duo Haas&Hahn, Favela Painting has already completed two community painting projects in Vila Cruzeiro—Rio's most notorious slum—along with the first portion of O Morro, its current effort to paint an entire hillside slum. Some 34 houses and 7,000 square meters of Praça Cantão in Santa Marta have already been transformed through paint, and the project hopes to return later this year to paint even more of the hillside. In each of its projects, Favela has focused on recruiting local residents to do much of the painting, including training and paying them. In this latest one, local inhabitants were trained through a partnership with Brazilian paint company TintasCoral on everything from different types of paint to safety measures while working on scaffolding. Dre Urhahn, one of the Favela Painting artists, explains: “This work of art can make a colorful difference in the lives of local individuals, the community and the city of Rio. It has the potential of working as a catalyst in the processes of social renewal and change.” Favela Painting is supported by Firmeza Foundation, and recently the decorative paint division of Dutch AkzoNobel—which is also conducting a community campaign of its own—signed on as a partner as well. There are all too many grim, unadorned spaces throughout the urban world. Paint brands around the globe: time to sponsor some community action near you! Website: www.favelapainting.com Spotted by: Ruben Brusse |
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Amazon's Mechanical Turk has been around for a while, and in recent months it's been joined in the crowdsourced labour arena by ShortTask, txteagle, Samasource, CrowdFlower and Fiverr, to name just a few. While similar to many of those, CloudCrowd aims to set itself apart by breaking large jobs into many small, concurrent tasks and emphasizing worker credibility. Billed as a “labour-as-a-service” crowdsourcing platform, San Francisco-based CloudCrowd strives to give companies and other work providers a way to get large, laborious projects completed more quickly and for a fraction of the price than they could be by salaried workers. Data entry and processing, image processing, internet research, product merchandising, and content creation and filtering are all among the services offered by CloudCrowd, which enables managers to pay for projects' completion on a cost-per-action basis. Clients begin by submitting a work sample; from there, CloudCrowd figures out how to break the job down, distributes pieces to its crowd, gets results checked for accuracy and then returns a quote. Once approved, work is conducted 24/7, and completed micro-tasks start coming back within hours. For large projects like data entry and image review, the cost savings of CloudCrowd's approach can be as high as 50 percent, it says. A proprietary credibility and review system, meanwhile, constantly evaluates the quality of each worker and weeds out the poor ones quickly. After launching last October, CloudCrowd's labour pool had already hit 25,000 by March. Serving both consumers seeking to work flexibly for extra cash and companies looking for savings and quick turnaround, CloudCrowd could be another one to emulate—or at least try out on your next big project. Website: www.cloudcrowd.com Spotted by: Murtaza Patel |
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We've seen myriad sites recently that aim to help neighbours connect, whether targeting tenants and landlords, office workers in the same vicinity, or community members with stuff to share. Now, UK-based Yourshack offers leasing and house-share services with a focus on community socialization. Website: www.yourshack.co.uk |
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The attraction of cycling as a green, healthy, and cost-saving form of transport is huge for consumers, especially so at a time when the environment and world financial woes dominate the zeitgeist. Businesses doing something a little different for cyclists are a strong bet for success. Here's five we recently spotted: 1. GREEN GOOSE — As part of their package of web services allowing users to track healthy lifestyle achievements, Green Goose's bike-mounted sensors record cycling activity and upload the data over wifi. The company also provides services to help employers encourage cycling to work. 2. E-WERK — The energy generated pushing those pedals has long been tapped to power lights using a dynamo. But why stop there? German manufacturer Busch & Müller sells a dynamo-powered power supply allowing users to charge phones, MP3 players and other mobile devices. E-Werk comes with a selection of connectors including USB. 3. VELOCOMPUTER — Some cyclists may prefer not to fit an assortment of paraphernalia to their bikes, be it for security, aerodynamic or purely aesthetic reasons. VeloComputer is a mobile phone-based alternative to traditional bike computers and uses the accelerometer built in to many modern smartphones. 4. THE HUMBLE VINTAGE — If a cyclist is away from home and hasn't got their bike with them, they may want to rent something with a bit of personality that doesn't clearly signpost them as a tourist. Melbourne-based The Humble Vintage refurbishes classic and vintage cycles as a rental alternative to the ubiquitous MTB. 5. BICYKLO — Aiming to make it easier to find the perfect cycle tour, Bicyklo aggregates thousands of tour offers from hundreds of operators worldwide into a single database, allowing cyclists to search by area, duration and type rather than have to seek out individual operators and investigate what they have on offer. Spotters: Doug Jost, Robin Benjamins |
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It's been a few years since we first came across the Linkle sewing café in Berlin, but recently one of our spotters alerted us to a like-minded establishment in France: Sweat Shop, conveniently located near Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Aiming to facilitate the DIY movement in the world of clothing, Sweat Shop offers 10 workstations equipped with Singer sewing machines as well as a central communal table. Amid a relaxed atmosphere featuring funky furniture, hot beverages and organic treats, sewing enthusiasts can come and go as they please, paying rates of EUR 6 per hour to rent a machine or EUR 25 for the day, including tee and coffee. A series of weekly workshops on sewing and knitting techniques are also available, ranging from EUR 20 to EUR 80 per class. American brand Singer sponsored the sewing machines; Sweat Shop also sells kits including everything necessary to create a particular item of clothing, according to a report in the New York Times, with prices ranging from EUR 30 to EUR 100. Given the continuing interest in all things DIY, there are still plenty of opportunities to facilitate the customer made trend among crafters in other parts of the world. Time to offer—or sponsor—some “stitch & bitch” sessions in a cozy being space near you...? (Related: All-in-one kits for style-sensitive knitting novices — Retailer helps tweens make their own clothes — A being space for learning English.) Website: www.sweatshopparis.com Spotted by: Lamia Aloui |
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Now that Expo 2010 is underway in Shanghai, travel to the Chinese metropolis is surely on the rise, with a record-setting 70 million or more visitors expected to visit this year. What better time to launch a personal guide service for the city? Picking up where Louis Vuitton's Soundwalk MP3 guides left off, AtYourSide offers custom services designed to make visitors' experience of Shanghai easy, enjoyable and hassle-free. Travellers begin by browsing the profiles of the company's personal agents and then booking online the one that best suits their needs. All agents are qualified linguists and interpreters who not only live in Shanghai but also speak some combination of English, German, French and Japanese; all must also pass a rigorous interview and training process, including everything from first aid and IT skills to knowledge of western cultures and business etiquette. Visitors' itineraries can be planned ahead of time to include trips in and around the real Shanghai, making sure to steer clear of the tourist traps and busy standard tours. General translation and simultaneous conference interpretation are both available, as are proofreading and document translation. Extra services such as mobile phone rental, office leasing and airport transfers can all be organized as well. Minimum booking is one 9-hour day; guides' rates begin at CNY 900 per day, variable with the season. Annual memberships are also available. While tour guide services certainly aren't new, there's still plenty of opportunity to upgrade such services with user-friendly features such as browsable guide profiles and top-notch business and translation skills. Owned and operated by award-winning Swiss design agency Walker, AtYourSide could provide a model worth emulating in other major cities around the world. How about yours...? (Related: Blind guides take sighted on sensorial walking tours of Lisbon — Niche tours focus on sustainable London — Sightseeing on the run.) Website: www.atyourside.asia Spotted by: Aly Cha |
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Apple may have sold a million iPads in 28 days, but you can be certain there are still countless consumers out there not yet sure they want to take the plunge. Tapping into that market of curious onlookers, UK-based Bid and Borrow—a site much like Neighborgoods, focused on the sharing of consumer goods—now gives consumers a way to try the iPad for just GBP 20 a day. London-based Bid and Borrow displays a wide variety of goods on its site, all submitted by users willing to rent them out. Those interested in hiring them can pay a fee or offer their time or talents for a barter trade. Though the iPad doesn't arrive in the UK until May 28, one enterprising Bid and Borrow member in Brighton is already offering one up for rent. Consumers can reserve it in advance; with a GBP 350 deposit, the device can be tried out at will for GBP 20 per day. Ever popular during tough economic times, the try-before-you-buy philosophy has already been applied to cars, chickens, cookbooks, camcorders and guitars—to name just a few products—but it makes extra good sense in the realm of expensive, cutting-edge consumer electronics, especially those with limited global availability. Website: www.bidandborrow.com |
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Consumers may be able to design their own sleeping bags, but it's a safe bet that few would come up with a jacket, tent and sleeping bag in one. That, however, is just what Seattle-based JakPak has innovated, aimed primarily at outdoors and sports enthusiasts on the go. JakPak bills itself as the world’s first all-in-one waterproof jacket, sleeping bag and tent, with the goal of “providing safety and comfort in an unpredictable world.” The patented JakPak design combines a waterproof sleeping bag, minimally structured tent and insect netting into a comfortable jacket, creating an instant dry habitat that is ideal for outdoor sports enthusiasts, people living in areas prone to natural disaster and anyone else on the go outdoors. Made from 3.1 oz., urethane-coated ripstop nylon polyester body fabric, the JakPak includes a detachable tent that provides shelter over the head, neck and shoulders. Attached “no-see-um” netting deters small insects, while an integrated sleeping bag folds in and out of the jacket for quick and easy access. Due to be available later this spring in the U.S., the JakPak is priced at USD 249.99. Sports and outdoors retailers around the world: one to get in on early...? Website: www.jakpak.com Spotted by: Murtaza Patel |
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