Wouldn't it be cool if...? With that question leading the way, 18-year-old Ben Kaufman founded Mophie, named for his two dogs, in 2005. The goal: To create a "funky product development firm based around good people and great ideas." Today, Mophie products are in 28 countries worldwide, at Apple specialist stores, and at Apple retail stores.


When Ben was 14, he started his first business, a video production and Web design company. Mophie was started when he was a junior in high school. Obviously, creativity and business sense runs through the veins of this manchild. Man, when I was in high school, you could usually find me in the office, where I had been sent by a teacher for some foolishness that I perpetrated on the innocent.
Originally from Long Island, Kaufman moved to Burlington, VT to attend Champlain College. At that time, Mophie was a one-person operation with a single product– retractable lanyard earphones to use with the iPod. Called the "Song Sling," the product earned $75,000 in sales in its first four weeks, then went on to win "Best in Show" at the Macworld San Francisco trade show. Today, Mophie employs 12 people and sells 72 different products.
Now, here's where the question comes in. Kaufman believes that if you can think it you can do it.
So he starts the process by asking, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" The next step came naturally: Create a community of ideas and improvements. The idea became a reality at Macworld when Mophie used its booth to get new ideas by soliciting attendees' designs. Called the Mophie Illuminator Project, the company got 150 ideas in about four hours. Then the company conducted online voting to choose three finalists. By the last day of Macworld, Mophie had marketing pitches and working prototypes of all three finalists.
We will have to see where the Illuminator Project takes Mophie and its community. But the mission to get ideas out of people's heads and onto shelves by engaging the power of a community to create the world's best products seems to me to be much in line with the purpose of social media and blogging. Except this is blogging for dollars.