If you like to be up on the latest gadgets, you're going to love Quirky.com. I could spend hours looking at the products on this site, which are all newly invented by people just like you and me who had an idea—a marketable one.
Quirky works like this: You join the quirky community (yes, they do use a lowercase Q. They're quirky lke that) for free to submit your new product idea, community members and quirky staff vote and comment on ideas, and the ideas with the most traction get selected to be developed by quirky and many end up on store shelves just months later. When products get sold, quirky shares revenue back with the inventor as well as the other community members who helped bring your product idea to life.
Some of the products seem like great ideas to me, like the $12.99 Tether, flexible plastic rods that keep long stemmed wine glasses from toppling over and breaking in the dishwasher. Can't tell you how many glasses I've lost that way.
Another favorite of mine is the $4.99 Stem, a cute little spray nozzle that you stick into a lemon or a lime to squirt out its juice—beats pulling out and dirtying my juicer. Instead, I can just keep my nozzle-loaded lemon in the fridge ready to spritz on a salad or liven up a recipe.
But then there are the products that make you scratch your head wondering, is this really a problem you need a gadget to solve? A case in point: the $12.99 Bobbie Brush, a roly-poly rubber toothbrush holder designed to keep your toothbrush from sliding off a wet sink. Never had that happen, so don't think a Bobbie Brush is in my future.
Now if only someone would invent a wet towel picker-upper for all those that never seem to make it back to the towel bar after "some people" in my family take a shower! Would anyone vote for that? Let me know what you’d like invented.
