From Lemons, She Made LemonAid Crutches

 From her site, www.lemonaidcrutches.com, Laurie Johnson writes:

As with many innovative ideas, LemonAid Crutches™ came into existence through personal need. In August of 2002, I was in a small plane crash, which took the lives of my husband and young son. Although I survived, I was left with a severely broken leg (femur) and began a long journey of surgeries, disappointments and crutches.

Still on crutches a year after the crash, I needed some cheering up. My sister and I decided it was time to do something with my “ugly” crutches. We had them professionally painted and covered the pads with gorgeous designer fabrics, and voila! they made me smile.

During my second year on crutches, I perfected the designer crutch. Becoming my own guinea pig, I played with different colors, painting processes and fabric choices. LemonAid Crutches™ was born while I crutched around town and the idea instantly became a hit.

Saving Kids and Starting a Company

Thirty-four-year-old Jeremiah Hutchins, who describes himself as having an “entrepreneurial spirit,” moonlighted as a trucker at night, hauling everything from Campbell’s Soup to Little Debbie snack cakes.

Hutchins listened to AM radio as he drove and the airwaves were filled with talk surrounding the high-profile trial of a man involved in the kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl in San Diego.

“All the people on the radio shows were talking about if they had only had a better picture of the girl or if she only had better identification maybe it would have helped,” Hutchins said. “It was a hot topic.”

Realizing the many shortcomings of various forms of child identification, Hutchins began working with a software engineer who developed the initial technology that took advantage of the mini CD-ROM format. Hutchins started pitching the product to day care centers, was met with an enthusiastic response, and the Safe Kids Card was launched.

The Safe Kids Card is a wallet-sized, mini CD-ROM that serves as an all-in-one identification card for children and holds such information as photos of the child, a digital fingerprint and other medical and personal information that is easily accessible in case of an emergency. More than 100 categories of information can be included in a card. The cost generally ranges between $13 and $15.

Hutchins started Safe Kids Card with $700 in cash and five of his wife’s credit cards, all the money he had.

With system-wide revenue of $340,000 in 2005, Safe Kids Card surpassed the $1 million mark last year.

Offering a Helping Hand and Creating a Business

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

by John Cook 

John and Pamala Temple’s idea started with a relatively simple premise: It should be easy for kids to find senior housing for their aging parents.

Five years after that brainstorm, the founders of Seattle’s A Place for Mom have built a profitable and fast-growing business with 150 advisers throughout the country doling out advice on everything from meal programs to Alzheimer’s care for 11,000 assisted living facilities.

With the number of people over the age of 65 expected to double in the next 15 years and their children increasingly using the Internet to find information, A Place for Mom looks to be on the cusp of a gigantic market opportunity.

And that has awakened the venture capitalists. Battery Ventures — a Wellesley, Mass.-based firm with $2 billion under management — recently pumped $9.5 million into the company.

A small portion of Battery’s money will be used to buy up employee stock, though the bulk is slated for additional expansion, said Pamala Temple.

In the next two or three years, A Place for Mom expects to triple its employee base — primarily adding advisers who visit nursing facilities and consult with families about the most appropriate living situation.

“We are really there to hold the family’s hand and help them figure out what level of care they need, educate them about that level of care and then give them a list of resources that is specifically chosen for them,” said Pamala Temple, adding that the company typically provides five or six recommendations.

Read the rest of the story.

Saving Lives on the Street

FROM:  KOMO-TV

By April Zepeda
Watch the story

MONROE – It sounds like a super hero, but it’s the “Roboflagger.”

Drive up to a construction zone, and you may worry about delays – but flaggers worry about you.

“My fear is the guy who’s driving down the road, eating a hamburger and reading the newspaper and not paying any attention,” said Denise Smith, a DOT worker.

Road construction is a dangerous job. In six years, dozens of workers in our state have been killed – most of them flaggers.

“It’s sad that we have so many people hit in work zones and we haven’t really changed anything since Ford came out with the Model T,” said inventor Bret P. Goss.

That’s about to change with the Roboflagger. Construction workers with the Department of Transportation will be the first to test it in a construction zone Tuesday night in Monroe. A human flagger stands behind a safety barrier and uses a remote control to stop traffic.

“When you want to stop traffic, hit the stop button. It goes from flashing yellow, to solid yellow, to red, and then the gate arm comes down,” Goss demonstrated to the transportation workers.

Goss is a former flagger who invented the Roboflagger.

“Now what we’ve done is taken the liability from the person on the road and replaced it with a machine that your insurance company can replace, instead of a mom or dad not coming home.”

Crews will test the Robofllagger during a five week project that will be done mostly at night.

“There’s a lot of exposure to drunks and sleepy drivers and that kind of stuff at night,” said Assistant Project Engineer, Carl Barker.

“The cost of a life is irreplaceable,” said Smith, ” I think it’s a wonderful idea and people will pay a lot more attention.”

And ‘flaggers’ will pay less with their lives.

“It’s nice to get you off the road,” Goss said to DOT workers, “you got a lot better chance of going home.”