Hoping to unleash everyone's inner artist, Vancouver-based Raw Canvas is a creative hybrid: bustling café and full-service art studio.

Besides offering the usual café fare—organic coffee and tea, snacks, comfy couches and wifi, as well as wine, beer and tapas at night—Raw Canvas encourages customers to pick up painting. They can drop in at any time, buy a canvas and just get started in the open studio space that's connected to the café. Raw Canvas provides paints, brushes and all other supplies, and staff members and resident artists are on hand to offer encouragement and tips.

Inspired by popular art jams in Hong Kong, Raw Canvas aims to provide a low-threshold venue where people can come in for a few hours and explore their artistic impulses without committing time or money to a series of classes. With, of course, the added pleasure of a latte or glass of wine. Canvas pricing varies by size, ranging from CDN 40 to CDN 80. If you're a café owner looking to add a new source of revenue to your business, be inspired and get creative! (Related: A being space for learning English.)

Website: www.raw-canvas.com
Contact: paige@raw-canvas.com

Spotted by: Erin K.

Although it may seem that everyone and everything is online these days, there’s still a fair portion of the population that isn't part of the social networking revolution. It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to be involved—professionals are realising the benefits of connecting online. However, it’s these professionals, especially those over 45, who are more likely to feel daunted by the latest wave of online interaction. Enter JumpStart Social Media, a web service to get the not-so-tech-savvy up and running with their own online profiles.

For USD 89.95, JumpStart's webwise team will get users set up with a profile on either Facebook and LinkedIn and leave them with a reference guide. JumpStart uses a web-based questionnaire to determine the subscriber's needs, and then uses this information to create a personal profile. Everything is then submitted for review to the subscriber, who then approves (or disapproves) the profile. When users change their password on either site, JumpStart is no longer able to access their profile, which keeps the process secure. For people who have already set up an account on either site, a USD 9.95 personalised guide is on offer to help users get the most from their online profile.

JumpStart is a new service from social marketing consultancy Digital Brand Expressions, based in New Jersey. It fits in well with the current focus on the importance of personal branding, and the rise of using social networking to establish oneself as an industry expert, attracting employers in a recession. One to set up for local or niche markets? (Related: Helping unskilled workers find employers.)

Website: www.jumpstartsocialmedia.com
Contact: info@jumpstartsocialmedia.com

Spotted by: Raymond Kollau

Proponents of free and open source software are already familiar with the benefits of a collaborative, sharing approach to design, and now the automotive world is getting a taste of its own thanks to a Netherlands-based effort known as c,mm,n.

Sustainable mobility is at the heart of the motivation behind c,mm,n (reportedly pronounced "common"), an initiative from Stichting Natuur en Milieu (Dutch Society for Nature and Environment) along with the technical universities of Delft, Twente and Eindhoven. Aiming to provide a model for cars in the year 2020, the first collaboratively designed prototype car was debuted recently at Amsterdam's AutoRAI 2009 car show. Boasting zero emissions, the hydrogen-powered vehicle features a lightweight (and therefore fuel-saving) thermoplastic exterior and an interior including soy-based memory foam and other recyclable materials. What its developers call a "river display," meanwhile, is said to function like an iPhone with access to a variety of information including route-planning, carpooling and efficiency-maximizing systems. The vehicle is also optimised to minimize depreciation and repairs. Materials in the body, for example, last only three years; after that, the car is designed to be taken back to the factory and rebuilt. Most paradigm-busting of all, however, is that the car's blueprints are publicly available under an open source license, so its design can be used and modified by others as long as any derived works are shared with the public as well. More than 800 people are currently involved in c,mm,n through the site's "c, mm, nity" and developer's wiki. A video on YouTube (text in Dutch) provides a computer simulation of the c,mm,n in action.

Given Generation C(ontent)'s penchant for contributing content and having a say in matters large and small, it's no surprise open source software is gaining ground. Will the same concept have "wheels" in the automotive world? Only time will tell. In the meantime, one to watch—and get involved in! (Related: Converting standard Corollas into electric cars — Open source approach to textbook publishing.)

Website: www.cmmn.org
Contact: sijas@cmmn.org

Spotted by: Paul Coppes

Travelling by air is fraught with uncertainties, from delays to cancellations to lost bags. Savvy travellers can already use Delaycast to assess their chances of having to wait longer than they'd planned, and now another brand-new service helps them notify the people who matter to them once they finally land safely on the ground.

ArrivedOK, a new service from Texas-based Eyeline Communications, lets air travellers automatically alert others that they've arrived at their destination. Users of the service, which just entered public beta, begin by scheduling their flight with the destination airport and expected arrival time, along with the phone numbers or emails of the contacts they'd like to be notified once they arrive. They can also compose personalized messages to be sent to different groups of recipients. They turn off their mobile phone during the trip, as generally required; then, when their plane lands and they turn it back on, ArrivedOK tracks their cell phone in the mobile network and instantly sends those tailored ‘Arrived OK’ messages to the designated recipients via SMS, email, Twitter or the user's blog. (Recipients must subscribe to a GSM/UMTS network for phone notification.) ArriveOK's technology is even smart enough to discern when a user turns on their phone much earlier than expected—indicating a problem—or when they turn it on in a country other than the one that was planned; in both cases, recipients are not notified, and the user receives an error message instead. The overall result? Not just a simpler and easier process on the traveller's part, but also a much less expensive one, since ArrivedOK alerts are three to eight times cheaper than calling or texting from abroad, Eyeline says.

ArrivedOK is being beta-tested in 10 countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, South Africa and Spain—through the end of May, and is free during that time. One to try out, partner with, or otherwise get involved in?

Website: www.arrivedok.mobi/hello
Contact: andrey.deriabin@eyeline.mobi

Spotted by: Judy McRae

Back in 2007 we wrote about Flattenme, a company that makes personalized storybooks for kids by incorporating in each a photo and the name of the child who will read them. Now from Argentina comes StickieStory, which takes an interactive, sticker-based approach to much the same theme.

Customers of StickieStory begin by choosing which story they'd like their book to be about—current options include "Space Adventure" and "Super Super," a superhero tale. They then upload photos of one main character and as many as three secondary characters, along with their names. From there, StickieStory creates a glossy and full-colour, 8.5-by-11-inch storybook with 12 pages, along with 3 sheets of stickers: one bearing the characters for the story, each customized with the appropriate face and name, and the other two with stickers for the contents of the story. Using the resulting StickieStory book is a combination of reading and play whereby kids place their stickers in the designated spots in the book as they follow along with the story. Pricing for each book is USD 19, and worldwide shipping is available.

Our sister site trendwatching.com first wrote about gravanity back in 2003, but there's still no end in sight to consumers' love for products of any kind that feature them—their face, their family or at least their name. Vanity, thy name is everyconsumer; entrepreneurs, that sound you hear is opportunity knocking! ;-)

Website: www.stickiestory.com
Contact: contact@stickiestory.com