Hellmann’s: Whipping Up True-blue Mayonnaise for More Than a Century

The goods of Hellmann’s have been mainstays in the American household for more than 100 years and its flagship product, the Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise along with its sister brand Best Foods Real Mayonnaise, is the top-selling mayonnaise in the entire United States.

The mayonnaise came to existence in 1756 when a French chef was cooking up a huge victory feast for the Duke de Richelieu while the latter was battling the British Army at the Port Mahon. The chef was creating a sauce made of eggs and cream, but as fate would have it, there was no cream in sight. So the chef decided to improvise and substitute cream with olive oil. Thus, a culinary masterwork was born and the chef called it the “Mahonnaise”, in honor of the Duke’s triumph

Mayonnaise has since then travelled far and wide, and in 1905, a German immigrant named Richard Hellmann decided to open up a delicatessen in Columbus Avenue, New York City, where he used his wife’s delicious recipe and sold the first ever ready-to-eat real mayonnaise. The condiment was used in his salads and other delicacies, and soon enough it became widely popular that he started selling it in bulk using “wooden boats” to other shops. In 1912, Hellmann constructed a factory and began mass-producing his delectable mayonnaise. It was marketed and sold as Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise in the Easter Coast of Unites States. The brand quickly became so successful that Hellmann had to close his delicatessen so he can devote all of his time and effort on his burgeoning mayonnaise business.

Today, Hellmann’s already has a long list of products that are widely sold in the Eastern Coast. The brand’s food products and condiments are staples in every American kitchen and a key player in the highly-competitive dressings market.

Sipping a Cup with Coffee Joulies

If you barely have time to wait for your coffee to cool, then perhaps Coffee Joulies are the right thing for you! Invented by two Daves – Dave Jackson and Dave Petrillo – these tiny, stainless steel capsules work to cool your coffee to a drinkable temperature and keep it right there for a longer period of time.

 

Dave and Dave worked on this project for 8 months. In opposite shorelines, they conceived, constructed, prototyped and manually-produced the product. Coffee Joulies then got a big break as a project on Kickstarter, wherein it sought $9500 to pay half of the expenses for manufacturing. By the time the whole project ended, Dave and Dave raised a total of $306, 944 which is more than enough to pay for the costs of making Joulies and supplying USA.

As of the moment, they are now working hand in hand with Sherrill Manufacturing and are about to complete the 8000 pre-orders of Coffee Joulies placed through the brand’s Kickstarter page.

Orbotix: Where Technology Meets the Toy Industry

For the average human being, a ball may just be a toy for the kids, bouncing prey for pets or vital equipment to athletes. But for the passionate founders of Orbotix, Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein, it is the zenith of robotics and the best example of how one day, smart phones can interact with the human world.

Orbotix is a company that focuses on launching a new idea of fun through the use of smart-phone controlled gadgets and robotics. In 2011, the company sold their first product, Sphero, an orb shaped like a grapefruit, which links to Android and IOS devices via Bluetooth. To put it simply, Sphero, is the planet’s first ever smart phone-controlled ball.

Envisioned by Bernstein, a robotics genius, and Wilson, a Bluetooth whiz and software hacker, the gizmo consists of processors, motors, accelerometers and gyroscopes, that propel it. It also has LED lights that change colors every now and a durable polycarbonate casing that can withstand high-impact falls. Several smart phone applications allow users to roll, fling, drive or putt Sphero wherever for as long as the users are within a 50-foot range away from the ball. The Sphero also has the potential to transform itself into a gaming console. To push things even further, Orbotix manufactured a piece of software that allows users to build their own apps for the Sphero device, ranging from musical properties to basic ball tricks.

To date, the company has raised over $6 million and has big plans for their future. They are currently planning to sharpen up their hardware platform, create innovative games and see what comes out of the fusion between the $90 billion toy industry and the $25 billion mobile apps sphere. It is undoubtedly a blank slate, but Orbotix is more than ready to fill it up.

Warby Parker: Great Looking Prescription Eyewear for Less

People dread having to wear prescription eyewear due to their lack of stylish qualities and expensive prices. Four friends, all of which wear glasses, decided to change that and create stylish and affordable prescription eyewear for those who need them, but still want to look good.

Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider, and David Gilboa launched Warby Parker in 2010 with the intention of bringing high quality, fashionable eyewear to those who need it but are not willing to shell out roughly $300 or more for them. The company’s name was derived from Jack Kerouac’s earliest characters Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker. Warby Parker was able to cut the usual cost of selling eyewear by going directly to the consumers who can easily order a pair through their website. Each pair of prescription glasses retails for $95, a far cry from what you can get elsewhere.

Aside from making a profit, Warby Parker is also dedicated to helping those who can’t afford to buy a pair of glasses but can barely see without them by donating a pair for every pair of Warby Parker glasses bought online.

Share Your Cars with RelayRides

Collaborative sharing startups have been making waves in the business world and one of these innovative new companies to make its name known in this corner of the industry is RelayRides.

RelayRides is a company that allows car owners to rent their idle vehicles out to people who contact them directly through the website. Being the first business to offer peer-to-peer car sharing, the concept for RelayRides came about when founder Shelby Clark found the need to rent a car during a terrible blizzard and ended up biking through the storm just to get to the rental company’s garage. The company was founded in June 2010 and six months later, RelayRides’ headquarters transferred to sunny San Francisco and since then continued to grow into a successful peer-to-peer car rental marketplace.

Membership to the site is free and anyone can sign up browse through the listings. Offering your car up for rent is free, too; however RelayRides collects a 40% commission on the price the owner and renter agree on. Car owners need not worry about handing their keys off to strangers as there are strict requirements that need to be met before a renter even becomes eligible to request to rent a car. Extensive background checks are done and those with serious offenses such as DUIs, reckless driving, vehicular manslaughter charges, stoplight violations, speeding violations over 25mph or having two or more speeding tickets on their driving record become ineligible to rent from RelayRides members. The commission the company collects also pays for insurance for both the car owners and the renters.

In October 2011, RelayRides entered into a strategic partnership agreement with General Motors wherein GM car owners with a subscription to OnStar can link their car’s subscription to their RelayRides account making face-to-face contact with renters unnecessary because renters can use their mobile phones to access the vehicles by themselves.

Perry Mandera and the Custom Companies, Inc.’s Freight Transport Capacities

Perry Mandera owns and operates The Custom Companies, Inc., a proven leader in the integrated freight transportation industry for more than a quarter century. He established the firm in 1986 as a pioneered of the “one stop” concept, combining a full range of truckload and less-than-truckload (LTL) solutions with domestic and international airfreight options, and local and dedicated-contract cartage services.

The Custom Companies takes pride in servicing the needs of a diversity of clients, from Fortune 500 corporations to local businesses. With 24/7 dispatch availability, the firm maintains the highest levels cost competitiveness and reliability, offering next-day and same-day delivery capacities throughout the continental United States. Mr. Mandera and his team maintain a state-of-the-art computer system that provides accurate and transparent tracing, billing, and pricing. Equipped with satellite tracking equipment, the firm’s core fleet of more than 350 power units provides secure and accountable shipping from pickup point to destination. The Custom Companies is currently transitioning to a high-efficiency “paperless” environment through the innovative Electronic Data Interchange.

One area of competence that Perry Mandera has developed within The Custom Companies framework involves intermodal transportation. Taking advantage of strategic alliances with Class 1 railroads throughout America, the firm works to ensure optimal train routing for every load carried. Truckload conversions that cut costs without impacting service are a particular specialty, with service from Chicago to Los Angeles running 72 hours. 

Mr. Mandera is well established within the transportation industry, having served in board capacities with the Illinois Transportation Association (ITA) since 1996. He notably achieved selection as one of the ITAs "Top 100 American Transportation Executives of the Millennium" in 2000. 

Snøhetta: Bringing Contemporary European Design to the Rest of the World

Founded in 1989 in Olso, Norway, Snøhetta has since been recognized as one of Europe’s leading architecture firms. Having a solid mix of architects working with interior designers and landscape architects, Snøhetta now has offices in both Norway and New York City in the US.

Seven architects and landscape architects got together to form a collaborative studio in 1987. Snøhetta, the architecture firm was formalized after the team from Norway collaborated with a team of architects from Los Angeles to join the competition to design the Egyptian Library of Alexandria. Since then, the firm was awarded the contracts for various large projects around the world including The Norwegian Embassy in Berlin, The memorial museum on Ground Zero of the World Trade Center site to commemorate the September 11 attacks, North Carolina State University’s James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, and the Lillehammer Art Museum in Norway. They have also been awarded the contract for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s expansion which is expected to be completed in 2016.

Yandex Isn’t Just “Yet Another Indexer”

While Google dominates the search engine market in most parts of the world, there is one company they have to beat in order to get a bigger piece of the pie in the Russian search engine market.

Yandex is a Russian internet company which runs the most popular search engine in Russia. The name Yandex comes from the phrase “Yet another indexer.” However, in reality, it’s more than that; it is a search engine that has kept Google’s growing popularity around the world at bay, holding a 65% share of the search engine market in Russia. It comes as Mozilla Firefox’s default search engine and also provides users with innovative functions such as traffic maps, predictive search, and a portrait search which helps people find a particular face in a photo.

The search engine was launched by CompTek in 1997 and the standalone company was founded 3 years later by Arkady Volozh.  In April 2012, Yandex was able to generate 60.2% of Russia’s search traffic and the company’s sites have attracted 46 million unique hits in March 2012 alone. The company also operates in other countries including Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. A wholly owned subsidiary called Yandex Labs operates in the Bay Area in San Francisco.

Yandex develops its own technologies and fosters other companies to develop technologies for them through their Yandex.Start program. Yandex systematically works with these companies to develop the technology needed to expand and improve Yandex’ services. It is through this program that the company was able to acquire WebVisor which developed behavior analysis technology, as well as Loginza, a single sign-in service.

The company’s search platform and other innovative services have earned itself a lot of accolades and recognition from industry insiders including online media outlet FastCompany which named Yandex as one of the Most Innovative Companies of 2011 for its prowess in search and for being able to stand its ground against internet giants.