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Crazy Startup Of The Day -  PickyDomains.com http://www.greenling.com/ Talk about a fruitful investment. Mason Arnold relishes the attention he and his com-pany garner around Austin for driving a vehicle with a big banana on the roof. In turning people's heads, he has turned a company car into a rolling conversation starter, brand fortifier and revenue generator. "It's the best marketing thing we've ever done," Arnold says of the vehicle, one of three fruit-topped Toyota Prius hybrid cars operated by his 8-year-old company, Greenling, an organic-food delivery service. Arnold couldn't be happier with his decision to purchase a company-owned Prius and top it with a $3,000 epoxy-coated, aluminum-and-Styrofoam banana emblazoned with the company's web address. "For every dollar we spend on the banana car, we probably get $10 to $20 in return," he says, citing a survey of new customers who signed up as a direct result of seeing the vehicle, which runs ...

Crazy Startup Of The Day -  PickyDomains.com http://thelastmile.org/ The next great tech startup could emerge from a classroom full of men serving double-digit sentences for offenses ranging from car-jacking to murder. Launched in 2010, The Last Mile is a tech incubator at San Quentin State Prison. Many of the inmates in the program will spend years in prison and some may never leave, but TLM is aimed at helping them find their voice and, for those who do leave, a job. Like many entrepreneurs, founders Chris Redlitz and his wife, Beverly Parenti, set out to fix a problem. "In California, we spend more for prisons than for higher education," Parenti said. "The average cost per prisoner per year is $45,000. So when many men leave San Quentin, we have already invested nearly $1 million for their incarceration." Two nights a week, a select group of inmates gather to learn about technology and innovation. To get into the Last Mile, inmates complete the in-prison college ...

Crazy Startup Of The Day -  PickyDomains.com http://www.missnowmrs.com/ CHICAGO – It took three stressful trips to the motor vehicle department before newlywed Danielle Tate finally succeeded in changing her name. Her frustration unleashed a new business that has saved thousands of brides from the same headache. “I complained to my new husband that this is ridiculous, why isn’t there some sort of service that does as much of the paperwork for you as possible?” said Ms. Tate, 29. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Well, you should do it.’” Six years later, MissNowMrs.com has helped some 82,000 users change their married names. At the cost of US$29.95, plus fees with various government agencies, the website offers an integrated process Ms. Tate likens to filing taxes on TurboTax. She estimated it saves about 13 hours of wasted time, on average. “It’s sort of amazing in this day and age and level of technology that there is still this amount of red tape associated with changing to your...

Coming up with a name for your new company or domain name for your new venture may seem like an impossible task – you’ve already thought about hundred different names, but they are all boring. All the good domain names are taken long ago or being sold for thousands of dollars. You were never the creative type. Excuses, excuses, excuses. In fact, business name ideas are actually fairly easy to come up with, if you use these tools 1. Crowdsourcing PickyDomains is the most famous crowdsourcing naming service thanks to a unique business model adopted – unlike naming agencies that charge thousands of dollars upfront, with PickyDomains you pay ONLY if you decide to use on the name or ideas suggested by their contributors. So you don’t pay anything if you did not like anything, as simple as that. And if PickyDomains came up with a perfect company name or domain for it – all you pay is $50. That’s something even the most cash strapped business can afford. 2. Brainstorming 2.0 Have you ever he...

Crazy Startup Of The Day -  PickyDomains.com   http://www.idreamofspace.com/ A new startup company’s $10 space posters come with a chance to win a ride on a suborbital space vehicle. Called ”I Dream of Space,” the company is selling 25,000 posters at $10 apiece, the proceeds of which should cover a $200,000 ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 seat on XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx, plus some profit for the company’s founders. No spaceflight company has yet made a commercial flight, and it could be years before they do, but that day is approaching. “Given the kind of progress we’re seeing with these companies, and the customers lining up, it’s going to happen soon. It has to happen,” said company co-founder Reuben Metcalfe. “If companies continue building the way they are building, and we build a robust community, it’s going to pan out.” Metcalfe, a 25-year-old New Zealander, and several friends founded the company in November 2011 as part of Startup Weekend. Metcalfe s...

Crazy Startup Of The Day -   PickyDomains.com http://lock8.me/ Franz Salzmann’s bike had just been stolen. His friend, Daniel Zajarias-Fainsod, had found his own bike filched two days earlier. Over coffee, the friends and students at Oxford University decided it was time to build a better bike lock. “We were very annoyed,” says Salzmann. “Locks today are so bad!” That was in 2012. After extensive research on bike-theft techniques and existing locks, the entrepreneurs have introduced their solution: Lock8, a keyless smart lock with a GPS tracker, motion and temperature sensors (in case a burglar tries freezing the lock), and a “painfully loud” alarm that goes off if someone cuts the lock cable or so much as moves the bike. When the alarm goes off, users receive a push notification to their smartphones. The movement sensor can be adjusted to be more or less sensitive so simple jostling won’t unnecessarily trigger the alarm. To build the first prototypes, Salzmann and Zajarias-Fains...

Chat has a bad reputation. So let’s clarify – business chat is not something creepy nor a chatroom full of MLM scumbags. Business chat or group chat is an essential communication tool for your company that’s entirely private. Business chat, enterprise chat and group chat are sometimes used interchangeably – it’s hard to find a person who has not heard of WhatsApp or GroupMe. However, there is a difference – group chats are just about chat, while business chat typically incorporates tools frequently used by businesses like tasks, project management, collaboration, file sharing, HR and so on. So let’s talk about best free business or enterprise chats, meaning communication tools for business with VERY generous free plan. Bitrix24 is probably the most popular free enterprise chat platform outside Skype and deservedly so. It’s also the one I know best, because I use it for my businesses, so get ready for specifics you probably don’t care about. The free plan includes 12 users and 5 GB of...

  Crazy Startup Of The Day -   PickyDomains.com   http://smokespoutinerie.com/ The founder of Toronto-based Smoke's Poutinerie had $400,000 to launch his fast-food chain, but not a dime of it went toward advertising. He opened his first store in November 2008, serving variations on the dish of french fries, cheese curds and gravy. To get the word out, he turned to the one marketing medium he could use for free: Social media. He signed up with Facebook just as the first restaurant opened and took to Twitter six months later. During the first six months, Smolkin put in nearly five hours a night sending invites to friends of friends from the company's account. His method worked: About 500 people accepted his requests and lines soon began to form around the block of his restaurant. Soon, customers were doing the friending themselves: Smoke's had almost 1,000 friends by the end of 2009 and his followers kept growing. "People started inviting their own friends," he said...

Crazy Startup Of The Day - PickyDomains.com   https://hourlynerd.com/ Linio, an e-commerce startup based in Mexico City, couldn’t afford Bain or McKinsey when it needed help pricing new products ranging from vintage wines to billiard tables. So this summer it farmed the work out to Anya Rasulova, a 2013 Wharton School MBA who was looking to make some money before starting a full-time job at EBay (EBAY). “We had so many things to develop in a short period of time,” says Bernardo Cordero, Linio’s managing director. “It was too complicated to do it all internally.” Cordero paid Rasulova, who worked in management consulting for three years prior to business school, $1,500 for an assignment that took about 35 hours. He estimates a small consulting firm would have charged $20,000. A growing number of companies are using freelance MBAs to access the same brain power they might find at a top-tier consulting firm. The demand has given rise to online marketplaces that are a cross between exe...