Archive for December 2011
Small Biz Borrowing On The Rise
Reuters: The Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index, which measures the overall volume of financing to U.S. small businesses, rose 20 percent in October after increasing a revised 12 percent in September, PayNet said on Thursday. Still, at 98.1, the index shows borrowing has not yet recovered to its level of 100 reached in 2005, [...]
What You Can Learn from Tickle Me Elmo
Fifteen years ago, Tickle Me Elmo took over Christmas. TThe hottest toy of the 1996 holiday season caused shoppers to turn vicious, inspired a whole new kind of black market (the $35 dolls sold at a several-thousand-dollar markup) and sparked a salacious scandal. During Tickle Me Elmo’s epic reign, Tyco “the toy company behind the [...]
Main Street Connect is a network of 52 community-based news websites. Inc. has up a video interview with the founders Jane Bryant Quinn and Carl Tucker. The video is below.
Business Week: In 2008, Jay LeBoeuf, 34, founded Imagine Research, a startup that on Nov. 9 unveiled its MediaMined software, which enables music and film producers to search, classify, and retrieve all manner of audio files. The software currently recognizes 400 distinct sounds, including instruments, voices, and noises like a dog’s bark and the crack [...]
There are many risks and rewards that come with inventing. Inventors Digest has pulled together a collection of risks you should avoid. Are you ready to walk that fine line? Risk #1: Getting a search without a patentability opinion. Before you order a search, make sure you will get at least a “file or don’t [...]
Hedy Lamarr: Actress and Inventor
Most people know Hedy as the beautiful actress who pushed the boundaries on what was allowed in early films. What most people do not know is that she had an interest in science. She also patented the predecessor to today’s Bluetooth technology. Her idea involved making a radio signal “hop around from radio frequency to [...]
Rocket Mail, 1931 Before “rocketmail” was the name of a short-lived free e-mail service in the late ’90s, it was an idea propounded by German inventor Professor Oberth, who thought it was a good idea to literally use a high-velocity, ill-aimed projectile to deliver mail from Berlin to New York City. He claimed to be [...]
