photo credit: woodleywonderworks

I recently came across an article naming the top 25 most creative business people in the world today. Some of them i found to be quite interesting and not someone that i would have ever thought of until i read this article. Below are a few of these top most creative business people, visit Fast Company to view all 25 of them.

1. Melinda Gates. As Bill Gates wife she has been said by Bill himself that the company would never even exist if it wasn’t for her input and influences she gives him.
2. Reed Hastings the founder of Netflix has broadened his range of Netflix devices to not just the Internet (as originally planned) but to the TV and other Netflix read devices.
3. Stella McCartney is said to be the new face for responsible clothing. In her designs there is no leather or fur used to create her luxurious clothing line.

You have to admire a guy gutsy enough to build an office building in Paris taller than the Eiffel Tower. By 2012, Thom Mayne’s 68-story La Phare (”the Lighthouse”) will rise over the La Defense district. The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner is famous for audacious buildings: the bunkerlike Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles that locals call the “Death Star”; the disjointed Cahill Center at Caltech; the mesh-covered science and art center at New York’s Cooper Union.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: chanchan222

Many are up in arms about the recent announcement of Disney buying out the long time favorite Marvel comics. Many wonder what this will forecast for Marvels many characters in the future. Will they change drastically, will they get rid of some of the characters that people love?

One sure thing about this transition is that Disney is in a place where they can provide 3D qualities to the Marvel characters, and some of the Marvel characters would be awesome in 3D light!

While yes Disney has always been known to be a fluffier side of character story telling, they may be the perfect solution to Marvel characters. Remember reading your Marvel comics and thinking to yourself how you wish they had brighter color, more actions, looked more realistic, came in 3D, or simply were just plain better then what you were looking at? Well Disney definitely has the capability of doing all of these things for all 5 thousand of the Marvel characters.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Your beer will remain cold until the last sip at Aces on First in Duluth because of a unique innovation added to the bar.

Aces on First became the first bar in Minnesota to install stainless steel coasters known as Chilldiscs that keep a 4-inch surface in front of every barstool at a frosty 26 degrees.

“It really keeps the drinks cold. It’s new, innovative and it’s fun,” Patronas said. “It was scary at first to have someone drill into your bar, but Aces wants to be cutting edge.”

Chilldisc, which was invented by Fred Kent of Westminster, Md., has reached bars in 13 states, mainly on the East Coast, since it was introduced to market last year. Kent’s invention pumps a corn-oil substance from insulated tubes underneath the bar to each coaster.

“It’s like a food-grade antifreeze, but there are no coils like a standard refrigerator,” said Kent, who has worked on the invention since 2004 after a 30-year career in the commercial refrigerator and metal fabrication businesses. “It’s a proprietary method of cooling to get the same results.”

“It’s a great product because it gives a competitive advantage,” Bradley said. “In the recession and this economy, it helps to get that happy-hour crowd.” He also said bars can offset their cost by selling the advertising space on top of the coasters.

Photo by Chilldisc.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Springwise:

Digital greetings are all very well, but it seems there’s something about the tangible paper card that just can’t be replaced. We’ve written about talking gift tags and greeting cards with online attachments, and now there’s Burney Cards, combining an artist-designed, fold-out paper card with a burnable CD tucked inside.

Created by Dutch firm Schmeitz+Freitag, the Burney CD Card provides content-sharing consumers with a giftable alternative to download links and plastic jewel cases.

The current line includes 24 styles of cards designed by up-and-coming artists. With designs for a variety of occasions, the cards let users record music, pictures or video onto the matching CD and send it along in the included slot, with a personalized message written on the card itself.

The 15-by-15-cm cards are priced at EUR 5.95 each, with an introductory offer that provides one free card for every 10 purchased. Burney Cards were named finalists in this year’s Creative Amsterdam Award.

Photo by Schmeitz+Freitag.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Reclining in his Peel St. office in an ergonomic chair of his own design, wearing a sleek black golf shirt with matching rims and watchband – Michel Dallaire is Bixi personified.

Smart, bold, elegant.

And yet, says the Montreal industrial designer who dreamed up the Bixi system, he’s been wearing the same type of shoe for 23 years.

Dallaire is full of surprises. In fact, he’s staked his whole career on the element of surprise, he said.

“All my life, I’ve been looking for that ‘wow,’ ” he said.

Dallaire’s office is littered with tokens of success, including the torch he designed for the 1976 Olympics – he refused a gold-plated version – and a row of futuristic seating commissioned for the University of Montreal.

His wall space is crowded with five diplomas, the Order of Canada and the Order of Quebec.

In his 43-year career, Dallaire has designed coffee urns, briefcases, swimming pools and subway cars, always looking for that “wow” or frisson.

But the bike share system he conceived last year is eliciting more than just shivers.

Bixi received rave reviews from all sides after its launch this spring and is being eyeballed by a growing number of cities, including Vancouver, Seattle, Minneapolis, Toronto, Ottawa, Gatineau and New York. The concept looks poised to sweep the continent.

Photo by The Gazette.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Men With Pens:

Not thinking and not caring.

That doesn’t mean you don’t care about the work you’re doing. There’s a huge difference between not thinking and not caring. When you don’t care, you’re just slapping words into a sentence or throwing images up onto the page. Whatever works – you just don’t give a damn.

But when you’re not thinking, you’re allowing yourself to be open to new ideas. You’ve loosened your creativity and set it free to go where it will. You start to think in new directions and try new ways of doing things.

This freedom of creativity is one of the main reasons you’ll find so many people encouraging you to take breaks, go for a walk, play with the kids or have a nap. These common-sense ideas have a deeper goal:

They let your brain loose to play so that you can do your best work.

Photo by RobertOak.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Washington Post:

Les Paul, 94, a Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuoso and inventor of the solid-body electric guitar who helped bring his instrument to the forefront of jazz and rock-and-roll performance, died today at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. He had pneumonia.

Paul first came to prominence for his fast and flashy jazz-guitar style, which backed such entertainers as Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he and singer Mary Ford, his wife, had hits with “How High the Moon,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Vaya con Dios” and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.”

All along, he refined musical inventions in his workshop. He was an early designer of an electric guitar that had a solid body, and his model managed to reduce sound distortions common to acoustic instruments.

He actively promoted such guitars for the Gibson company, and the Les Paul line of guitars became commonplace among such musicians as bluesman Eric Clapton and rockers Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.

Paul called his first solid-body guitar “the Log.” It was made of a four-inch thick piece of wood from a nearby railroad track, a neck he borrowed from an Epiphone guitar and two pickups to give it the electric pulse. Audiences and music executives laughed at the ungainly device, and he spent years honing its visual appeal.

Photos by Dan Grossi-AP/Richard Drew-AP.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

From 1790 until 1870, U.S. patent law required inventors to submit actual physical models of their novel machines along with their drawings and descriptions.

These miniature testaments to innovation — “not more than twelve inches square … neatly made” — are the subject of a new exhibition at Harvard University, Patent Republic.

The display draws on the collection of Susan Glendening, a New York psychoanalyst by day and fervent collector by night. Seventy-five of her models are on display in Cambridge.

Below are four models. Take the test. Can you tell what they do?

Invention A:

Invention B:

Invention C:

Invention D:

Answers:

A = “Apparatus For Physical Culture” was a predecessor to the Bowflex and pulley-driven weight lifting machines.

B = The fringemaker pictured is rare among patent models in that it actually works. (The plastic spools are not from the original.)

C = You couldn’t always change the incline of your bed with a remote control. This pillow support was adjusted by a simple thumb screw.

D = This machine for cutting lozenges is hand painted. According to the patent, the machine will allow for the manufacture of “the flat pieces of confectionery known in the trade as ‘lozenges,” with “exactness and rapidity.”

Photos by Susan M. E. Glendening.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Nothing puts the DIY in climbing a building like a homemade pair of suction gloves. Inventor Jem Stansfield used his vacuum-powered device to clamber up the 120-foot aluminum wall of the White City building in London last week.

Each glove consists of wooden panels edged with latex and attached via tubing to its own motor. The motors were cannibalized from two vacuum cleaners and housed in a wooden backpack of sorts. Pressing the gloves flat against a surface creates the vacuum effect, which can be toggled through a shutter on the back.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Dress For Dinner Napkin. Dressing for dinner has never been so easy!

Disposable Lighter Camcorder. Perfect for spying on smokers and pyromaniacs.

Goldfish Trash Bags. The neighbors will be calling the ASPCA within minutes.

Mix Stix. Be the percussion hero of your kitchen.

Photos by perpetualkid/redferret/trendsnow.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.