YBuy.Com Tries Shareware Model With Hardware Goods.

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https://www.ybuy.com/

YBUY is a try-before-you-buy online subscription service that charges users $24.95 to give them a chance to test drive the latest in electronics, home and kitchen gadgets for 30 days before they commit to purchase.

“For most consumers, when it comes to electronics or products for the home, the idea is that they want to test the product out first,” said YBUY CEO Stephen Svajian. “Typically, you’ll wait in line for hours. Then, when you finally get into the store, there’s someone right behind you breathing down your neck, pressuring you, and maybe even dripping sweat on you. And at the end of the day, you may only get five or ten minutes with a device that hundreds of other people have had their mitts on. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen someone wipe down an iPad after they use it. This can make for a pretty gross and stressful shopping experience.”

With YBUY, Svajian said, there’s no reason for brick and mortar showrooms to exist. “We can actually bring the showroom straight to your living room,” he said. “Our unique alternative, that comes to you brand new or completely sanitized, allows consumers to test it out for 30 days in the comfort of your own home. This can really help you get to know the item you would like to invest in, before fully committing to make the purchase. There’s no other experience like it out there on the market.”

YBUY, who’s site appears to be overloaded at moment because of this announcement, will be offering the new iPad on their site for $24.95 for a one month test drive.

Sounds like how you sell puppies. “Why don’t you take it home overnight and see if your family likes him. If not, bring him back tomorrow.”

[Via - Business Opportunities Blog]

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http://robbiecrawfordstudio.com

The moment Robbie Crawford touched a calligraphy pen to paper, she fell in love with the beautiful form of handwritten expression.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Now, at the age of 60 and after 36 years in nursing, Crawford has finally chosen to do what she loves.

She retired from her nursing career in September to start her own full-time calligraphy and engraving business out of her Tallassee home in Blount County.

"I decided when I retire that I would do something I would love to do for the rest of my life," Crawford said. "This is so much fun, so much fun."

The baby boomer spends her days writing fancy letters on certificates, addressing wedding invitations and using a dentist's drill to engrave calligraphy on wine bottles and decorative stones.

After years of doing calligraphy work sporadically, never believing she could make a career of it, she said she finally took the plunge because nursing had become difficult and exhausting. She worked night shift on the oncology floor at Blount Memorial Hospital the past nine years.

"The hours were horrible," Crawford said. "I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to do it.' I knew I had the talent. I knew I had the skill. Plus, it's marketable. People always want something personalized."

Crawford first learned calligraphy as a 26-year-old working in Memphis. During one of her women's Bible study meetings, a member taught calligraphy.

"You don't have to have good handwriting," Crawford said. "Calligraphy is an acquired skill. The more you practice the better you get."

It's all in how someone holds the pen, she said.

When she first started, she thought

she was good, but now she laughs at how "primitive" her first tries were.

She began practicing every day for about an hour. That's about all she could do without her hand cramping.

It took eight years for her to become comfortable enough to sell her calligraphy work.

She had several successful years doing calligraphy part-time while still working as a nurse.

At one point, a greeting card company offered her $5,000 for rights to a print she did with the story of Jesus written in calligraphy in the form of a Christmas tree. They wanted to put it on a Christmas card, but Crawford didn't sell it. She still uses it today for her own work.

When she and her husband moved to Chicago for her husband's work, she lost her calligraphy contacts and stopped selling her work.

The couple moved to the Maryville area in 2001 because they wanted to move back to Tennessee.

While working at Blount Memorial, she did calligraphy for family and friends about once a month, keeping her skills fresh.

She put a small calligraphy studio in her basement complete with a writing desk, a filing cabinet of hundreds of her prints and framing equipment.

She recently added an engraving station.

She never thought of engraving before she heard of an engraving course given by Ken Brown, a widely recognized calligrapher.

When she teaches calligraphy at local art stores, she uses Brown's book. She took a short course on engraving in Dallas in November and since then has been hooked.

"I can't keep away from this engraver," Crawford said. "I engrave all the time. Even if I don't have an order, I just engrave glass."

Some of her favorite items to engrave are wine bottles and small stones on which she engraves people's names. She said the stones are perfect wedding favors.

She personalizes perfume bottles and has even engraved golf clubs.

As part of her new business, she also attends bridal shows, perfume events and craft fairs promoting her business.

She keeps a calligraphy pen in her purse so she can write people's names on the spot.

The best part of this venture, she said, is that she doesn't have to watch the clock to see when she has to leave for work.

She has more time to spend with her husband, fish and hunt for rocks in the woods with her grandson.

"I wake up happy and excited to get down here," Crawford said. "My life is my own for the first time in a lot of years."

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[Via - KnoxNews.Com]

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http://www.houzz.com/

Drew Sivgals used to do most of his landscape design near Newport Beach, Calif., where his five-employee office is based. Now nearly one-third of his business comes from out-of-state or overseas clients. He attributes much of his newfound clientele—including a Dubai homeowner who wanted a semi-enclosed air-conditioned patio—to a three-year-old website called Houzz. “I’m getting quite a few inquiries from all over the United States and internationally,” says Sivgals. “I just got an e-mail from a lady who lives in Capri.”

Houzz is an online directory that homeowners use to find architects, general contractors, and myriad other home-improvement pros for construction or remodeling projects. Combining elements of local review site Angie’s List (homeowners can read reviews fellow homeowners post) and image-sharing network Pinterest (professionals can post photos of their work for homeowners to browse), Houzz has more than 60,000 professionals in the U.S. who actively manage their profiles, adding photos and answering questions. Sequoia Capital led an $11.6 million investment in the Palo Alto startup in December.

Does the world need another service aimed at making comfortable people more comfortable? The commercial benefits aren’t just for furniture makers and other brands that pay Houzz to advertise their products. The site helps small business owners like Sivgals broaden their reach beyond their local area, says co-founder and Chief Executive Adi Tatarko. “Now Houzz turned on the light and we can see what’s going on around the world,” she says. “I think Dubai is an extreme example, but there are definitely many others who are reporting that they are getting jobs across the U.S. and not in their local metro areas.”

Houzz’s ability to connect professionals with homeowners regardless of location builds on a national trend: an upswing over the past year in remodeling as new construction stagnated. Contractors who typically did new construction before the housing bust “broadened their geographic coverage because they’ve been able to pick up remodeling work,” says David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Homebuilders in Washington.

“The housing cycles prior to this one had not been so severe,” notes Crowe. “Most builders had ways of surviving that require them to travel farther or take on work they didn’t usually do—but this cycle it’s a new phenomenon. It surprised me in that it was that widespread.”

[Via - BusinessWeek.com]

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http://MrBeer.com

“Not bad. In fact, my first home brew wasn’t as good as this.”

That was Garrett Oliver, Brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, and what he had to say when he gave a MrBeer beer kit a try for himself. And believe us—he wasn't drunk when he said that.

Oliver described the “Mr. Beer Process” in three steps: "We sanitize, we brew, and then we bottle."

And how much did it cost him to make a 2-gallon beer?

It took him $40 for the complete kit—and a 2-gallon beer worth $.25 cents to $1, depending on the size of the bottle that’s being used.

That's not bad, considering it tastes good. Comedian Andy Dick once had a test run of the Mr. Beer as well, and all he had to say was: "That's smooth. That's probably the smoothest beer I've ever drank." And unlike those that have been shipped and exposed to outside air, Mr. Beer’s aroma is more intense because it comes straight from the plastic beer keg.

Mr. Beer has been in the business of creating the world's easiest home brewing systems and supplies since 1993. They use barley, wheat, and hops for their malts, and are brewed on their modern facility on South Island NZ. They use a complex process of cracking, heating, and separating grains and then adding in hops to produce the color, balance, and flavor that beer is known for. However, the difference is that with Mr. Beer, all the excess water is removed, and the concentrated malt extract that’s left would be canned for shipping.

Their most popular product is the Premium Edition Mr. Beer Kit, which comes with a 2-Gallon Fermenter, first batch of beer (Standard Booster Recipe with Hopped Malt extract, dry brewing yeast, and No-Rinse Cleanser), eight amber-colored bottles with caps and labels. These bottles are designed to accommodate carbonated beverages, and are FDA approved.

Other Mr. Beer products also include Cider Kits a nd Root Beer kits—and they taste good as well.

With such high-tech procedures, does it guarantee perfect beer all the time?

Not necessarily. It depends on how you brew it.

"It's a little bit sweet and needs a little bit more carbonation." Oliver observed, after tasting his first batch of beer.

But here’s where he made a teeny-tiny-itsy-bit mistake: he didn’t wait long enough for the beer to ferment.

A good way to avoid this is to let the beer sit longer than a week to reduce its sweetness. The longer it ferments, the less sweet it becomes.

As with everything else, patience really IS a virtue when it comes to brewing your own beer. According to Drew Vics, a.k.a "The Brewologist", you can have home brewed beer in two weeks, but if you want it to taste its best, then wait for four weeks—or three and a half, if you can't wait any longer.

A good solution for that "le ss head" or "less carbonation" problem so often encountered by first-time brewers is to dissolve no more than 3/8 of a cup of sugar or confectioner's corn sugar into 1 pint of hot water and then let it cool. Then divide them evenly among your bottles instead of adding each sugar in each bottle (as what the direction says). This results in better and more even carbonation.

Really, it doesn’t get any simpler than that. Vics put it succinctly: "Mr. Beer makes a good beginner home brewing kit, and it is a great kit to keep around and reuse, even for the more advanced brewer. This is a great way to get your feet wet, and learn the basics of the home brewing process."

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[Via - Odd News]

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http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/

Dollar Shave Club, a startup in Santa Monica, Calif., has decided to take the Razor Industrial Complex head-on. Earlier this week, it began selling razors on a subscription model. You pay $1 per month and have five, two-bladed razors delivered to your door. (For $6 a month, you get four-bladed razors and for $9 per month, you get six-bladed razors.) All the products feature aloe vera strips and swivel heads. Ooh la la.

Dollar Shave Club says it partnered with a large razor manufacturer to create its line of products and centers its pitch on the idea that it can give you a good razor at a low price. It also seems to want to capitalize on the idea that men are lazy.

“Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back-scratcher, and 10 blades?” the company asks in a very funny YouTube ad that has garnered it a lot of early attention. “Your handsome grandfather had one blade and polio.” If Hollywood director and manchild bromance specialist Judd Apatow were a business model, he would be Dollar Shave Club.

Without a doubt, Dollar Shave Club kicks off memories of such legendary dot-com boom fiascos as Kozmo.com, which promised to deliver just about anything to your door in less than an hour, and Pets.com, which seemed to base its business model on a funny puppet. But where Kozmo.com raised about $250 million in venture capital, Dollar Shave Club has taken only $1 million so far from such big names as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz.

[Via - BusinessWeek.com, Submitted By Minty Mike]

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http://www.scootnetworks.com/

Scoot Networks wants to be the Zipcar of electric scooters. Scoot unveiled its service, still in a closed "alpha" testing period at the Launch conference in San Francisco, the location where Scoot will initially kick off its service.

Scoot is targeted at regular urban commuters who might otherwise attempt to dash around the city via taxi, bus or train, as well as those who might use the service to get around town only once in awhile. What's more, the scooters are controlled by your smartphone—you can reserve a car through an app on your iPhone, and then the phone in effect becomes your key, and dashboard. The scooter starts when you plug in the phone.

The company says it is a hybrid of three new but proven technologies: Chinese electric motorbikes (tens of millions are on the road, growing by over 10 million per year); European bike sharing (hundreds of cities have deployed such systems in recent years); and real-time, mobile transportation services (e.g. GetAround, Uber). The scooters top out at about 30 mph.

Scoot Networks expects to charge about $5 an hour for a trip, though monthly deals will be available for regular riders. At the start, users will only be able to reserve round-trips. Scoot will provide helmets, and handle theft and insurance requirements.

The company comes out of a GreenStart accelerator program, which helps entrepreneurs build clean tech initiatives. Scoot certainly found a favorable audience at Launch. Tim Young, the co-founder of About.me and one of the judges evaluating start-ups at the event, offered to write Scoot a $50,000 check on stage.

[Via - USAToday, НТ - BeerCoupons]

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