Mompreneur jumps into the ‘Shark Tank’

It all started with a 4 a.m. email nearly a year ago: “Do you think a baby bib could change the world? I do...”

Then Susie Taylor included a link to her website, bibbitec.com, and off it went to Shark Tank, the popular ABC television show where entrepreneurs pitch their companies to investors on the show — and by extension, 7 million viewers.

Four months later, as the “mompreneur” was leaving her Biscayne Park home to pick up her kids from school, she got a call from the show asking her to pitch on the spot. Driving with her phone on her shoulder, she told the Bibbitec story.

Shark Tank bit. After a few more back and forths, her segment was filmed last summer.

Friday night, Taylor is scheduled to be on the show pitching Bibbitec’s main product, “The Ultimate Bib,” a patented generously sized, stain-resistant and fast-drying child’s bib made in the USA — Hialeah, to be exact. Bibbitec’s $30 bib can be a burp cloth, changing pad, breast feeding shield, full body bib, place mat, art smock and more, Taylor says.

We won’t be getting any details on what happens Friday night when she and her husband, Stephen Taylor, get into the tank with Daymond John, Mark Cuban and the other celebrity sharks; Taylor has been contractually sworn to secrecy. But whatever the outcome, she believes it will be worth it for the marketing pop.

Taylor was inspired to create her bib after a long and very messy plane ride with her two young sons and started Bibbitec in 2008. She and her team — her husband is CFO, her sister, Heather McCabe, handles sales and marketing, her uncle, Richard Page, is in charge of production, and her aunt, Marcia Kreitman, advises on design — have expanded the line to include The Ultimate Smock for older children and the Ultimate Mini for babies. Coming soon: a smock for adults.

Taylor already got a taste of what a national TV show appearance can do for sales. In September, Bibbitec’s sales jumped 40 percent after she was on an ABC World News "Made in America" segment. “Within 30 seconds, we started getting sales from all over the country and they didn’t even mention our name on the air,” Taylor says. She said that confirmed her belief that a Shark Tank appearance would be worth it.

Plus, Taylor has been hooked on Shark Tank since the first time she watched it in 2008 as she was developing her product. Trained in theater, she admits she didn’t know much about business and learned from the show. She would practice how she would answer the questions.

“I’m all about empowering women who are sitting on the couch watching, because that’s what I was four years ago,” says Taylor. “All I wanted to do was to be on Shark Tank because I believed if I got on Shark Tank the world will see what I am trying to do and that’s all I need. I know it’s a great product.”

Will that theater training come in handy Friday night? Stay tuned. Shark Tank airs at 9 p.m. on ABC and Taylor hopes viewers will join in on Twitter using the hashtag #sharkbib.

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Healing gardens: Horticulture therapy takes root in South Florida

Allspice and heirloom roses scent the garden where Robert Bornstein starts his work day at his home, tending plants meant not for show but for healing.

"We have 35 years of scientific documentation to tell us we were meant to be with nature,” says Bornstein, potting an Everglades tomato that his seniors with limited mobility can grow indoors. “I need at least ten minutes in the garden or I’m no good.”

Bornstein’s work, called horticultural therapy, uses gardens and gardening activities to improve memory,, physical coordination, rehabilitation and social skills. According to Elizabeth Diehl, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture, a growing body of research shows horticulture therapy’s benefits among older populations.

“Having access to natural spaces reduces violent behavior in Alzheimer’s patients,” Diehl says.

As hospitals and treatment centers become aware of the benefits, they are adding horticultural activities to their recreational therapy programs. Bornstein, who began his career working with patients who had been declared criminally insane, now has a busy practice serving 40 senior residence facilities across South Florida and charges roughly $90 an hour for his services.

Ten minutes slip to thirty.

“I’m late!” he realizes, and jumping into his Prius, guns it to Deerfield Beach.

"You see, ladies? He’s always running," Geraldine Markiewicz, a retired first-grade teacher, tells fellow Horizon Club residents as the therapist races into the assisted living facility bearing bags of materials for a flower arranging hour. Fifteen residents range around the common area, some in wheelchairs. Bornstein passes around thimble-sized plastic containers that look like champagne glasses, followed by sprigs of eucalyptus, cattails and dried flowers. Each person selects an element, decides its arrangement, and attaches it to a thumbnail of floral foam with all the hand-eye coordination he or she can muster.

Neuropathy, rheumatoid arthritis and the shaking hands of Parkinson’s disease can make such fine movements difficult. Yet as the arrangements take shape, no bigger than a salt shaker, they look as fine as if a caterer had created them for a wedding table.

Activities Assistant Gwenda Rodriguez stands by as a resident who can barely move wills her hands to place a purple flower in the cup. The woman’s face beams. She has made the most elegant arrangement of all.

* * *

Elena Naranjo used to be an assistant director at a mental health center, dealing with continual crisis management. Then she got a license in permaculture, the design of holistic living spaces based on sustainable agriculture. “I think there’s a very healing application working with nature. It’s where I wanted to end up,” Naranjo says.

Now she, a small staff, and the homeless and formerly homeless families of Verde Gardens, a 145-unit affordable housing community of Miami-Dade Homeless Trust and Carrfour Supportive Housing, are reaping their first full harvest on the Farm at Verde Gardens.

Modeled on the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Calif., the 22-acre farm on former Homestead Air Reserve Base land offers skills and business opportunities to community members like Xavier Wright, as well as fresh food

“I’m an outdoor person. My grandparents grew cotton and peaches,” says 25-year-old Wright who arrived at the Chapman Partnership homeless shelter a single father with full custody of his autistic son. “I love this,” he says, setting pigeon pea seedlings in the soil.

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The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]

BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]

This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.

Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.

And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook Off Exclusive Clip

The competition on Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off is heating up, and in this exclusive clip from the hit Food Network show, Sister Act star Kathy Najimy is definitely feeling the pressure -- and possibly succumbs to it.

"I'm feeling very nervous about the Béchamel Sauce because I've never done it for 100 people before," Najimy says, while quickly whipping up the famous white sauce. "The scary ingredient for me in the sauce is the flour."

Video: Guy Fieri's Hometown Tour

And clearly, something goes awry when the sauce starts to take on a doughy consistency.

"How am I going to explain to Rachael [Ray] that I made a muffin?," she worries.

Video: ET Goes Backstage wtih Nancy O'Dellon the 'The Rachael Ray Show'

Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off, in which the last celeb standing (who's mentored either by Rachael Ray or Guy Fieri) wins a cash donation towards the charity of his or her choice, airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Food Network.

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Ex-Sen. Huntley pleads guilty to mail fraud

Former New York state Senator Shirley Huntley pleaded guilty today to mail fraud charges after admitting to embezzling more than $87,000 in taxpayer funds earmarked for a non-profit.

The Queens Democrat said that she used funds from a charitable non-profit education organization to buy personal items and benefit family members.

The embattled ex-legislator was initially indicted on Aug. 27 by state authorities on charges that she falsified documents to conceal the fact that her niece and an aide allegedly siphoned $30,000 from a sham charity she created.

But Brooklyn federal prosecutors quietly opened a mail fraud case against Huntley.

The ex-legislator did not speak to reporters and declined to answer questions as she left the Brooklyn federal courthouse.

It's not clear whether today's plea will resolve a state corruption case against Huntley that's still pending in Nassau County Supreme Court.

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Mercantil Commercebank boosts its earnings

Merantil Commercebank, based in Coral Gables, on Wednesday reported a net profit of $10.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2012, up from $7.7 million reported for the same quarter of 2011.

The bank earned $31.8 million for the full year of 2012, nearly double the $16.2 million it earned in 2011. The bank said its positive results primarily reflect strong growth in loans and improved asset quality.

Mercantil Commercebank had $6.8 billion in total assets at year-end 2012. It has 18 branches, including 15 in South Florida, one in New York and two in Houston.

INA PAIVA CORDLE

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Study: Medicaid expansion may save state money

Florida would save money over the next decade — not lose billions as Gov. Rick Scott has argued — by accepting Medicaid expansion under federal healthcare reforms, according to a detailed economic study.

Miami-Dade legislators and healthcare industry leaders, getting together on Monday, heard about the report by Georgetown University — the most positive yet on a highly debated provision of what is often called Obamacare.

Jack Hoadley, a senior researcher with the Georgetown Health Policy Institute, said the study was the first to calculate spin-off savings in other state programs if Florida accepted the expansion, which over the next 10 years could bring $26 billion in federal funds to provide insurance to an estimated 815,000 to 1.3 million Florida residents who are now uninsured.

In Miami-Dade, expansion would cover an additional 150,000 to 225,000, according to the Georgetown projections. That reduction in the uninsured would bring huge relief to the county’s hospitals, which by federal law must treat anyone who comes to the emergency room, regardless of ability to pay.

The top-level meeting, at the United Way of Miami-Dade headquarters, was convened by United Way, Health Council of South Florida and Health Foundation of South Florida.

At the very least, the Georgetown findings and other recent analyses have some critics reconsidering opposition to the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act.

State Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah, who previously was an “absolute no” vote against Medicaid expansion, said after the meeting that he was now “open to the thought” that expansion makes sense.

State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez, R-Hialeah, said he was still concerned about the debt-ridden feds’ ability to fund Medicaid over the long term, but “we are looking at all the options.”

Estimates about the real costs of expansion have varied wildly based on the law, which requires the federal government to pay all costs of the expansion for the first three years. Starting in 2017, the state will start paying a small share, which will reach 10 percent of the expansion costs for 2020 and beyond.

Gov. Scott, who has long been critical of Obamacare, contended in December that expansion would cost Florida taxpayers more than $26 billion over 10 years. Opponents and healthcare experts criticized that estimate as way too high, and earlier this month the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration gave a much lower estimate of $3 billion for the decade.

That was lower even than a report by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, a Washington research group, which in November estimated that expansion would cover an additional 1.2 million residents at a cost to the state of $5.4 billion over 10 years.

Georgetown’s Hoadley said Monday that the Kaiser study used only rough data for all 50 states, while the Georgetown study, funded by two Florida nonprofit foundations, looked in detail at how Medicaid expansion would save money in other areas. The Georgetown study found that the state would have to spend less for safety-net hospitals such as Jackson Health System, mental-health and substance-abuse programs and the medically needy program.

Hoadley said the savings calculations were “a very cautious estimate.”

The Georgetown report projected that the state would save $300 million in 2014, the first year of Medicaid expansion, and $100 million in 2020, when the state would be paying for 10 percent of the expansion costs.

The Georgetown study found that expansion was especially important in Florida, where almost one in three — 30 percent — of nonelderly adults are uninsured, compared to 18 percent nationwide.

In South Florida, the figures are even higher for uninsured non-elderly adults: 57 percent in Hialeah, 50 percent in the city of Miami, 48.5 percent in Deerfield Beach and 31.2 percent in Kendall.

Hospitals strongly support the expansion. On Monday, Phillis Oeters, an executive with Baptist Health South Florida, told legislators that hospitals have already seen their Medicare and Medicaid payments reduced greatly in other areas.

“Enough is enough,” she said. “Hospitals can’t take it anymore.”

A study done for the Florida Hospital Association estimated that the infusion of federal funds from Obamacare would add 56,000 jobs to the state.

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Apple announces iPad with double storage capacity

(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell a version of its iPad tablet computer with 128 gigabytes of storage, which is twice the capacity of its existing models.

Apple, which has sold more than 120 million iPads so far, said that the new iPad will go on sale February 5, in black or white, for a suggested retail price of $ 799 for the iPad with just Wi-Fi model, and $ 929 for the version that also has a cellular wireless connection.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The San Francisco 49ers Take a Pop Culture Quiz

ET's Rocsi Diaz got up close and personal with the San Francisco 49ers in New Orleans Tuesday during Media Day, where they're gearing up for Super Bowl Sunday. But though all their energy will be focused on winning the coveted Vince Lombardi Trophy, how much do the 49ers know about this year's halftime performer, the one and only Beyonce?

Pics: Inside Beyonce's Super Bowl Rehearsals!

Ranging from some clearly pop culture savvy players, to those who need more than a little help (ahem Garrett Celek), click the video to see the 49ers have a little fun before the big game and to find out which Beyonce song is quarterback Colin Kaepernick's favorite!

Video: Mary J. Blige -- Beyonce Will Be 'Amazing' at the Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLVII, featuring the San Francisco 49ers vs. the Baltimore Ravens, airs this Sunday, February 3 on CBS.

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Violent parolee sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering Brooklyn liquor-store clerk

A violent parolee who killed a beloved Brooklyn liquor-store clerk was sentenced to 35 years in prison today.

Eion Klass, 36, had previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter and robbery for the 2010 killing of Yoseph Robinson at his shop in Midwood.

Robinson, 34, was shot three times during a struggle with a robber at MB Vineyards, where he worked when he wasn’t lecturing about Judaism and studying the Torah.

The clerk was a former small-time criminal and record label worker who converted to Orthodox Judaism over 10 years ago.

“Your senseless cowardly act cost us way too much,” Robinson’s girlfriend, Lahavah Wallace wrote in a victim impact statement. “[Yoseph] ran the streets but left that alone to make something of himself.”

“When you walked in that night you stopped being a man, but Yoseph never will. I pity you. Enjoy the rest of the miserable existence you think is a life.”

Robinson was behind the store's counter, chatting with Wallace and a friend, when Klass, wearing a mask, entered and demanded money and jewelry.

Wallace handed over her jewelry, but Robinson lunged across the counter, and struggled with Klass, who shot him.

Judge Neil Firetog sentenced Klass to 25 years for the shooting and 10 years for the robbery.

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