How to Protect Your Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights in Overseas Markets

Are you thinking of taking your business global this year? Whether you are a service-based business or hoping to export your products, it’s critical that you take steps to protect your trademarks, copyrights and patents overseas.


Why? Industry estimates suggest that $250 billion is lost by businesses each year due to infringement of intellectual property (IP) rights in international markets.

10 Local Marketing Tips, You Can Implement Today

Have you ever wondered why some local businesses seem to be thriving by marketing themselves only on the Internet? So did we. And we discovered that you must start with Google.



However, you have to go above and beyond it to make the Web a real game changer for your small local business.
There are thousands of different ways to market your business on the Internet. But we know you’re very busy

Jason Lucash And The Story Of OrigAudio

Site of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

http://www.origaudio.com/

The ability to put a new spin on the old: That's what catapulted Jason Lucash and his business partner, Mike Szymczak, from aspiring entrepreneurs to creators of one of Time's 50 best inventions of the year in 2009. Each year since then, their Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company, OrigAudio (look for discounts), has doubled its sales.

Tired of lugging bulky audio players around on business trips while working for JanSport, the duo started futzing with the idea of putting speakers into Chinese-food takeout boxes. The boxes start flat, and "whenever you want to use it, you pop it up," Lucash says. The idea sounded good. The product? Not so much. They moved on to putting a very old idea--origami--to work. In 2009, with $10,000 in seed money from Lucash's mom, the two launched OrigAudio (origami + audio) with one product: speakers, made entirely from recycled materials, that come flat and fold together. "The Chinese takeout box concept inspired us, but origami is what powered us," Lucash says.

The two were selling 15 pairs a day through their website when the U.S. Marines placed a whopping order for 50,000 (launching OrigAudio's corporate gift division). Shortly after, Time waved its magic "best" wand. With the holidays coming on fast, the company quickly sold out of its stock of 25,000 units. That's when Lucash and Szymczak gave their two-week notice to JanSport.

OrigAudio's volume has been turned up ever since. Now with nine products and 14 employees, the company had 2012 sales of $4 million. The products are carried in mass-market retailers and sold online through multiple merchants. And, in a rare move, QVC approached OrigAudio about selling its wares after seeing them at the Consumer Electronics Show.

OrigAudio's top-selling product, at 750,000 units, is the Rock-It, which makes a speaker out of pretty much any object you clip it to. It's another example of the old-made-new strategy. The "really cool" technology, Lucash says, had been around for 60 years, "but we always saw these big applications of it. So we were like, This thing would be sweet if you could make it portable."

Perhaps most appealing about Lucash is his desire to teach entrepreneur wannabes, even while he has his own business to maintain. He frequently steps up to podium mics to make sure college students get an earful of the types of lessons he didn't get as a managerial economics major at the University of California, Davis. In time, he hopes to go back to school himself and get an MBA so he can teach marketing classes. "I just like educating. I want people to get something out of it," he says.

One of the biggest lessons Lucash has learned on his own? "There are so many people that rely on you. We're supporting 12 other people," he says. "You want to make sure the company is going to do well to keep your employees happy and keep them financially secure, and that's very challenging. They don't teach you that in school."

[Via - Entrepreneur]

Cool Apps - StrokeLink.ca

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Now Is Time for PINTEREST to Start Generating Revenue

Pinterest, the company whose trademark social pinboard allows users to display images they find appealing, has decided it's time to work toward profitability. "A lot of last year was keeping up with growth
[and] the big change with touch-screen devices," founder Ben Silbermann said. "[This year], we're building foundations to monetize." What are it's plans? Pinterest is getting ready to

Cool Startups - StrokeLink

Site of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency

http://strokelink.ca/

In the early days of the mobile phone, it was perceived as a leisure item. Fast forward to today, the cell phone has gotten a whole lot smarter, and majority of the world’s population can’t go about their day-to-day lives without one. Morgan Moe, co-founder and Chief Clinical Innovation Officer of StrokeLink, believes the iPad is poised to walk the same path.

StrokeLink, is a free iPad app that empowers stroke survivors during their care and rehabilitation process through the provision of a knowledge base and self-care tools to augment the gaps that are unfortunately inherent in health care deliveries. Just in Canada alone, 67% of stroke patients get discharged from the hospital without access to rehabilitation facilities. And even if they do, care allotment is relatively low and self-management resources range from very little to absolutely nil.

The idea for StrokeLink came about when Morgan, then a volunteer at ARBI (Association for the Rehabilitation of the Brain Injured), went to visit her great aunt who had multiple strokes. She saw that her aunt was given written exercises on pieces of scrap paper, although they were mostly stick figures with barely discernible instructions. Around the same time, Morgan got her first iPad and, according to her, it seemed obvious to piece the two together.

When asked what had been their biggest challenge so far, Morgan and co-founder/CEO Anne-Marie Paquette asserted that it had been shifting people’s perception of the iPad from a leisure gadget to a health care delivery tool.

Essentially, the app is subdivided into four categories: My Goals, which is where the patient’s personal goals are stored; My Progress, which measures daily activity to assess the patient’s progress based on his goals; My Programs, which includes photos, videos, audio and text descriptions of each exercise in the rehabilitation program; and My Library, which is a resource base to help the patient better understand his care team, how to prevent another stroke from happening, living and coping with the effects of stroke.

At the moment, StrokeLink is set to release an update that will allow users to customize the app’s built-in exercise programs, as well as create their own. Using the iPad’s microphone and camera, they should be able to substitute existing pictures, text, video and audio. As well, through StrokeLink’s web dashboard, health care providers should be able to remotely monitor their patients’ progress.

[Via - Bitrix24.com]

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Teaching Kids to be Business Savvy

One of the best reports I read this summer - about students from age 10 being taught business and economics under the proposed national curriculum – received scant coverage. Nobody seemed terribly excited by the idea, even though teaching primary school kids about business is brilliant.



I have long argued we need to teach entrepreneurship at schools. Predictably, the draft shape of economics

You Should Switch to Google Apps

Below, I outline the top reasons your business needs to be on Google Apps:




1. The Cloud
2012 was the year of the cloud and 2013 is carrying the momentum.
With that momentum, businesses see the opportunity that Google Apps
presents. In fact, according to International Data Corporation analyst
Melissa Webster, Google will gain momentum this year because there’ll be
a lot of collaboration