Our New Daily Player!
For sometime now, we’ve had a special project in the works. We wanted to give our listeners and readers a chance to hear a new Why Didn’t I Think of That?® feature every day, even if they’re away from the radio. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Today marks the beginning phases of a plan to provide our listeners and fans with even more regular content. I’m proud to announce that we’re opening up our Daily Player web app to our Facebook Fans.
Users of the app will be able to hear a new Why Didn’t I Think of That? feature every day. They can mark their favorites, share them with friends, and soon, users will have access to additional content for the day’s story.
Every weekday, the app will update with a new story. And the only way to find out about it, is to become one of our Facebook fans! So like us on Facebook…
Then check out the Daily Radio Show App! It’s as simple as that. Let us know what you think!
TOMS Shoes
Blake Mycoskie was supposed to be on vacation. But his jaunt through South America would result in one of today’s most successful philanthropic businesses: TOMS Shoes.
While attending Southern Methodist University as a varsity tennis player, Blake Mycoskie co-founded a pick-up and delivery laundry service for his fellow students called EZ Laundry. It bloomed into eight delivery trucks and forty employees across seven different colleges. Mycoskie sold the laundry service to his business partner and relocated to Nashville, Tennessee.
While in the Music City, Mycoskie started a new business. This time, it was outdoor media. Enormous billboards, aimed at the giants of the music industry, were his focus. The start-up caught the eye of Clear Channel. Soon after, Clear Channel made Mycoskie an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Having sold his second start up, Mycoskie turned briefly to the world of reality television. Appearing with his kid sister Paige on The Amazing Race, the young business mogul came within four minutes of winning the second-season’s $1 million prize. The experience inspired Mycoskie to start a new venture called Reality 24/7, a cable channel dedicated exclusive to reality programming. Mycoskie partnered with former USA Network CEO Kay Koplovitz and E! Network co-founder Larry Namer. He raised an astonishing $2 million. But that capital brought about the attention of media giant Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch started his own reality TV cable network, and Reality 24/7 ended before it even began.
Blake Mycoskie - Founder of TOMS Shoes
After that, Mycoskie moved to Los Angeles, where he got involved in an online driving course company. But it wasn’t until 2006, the Arlington, Texas native found his calling–shoes. While vacationing below the equator in the western hemisphere in the country of Argentina, the rogue businessman saw many native children without shoes, despite the high risk of podoconiosis–a debilitating disease caused by walking in silica-rich soil.[
Mycoskie got an idea. He sold his share of the driving course business and used the capital to launch TOMS Shoes.
The 30 year-old based his footwear after the alpargata design. Know more widely as espadrilles, the shoes have a rubber or rope sole with cotton fabric or canvas top. The concept of TOMS was simple: Buy a pair of shoes today, give a pair away tomorrow. The original name, "Tomorrow's Shoes" was too big to fit on the label, so it was shortened to "TOMS Shoes."
For each pair of shoes TOMS sells, the company donates a pair to a needy child. This philanthropy, known as “One for One” has donated over 1,000,000 shoes since the launch of TOMS Shoes in 2006. Shoe donations and “shoe drops” have been held in the United States in Kentucky, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana as well as internationally. Countries include South Africa, Argentina, Haiti, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Rwanda. In September of 2010, the company's sister non-profit company--called "Friends of TOMS"--reached its millionth shoe donation in Argentina.
That same year, TOMS Shoes made the number six spot on FastCompany’s Top Ten Most Innovative Retail Companies.
Though bold, it was not his last project.In June of 2011, Mycoskie unveiled his newest project: TOMS Eyewear. Like the shoe company, it donates prescription glasses, sight-saving surgery or medical care for every pair of glasses sold.
Owen Richason is a blogger and social media promoter. He is a former business writer for "Tampa Bay Business and Financier," and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle and on Business.com.
Crowd-Sourcing Innovation
It’s a problem we’ve all experienced. You’ve got a power strip, but plugging big adapters into it hogs up so much space that you can’t use all the outlets.
Enter Jake Zien, the high school senior who decided to do something about it.
Zien, a proud native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, originally conceived of Pivot Power during a pre-college summer camp at the Rhode Island School of Design. His idea was simple: create a flexible, jointed power strip that could be bent, twisted, and shaped to accommodate the maximum number of adapters. The bendable nature of the strip would also help fit it into corners and crevices, where more rigid power strips dare not go.
Zien began researching patents to protect his invention. He was nervous about taking his idea to a large corporation, fearing that they would turn him down, then go out and make the product themselves, stealing his idea. It’s a common fear among inventors, and many people react by keeping their idea secret from anyone and everyone until they’ve worked out all the little details. Zien went a different route. He decided the best way to protect his idea was to tell everybody.
“I think in order to make ideas happen you have to share them with a lot of people, and not keep them to yourself because [you think] the first person you tell is gonna steal it,” Zien says. The philosophy materialized when a family friend suggested Zien look into a website called Quirky. After doing his due diligence, Zien decided to take a chance. He signed up with the website and, for a small fee, introduced his idea to an online community of thousands of inventors, all sharing one goal: to make the best possible products.
Quirky is a hybrid of social networking and brainstorming. The company helps inventors work out the details of a product, from coming up with the brand name and designing the packaging to actually producing and distributing the product. Using a “crowd-sourcing” strategy similar to sites like Kickstarter, or even Groupon, Quirky allows its community to vote on user-submitted product ideas. Each week, two ideas are selected to go through a development process, where all the details are ironed out and the product is either scrapped or sent to market.
“Our job is to act as sort of shepherds of our inventions,” says Ben Kaufman, the 24-year-old founder of Quirky. “People will submit ideas to the site in various forms. Some are fully formed concepts with renderings and beautiful schematics. Some are problem statements: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if … doesn’t it suck that?’”
Quirky is a dream for many, but it has its trade-offs. You, as the inventor, will no longer own the rights to the product. But you will receive perpetual royalties– at least 12% of online revenue and 4% of traditional retail sales.
“Influencers”– Quirky users who chime in with suggestions on design, functionality, and other aspects of Quirky products that go to market–also earn a small portion of the revenue each time they influence the product’s development.
Podcast Episode #5: “Rethink Your Industry”
After researching hundreds of successful entrepreneur stories, Why Didn’t I Think of That? co-founders Bob Smith and Greg Anastos realized that all the businesses they were studying were forging very similar pathways to success. So they developed a list of twelve “Axioms for Entrepreneurs.” In the latest episode of the Why Didn’t I Think of That? ® Podcast, Bob and Greg sit down with thinkofthat.net blogger Benjamin Christopher and discuss the first axiom, “Re-think Your Industry.”
Episode #5: “Rethink Your Industry” – January 13th, 2012
Listen to the podcast above, or download it for free from iTunes.
The Why Guys explore how companies like Netflix, Apple, Xerox, and General Motors were able to look at their industries, and their companies, in a new light. Using fascinating examples as diverse as the bottled water industry and the turn-of-the-century railroad companies, they explain how important it is for companies to re-evaluate what services their business is providing customers and how to examine what their particular industry could be doing better.
The DODOcase
There’s nothing quite like reading a good book. The experience has no equal – not just in terms of storytelling, but also the actual physical experience of reading a book. The heft of the book, the experience of turning the page to reach the next part of the story, and the sensation of having the front cover in one hand and the back cover in the other as you pour over the information all add up to a unique experience.
Over the past few years, e-readers like the Nook, the Kindle, and tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire have become an increasingly popular way to read. But, while can they hold hundreds of books at a time, they lack the tactile sensation provided by opening a book. To some, that makes e-readers a cold and unappealing product.
When 28 year old entrepreneur Patrick Buckley heard that his family and friends were reluctant to switch over to an e-reader because they strongly preferred the sensation of holding a book, he had a great idea.
Buckley created the DODOcase– a case for the iPad, Kindle Fire, and other e-readers that gives you the convenience of an e-reader, with the the shape and feel of a hardcover book. In order to realize that idea, Buckley turned to TechShop, a company that specializes in providing entrepreneurs with the resources they need to bring their ideas to life.
After just four weeks in “the shop”–and spending less than $1,000–Buckley had a prototype ready. Buckley spent the next four months selling Dodocases at an amazing rate. In just four month’s time, his fledgling company sold over one million cases for devices such as the iPad, the Kindle, the Nook, and a wide variety of smartphones.
Today, DODOcase has forty employees, and each day they create and sell their cases using traditional bookbinding techniques to give each case the feel of a real book.
By listening to the people around him and using old production methods in a new way, Buckley created an innovative product that has found its place in a seemingly over-saturated market.
Watch the video below to learn more about Patrick Buckley, the book binding process, and DODOcase’s origins.
