Category Archives: Entrepreneur

Turn Your Bed Into A Smart Bed

Beddit

We spend around one-third of our life sleeping. Sleep plays a crucial role in good health and well-being. Getting enough quality sleep helps protect our mental health, physical health, and quality of life. The damage from sleep deficiency can harm you over time. For example, ongoing bad sleep can raise your risk for some chronic health problems. It also can affect how well you think, react, learn, and get along with others.  But, as our lives become faster and our stress levels increase, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sleep peacefully at night. There’s a new product which could change all that. It’s called the Beddit, and you sleep on it.

Beddit is an innovative ultra-thin film sensor that measures how you sleep. The device uses ‘ballistocardiography’, with a sensor that is sensitive enough to measure the mechanical forces that come from your heart beat, your pattern of breathing, and the way you move in bed. Simply place Beddit  under the sheet and it will connect wirelessly to your smartphone. In the morning, the accompanying app will draw a full report on your personal sleep habits and will and suggest how to improve the quality of your sleep.

Learn more about Beddit here.

What Sparks Our Fire: An innovative monitor that can help us reach good health and general well-being.

Would you try Beddit?

This Is How You Can Change The World With An App

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Mobile apps have proven to be popular for solving numerous modern-day problems. Here is an app that can help you make a better impact on the environment. But before we get started:

Did you know that the average person generates four pounds of trash every single day and that only 30% of that gets recycled? And, did you also know that recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to listen to a full album on your iPod? Or that, recycling 100 cans could light your bedroom for two whole weeks. So, why are we recycling so little? Well, simply because it is so much easier to dump our trash into a single bin and get it over with. But, 26 year-old Blake Rupe, is trying to change our bad habits by making recycling fun, with her recently launched app Re-APP.

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Re-App is designed to help people track and share their recycling habits. The app turns recycling into a competitive game that encourages players to measure and track their daily recycling efforts and get the highest amount of waste. Within the app, users can document what they recycle into a virtual bin, share their progress on social media, and see what other friends who have the app have recycled on a virtual leaderboard. Each material recycled brings someone closer to the glory of being deemed the “winner.” You can download Re-APP here

What Sparks our Fire: A mobile app that helps us visualize our impact on the world.

Are you ready to join the movement?

A Smarter Way To Network

swivelCard

Most business cards end up in the trash or stored in a drawer, becoming forgotten in an instant. This has resulted in a number of creative attempts to innovate this networking utility in ways that will make them more effective.

Introducing swivelCard, the latest product in this space, which integrates a printed USB drive with a regular business card. When folded up and inserted into a USB port, it directs the recipient to open a web page. What’s cool is, that site address can be changed after the fact, so you could hand a prospective client a business card that leads to your homepage and, subsequently, have that particular card navigate to a different page instead.

swivelCards can also be tracked as to their location and the times when the cards are used. In addition to standing out from the crowd of normal business cards, you can give your swivelCard with pictures, videos and presentations for the anyone to check out. Plus, analytics through a back-end software interface will allow you to access helpful information about your cards and how they are being used.

What Sparks Our Fire: A business card that people will actually remember, keep and use

What information would you share on your swivelCard?

Upgrade Your Contacts

Humin

It’s no secret that most of Apple’s native apps are lacking in features and there are third party apps that function much better. The one app that I previously saw no need to improve was my Contacts app. It simply does a great job of saving my contact’s phone numbers and email addresses in a simple format. Well, after downloading Humin I now can see how much I’ve been missing out on.

Humin does much more than keep track of how to contact the people you know, it reminds you how you know people, helps you remember them, and can even help you contact them. When adding a new contact into the app, by just entering a phone number or email address, it will automatically add a photo, where and when you added the contact, and where they work. While these features may appear intrusive, Humin guarantees that they are only taking the minimum amount of data onto their servers, so majority of it they will never have access to. Swiping over a contacts picture allows you to call them right from the app, or it can take you to your text message conversation with them, allowing you to use this app to fully replace the green phone app.

This app redefines what a contacts app can do by bringing your contacts into the 21st century, far away from the days of keeping a rolodex on your desk.

What Sparks our Fire: Apps that help us out.

Are you ready to improve your contacts app?

Need a Hand?

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Sometimes you find yourself in need of a little help. And when your network of friends who are skilled enough and willing to lend a hand runs out, you need another resource on where to turn. Fiverr has raised around $30 million for their website that can simply lend a hand when you need it.

Fiverr allows you to hire someone to help you with a specific service, starting at just $5. Need someone to design your business a logo? Record a jingle for you? Or review your resume for you? All of these services can be found on Fiverr. If you choose to pay more than just $5 you can get even more extensive services.

We aren’t suggesting you rely on Fiverr for every service you need. But, it’s great to know that for just five bucks, you could easily find someone to lend a hand.

What Sparks our Fire: Seeing new services that can ultimately help with anything

What would you use Fiverr for?