MarketWatch:

A project that began in response to a lumpy bowl of Malt-O-Meal is now, after nearly a decade of tinkering in his spare time, ready to hit the market.

“I wanted to find a way to make a better bowl of Malt-O-Meal in the microwave,” said Wylie. “I saw the potential of using the turntable as a source of motion very early. But it took quite a few attempts and designs to get it all working perfectly.”

The real breakthrough in development came with the addition of his patent-pending anchor bar, which maintains a consistent downward pressure on the entire assembly, holding it securely in place.

Wylie wants to use his invention to create jobs in Kansas, particularly in the Wellington area. He plans to use the money raised from the sale of the StirMate to fund research and development for future products and develop as many Kansas ideas and innovations as he can.

“The StirMate has been well received by many people who want to send the production to China,” said Wylie. “But my goal is to create jobs locally and help the Wellington economy.”

The Huffington Post:

When it comes to getting a loan for your small business, it may not come down to who you know, but where you go. Banking Grades, a new grading tool from Philadelphia-based MultiFunding, found that some of the nation’s biggest banks have the worst performances when it comes to small-business lending. Meanwhile, banks that recorded the best small-business lending performances are the ones most entrepreneurs have probably never heard of.

The big banks (defined as those with deposits of more than $10 billion) that ranked the highest for small-business lending are:

1. Zions First National Bank, Salt Lake City. Grade: A (25.44 percent)
2. First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, Raleigh, N.C. Grade: B (23.8 percent)
3. Synovus Bank, Columbus, Ga. Grade: B (19.25 percent)
4. Chase Bank Usa, National Association, Newark, Del. Grade: B (18.34 percent)
5. Bancorpsouth Bank, Tupelo, Ms. Grade: B (17.13 percent)
6. Wells Fargo Bank Northwest, National Association, Ogden, Utah. Grade: B (13.71 percent)
7. Arvest Bank, Fayetteville, Ark. Grade: B (12.82 percent)
8. Whitney Bank, New Orleans, La. Grade: B (12.02 percent)
9. Capital One Bank (Usa), Glen Allen, Va. Grade: B (11.85 percent)
10. Tcf National Bank, Sioux Falls, S.D. Grade: B (11.49 percent)

Photo by Billy Brown

The Washington Post:

The online world has become awash with opportunities to both spread the word about job openings as well as investigate possible candidates before you meet them in the flesh. But how can small businesses avoid information overload? Here are some tips:

●LinkedIn: Every recruiter’s friend and even better than you think. LinkedIn is a great first stop for recruiters. Beyond showing their professional growth in an easy-to-read format, smart candidates request (and get!) insightful recommendations from peers, clients and friends that give an outsider’s view of their performance. These are sometimes more powerful than regular references, since they are publicly displayed.

●Love or hate Facebook, check it out. If an applicant has an open page, this can be a great way to see beyond the resume. You can learn where they volunteer, what kind of music they listen to, what activities they participate in outside of work or what TV shows they like. This information can provide powerful insight into whether a candidate is a good cultural fit.

●To tweet or not to tweet. Twitter can be an awesome way to find out more about candidates. You can determine if they are interested in your business and industry subject matter by the type of news and posts they share.

Photo by MoneyBlogNewz

After many years of trying to make potato chips taste like jalapenos, the creators of Deano’s Jalapenos decided to ditch the potato all together. Their chips are “non-potato chips” made out of thin slices of jalapeno. The peppers are deep-friend and flavored with sea salt, cheddar or ranch.

We use the freshest jalapenos available, shipped dailey from Texas and New Mexico. Our cheddar coating has just the right flavor to enhance the flavor of the jalapeno, which gives it a nice finish to the chip. Once again there are no potatoes used in Deanos Jalapeno Cheddar Chips. The jalapeno chips are at what “we” call a medium heat level, although each batch is a little different depending on mother nature.

Co.Exsist:

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging—though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles—just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

Photo by GorillaAttack/ShutterStock.

US News:

Have you ever tried to sell something on Craigslist but didn’t really have an idea on how much to ask for it? Or have you tried to buy something online but weren’t sure if you were getting the best deal? This is where Priceonomics comes in.

Priceonomics is the price guide for everything. It takes the guesswork out of the process and tells you exactly how much you should be paying for any used item. When you search for an item, you can see how the site’s team came up with the price and view the data they used. If you’re searching for an out-of-the-ordinary item, always double-check the data to make sure they are comparing prices from the actual product you’re looking for.

Mass High Tech Business News:

Bob Caspe knows a thing or two about startup businesses. Caspe, a serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, has co-founded Wellesley-based IEC Partners LLC and launched the International Entrepreneurship Center.

The company, co-founded by six partners, supports the center, which provides resources to businesses that have “clearly defined business customers and partners” at it 9,000-square-foot center in Newton.

Located in a historic hemp mill on Nevada Street, the center includes more than 35 furnished workstations to be used by startup and emerging growth companies. Currently, the center managed by Caspe, who founded several high-tech businesses including Leaf Systems Inc. and Sound Vision Inc., hosts five startups and has room for another 20, according to IEC.

Photo by pleasantpointinn

VentureBeat:

UberConference allows teleconferencers to dial a number (no PIN required), see who is calling in, and determine who is currently talking. The organizer can instantly tell when one or more participants are causing feedback or noise, and mute them. The organizer can even cut select participants out of sections of the call (UberConference calls it “earmuffing”) if needed for confidentiality reasons.

A particularly helpful feature is the ability to click on a participant and see their social overview, taken from popular networks: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. That’s a feature I’ve wanted often enough on calls with participants from multiple divisions or companies.

Currently, UberConference is free, but in the future the company will “offer a premium version of the service with more features and different pricing options.”

Little Drooling Bear Food

Watery Coffee

Herpes Pizza

Smart Noshery Makes You Slobber

OK Chinese Food

Wet New Modern Age Dining Room

Meat Patty Explode the Stomach

Restoran Fatso

Come & Wait Restaurant

Via stupidest.com and BuzzFeed.

On this day in 1829 a patent for the Accordion is granted to Cyrill Demian in Vienna.

Demian’s instrument bore little resemblance to modern instruments. It only had a left hand buttonboard, with the right hand simply operating the bellows. One key feature for which Demian sought the patent was the sounding of an entire chord by depressing one key. His instrument also could sound two different chords with the same key; one for each bellows direction (a bisonoric action).

The piano accordion was first played in German-speaking regions, and then spread over Europe. Some early portable instrument with piano keys had been invented in 1821, but it started to actually be played much later, and built its reputation from there.

At that time in Vienna, mouth harmonicas with Kanzellen (chambers) had already been available for many years, along with bigger instruments driven by hand bellows. The diatonic key arrangement was also already in use on mouth-blown instruments. Demian’s patent thus covered an accompanying instrument: an accordion played with the left hand, opposite to the way that contemporary chromatic hand harmonicas were played, small and light enough for travelers to take with them and used to accompany singing. The patent also described instruments with both bass and treble sections, although Demian preferred the bass-only instrument owing to its cost and weight advantages.

By 1831 at least the accordion had appeared in Britain. The instrument was noted in The Times of that year as one new to British audiences and not favorably reviewed, but nevertheless it soon became popular. It had also become popular with New Yorkers by the mid-1840s at the latest.

USA Today:

Yes kids, back in the old days of the 20th century, people actually had to get up off the couch, walk to their TV, and turn a dial to select the channel they wanted to watch. I remember functioning as my father’s personal remote control as a kid, jumping up to change channels on our old Zenith.

[Eugene] Polley changed TV forever by inventing the “Flash-Matic,” the first wireless TV remote, in 1955. The device looked like a ray gun. It’s given way to the sleeker, high-tech devices we use today.

Photo by espensorvik

This is the most niche cleaning business I’ve seen all week!

Melone had a brainstorm.

“I used to clean houses while I was in college, and my brain started ticking – why not start a cleaning business, by moms for moms,” said Melone. “A business where you could take your babies with you while helping out working moms by cleaning or organizing for them, all while creating jobs for other new moms.”

She found a line of organic cleaning products, Clean Irene, which were a perfect fit for the business – and now they are local distributors of the national product line.

On a recent Friday, they are working in Nashua, sprucing up Katie Olivier’s kitchen. It’s the first time Olivier has used a cleaning service.

Brad Templeton:

There’s a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for example, has a project called MatterNet working to provide transportation infrastructure for light cargo in regions of Africa where roads wash out for half the year.

Closer to home, these drones are not yet legal for commercial use, while government agencies are using them secretly.

Here’s one useful idea: A small set of medical drones scattered around the city. Upon emergency call, they can fly, via a combination of autonomous navigation and remote-human-operated flying at the end, to any destination in the city within a couple of minutes. Call 911 and as soon as you say it’s a medical emergency the drone is on the way. When it gets there, the human operator lands it or even sends it in a balcony on tall buildings with balconies. Somebody has to carry it to the patient if they are far from the outside.

When it gets to the patient it has a camera and conferencing ability to a remote doctor can examine the patient and talk to people around the patient to ask them questions or give them instructions. It also could contain one of those “foolproof defibrillator” modules able to deal with many kinds of heart attacks. They are already in many buildings but this way they could be anywhere. It’s more useful than a taco.

BusinessWeek:

Weather Underground, a site that compiles local data collected by 24,000 weather geeks with sensors on their roofs, this week released a free tool for businesses to use to look for patterns in their sales related to the weather. Anyone can punch in a location and time period to download a spreadsheet with detailed weather data. The file also has a place to enter daily sales (which comes prepopulated with fake sales numbers) and charts that show the sales numbers in relation to temperatures, precipitation, and dew point (a measure of humidity). The spreadsheet calculates the correlation between sales and those three weather metrics to show which have a meaningful relationship.

Weather Underground’s main business since it started in 1995 has been targeting ads on its site for brands that want to reach consumers during certain weather conditions. Companies can, for example, offer getaway deals to Hawaii during nasty winter storms, or hawk lawn furniture and garden supplies on the first sunny weekend of spring.

Cornell Chronicle:

Once you pop the top of a tube of potato chips, it can be hard to stop munching its contents. But Cornell researchers may have found a novel way to help: Add edible serving size markers that act as subconscious stop signs.

As part of an experiment carried out on two groups of college students (98 students total) while they were watching video clips in class, researchers from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab served tubes of Lays Stackables, some of which contained chips dyed red.

In the first study of the research, which is published online this month in Health Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association, the red chips were interspersed at intervals designating one suggested serving size (seven chips) or two serving sizes (14 chips); in the second study, this was changed to five and 10 chips.

Unaware of why some of the chips were red, the students who were served those tubes of chips nonetheless consumed about 50 percent less than their peers: 20 and 24 chips on average for the seven-chip and 14-chip segmented tubes, respectively, compared with 45 chips in the control group; 14 and 16 chips for the five-chip and 10-chip segmented tubes, compared with 35 chips in the control group.

Photo by Robin Wishna.

60 Minutes:

One of the wealthiest, best-educated American entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, isn’t convinced college is worth the cost. With only half of recent U.S. college graduates in full-time jobs, and student loans now at $1 trillion, Thiel has come up with his own small-scale solution: pay a couple dozen of the nation’s most promising students $100,000 to walk away from college and pursue their passions. Morley Safer takes a look at Thiel’s critique of college.

Best quote of the story:

Peter Thiel: We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing in the last decade. Everybody believed you had to have a house. They’d pay whatever it took. Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay whatever it takes.

Photo by hxdbzxy/ShutterStock.

Cassandra Daily:

The hottest act at last month’s Coachella wasn’t one of the young artists who found neon-painted festival fame through the blogosphere, but an iconic rap star resurrected from the grave. Debates about whether the stunt was imaginative or exploitative persist, but so stirring was Hologram Tupac’s performance that rumors of other dead rock star tours have been swirling about in the weeks since.

Photo by .

• 1819 – The SS Savannah leaves port at Savannah, Georgia, United States, on a voyage to become the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The ship arrived at Liverpool, England on June 20.
• 1906 – The Wright brothers are granted U.S. patent number 821,393 for their “Flying-Machine”.
• 1980 – Namco releases the highly influential arcade game Pac-Man.

For more on Pac-Man, I recommend the book The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect.

In the thiry years since the first Pac-Man first ate a pellet in 1980, the video game industry has undergone a mind-blowing evolution. Fueled by unprecedented advances in technology, boundless imaginations, and an insatiable addiction to fantastic new worlds of play, the video game has gone supernova, rocketing two generations of fans into an ever-expanding universe where art, culture, reality, and emotion collide.

As a testament to the cultural impact of the game industry’s mega morph, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with curator and author Chris Melissinos, conceived the forthcoming exhibition, The Art of Video Games, which will run from March 16 to September 30, 2012.

SFGate:

The RoboShower™ is rectangular in design with over 20″ double-wide adaptable and one-of-a-kind head. This is to ensure that practically anyone will be able to receive adequate coverage of water flow while showering. Inventor, Mr. Audie Norr, did however keep a host of body types and sizes in mind with the design, and equipped the RoboShower™ with the ability to go from rectangular to a triangle shape to allow users to be able to manipulate the RoboShower™ to best fit their coverage needs.

The RoboShower™ also comes packaged with a shower Extension Arm and plumbers Thread Seal tape for security and mounting. The colors of choice for the RoboShower™ are silver and blue.

RoboShower™ inventor, Mr. Audie Norr, had two primary goals in mind when designing the RoboShower™. He wanted to provide the general public a shower system that gives options for waterfall coverage with the ever growing differentiation of body sizes of consumers today, as well as provide a shower system that was eco-conscious by saving on overall water usage.

The Commercial Appeal:

Entrepreneur magazine recently named Lil’ Angels among its Top 500 Franchises in the country. It was the sixth time in a row the business was identified in the listing.

The business, which partners with 78 of its franchises across the country to provide photography of children in day care and similar settings, got its start in 1996 and was based in Memphis until 2010.

Since that year, the corporate office has functioned in space near Kroger at 6831 Crumpler in Olive Branch. Lil’ Angels holds its franchise schools offsite, however, most recently at a hotel meeting room.

The budding entrepreneurs don’t have to start out professionals to be part of the Lil’ Angels family of home-based studio franchises. In fact, owners prefer a clean slate on which to write.

Women’s eNews:

Jan became interested in namdas during a research project on declining crafts while getting her master’s degree at the Craft Development Institute in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital.

As part of her research, Jan was required to introduce innovations to increase the marketability of Kashmiri namdas. So instead of using local wool, she used 100-percent merino, a type of sheep prized for its wool quality. She also used dyes free of azo compounds, a chemical used in dyes for its vivid colors, so they wouldn’t be harmful or bleed.

“You can hand wash our namdas,” she says. “They won’t lose their color. You can even vacuum them, things you can’t do with the ordinary namda you find in the market these days.”

For embroidery, she opted for a superior thread and a style called crewel, often used on curtains.

Photo by Neil

On this day in in 2000, Mark Hughes, the founder and CEO of Herbalife died. Herbalife is a global nutrition, weight management and skin-care company who’s products are marketed through a network of 2.1 million independent distributors.

In February 1980, Mark Hughes began selling the original Herbalife weight management product from the trunk of his car. Hughes often stated that the genesis of his product and program stemmed from the weight loss concerns of his mother Joanne, whose premature death he attributed to an eating disorder and an unhealthy approach to weight loss. His goal was to change the nutritional habits of the world.

His first product was a protein shake designed to help people manage their weight. He structured his company using a direct-selling, multi-level marketing model which attracted thousands of distributors (Herbalife Independent Distributors) who sold its products door-to-door or through word-of-mouth, without relying on commercial distribution in retail stores.

The company’s slogan, “Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How”, became a marketing theme for distributors, featuring heavily on badges, flyers and posters. Early methods to recruit distributors included seminars, which would feature distributors giving health and weight loss testimonials on the Herbalife products and a keynote address by Hughes. By 1982 Herbalife had reached USD 2 million in sales and had expanded into Canada.

Mark Hughes died at age 44 of an accidental overdose.

via Wikipedia.

Mail Online:

Scientists still say they are desperate to learn the secret of ‘Starlite’ – and the inventor’s family may have it.

The material was the invented by the eccentric English inventor and former hairdresser Maurice Ward who had no formal scientific training and claimed he put it together on his kitchen table with a food processor.

It was unveiled to the world on the BBC TV show ‘Tomorrow’s World’ in 1991 during which he held a Starlite-coated egg up to a blowtorch.

Despite the extreme heat it was barely warm to the touch and was still runny inside.

Experts immediately realised its possibilities for things like aeroplanes, fire doors, spacecraft and dozens more possibilities.

Mr Ward, however, refused to play ball.

Over the following few decades his paranoia, capriciousness and need for absolute secrecy ruined all attempts to get it onto the market.

Photo by Emilian Robert Vicol

Mail Online:

Now the Etch-a-Sketch, that beloved toy which started life in the 1960s and amused children for the next three decades, is coming back – thanks to the help of the iPad.

Inventor Ari Krupnik has created an almost exact replica sleeve of the Etch-a-Sketch, including those two big twiddly buttons with which you can sketch on your designs on the grey screen.

Plug an iPad into the belly and – hey, presto! – everyone’s favourite toy has come back to life.

For the re-birth of Etch-a-Sketch, Ari worked on the software side, emulating all those beloved features to make this identical to the original – so shaking your iPad will clear your image just as before.

Although there is a nod to modern times – you can share your pictures via Facebook or Flickr – or even send a timelapse video to YouTube.

azdailysun.com:

The defibrillator is still a work in progress, but Strauss recently filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to secure a patent for CardiaGard, a device that will monitor the heart to detect and treat coronary artery disease — a condition that affects more than 15 million Americans.

The device is designed to be inserted into a subcutaneous layer over the heart. Electrodes attached to the wires can detect the slightest changes in the heart’s rhythms in the same way that an electrocardiogram does, he said. The implantable defibrillators currently on the market thread wires into the arteries to monitor and shock the heart. Those wires can cause irritation or result in infection after the surgery.

“There is no risk of causing a patient to go into cardiac arrest when they are actually being operated on because we are not touching the heart,” he said.

Photo by epSos .de