Non-Tech Businesses and the Technology They Created

culled from:mashable.com

Invention based on necessity — Benjamin Franklin knew this well. He created bifocals when he realized he needed multiple kinds of eyeglasses to keep doing his work. Likewise, the following innovators solved practical problems by stepping outside the activities of their everyday business; they created the tools they needed to keep growing.
1. Re-Imagining Real-Estate Leads: Leads2Listing

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Image: Leads2Listing

Travis Thom and his fellow real-estate agents at Venture Realty Group in New Mexico, mined for new leads by cold-contacting owners of expired for-sale listings. However, it occurred to Thom, Venture's owner, that his company was spending too much time and money on an often-frustrating effort. What he needed was a way of bringing better leads to his staff for less outlay. He imagined a web-based tool that would attract homeowners who were more assuredly primed to sell.

Assembling a team of coders, Thom built just that. "I don't write the actual code," he said. "I knew just enough to know how it should function, and whether it was doable or not." Under his guidance, Leads2Listing emerged as a query-based agent's landing page, one that entices homeowners into envisioning what their property might be worth by getting them to answer a series of questions. Once they've entered their information, Thom and crew can then inform the potential client of possible selling prices, and they're starting with a prospect that's already warmed-up to the idea of listing their house.

Turns out plenty of other agents think Leads2Listing is a helpful tool as well. For $57 a month per site, agents in places such as Chicago, Denver, San Diego and Palm Beach are now using the tool Thom has built.
2. Mobile Coat Check, Mobile Tracking: CoatChex

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Image: Flickr, King Huang

Indie entrepreneur Derek Pacqué started a mobile coat-check company in Indiana — keg-shaped racks that can be brought to venues — but soon found he had to build something to manage of all the rack's inventory. With his company, he designed and implemented an app that used photos and QR codes to track garments at each event. Hence, CoatChex was born.

And, as Pacqué told Entrepreneur, the potential of the software now exceeds even its night-of-event practicality. "We realized that venues want data on their customers," he said. "Data that comes from our app." With the information CoatChex collects, it's now working to help venues to further engage their clientele.
3. From Grain to Silicon (Valley): FarmLogs

Farmlogs team

Image: Farmlogs Press Kit

What if the "need" in question was that your own family was trying to run its farm more profitably? That was the case for 25-year-old Jesse Vollmar, working on a fifth-generation Michigan farm where he grew up. He'd already used his knack for coding to build smaller-scale tools for the Vollmars' silos, but one day a neighboring farmer asked the young man when he'd make crop-management tools for everyone else.

    "That was just a light-bulb moment,"

"That was just a light-bulb moment," Vollmar said. "This is something that was needed by the market. I'd already seen that we were struggling without it."

And so, with the help of his business partner, and a boost from Y Combinator, Vollmar went on to create FarmLogs. The software, currently free, monitors crops, costs, revenue, weather and other factors of farm operation. Today, it's in the hands of more than 5% of the row farmers in the United States, and it's used in 130 countries worldwide. As for Vollmar, he may now work in the world of tech, but he still goes back to the family farm. "It's kind of funny," he says. "We take our team touring all day, riding in tractors, learning all about how the work is done, firsthand."

What all three stories have in common is drive and an underlying concept: Innovate to survive as a business; invent to solve a challenge, to spur a brick-and-mortar operation on to the next level.

And whether it's finding new ways to lure home-sellers to an agent's office, or better managing inventory, or bringing big data to the farm, the world of tech invention often thrives on these moments of need — even if technology isn't the first business of the innovating owner.