Entrepreneurs: Collection I
by Miki Saxon
I read about a lot of startups, but the ones that really resonate with me are the ones that are doing more than creating a business.
I can’t write them all up, so I though I’d give you the links to a few favorites along with my reasons.
For Israel and Palestine, entrepreneurial passion may do what so-called diplomacy has failed to do.
Even by Middle East standards, the scene in a Dead Sea restaurant, situated within a “green zone”–a no-man’s-land claimed by neither Israelis nor Palestinians–was surreal.
What do you get when you combine an Israeli Special Forces commando, an Arab investor and a religious Zionist? An ultra hot startup called Webydo.
Webydo has removed software code developers and programmers from the picture – enabling professional graphic designers to create sites on the fly for ten times cheaper, and far faster.
I am a dedicated recycler, so you can imagine my feelings when my grocer stopped taking plastic bags for recycling. When I asked why he said that China wasn’t accepting them for recycling, so there was no place to send them. Terrific! We use all that energy to send them to China, so they can ship back whatever they made from them.
I much prefer a solution being developed by Sierra Energy called the FastOx Pathfinder.
The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, … can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.
As you can see, the apps that entrepreneurs and investors seem to love aren’t on my interest list; they mostly solve the imagined problems of “affluent and hyper-connected 20-somethings in cities with great cell service and ample Wi-Fi” who prefer impersonal sex-without-strings, bargains and inane pastimes.
But there’s finally an app a parent can truly love—especially when separated from their children in a war-torn country—from an entrepreneur who had the sense to avoid the bleeding edge.
According to UNICEF, RapidFTR’s ability to photograph, record and share information about lost children has reduced the time it takes to reunite families from over six weeks to just hours. The app was not particularly complicated, from a technical standpoint, but Mr. Just wanted to make sure it was something aid organizations would actually adopt.
Personal annoyance, in this case with charging wires, has always been an innovation driver, but stubbornness and a silo-breaking mentality also help. And even after all that, Meredith Perry still had a difficult time getting uBeam funded—well, of course SHE did.
Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. (…) Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.
Finally, on a lighter note, another woman is out to abolish the need for the underwire that provides all that lift that women tolerate and men crave.
In this case, 3-D has nothing to do with 3-D fabric printing, but rather with the way the Curvessence technology used in the brand’s lingerie works. Cohen says the nylon polymers sculpt to conform to a woman’s torso, and “remembers” its shape over time, slowly returning to its original form if it is temporarily stretched, for instance.
Flickr image credit: Seth Waite
