Quick
Pitch: Quirky is a social product development company founded
in June 2009 by 23-year-old entrepreneur Ben Kaufman.
Genius
Idea: At its core, Quirky builds consumer products. It sells cable
organizers, a modular spatula system, and double-sided USB sticks. It’s how they create and
develop their products that really makes them stand out, though.
Quirky
describes itself as a “social product development company.” It
essentially crowdsources product ideas and then places them at the mercy
of Quirky’s thousands of users. The community votes on which ones they
want to develop and then adds its input on things such as product
aesthetics, design, logo, and even its name. The best ideas are then
taken by Quirky’s team of engineers and designers and turned into 3D
renderings.
The next step is the most important one: the product
is then placed on pre-sale, where anyone can buy the product. However,
Quirky will only sell something if it hits a minimum number of sale
commitments (usually under a thousand). Once that number is reached,
the product is made and person who submitted the original idea gets a
piece of the revenue pie.
The video embedded above is pretty easy to follow despite being a screencast of a complex design application. The developer simply drags and drops a few elements onto the screen to initialize the video input device, recognize a marker, and incorporate a 3D model of a teapot. After connecting a few dots and tweaking some settings, we see the teapot appearing on an AR marker via the developer's webcam.
The experience itself is not the impressive thing - fans of AR have seen webcams place objects on black and white makers for a while now. What is interesting about this video is how quickly and easily the plugins for Quartz made what is normally a fairly complex process of programming an AR app.
This application is an innovative implementation of the ARToolKit, a free and open-source library for creating AR apps created in 1999. Just as SDKs for platforms like the iPhone make mobile app development much easier, these types of plugins for visual design tools will make the development of AR apps quick and easy. The easier (and cheaper) it is to develop AR applications, the faster the technology will grow and the more exposure it will receive in the public eye.
Source: readwriteweb
Within a few months, it gained the kind of momentum most entrepreneurs
only dream about. Tech bloggers praised it, and users flocked to it.
Ashton Kutcher posted a video online showing him and his wife, Demi Moore,
using the service.
But then Mr. Dodsworth received a message from a company he did recognize: Betaworks, a New York City technology firm known for its eye for emerging Web services.
“Money is nice, but I actually needed expertise more than anything else,” he said. “Betaworks had a track record in this field back when no one had a track record in this field.”
In the two years since then, Betaworks has become prominent in New York technology circles for helping entrepreneurs fine-tune and expand their companies. The company has guided some entrepreneurs to lucrative sales and helped others raise cash from notable New York and Silicon Valley investment firms.
Such incubators are familiar in more established tech hubs. Silicon Valley, for example, has the technology incubator Y Combinator, and Pasadena has Idealab.But how about other businesses? Manufacturers? B2B service providers? Equine dentists? Are they experimenting with social media?
You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media.
Source: Mashable