It’s almost the end of January already and we’ve probably got new resolutions and new motivation, but are we about to go full speed on another year without a plan? I can’t stress how important it is to write down your business plan.  I learned the hard way by leaping straight into doing design work [...]

There’s nothing like the feeling you get seeing your new business in print for the first time, but PR is often seen as one of the great mysteries to startups, so here is a quick demystifying guide to how to get the best results. 1. Take your time building your story Go back to basics, What’s [...]

The Internet. Made for talking cats and skateboarding dogs. Oh, and innovative startups. So as we’re at that silly time of the year when people are trawling around Youtube looking for more cuddly things on video, we thought we’d show you 6 ways your startup is rather similar to your miaowing pal. 1. You own [...]

Creativity strikes at unexpected moments. Sometimes, Innovatrs have to go off the grid to get inspired. So our 5th and final innovative gift is The Cave from Heimplanet, geekily beautiful yet practical. Heimplanet was inspired by the molecular structure of a diamond, one of the most stable and efficient forms in nature. The geodesic Inflatable [...]

Spies and Innovatrs alike will love the Victorinox Flash Laser, 4th in our week of innovative gifts. It’s a pocketknife with a 64GB flash drive and a laser pointer, ideal for business trips. Amazingly, it’s also got a nail file, screwdriver, scissors, pen and blade. We think it’d be great for important pitch presentations. With [...]

For the 3rd day of our series of innovative gifts we bring you the Levitron Revolution, a genius little piece of technology that actually levitates small objects. You read that right. The base contains four electromagnets which levitate the small disc when it’s positioned exactly in the centre. Then you can put any 12oz object [...]

Welcome to day 2 in our weeklong series of gifts to delight the innovator in your life. Yes, these are a pair of gloves. They’re not your average, thoughtless gloves. Today we’re featuring touchscreen gloves, designed to keep those precious hands warm as they email you. They’re not the most spectacular present in the world, [...]

Innovatrs are disruptive. They think outside the system and create new paradigms. They’re also maddeningly difficult to shop for. What do you buy the innovatr in your life? Don’t worry – every day this week we’ll feature a different gadget to give you a gift idea. Have you ever wondered what your innovatr’s voice looks [...]

A few days ago we focused on Finnish innovation. Now it’s time for a look at Israel, another small country punching above its weight. Israel has an unusually high number of engineers per capita, products of the highly-esteemed Technion university in Haifa. Israel is also rated just behind the US in the number of companies [...]

Today, we’re taking a look at Finnish innovation. The little Nordic country is a hotbed of ingenuity and the birthplace of successful start-ups like Angry Birds. Finland has $46 of venture capital investment per capita, leading some to call it the Arctic Valley of Europe. Here are our three favourite start-ups, and our views on [...]

ASOS – The king of Digital – A company born and bred out of the digital revolution, it’s no wonder that they would do everything right when it comes to digital.

Internet privacy is a hot topic. Growing public awareness of how sites like Google and Facebook use your information has gone hand in hand with high-profile privacy scandals. Similarly, more people know about the threat posed by phishing and malware. The result is a loss of trust in the Internet. Consumers want to proactively protect [...]

Webdoc is the latest creative start-up to get our juices flowing. It’s a tool for creating rich media content, started by a group of innovative Swiss. Here’s how it works. You sign up for the service, which is completely free as of now. You create a new post which pops up as a blank canvas. [...]

We usually think of geeks, techies, product developers et al as being glued 24/7 to their computer screens, but they actually, every once in a while, socialise OFFline and gather to drink beers and eat pizzas. Meetup.com, a NYC start-up, has become an offline social networking success story. Founded during the dotcom boom era, it [...]

A few weeks ago, we talked about location-based social networking from a marketing perspective. Today, we’re having a look at innovative start-ups which use geographically based technology. First up is Batchgeo, an incredibly user-friendly mapping service working in tandem with Google Maps. It converts spreadsheets full of addresses into personalized maps, saving you the labour [...]

It’s been a busy week in the music industry – here’s what caught our attention. Facebook’s expansion into music has stimulated all kinds of exciting startups since the f8 introduction of the Open Graph. 3rd party developers can display users’ activities on their Facebook pages, and on the real-time Ticker. So, users see what songs [...]

An examination of the recent trend for high-profile celebrities to involve themselves in the hyper-saturated brave new world of emerging startups, specifically as evidenced by the recent actions of Leo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher.

Last month Business Insider produced a piece called  ‘no more like this or we’ll scream’ which talked about the categories of startup which are now so saturated that there’s no point in trying to penetrate them. We probably recognise these ourselves – “not another photo sharing service”, more “very similar to what I saw yesterday daily [...]

This morning I was having a belated peek at yesterday’s unveiling of the iPhone 4S, the newest installment in a long-line of consumer-adored products from Apple computers, one of the stars of today’s tech-centric economy. However, upon perusing through my status-populated Facebook news-feed this morning, I was deceived by some comments into having some negative [...]

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” –Albert Einstein This Friday we’ve decided to showcase a conversation with Yoni Binstock, a young entrepreneur and member of our Innovatrs community. This American from Cleveland, Ohio has been working on an an innovative [...]

It seems like forever that Google have been on top of the world, both figuratively in a business context and quite literally, what with the organization’s penchant for camera satellites in outer space and one’s ability to ‘Google Map’ anything from the Taj Mahal to the Pyramids to your fifth grade teacher’s house. Google has [...]

With the success and popularity of Zynga’s FarmVille and other such applications, marketers the world over have acknowledged the subtle potential of fusing entertainment with marketing, gamification, as a means of stimulating engagement and encouraging consumer participation with the brand. An exploration of the merits of using gamification tactics as a means of marketing innovatively.

This week is Dreamforce week in San Francisco. It’s probably an insult to call it a user event: although targeted at users of Salesforce it’s become an industry highlight,  one of those where tech press will wait for the big news in the Cloud and beyond. Although by no means can we think of Salesforce [...]

Networking is one of the best ways of making sure that you’re successful in business, although it’s something that many people who work for themselves often forget when they’re based at home all the time. The same can also be said for businesses with employees, who can often stagnate pretty rapidly in an office environment [...]

As competition gets tougher and tougher more companies are using social media and crowdsourcing, asking their customers to provide ideas and help in the decision-making when tackling issues and achieving goals. Social media and crowdsourcing are powerful tools for a company to communicate with consumers when it comes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. Businesses [...]