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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Buzzwords. They proliferate in the tech and innovation sector like nowhere else. Every day you hear some new expression and you’re not sure whether to whack it into your business plan and impress the investors with how happening you are, or whether it’s one of those which is going to make everyone in the room [...]

As researchers continue to explore new ways to promote and improve solar power, Spanish companies are becoming world leaders in this emerging field. In the last few years the number of installed photovoltaic systems has been growing exponentially and Spain is about to become a leader in innovation and generating advanced solutions in the industry of [...]

Joining innovatrs has some great advantages for startups, entrepreneurs and innovative souls. Not least of these is the 7-stage, 49-phase, innovate framework which takes our extensive experience and knowledge to create one of the most practical startup frameworks you can imagine. So today I thought I’d give a little sneak preview into one of the [...]

New technologies have sparked a rapidly evolving business culture, forcing organisations to re-evaluate their established processes: they must innovate or miss out on gaining a competitive edge.  Companies have traditionally focused their internal innovation resources on the limited aim of enhancing a specific set of core products, rather than the broader goal of ingenuity for [...]

Here we go again. Tonight marks the return of the seventh series of The Apprentice, just five months after the last one. On this occasion, the budding ‘apprentices’ are not vying for a place in Lord Sugar’s company. Instead, the winner will receive a £250,000 investment in their business, a gesture that has been designed [...]

Facebook is apparently valued at over $50bn; Groupon rejected a $6bn buyout from Google when the ‘deal-of-the-day’ website was only two years-old; and if rumours are to be believed, TweetDeck was recently acquired by Twitter for over $40m…not bad for a company with a mere fifteen employees. There’s little question we’re in the middle of [...]

There is no shortage of advice to early stage businesses: we have our own innovate framework to help you build your business. But there’s one place where most entrepreneurs stumble: how to get the first sale. We are taught how to size the market, how to value your market potential, how to protect your IP, and more [...]