Innovation & Creative Sites Worth Visiting

Hi All, Just a few innovation & creative links I wanted to share with you:

www.kickstarter.com Use this site to obtain funding for a new idea. Check it out, a great concept. Used for consumer products, books, movies, poems, music, anything really. Inventors find funding through offering something to their funders (like a first edition or something).

www.quirky.com This is the website of a crowd sourcing product maker. The Quirky team seem to have a fantastic grasp on how to take everyday things and reinvent them in innovative ways. A better mousetrap? Probably in the works at Quirky. You can also get paid for your ideas and contribution to a product. The perfect solution for anyone not short on ideas but a bit fuzzy on the execution and low on time.

www.inventables.com This site boasts that it is the hardware store for innovators. I signed up for the email newsletter. Some of the new hardware items coming on to the market are pretty cool. I have no idea how to use them but it has been great to see what people are dreaming up.

www.inhabitat.com I have found this site to be a great resource for all things related to green or eco design. Some really great articles on urban farming for example.

www.appmakr.com This website is one of those "platforms" that helps users make simple apps for iPhone, Android and Windows. I tried a few and found this one to be pretty great for a number of reasons. The in built functionality they support is pretty good and does allow for a phone gap or HTML5 drop-in by you (i.e. full customization). The service is also free (with ads in your apps) but the ads don't look too bad and you can easily make an app without ads for an additional fee.


Some other great sites (just for some of the services they offer):

www.zite.com  If you have an iPad then you simply must get zite. When you do get it you can basically make you own magazine/newspaper (or rather, Zite will do that for you). This isn't your average RSS feed collector app but it has an algorithm inside to learn what you like and to give you more of it. I was blown away at how quickly Zite started delivering me exactly what I wanted on a daily basis - I was engrossed in every article. How many of us could pick up a magazine or newspaper and say that? Try it, you will be impressed.

www.docs.google.com I love google docs for hosting all kinds of files and sharing documents


www.dropbox.com Also a great cloud "soft-drive" for you to park documents and files, even photos. Has a great photo handler that will make a sharable gallery out of any photos you drop in the photo folder.


picasa.google.com Like google docs but for photos.


www.flikr.com The yahoo version of picasa


groups.google.com Now this is useful for a number of things. As a forum or "group discussion" (well, that is a forum isn't it?). One of the coolest things you can do with a google group is create group messaging by emailing one address. So step 1 - create your group, step 2 - add people and their emails to it, step 3 - you get a group email address. Anyone can now use that email address to contact everyone on the list. Good idea for sports teams, class coordinators, sales reps etc. I like this feature and even though you can do this manually on outlook and other email applications I think google groups is a winner for public events and community groups.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find some useful ideas & tools through these links.

Respectfully,
Pete

Five Ideas to Change the World: Issue 1
Buy at Amazon.com
Kindle and Paperback