Open up your mind and say, ahh...

You don’t have to be a Hollywood mogul to have someone do mind-numbing tasks for you. Just ask Ted Roden.

Three years ago, Ted Roden was sitting in a maternity ward with his wife and newborn baby when he came to a realization. Between his full-time job as a New York Times developer, the book he was writing, and his family, when would he ever again find time for the small yet necessary tasks of everyday life like booking a dinner reservation? Or paying his electric bill? Or scheduling a phone call with this reporter?

That’s when Roden came up with the idea for Fancy Hands, a team of personal assistants that helps you accomplish the kinds of basic tasks anybody can do, so you have more time to do the things only you can do. For example, Fancy Hands can’t write this article for me, but they can do all the things that might be keeping me from writing it, like calling the cable company or scheduling a dentist appointment.

“The idea came totally out of a need,” says Roden, who was Fancy Hands’ only user for the first six months of its quiet launch back in April 2010. Spoken like a true developer, he adds, “Rather than make a simple phone call to take my wife out to dinner, I built an elaborate platform.”

Transforming the idea from a personal pet project into a business only made sense, considering the outsized levels of productivity people strive for today. And the transition itself went fairly smoothly, as Roden had worked for a startup before (he was one of the first programmers at Vimeo, back when “you had to explain to people what Vimeo was”), and the way Fancy Hands makes money is pretty straightforward. “It’s a very complicated system underneath, but business-wise it’s very simple. People pay us, we do things.” Participants pay a monthly fee depending on the plan–$25 will get you 5 requests a month, while $65 will get you up to 25 requests.

The bigger challenge was, and continues to be, convincing consumers that you don’t have to be a Hollywood mogul or a corporate fatcat to reap the benefits of a personal assistant. “Delegating is hard,” Roden says. “Even if you give someone a real assistant sitting next to them, it’s going to be a while before they figure out anything to give them. We try to demonstrate to people how there’s so much you have to do in a given day, but only so much you have to do yourself.”

We try to demonstrate to people how there’s so much you have to do in a given day, but only so much you have to do yourself.

While Roden is coy about the specific number of requests Fancy Hands handles daily, he says that during January and February of this year, his assistants logged over 40,000 minutes on the phone for his clients–that’s about a full month straight of talk-time. And phone jobs don’t even make up the majority of Fancy Hands’ work; most requests involve emailing, proofreading, and research.

One major thing Fancy Hands hasn’t had the infrastructure to support yet is the ability to pay for things on people’s behalf. But that’s all about to change in the coming days and months, Roden says. Another new feature Fancy Hands plans to launch this year is a pricing plan for companies who want to make Fancy Hands’ assistants available to its employees during business hours.

“This is going to be a make-or-break year for us without question. We’re either killing it this time next year or we probably don’t exist.”

In the future, Roden hopes that completing “mind-numbing” tasks will become such an automated process that people will forget how they ever completed them in the past. He compares it to how digital immigrants of a certain age may forget how they ever bought airline tickets before the Internet came along. But until the day that technology can take care of all these annoying duties for us, Fancy Hands’ assistants are here to help.

Image: Flickr user Matteo Mignani

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Shoptiques

Quick Pitch: Shop local boutiques online.

Genius Idea: Brings an offline industry online; lets you shop by neighborhood.

It all began with Paris and a shoe.

While shopping in France’s capital four years ago, Olga Vidisheva stumbled across what she describes as a “tiny, one-location wonder boutique with the friendliest, most stylish owner.” There, she found a pair of suede sandals unlike anything she’d ever come across in a department store, which she promptly purchased and packed into her suitcase home.

Vidisheva says she has wanted to go back to that boutique ever since, but has never been able to. Since that time, she’s discovered some fantastic boutiques stateside, picked up a MBA from Harvard Business School and is now on a mission to make the experience of browsing and buying from boutiques available to everyone everywhere through her newly launched site, Shoptiques. The sites lets you buy clothing and accessories from 50 boutiques with one flat shipping and return fee.

Shoptiques isn’t the first business that’s attempted to bring the boutique industry online. London-based Farfetch.com, which raised $18 million in January, has made the inventories of some 200 boutiques available for online purchase. Backend solutions like Shopify have also made it easier for small businesses to set up storefronts on the web.

So what makes Shoptiques different? The biggest differentiator is product. Farfetch focuses on upmarket brands and products with pricetags not infrequently in the high hundreds and low thousands. Brands aren’t a focus on Shoptiques, and products are priced between $50 and $300.

Shoptiques also invites you to shop differently: that is, like a local. Shops are organized by neighborhood, so you can pull up all the inventory from Brooklyn, for instance, or West Hollywood. From there, you can filter by color, price, size and style. You also have the option to browse across cities by category, just like any other apparel retail site.

Shoptiques is a recent alum of Y Combinator’s accelerator program and has raised an initial seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, General Catalyst and SV Angel, among others. The startup takes a “healthy cut” of each sale made on the site, Vidisheva tell us. Everything sold online is brought in and photographed by Shoptiques. Once a sale is made, the boutique is responsible for shipping it to the customer and keeping track of remaining inventory.

Inventory and sales growth are top priorities for Shoptiques going forward, as are further curation and personalization features, Vidisheva says. “If your style is classic, and mine is edgy, we should experience the site in a different way,” Vidisheva says of Shoptiques’s plans for personalization. “Perhaps we’ll start shoppers with a quiz, recommend that they follow a few boutiques and go from there.”

Mobile is also on the roadmap, with an emphasis on bridging the online and offline shopping experience. “We want to become a destination for boutique living and shoping,” Vidisheva explains. “If you’re on the streets of Nolita, we want to tell you which boutiques near you have stuff. We really see our boutiques as partners, and we want to drive traffic to their offline stores as well. We benefit because they’ll be in business a long time, and we want to work with them for a long time.”

All that’s very promising, but we still feel one element is missing from the shopping experience: the interaction with that friendly, stylish boutique owner Vidisheva met in Paris. Phone numbers for each of the boutiques are provided on the site so that shoppers can ring when they have a question about styling or fit. But we’d love to be able to jump in a video or even an SMS chat with boutique workers while we were shopping, or see how a particular piece has been styled on a store mannequin.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Alija

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Robots in movies may be evil more often than good, but they’re becoming part of our lives. And their tech is evolving so that they “feel” more like we do.

This happened recently, and we had to show it to you. NASA’s sort of recreated the look of one of the famous parts of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco with an astronaut’s space suit and Robonaut. 

Bot Vid: Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound

Boston Dynamics has a bit of a rep for making scary military bots, but its latest Sand Flea robot is different. While still being designed for military or policing purposes, the tiny robot can leap over high obstructions in a single leap and could almost earn the epithet “cute.”

Bot Vid: Hand Shake Robot

Osaka University is demonstrating its robotic prowess by developing a robotic telepresence hand that can communicate the grip, force, and the body temperature of the remote operator. It’s all about adding a more tactile aspect to telepresence meetings.

Bot News

Robots at Foxconn. Foxconn’s again in the news because of its plans for revolutionizing its production lines in China, but in this case it’s because CEO Terry Gou has another way to stop employees working in illegal conditions: He wants to add thousands of robots to his factories.

Robot teachers. The idea of robot teachers has been around a while, but the technology is getting a new spin courtesy of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a $100,000 prize competition to design a better automated “robotic” grading software. The idea is that teachers would assign more writing tasks if they didn’t have to grade them, and this would boost what’s seen as low writing skills in U.S. students.

RoboBonobo. A great ape sanctuary in Iowa has an unusual Kickstarter project underway: It wants to make a remote telepresence bonobo robot which the apes can control to interact with visitors. You may be skeptical, but bonobos are among the smartest great apes and have been taught to communicate using sign language–and the overall goal is to develop a super-clever touchscreen speech app so the apes can communicate with people better. As part of the Kickstarter project, if you fund it with over $500 you can get a Skype session with a bonobo.

Bot Futures: Tactile Robots

Giving robots human-like touch sensitivity is likely an important goal for the time when robots are more a part of our daily lives. Touch is incredibly important for things you may not imagine–such as detecting when you’re bumping into something gently, or for applying the right amount of force when, for example, helping someone out of bed.

Robot touch is actually something researchers at the University of Pittsburgh say is a “holy grail” of robotics, and they think they’ve got a technology that could enable it. It’s called Belousov-Zhabotinsky gel, and it’s pretty weird. That’s because if you don’t poke it or stimulate it in any way, it pulsates by itself.

The idea is that by engineering the BZ gel carefully it can be turned into a super-sensitive and soft sensor system for robots so that the machines could work out if their stiff, mechanical limbs are touching something that needs to be handled carefully–or, in the case of bumping into a human accidentally, to know it’s done so without necessarily having to “see” the situation happen and react accordingly.

It seems more and more likely that when robots do become a daily experience for us, they’ll be imbued with slightly human behaviors like touch sensitivity and, indeed, ethics.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Facebook talks design, Prettypegs sex up Ikea couches, and Google nudges employees to eat better (then measures the hell out of the results, of course). It’s our top stories of the week.

Facebook Agrees: The Key To Its Future Success Is Design. “We want to make the experience of using Facebook as seamless and easy as talking to people in real life.”–Facebook’s Chris Cox

Infographic: Red Meat Is Killing Us. But yay, vegetables!

6 Ways Google Hacks Its Cafeterias So Googlers Eat Healthier. “When employees are healthy, they’re happy. When they’re happy, they’re innovative.”–Google’s Jennifer Kurkoski

An American-Made Miracle: How An Aeron Chair Gets Built Every 17 Seconds. Thanks to techniques imported from Toyota, Herman Miller’s Aeron-chair factory has increased productivity by 500% and quality by 1,000%.

Apple’s Slick iPad Branding Hides A Broken App Infrastructure. “iPad branding isn’t actually a problem. The problem is that Apple buys into their own branding within their infrastructure.”

A Super-Fast Way To Upgrade Your Ikea Couch: Awesome Legs. At least you don’t have to assemble these.

The Main Failing Of Design School: Kids Can’t Think For Themselves. “Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.”–Pentagram Partner Michael Bierut

Better Than A Van Gogh: NASA Visualizes All The World’s Ocean Currents. “NASA has rendered a picture of the ocean that’s as gorgeous as the ocean itself.”

Why Drive Up To A Theater, When You Can Float Up To It? Watch The Little Mermaid… with little mermaids!?

Move Aside, Hipstamatic: Flixel iPhone App Turns Pics Into Artsy Animated GIFs. Lolcats, meet Helmut Newton.