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Watch to see the winner!

Our new contest, BENJAMANIA, has completed its beta testing phase and we’re now looking for you to help us with our official launch! BENJAMANIA is free and requires no obligation from you, other than submitting a lucky 5-digit number and tuning in to watch and see if you’ve won money. Each contest will feature a video of our hosts as they scratch off lottery tickets until they find a winning ticket. Then they randomly draw a 5-digit number. Whoever submits the lucky number closest to the number drawn by our hosts will receive the lottery ticket winnings. It could be $2 or it could be $2,000, but that’s the beauty of it! We’ll announce the contests ahead of time  on the BENJAMANIA page and we’ll also post the videos right here, so stay tuned.

Since this is a new project, we’re looking for feedback and we welcome comments on what you like or how we can make a fun contest even better!

We’re continually adding to our Business Plan Competitions Map to keep you current on all the opportunities out there. Each week we’ll be posting an update of what competitions we have added – as you can see, there’s something for everyone, and there is still some time before the registration period ends! Stay tuned for some more new features in this section of our website.

• Bucknell University Venture Plan Competition – Open to teams of undergraduate university students, this contest offers prizes of up to $5,000 for the most promising new ventures.
• Great Lakes Entrepreneurs Quest Business Plan Competition – All Michigan citizens are invited to apply to one of three different categories depending on the nature of the business plan. Cash prizes range from $500 to $5,000.
• Milken-PennGSE Business Plan Competition – Open to virtually anyone, this competition judges educational business plans and encourages applications in every conceivable educational setting. The first place prize is $25,000.

We’re off and running in 2010 with a brand new selection of partially thought-out ideas and inventions from Halfbakery.com. If you’re new here, make sure to check out the other posts in this series to see what its all about!

Our list this month features some pretty interesting ideas, in no particular order. If you’ve got some time, click through on each of the ideas, because the comments other members leave are often just as outrageous as the ideas themselves.

Anycolor Pen with ColorPick

“Most paint programs allow you to do two things that are sadly missing from the paper world: 1) Select the color of your brush from a color palette, and 2) Select the color of your brush from an existing color. The AnyColor pen remedies this! The pen contains Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black ink cartridges, and adjusts the flow rate to create the desired color. (These are the same subtractive colors used in inkjet printers) The color can be specified by adjusting three (R,G,B) sliders and displayed on a miniature color LCD screen built into the back of the pen. Alternately, the user can press a button on the side of the pen and tap on any real world object. Photocells in near the tip of the pen register the RGB value of the of the object, and adjust the flow rate accordingly (the back of the pen also turns the appropriate color).”

Perhaps not be most essential office tool, but definitely a fun idea, and useful if you’re looking to match an already existing color. It reminded me of a high-tech version of the old-school color changing click-pens! Looks like it may have already been designed, but is still only in concept form.

Cereal Screen

“This is a half-circled-shaped thin wire mesh with a lip along the rounded edge. When you are nearly finished your breakfast cereal, place the mesh along the edge of the cereal bowl, tip back and the remaining milk passes through as the leftover bits of corn flakes or rice crisps are trapped in the mesh, where they can be collected with the spoon. Saves having to hunt for the last floaty bits at the end of the cereal session, and removes fear of choking while drinking the milk. Mesh would have to be flexible enough to adapt to different bowl circumferences.”

I envision this invention making more of a mess than anything, but this is a perfectly “half-baked” idea, and for you picky cereal eaters out there, this could be just the tool for you!

Toaster Calibration

“A camera/small LCD screen combo device on the front of your toaster where you can take “after” pictures of your toast after cooking at different temperature settings. Subsequently, when turning the burned-ness dial it will display your previous toast pictures, so you can get an early idea of how much tan, brown or black you want on your bread prior to the magical transformation.”

Must be I was hungry for breakfast when I chose these ideas…. This idea aims to to be the solution for anyone looking to get that perfect slice of toasted slice without all the guess work and waste of several severely burnt slices – unless you prefer to eat charred toast..

Clothing Heater

“So the idea is a heating system that fully heats one’s cold clothes. A rack designed to hold ones clothes and fully heat them. Switches on 5-10 minutes before you get out of bed with a timed system, or do it yourself with a switch if you’re a snooze abuser.”

This is one invention that I would definitely invest in if it existed. Waking up in a room that is drafty in the winter is no fun, and this might even make me slightly less reluctant to get out of bed in the morning! There would be the possibility fire hazards, but in my opinion it’d be well worth it.

With New Years approaching, we have decided to wrap up 2009 with several of our favorite posts we have written since the beginning of the Finding Benjamin project. We have learned so much and come so far from those first days back in July when we launched the site. But with a new year comes new ideas, and boy do we have plenty of them, so stay tuned!! Here are the top five favorite posts from 2009… [Read the rest of this entry...]

By Dave Buechel

Dave Buechel, a member of the HOP, was sent in to do some undercover work and see if Amazon Mechanical Turk is the real deal! See what Dave has concluded! If you aren’t familiar with our previous article on Mechanical Turk, check it out here.

If you have the time and devotion, Mechanical Turk is a great way to earn fast, easy money. The tasks, or HIT’s you accomplish in order to make money are simple. Most HIT’s take only a few seconds to complete, however you are given at least an hour to complete them depending on their difficulty and the amount of money they are worth. I have completed HIT’s that are worth anywhere from $.01 to $2.15. When I first started out I wasn’t very careful with my submitted work, which resulted in rejected HIT’s. These rejected HIT’s led to a lower approval rating. Your approval rating is the ratio of approved and rejected HIT’s. Most HIT’s require you to have an approval rate of 80% or higher, and if you have a lower rating than that you will not be allowed to even attempt the HIT. Without being able to attempt most HIT’s, it was extremely hard to complete tasks and  make money. After a month of increasing my rating back to a reasonable ratio, I could then do most tasks and start earning money.

Since starting in September, I have completed 1275 HIT’s and made $40. If I spent the time and gave as much effort as I did for my schoolwork, and didn’t have the approval rating setback, I could have easily made a Benjamin by now.