Your Nail Polish Could be Toxic | GreenPacks.org

July 22, 2013January 22, 2015 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Did you know your favorite nail polish contains toxic chemicals? Going by recent research, the nail polishes you commonly use contain at least three harmful chemicals.

Investigators at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control sampled as many as 25 brands of nail polishes commonly used in California salons and found that 10 of 12 samples that claim to be free of toluene actually contained the substance in a serious level.

They also discovered that five of the seven samples that claim to be free of the “toxic trio” actually contained those in dangerous levels. The three toxins – dibutyl phthalate, toluene and formaldehyde – may cause serious health problems, including asthma, birth defects, cancer, and other chronic health conditions.

Entrepreneur’s Guide to Effective Time Management | BusinessNewsDaily.com

July 22, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Innovators like Henry Ford have attributed their success to good time management. Nevertheless, a recent study found that 72 percent of small business owners are working longer days and on more weekends, while half of those surveyed find there’s not enough time to get things done. With time being the most valuable commodity for small business owners, a time-management plan is essential to running a business and achieving a work-life balance.

Here’s how other entrepreneurs, from freelancers to small businessowners, effectively manage their time and how you can create your own time-management plan for life and business.

Workstation Couch | CoolBusinessIdeas.com

July 22, 2013July 22, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Since we’re on a subject of working from home – here is another interesting “workstation”, this time in a form of a couch. Famed Philippe Stark created the piece for the Italian brand Cassina. The couch, called My World, ergonomically designed to support the ideal posture for working and concentrating, while still being relaxed. The piece also features storage, work surfaces and ports for your various gizmos. It is so well-thought-out – you might never lift your bum…

Soldiers Turn Entrepreneurs as One Million Exit Military | Bloomberg

July 22, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Robert Rummells, a U.S. Army Ranger for 22 years, says it was a natural transition when he opened a Mosquito Joe pest-control franchise in Richmond, Virginia, earlier this month.“I’m an outdoor type of guy, and I didn’t want to be chained to my computer in an office, talking on the phone,” said the 49-year-old, who tried jobs such as installing equipment at a community college and simulated firearms training after retiring from the military in 2009. “I learned I needed to work for myself.”

As more former service personnel turn to entrepreneurship, they’re generating jobs that are helping to cut the unemployment rate for veterans to a four-year low of 6.2 percent in April, lower than the 6.9 percent rate for adult non-veterans. The boost to the labor market matters: More than a million Americans are projected by the White House to transition out of the military through 2015.

via Read More.

Your Hidden Censor: What Your Mind Will Not Let You See|Scientific American

July 15, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ 1 Comment

It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?

The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?

Okay, that stunt was not a very good experiment, but twenty years later the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser did a better job. He filmed a video of two teams of students passing a basketball back and forth, and superimposed another video of a girl with an umbrella walking right through the center of the screen. When he asked subjects in his study to count the number of times the ball was passed, an astonishing 79 percent failed to notice the girl with the umbrella. In the years since, hundreds of studies have backed up the idea that when attention is occupied with one thing, people often fail to notice other things right before their eyes.

Personalized Shopping Startup The Hunt Adds Tyra Banks As Investor | TechCrunch

July 15, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

The Hunt, a website designed to help shoppers find specific items to buy online, has added Tyra Banks to its list of high-profile backers.

This is not the first time Banks has expressed interest in the tech startup community. The former model added an investment sector to the Tyra Banks Company, Fierce Capital LLC, and told Betabeat she would have liked to have invested in startups such as Uber and Airbnb when they first launched.

The amount of Banks’ investment was not disclosed, but The Hunt CEO Tim Weingarten tells TechCrunch the money will go to improving functionality and user engagement. While Weingarten also declined to give specifics of the direction The Hunt is heading, he says users can expect to see new developments within the next few months. Prior to its most recent investment, The Hunt raised $2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and another $700,000 from Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager) and Rohan Oza.

Weingarten’s website functions through “hunts” that users post to find items they want to purchase. Weingarten tells me 75 percent of the time that a user is satisfied with an answer and declares the hunt “found.” However, this majority is solved by the minority of users — 15 percent of registered users aid in others’ hunts. With over 300,000 registered users and 250,000 products added to submitted hunts, a simple and generalized calculation comes out to an average of 55 hunts from each person in that percentage. That’s not necessarily representative of what actually happens, but it’s still a lot of hunts to be solved.

How Entrepreneurs Should Use Their Accountants | Forbes.com

July 15, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Being entrepreneurial doesn’t end at starting a business; it means constantly striving to perfect your business model and quickly and continually adapting to change.

While “big data” has become a buzz word and the ability to readily capture data to inform business decisions has significantly increased in recent years, overlooked in this data grab is the importance of financial data and accountants, specifically.

You may just think of your accountant when it’s time to file your taxes, but he or she actually holds the secret to how healthy your company is and what to do about it.

What the accountant has is a mass of financial data, and with the right amount of financial data, a good accountant can almost instantly identify a business’s strengths and weaknesses.

Are your costs of goods sold too high? Are your prices too low? Do you have a manager whose team is particularly productive?

Cash Scarcity Threatening Berlin’s Thriving Startup Scene | Bloomberg

July 15, 2013July 15, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Naren Shaam spoke virtually no German and knew only one person in Berlin. That didn’t keep him from founding his travel planning website, GoEuro, there.

“Berlin was the right choice,” said the 30-year-old Harvard Business School graduate, who now has 20 people working for him at his offices in an old industrial building. “I would do it again here.”

Young people like Shaam have made the German capital a global hotbed for startups, drawn by a raw, artsy atmosphere that rivals Brooklyn’s as an icon of global hip. The city is home to 2,500 fledgling tech companies, employing some 30,000 people, according to the Federal Association of German Startups, which was set up in the city last year.

But even as Berlin jostles with London for the title of Europe’s latest Silicon Whatever, a lack of financing threatens its growth. Shaam, for instance, acknowledges that finding backers would have been easier and valuations higher in the U.S. or Britain, though he felt free-wheeling Berlin, with its growing talent pool, was a better fit

Ikea Jerker Do-It-Yourself Treadmill Desk| lifehacker.com

July 15, 2013 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Love the idea of a treadputer and happen to own the well-loved, easy-to-Craigslist IKEA Jerker? Turns out it makes for a really nice treadmill desk.

The muscle soreness I’m experiencing today after walking around Comic-Con this weekend made me realize: I’ve got to incorporate more standing and walking into my daily routine. Maybe a treadmill desk? There are some expensive desks made to fit over a treadmill (sold separately), but someone on Hacker News modified an IKEA Jerker desk to do the job. The discontinued but beloved model of desk, which I already own, plus one of those inexpensive but utilitarian wire shelving units gives you a wide monitor stand plus plenty of keyboard and mouse room. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it looks really tempting to try. The owner says: