We all want to stay up to date with current events and what is happening around the world, but often do not want to spend the time to watch the news or read a newspaper. Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin realized this and thought it would be a great idea if there was somehow a summary of everything that had happened the previous day. They met while studying abroad in college and reconnected when they were both working for NBC News. They decided to found TheSkimm, which is an email subscription service that succinctly summarizes the news in a way that is fun and doesn’t take long at all to read.

It’s a free subscription, and here’s the website if you want to learn more.

Ryan and Adam Goldston were both students at USC when they came up with the idea to make a shoe that helped people jump higher. The technology in the shoe allows for people to have a higher vertical jump because it essentially acts as a spring. The company was headed to obscurity until the NBA banned them from competition because they provided an unfair advantage. After that, sales skyrocketed. Adam, in an interview, said that the PR and marketing that they got from the NBA was the equivalent of 150 million dollars of marketing, and it was absolutely free. Since then, revenues have consistently grown and they have expanded into running shoes as well.

Here’s their website if you want to research some more

Arthur Kay cares about the environment and noticed that coffee grounds were being wasted and put into landfills when they could’ve been used for other things. Kay pitched his business idea to collect coffee grounds from wholesale producers and coffee shops and convert it into biodiesel and biomass pellets, and then sell to transport and heating industries. He won many different pitch competitions, received a lot of funding from various organizations, and has gained a lot of traction over the last year. To date, Kay’s company has saved 804,245 tons of Co2 emissions and 53,200 barrels of oil. I’m not sure many people have the vision to see a business that helps the environment as well as makes money from thrown away coffee grounds, so it’s very impressive that Kay saw this as an opportunity and has taken it to market. With so many businesses now focusing on the environmental impact that their business makes, Bio-Bean is very popular among millennial consumers (although they aren’t the source of revenue for the company) because it takes waste away from landfills and reduces fossil fuel consumption.

Here’s the website if you want to read more

Sapone and Beck met at Harvard business school and both launched into careers in the finance world. They worked very long hours and didn’t have the time or energy to keep their apartments clean, so they decided to hire someone off of Craigslist to keep their apartments clean. After they realized how much easier their lives became, they decided to scale their idea and make it into a business. Hello Alfred is a service that, for as low as $99 per month, can get you someone to come to your apartment and clean, get groceries, take care of drycleaning, and organize your home. They run their “Alfreds” through intense background checks, and on their website it says that only 3% of applicants are invited to become Alfreds. It’s cool that this is another example of how an inconvenience in their lives was the driving force behind the innovation and creation of this business

Here’s their website if you want to learn more.

Tesse Vetter is a mother of three and when her boys were younger, she didn’t want to feed them anything with artificial preservatives in it. For most foods it wasn’t too hard to find a substitute for the popular items, but Tesse couldn’t find any salad dressing that was all natural. She decided to make her own, and people loved it so much that Greg, her oldest son, had the idea to commercialize it. He thought that many other people would have the same problem his mom did and his mom’s dressing was good, so he decided to sell to whole foods. He started out by selling 60 cases of the dressing to whole foods and it did so well that now they are selling millions of dollars worth of salad dressing every year. I found Greg interesting because he was still very entrepreneurial even though the initial idea wasn’t his. I know a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with finding an idea that could change society or solve a big problem, but Greg is proof that as long as the people you get the idea from get some of the credit, it is perfectly acceptable to use other people’s ideas and change or mold them into something marketable and be creative with ways to bring a product to market.

Treadmills can be hard on your joints and hard to use when rehabbing an injury. Many people who can’t use a treadmill (the elderly, people with bad knees, people who get dizzy from them, and even professional athletes recovering from injury) are left with little to no options if they want to go for a walk or run. Some choose to do their workouts in the water, but that can be inefficient and hard to find a pool to do it in. Sean Whalen, founder of AlterG, saw these problems and devised a solution in his garage. Sean saw a problem with the way treadmills worked, so he came up with the idea of anti-gravity treadmills. You can control how heavy you feel using differential air pressure, making it much easier to run since you don’t have to support your entire body weight. The CEO of the company said that he hurt his knee when he was 26 and hadn’t run since. When Sean Whalen approached him about being the CEO, he ran for the first time in years and remembered how much he missed it. Numerous professional athletes have used Sean’s treadmills, including Dwayne Wade and Tom Brady. With all of the crazy technology inside, it’s not going to be a household item anytime soon, as the cheapest models sell for $35,000. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not accessible to the common person. Sean markets his products to gyms that have injury rehab in them and even places that help people who suffer from strokes, impaired mobility, or veterans who were wounded serving their country.

Sean Whalen is impressive to me because he developed an idea that helps people do things that they previously could not. It’s inspiring to think that because of him, elderly people can walk for the first time in years, athletes can rehab injuries faster than before, and it’s easier for an injured veteran to re-learn how to walk. I can appreciate entrepreneurial ventures that solve petty problems like tangled earbuds, but I respect Sean Whalen, his creation, and the reasons behind the innovation.

Here’s his website if you want to read more