There are real inventions like the integrated circuit, the airplane and the cotton gin and then there are marketing concepts like the Pet Rock and now, the $100,000 Zafirro Iridium razor blade.The company says that the Iridium is the world’s first razor with sapphire blades.  According to Zaffiro CEO Hayden Hamilton, the 80 atom wide sapphire blade provides a finer tip than steel. The razor's handle is made up of stainless steel and iridium, with the iridium comprising the handle’s skeleton. Hamilton says iridium is "10 times rarer than platinum and made mainly from meteorites... It’s the strongest functional metal and has been used for making rocket models for the last 50 years.”

Will the Iridium razor provide a better shave than a $10 Gillette Fusion or a $1 Bic? Probably. 10,000 or 100,000 times better??? Certainly not. But that's not the point of the product. Zafirro is making only 100 units. It's essentially limited edition jewelry. The surprising thing is that this exercise in marketing to the uber-rich will probably work. Zafirro claims to have already received "dozens" of orders.

Most inventors dream of creating a product that's sold at Wal-Mart. Zafirro's pending success with the Iridium points to an alternative path.

Here's the Zafirro website.

Sculpteo, a European prototyping company, is now offering the ability to shrink yourself! With the ability to transform digital files into real-life, physical objects, Sculpteo allows digital dreamers to turn 3D files into 3-dimensional creations, as well as create easily 3D objects based on 2D drawings or simple text. Sculpteo makes it easy for users to edit or customize items by allowing them to select size, material, and color or monochrome printing options -- all done conveniently online. That means you never have to speak to a customer rep and deal with back and forth. Once you approve your design it is shipped to you the next day. The turnaround time of a Mini Me is 10 days. The price is calculated based on the size you choose. Learn more at Sculpteo.com

A century from now Steve Jobs will be remembered alongside Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers and Walt Disney. He ushered the new light of personal information into the world, mass produced it, made it fly and coupled it with new forms of entertainment. Jobs once said that all computers do is pick up and rearrange numbers, but if they do it fast enough, the results appear to be magic. His career was spent packaging that magic into sleek boxes with user friendly form and function.

Jobs was among the first to recognize that computers could be sold to everyone, not just big corporations. One of his great gifts was the ability to understand them from both an engineer's and a user's perspective. He got his start playing with telephone equipment and moved on to computers just as the industry was picking up steam. Growing up in Silicon Valley he was at the center of things. When he was a teenager he cold-called Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Helett-Packard and talked his way into a summer job.

He started college, then dropped out and traveled to India. He became a Buddhist and experimented with psychedelic drugs. He returned to Silicon Valley. On April Fools' Day 1976, he started Apple with Steve Wozniack. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he once said. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions.” Bill Gates, he suggested, would be “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.

Somewhere along his incongruous path Jobs developed a love for typography. That love became a defining feature of the Macintosh that Apple launched in 1984. The Mac interface offered a clean blue screen with black type and windows, icons and menus. It was quantumly easier to use than so-called personal computers of the time that were chained to DOS operating systems with displays of harsh green letters and numbers on black screens. The Macintosh should have been a blockbuster success. It wasn't. Jobs was pushed out of the company he founded by its board of directors.

His separation from Apple was a blessing. He went on to co-found a new firm, Pixar, which specialized in computer graphics, and NeXT, another computer-maker.

In 1996 Jobs returned to Apple, when the company acquired NeXT. Apple was then in deep trouble. Business Week wrote, "“The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead.” This sentiment about Apple was echoed by Michael Dell, who said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Steve Jobs proved them wrong. He put NeXT technology into a new range of Apple products: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple briefly became the world’s most valuable listed company. “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” Jobs said.

He was a man ahead of his time. Computing’s early years were dominated by technical types. But Job's obsession with form and function gave him an edge as technology evolved. His broad-based understanding of other fields gave his products a competitive advantage in a world where computing devices are fashion items. When he introduced the iPad 2, in March 2011 he ended his speech saying, “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

Beyond a broad based outlook and understanding of technology, Jobs had a monomaniacal obsessive with details. He believed that everything mattered, even the things that nobody sees. He required the first Macintosh to function without an internal cooling fan, so that it would be silent—putting user needs above engineering convenience (this decision led aftermarket suppliers to create bolt-on fans). He called an engineer at Google one weekend to tell him that the color of one letter of Google's on-screen logo on the iPhone was not quite the right shade of yellow. He often wrote or rewrote the text of Apple’s advertisements himself.

Although he presented himself as a Zen-like mystic, Jobs ran Apple like a dictator and had a fierce temper. He didn't believe in market researchers and focus groups, and relied on his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. Jobs had a gift that enabled him to foresee what consumers wanted before they knew they wanted it. He was right far more often than not. Most inventors and entrepreneurs do not have that skill.

Steve Jobs created "insanely great" products and was a model of passion driven entrepreneurship. He showed us that product quality and inspired design add to gross margin rather than subtract from it. He set the standard for what a baby boomer career could be. And he made nerds cool.

He'll be missed.

Farhad Manjoo has posted a glowing review of a new LED light-bulb from a company called Switch Lighting. He writes that the most remarkable thing about the new bulb is that the light it produces is totally unremarkable - it looks just like a typical incandescent bulb but uses roughly 1/5 the power. And it doesn't have the huge toxic drawback of compact fluorescent bulbs, namely, mercury. The new bulb is beautiful too. The main drawback today is that it's expensive. A 60 watt bulb costs $20 and should last for nearly twenty years. Even at today's high price the savings in electricity enable the Switch bulb to pay for itself in about 4 years. But, if you wait a couple of years, the cost should drop below $10. Read Farhad Manjoo's full review of Switch Lighting's new bulb at Slate.