underwater sports jetpack
October 5, 2015 · In The News

In the World This Week: Underwater Jetpacks & Quality Early Education in Urban Slums

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This week, a couple of our team members were featured in magazines for being beautifully dressed and all around beautiful. Garrett Grohman, Director of Inside Sales, had a paparazzi-style snapshot taken of him, and GQ Tweeted it and called it a photo from the “most dapper motorcycle ride on the planet.” Anastasia Emmanuel, Marketing & Community Management for the UK, had her face blown up across an entire page of a Croatian magazine. Babes of Indiegogo – new Instagram hashtag? We’ll let you decide for yourselves.
Garrett Grohman GQ
Anastasia Emmanuel Indiegogo

Tech News

Unless you’re afraid of drowning, chances are at one time or another you’ve dreamed of being a mermaid. Or a mer-man, pop, mer-man. The latest in superhero tech comes from the x2 Sport Underwater Jetpack, which propels you through the water three times faster than any human can swim. The practical application? TBD. But dust off those goggles from your childhood swim lessons and get ready to further confuse fish.

underwater sports jetpack

Remember when you used to play fortune teller and pretend that the weird snowglobe your grandma gave you with a “cute,” but in reality extremely scary angel inside was a crystal ball? Tempescope has come up with the unexpected fusion between the two. By syncing with your phone or computer’s weather apps, Tempescope shows you tomorrow’s weather in small box akin to a snowglobe. If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder it’s probably not great for your mental health, but otherwise it’s pretty cool to have lightning in a box on your desk.

Tempescope weather box

Social Innovation News

All over the world, working parents struggle to earn and income provide for their families while simultaneously ensuring their children are well taken care of. In urban slums, where kids can easily get into dangerous situations, childcare is especially important. IMPCT is tackling the problem by finding investors to fund day care centers to improve their educational offerings, and training informal caretakers to become small business owners. A serious win-win. Thanks to their Indiegogo campaign to set up the first center in El Salvador, IMPCT won the $1M Hult Prize, which is provided yearly with the Clinton Foundation to solve the world’s most pressing social problems.
IMPCT social innovation
If you’re the person who follows people around the house turning off lights as they get turned on, check out Axiom House, a net-zero energy house that costs less than a billion dollars. In fact, because it’s pre-fabricated, the house itself costs a modest $220,000. Before you do a jig next to your desk and decide to build one in San Francisco, keep in mind that land is not included. It’s built not only to create as much energy as it uses, but to create far less waste during construction than most other houses. AND it looks good.

Where are they now? Indiegogo success story

Con Man contributors are getting a really fast ROI. The first three episodes streamed live on Wednesday 9/30, serendipitously immediately following our Oktoberfest team dinner. It’s amazing that instead of going the traditional TV route, the Con Man team opted to crowdfund a web series (and the highest-funded web series, NBD or anything) so they could maintain creative control.
 Con Man Indiegogo crowdfund
And on a completely different note, cheers with your hot chocolate to 11-year-old Max Ash, who created sports-inspired mugs with backboards specifically for throwing marshmallows into cocoa. After getting great responses from several different pitches (could it be because he is adorable?), he ran a successful Indiegogo campaign. When UncommonGoods placed a large order, they were surprisingly popular. The mugs are sold at Hammacher Schlemmer, Nordstrom, The Grommet, and even the Basketball Hall of Fame and last holiday season he sold more than 18,000 of them.
Max Ash Indiegogo marshmallows
We can’t all be as fashionable and dapper as Garrett, but if you want to be the next Max, or even the next Con Man, start your own campaign now.

Start a Campaign

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