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By benjaminchristopher, March 24, 2010 2:30 pm

A couple more updates:

When we first ran our story on Batter Blaster, the organic pre-made pancake batter in an aerosol can, the company had made $9 million dollars. Well, as it turns out, their expected revenue for last year was almost twenty million dollars.

As I reported in my blog entry, Batter Blaster had a hard time getting off the ground. But it was determination and ingenuity that pushed Sean O’Connor and his quirky startup to the top of the aerosol-breakfast food world.

CNN Money reports:

Through word of mouth, social networking and publicity stunts — traveling 180,000 miles in an Airstream trailer to visit county fairs; rallying a team to cook 76,382 pancakes in eight hours to set a Guinness World Record — O’Connor and his 16 employees have gotten Batter Blaster into 13,000 outlets nationwide, including Costco (COST,Fortune 500) and Whole Foods (WFMI, Fortune 500) stores.

It’s a good product, too: It tastes good, is convenient, isn’t terrible for your body or even the earth. It’s really everything you could ask for from a can of pancake batter. Unfortunately, I still see it in grocery store aisles only rarely. It’s possible, though, that I’m going down the wrong aisles.

Meanwhile, our Why Didn’t I Think of That story on Pandora Internet Radio has had some interesting developments. A few weeks ago, I posted a fairly in-depth look at Pandora’s beginnings and inner workings. While the station is a popular staple of streaming music, it wasn’t always that way. Things were particularly grim, according to the New York Times, come the end of 2001. Pandora founder Tim Westergren “had 50 employees and no money. Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.”

Thankfully for the company, those hard times came to an end. Pandora has already invaded the iPhone and is on its way to new, internet-ready televisions. Recent annual revenues have been around $20 million. But that’s all in the past. Now it’s time to look to the future.

And the future, some believe, is streaming services like Pandora directly into your car. Well, “directly.”

Here’s how PC World describes it:

The Pandora service will be integrated into two car stereo systems to start – one from Alpine and one from Pioneer, both of which will go on sale next month. Conrad says the Pandora app will run on your smartphone, but will plug into the car stereos by way of a 32-pin cable. When the smartphone is plugged in, the screen will lock on the smartphone and the Pandora will be displayed on the dashboard of the car.

Ford has also made Pandora part of its new driver interface and dashboard design called MyFord Touch. Here too, the Pandora app runs on a mobile phone, but once plugged into the Ford system, a voice-recognition system can be used to interact with the Pandora app, and the car’s pre-set radio buttons can be assigned to Pandora’s virtual stations.

Um… Playing it through your phone? With a cable connecting the two? That sounds like a hassle, or at the very least a little archaic. If the phone is going to be communicating with your car stereo and display, why not make it automatic, wireless, and holistic? You get into your car and all of your calls are automatically transferred to your stereo system, all of your apps are available from your touch screen console, etc. Maybe I’m asking too much. But, if you haven’t noticed, I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy.

That being said, this could mark the beginning of a new phase for Pandora. And to think, Westergren probably never would have imagined such success when he started the Music Genome Project a decade ago. But, as countless other business owners have discovered, for better or worse, a big part of the journey is not knowing where you’re headed.

Congratulations to Batter Blaster and Pandora on all their success.

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By benjaminchristopher, March 17, 2010 5:43 pm

Hello again, dear readers.

It’s been a while. There are a number of reasons for that. Namely, as some of you may have noticed, a “security breach” occurred on the Think of That Blog last week. We were lucky enough to get the problem resolved over the weekend, but it was a bit scary while it lasted.

In the news, there have been some interesting updates on a lot of the stories we’ve ran recently.

Starting with cloud computing. I wrote a post in January describing cloud computing as the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way we access our data. Recently, Google–itself no stranger to online applications and documents–took  another step toward getting us all up in the clouds: It has opened an online App Marketplace for businesses.

As you likely know, Google already offers free applications like Google Docs, which users can access and use from any computer with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. Well the App Marketplace takes it a step further, offering third-party “cloud applications” for small businesses, from software providers such as Intuit, eFax, and more. These are affordable internet-based programs that small businesses can use to set up a virtual software infrastructure to increase productivity and mobility. Phew. That was a lot of buzzwords.

No? Well here’s how blogger Rajan Chandras describes the role that Google’s new App Store might play in small businesses, from his recent blog post:

In this fierce and fearful economy, small businesses — and that includes you and me in our moonlighting activities, and small developers looking for a profitable outlet to their creativity — need all the help they can get. By tapping into this mushrooming cloud of computing and by thinking outside the box (the one underneath their desktop, that is) they should be able to eke out some nice savings without sacrificing effectiveness, and/or earnings without standing to lose their shirt.

Well said, Chandras. And benefits like that could be seen on a very big scale if cloud computing and cloud-apps become an more dominant force.

Speaking of apps, the Amazon Kindle will soon be offering unique “Active Content” for the slim, black and white e-reader. I complained in my review that the Kindle didn’t offer something as basic as a word-processing program (after all, it has a keyboard). With third-party developers now able to create apps for the device with the Kindle Development Kit, it shouldn’t be too long before someone hears my prayers.

This “active content” has its limits. Namely- the amount of bandwidth they can use (an abysmally small 100 KB a month) which makes it unlikely that this will help the Kindle much against the impending iPad release. At the same time though, it makes this cost-effective alternative even more versatile than it already is.

Remember the good old days, before “Apps,” when there were just applications, before proprietary technology became what it is today? Sure, there were always fundamental format wars, Mac Vs. PC, etc. But now, every device we own is becoming more and more like a computer. I predict that, in ten years, even our televisions will be indistinguishable from a computer. Even so, the idea that you could buy one application and have it work on all your devices would be laughed at today. Everybody wants to have the number one technology, and nobody wants to share. Just a fact of life, I guess.

More updates to come soon, such as– which Why Didn’t I Think of That story has nearly doubled their sales figures, and which internet radio station might soon be segueing from the information super-highway to the real life highway.

All that, plus some great original stories, coming soon.

Thanks for reading!

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By benjaminchristopher, March 2, 2010 3:47 pm

Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank both worked for a Southern California home-improvement chain called “Handy Dan” in the 1970’s.

While there, they experimented with heavily discounting products in one of Handy Dan’s locations. The experiment was a success in every sense of the word, and it was their intention to expand it to more stores. But they never got the chance.

Sanford Sigoloff, a “turn-around artist,” took over Daylin Inc., the parent company of Handy Dan. Sigoloff had a reputation for gutting the upper-level management of companies he took over, and Handy Dan was no exception. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank got the boot, and their days in home improvement stores came to an end. Or so it seemed.

Fortunately, Marcus and Blank weren’t quite ready to throw the towel in altogether. In fact, quite the opposite- their little “discount experiment” had inspired them. They wanted to create a new, nationwide chain of home-improvement stores that would sell a wide array of home-improvement and construction goods for as cheap as possible. Moreover, they wanted to provide the best customer service in the industry. Their employees would all be thoroughly trained, ready to give customers the kind of specialized information they needed at the drop of a hat.

To enact their vision, Marcus and Blank used money from a New York City investment firm to prep and stock their first stores. There were over 18,000 products on their shelves, ranging from painting products to building and plumbing supplies, their prices marked down as low as they could be. To fill even more space, empty boxes were piled to the ceilings, creating the illusion of an even larger inventory.

The inventory was in place, the sales staff was trained and ready, and their name was picked out. So, in 1979, the first two Home Depots opened their doors.

As a promotional stunt, Marcus and Blank had their children hand out $1 bills at the door to shoppers. They assumed the money wouldn’t last to lunch. But come sunset, the kids were still out there, now in the parking lot trying to wave down potential customers, offering them money to come into the store. Blank recalls the moment as “a crushing disappointment.”

Of course, anyone familiar with the Home Depot–which is probably everyone reading this–knows that Marcus and Blank’s crushing disappointment was unfounded.

Word of mouth quickly spread about this new low-cost, customer-friendly, home-improvement chain. Furthermore, Marcus and Blank were determined not to let their customer base stop at professionals. To attract more “inexperienced” homeowners and the like, the Home Depot began offering classes to their customers–similar to the training Home Depot’s employees went through– to teach them all the “handy” skills they would need to fix their own plumbing, do their own carpentry, and tackle all of the home improvement needs that people usually passed along to trained professionals. In so doing, Marcus and Blank hoped to create a whole new set of customers for their growing chain.

Within several years, Home Depot had expanded to the Miami market. In 1981, the company went public. Sales, originally projected at $9 million, were coming in well over $17 million. Growth seemed inevitable for the Home Depot. And grow it did. Within a decade, there were 118 locations in the US. Sales were at almost $3 billion. Things were looking good, and they were only going to get better.

To put the amount of money that Home Depot makes a year–and it’s an awful lot–into perspective: I recently spoke about the chain with a friend of mine who buys, fixes, and sells realty properties for a living. He does much of the handiwork himself, and frequents Home Depot probably more than he’d like to. He recently totaled his receipts from a year’s worth of expenses and determined that he annually spends about $100,000 at Home Depot alone, to say nothing of the other hardware and supply stores he goes to.

So think about all the people like my friend Matt, people who utilize one or more of Home Depot’s 2000 US locations on a weekly basis. Then think about all the average folks who go to Home Depot, just to pick up a new door knob, or a can of paint, or a house plant. All those patrons, all those dollars, and all those door knobs add up. They add up quite a bit. Despite the recession, Home Depot’s recent sales exceeded $71 billion dollars.

So there you have it. A low-cost home-improvement chain, made to fit the needs of specialists and laypeople alike. Now why didn’t I think of that?