Can stickers be art? Yes, stickers. The little pieces of paper or vinyl with sticky backs that you stick to things.

Well HU2 seem to think so as they’ve created a series of vinyl wall stickers that retail from £15 for £49 each.

Of course, their stickers are a little quirkier than the usual and include everything from cityscapes to fake birdcages to trails of ants pointing the way to your kitchen.

You can even send them a photo of yourself and get it turned into some sticker-style artwork.

Site: www.hu2.com/stickers

Micro Giardini are aluminum cans prepacked with seeds and ‘a growing compound’. Open them up, add water and a few weeks later you’ve got a miniature garden.

The varieties on sale change throughout the year and you can even order ones with custom labels – opening up a whole mess of commercial possibilities.

Ideal for would-be apartment-dwelling gardeners and the micro businesses that want to sell to them.

Site: www.microgiardini.com

Storytime is one of those great shared experiences between a child and his parents or grandparents, that, in a perfect world, no child would go without. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world and hectic work schedules, travel and geography often conspire to make storytime a near impossibility.

Living miles away from his own parents, Coby Neuenschwander faced this exact problem with his son Oliver:

“Because of the distance between Oliver and his grandparents, they were having trouble establishing a meaningful relationship. Visits only happened a couple of times per year, phone calls were inadequate, and video chat alone didn’t hold Oliver’s attention. Reading together became the vehicle for establishing and strengthening the relationship between grandparent and grandchild.”

So he developed Readeo.com, combining childrens’ books with video chat to help recreate the shared reading experience.

Readeo users create an account, choose from a selection of childrens’ books and then use their web cams to effectively read the book together. Both parties can see and hear each other, interact, turn the book’s pages and select books to read.

Guest access to a selected “Book of the Month” is free while a $9.95 monthly subscription buys you full access to the entire library (drawn from Readeo’s partners, including Simon and Schuster and Candlewick Press).

And while it can’t replicate the experience of tucking your kid in at night, where this isn’t possible, Readeo is a great alternative.

From a business perspective, it’s also a fantastic example of how existing technologies can be adapted and repurposed for a new market. Which begs the question: where else could this kind of idea be applied?

Site: www.readeo.com

Sugru, London

OK, so Sugru is not strictly based in Ireland but the idea was dreamt up by an Irish student.

Irish Product Design student Jane had an idea for a material that would help her “hack the stuff” she owned so that it worked better for her. Two materials scientists and six years later, Sugru was born.

Looking a bit like silly putty, Sugru is a moldable modelling-clay-goo-type-stuff that sticks to lots of other materials and cures at room temperature to a silicon rubber. What that means in practice is that you can use Sugru to fix or even redesign all sorts of everyday objects.

Mass production rarely results in products which are a perfect fit for any one person -  which the whole point really, mass produced objects have to suit the masses. Sugru lets people tweak the products in their lives to create things that work better for them in the same way that techies hack code.

“Why are so many mass-produced products just so bad? Uncomfortable tin openers, leaky trainers, they get our goat! Why should you have to spend £20 on a designer tin opener?? You shouldn’t! Hack the one you have instead. Power to the (handy) people!”

And even if you’re not feeling particularly handy, Sugru’s also great for protecting your kit (it’s waterproof and rubbery when cured) and fixing broken stuff.

From Etsy to Make, people are rediscovering their handiness, creating new products and hacking existing ones. No wonder Sugru’s been getting rave reviews in everything from Wired to The Telegraph.

Expect “to sugru” to become a verb soon.

Site: www.sugru.com

[Note: Make sure to check out the Sugru blog for tons of fascinating and creative hacks from users.]

BubbleBum, Derry

UK regulations require children between 3 and 12 to use a booster seat when traveling by car. Unfortunately booster seats are cumbersome and uncomfortable plastic contraptions that neither kids nor parents like.

Derry-based mother of two, Grainne Kelly, knew all too well exactly what this meant in practice – booster seats were often left out, particularly when traveling abroad.

“I am from the travel industry and have had lots of clients (myself included!!!!) arriving at car hire desks who have not had the booster seat that was ordered at the time of booking. The car hire firms claim that the seats are on request which is not much use when you are standing in an airport with tired kids and no seat available.”

So she invented the BubbleBum, the world’s first inflatable car booster seat.

Not only does it conform to all relevant safety standards but it also folds away neatly when deflated, can fit three across the back seat of the car and is actually nice to sit on.

Problem solved.

Idea vs. Implementation

Which would be great in itself. But Grainne has taken hold of her idea with both hands and run with it.

Taking what she call a ‘calculated risk’, she arranged manufacturing in China, safety testing and patenting, developed BubbleBum’s branding and website and launched the product – all in a little under a year and funded entirely through her own savings.

What’s more she managed to do it without any experience in manufacturing, “Everything was new so I had to be willing to say, ‘I know nothing about this, please help.’”

Since releasing the product in late 2009, BubbleBum has already attracted likely deals from distributors and big name retailers in the UK, Ireland and North America – not to mention racking up impressive sales through the site.

In fact, the interest has been such that Grainne is in the process of moving the entire family (pet pooch included) to the US in order to make the most of the opportunities that are presenting themselves.

It’s a move that’s very much in keeping with Grainne’s attitude towards risk, namely “If you don’t invest, you can’t expect any return.” Of course, that’s not to say that she’s leaving her success to luck. In fact, her approach would seem to be exactly the opposite:

“It’s like Lego. You have to start with a plan and add the pieces 1 by 1. Otherwise your spaceship turns out looking like a dinosaur.”

“You’re never going to learn if you don’t make mistakes, but I live in a house where negativity is just not allowed and I’m cool with that.”

So an impressive product, launched by an impressive entrepreneur – expect to see big things from BubbleBum on both sides of the Atlantic in the very near future.

Site: www.bubblebum.co.uk

When I first moved back to my hometown the idea of black taxis running bus routes seemed a little odd.

Local taxi drivers had purchased old black cabs and drove them from the city centre to various estates around the town. You could fit 5 or 6 people in each and, if I remember correctly, the child fare was about 40p (showing my age a bit there).

Anyway, it seems like my local cabbies were a bit ahead of their times as the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced plans to do the same – yellow cabs running predetermined routes with designated pick up and drop off points.

The first routes will run during morning rush hours with fares starting from just $3 per person – although there has to be more than one passenger on board for you to get the fixed price.

Good for consumers, good for congestion and good for the environment.

Via: PSFK Pic: Ekke Vasli

Every niche, every interest group and every ‘tribe’ has its own in-jokes and humour.

While ‘non-nerds’ might not get it right off, nerd merit badges are proving rather popular with the nerdier segments.

Each embroidered badge costs about $6 and comes velcro-backed so that you can stick it onto your bag or jacket (nerds not being known for their sewing skills).

Of course, you have to earn your badge first, although this is left to a kind of nerd honor system and the likely inquisition from fellow nerds once you start sporting your shiney new badge.

Currently there are badges available for being a web developer, having an empty inbox and being featured on BoingBoing (pictured) amongst others.

Personally, I wasn’t quite cool enough as a child to be considered a nerd. But after years of hard work I’ve achieved a level of honorary nerddom where I can appreciate the humour – but without wearing the sash.

Site: www.nerdmeritbadges.com

There are a lot of coaches out there – business coaches, life coaches, social media coaches, coach coaches. But despite the numbers, it is surprisingly rare to find someone doing anything even a little different in this space.

Cath Duncan has decided to do just that with The Bottom Line Book Club – an online coaching program that uses well-known personal and professional development books as source material.

The idea is to help busy professionals cut down on their ‘required reading’ each month and get ‘the bottom line’ on a given book. This goes beyond simple summaries to include detailed interpretations of the books and explanations of how the writer’s main themes can be further explored and applied.

Members are given access to a short audio seminar, PDF manual and workbook that highlight the key themes and help to start putting these ideas into practice. The downloadable resources are followed by a series of practical ‘self-coaching’ emails every other day designed to reinforce the concepts and prompt action.

To take things a step further, founder Cath Duncan, also conducts interviews with the author, or another subject matter expert, discussing the themes raised.

Membership runs from £9 to £16 a month (the higher price includes access to the interview and archives) and Bottom Line guides to individual titles can be purchased for £12.

Creating Your Own Bottom Line

This ‘curated consumption’ model fits neatly into cash rich, time poor lifestyles where people are seeking out reliable curators to help them navigate their own particular information needs.

So the obvious question is, how could you do the same in a subject matter or niche you know and enjoy?

Well, let’s unpick the business model a bit:

• Start with a subject you enjoy and know, for Cath it was personal development
• Find your potential customers’ pain points. Virtually every industry and pastime produces more ‘must-read’ information than any one person could hope to digest. Helping people get to the bottom line, quickly, is a valuable service.
• See where you can add value. Go beyond summaries and look for ways to add context or make abstract concepts practical.
• Find a structure. Bottom Line Book Club is primarily a subscription-based model and uses PDFs and audio downloads. Look for formats that will suit your market.

We can see this model being applied to just about any topic. How about the bottom line on trade journals, industry-specific book clubs or the latest conferences and events in your field?

Site: www.bottomlinebookclub.com