There are spam filters for you digital mail, but there never seems a way to stop the useless junk mail that comes to your physical box. PaperKarma tackles the mission to help you take control of your home or business mailbox and to receive only what you want. Businesses don’t want to spend needlessly on paper products that will just be trashed anyways, so why should you keep receiving them?
The iPhone, Android, and Windows app is a product of Readabl Inc. from Seattle. They work closely with source distribution companies to help you unsubscribe from catalogs, magazines, credit card offers, etc. and optionally – i.e., if you explicitly choose to – convert you to the corresponding online (email) versions. According to their website PaperKarma was started to deal with the environmental impacts attached with trashing junk mail and the frustrations that accompany seeing things you know are just a waste of time.
If you frequently use public transit systems you’ll understand the pain of waiting at a bus stop counting down minutes, when you could have been doing something more useful. Especially during these cold months, being outside is the last thing anyone wants to do. Luckily in Toronto apps like the Rocket Man app exist, although not the most well designed piece of usefulness, it does still work. But apparently the problem of waiting for streetcars and busses can also plague those in warmer climates.
Founded by the foursome of Adam Mann, Al Wold, Brett Farmiloe, and Michael Witham, Find My Train is an iPhone app for the Phoenix Light Rail that will let you know when your train is scheduled to arrive with just one tap. Aimed to be the most simple transportation app design ever created the project came to be after Adam Mann pitched his idea this past October during Startup Weekend Phoenix.
“Always deliver more than expected”. “The trick isn’t adding stuff it’s taking away”. “Life is short. Build stuff that matters”. Those are just some of the incredible quotes from the likes of Larry Page – Google, Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook, and Siqui Chen. Startup Vitamins takes these quotes and many others, designs a poster, and hopefully inspires you to do more.
Startup Vitamins provides amazingly designed quotes from industry leaders, such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jason Fried. With the goal to keep startups motivated and on the right track during the difficult journey of developing a dream. Startup Vitamins is great, not only for the posters themselves that are amazingly beautiful and also relevant, but because of the idea behind it. These are made by people who’ve experienced failure…. to the tune of 11 failed projects. To support the startup community even more, $5 from each sold poster goes towards organizations, which breed startup culture – Startup Weekend and Garage48.
Instatrip is in the business of creating and sharing photo trips based on your Instagram exploits. Automatically generated via Instagram’s photo stream and its location tagging service, it’s a place where you can create and share your photos from holiday trips, vacations, road trips with friends or any of the other random and interesting places you visit
Instagram itself has a photomaps element, but it doesn’t seem to have the ease of use to tag, filter and sort based on a specific journey specific to only you. If you’re trekking across the states and want to create an album photo stream on a map, Instatrip lets you do that. All you have to do is simply add properly formatted tags to your pics and its done.
LUMOback, by zero2one is hoping to help 80% of Americans affected by back pain at some point in their lives. Back pain leads to lost work time, missed workdays, disability claims and is a $50 billion per year industry. One of the most common accelerators to back pain is poor posture; in the startup world being hunched over a laptop is common practice.
Founded in 2011, LUMOback is an iPhone app and accessory that senses poor posture moments and reminds you to fix it. The small, flexible accessory adhesively attaches to your back. While you move about and sit throughout the day, the device keeps track of poor body posture and sends a little vibration to remind you to sit or stand straight.
There really only are a few household tasks that are as mundane as cleaning windows. Grabbing a spray bottle, squeegee and a towel with a bucket of water just so you can spend an hour trying to achieve a streak-free window. But fear no more, the inventors at Ecovacs have created a Romba style device to clean your windows for you.
The window cleaning robot suctions to the glass, and in a streak-free way that you would never get, scrubs and shines your windows with a buzz and sparkle so you never have to get your hands dirty again. The one touch robot does this all through a three stage cleaning process. First, a front cleaning pad sprays cleaning solution. Second, the squeegee draws remaining water-borne dirt and dampness off the window. Finally, the rear-cleaning pad wipes down the window dry.
Cincinnati-based startup ChoreMonster knows that getting a child to clean up, wash dishes or do any other chore for that matter is a chore on-to-itself. The new free and clever little app aims to make tedious tasks fun and rewarding for kids and less of a hassle to deal with for parents.
Parents quickly and easily create scheduled chores with point values for their children, and once it gets completed they get points. Once the kids get enough points they can “purchase” items such as hugs, money or possibly a camping trip with the points they collect. Kids can review their chores on their own app/site, checkout their rewards and keep track of their points. During all of this kids also earn random monsters for added fun and stickiness. Parents hopefully won’t have to yell at their kids to do something, while kids won’t have to hear from parents what they need to get done.
Were you part of team Berenstain or Paddington? That’s the decisions that plague children before they become tweenies and are force-fed the Twilight Saga. A team of five has founded a new startup to give kids the chance a new way to dig up and discover millions of book titles at their very own doorstep. Before they get too old and Amos & Boris aren’t “cool” anymore.
Mail A Tale is a monthly subscription of hand-curated children’s books delivered right to your door. For just $19.95 a month you can receive the basic package which includes 1 hardcover or 2 softcover books, or $39.95 for the book box plus that gives you 4 softcover or 2 hardcover books.
As we live in the middle of winter and start dreaming about warm weather that will creep in around the corner, it’ll be the time to open the bank account and start planning for summer time adventures. But did you just spend a boatload of funds on a snowboard or ski gear? If you’re like many of us, then you’ll begin scouring the net in the next few weeks for pre-sales on new mountain bikes, helmets, outdoor running gear, and more. Even then you’ll probably end up paying more than you ever wanted to.
Buystand is an online marketplace for outdoor, fitness and active enthusiasts to get the gear they love at the price they want to pay – say, 25% less than retail. Sort of like a Priceline for adventure apparel seekers, the platform lets shoppers set their preferred price matches retailers willing to sell in that price range.
Great typography, smart usage of color, a bold presence and intuitive gesture-controls: when you combine all of these essential ingredients you get the very simple and awe inspiring alarm clock app for the iPhone. Rise has a very simple task, provide usage for a single alarm that you can have set off once or once a day. That’s it. A small task but an important one.
It may not be the app packed with hundreds of features, but it doesn’t have to be for it to be successful. We all use an alarm clock everyday, its one of those things that can be super annoying or it could turn to be something we enjoy. Rise makes it a joy to wake up.
