I'm flying off to cover the Burton European Open (otherwise known as the BEO - pronounced BeeYeow!) at the start of February courtesy of some fine fellows at Nokia. There you go readers, proof that all you have to do is write a blog for 5 years, and put in approximately 1,600 hour's (the equivalent of 200 working days) of work and things will start happening for you. Before you all rush off to start your own blog though, there's a much shorter-term opportunity to get an even better deal for just a few days of effort you might be interested in...

If you've come up with a cunning plan to create the greatest snowboard company ever seen, the first thing you'll need is money. Traditionally your options were limited to breaking open your piggy bank, borrowing money from your friends or family, prostrating yourself in front of your bank manager, taking up some sort of  criminal endeavour, or being publicly humiliated on Dragon's Den/Shark Tank. Nowadays though there's a new option for any poor-orphaned-friendless-pround-honest-shy people out there: crowd funding. 

Take your brilliant idea, stick it on a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and sit back while billions of potential investors throw cash at you. So far 43 snowboarding ideas have gone through this approach and here's our 10 favourite doomed attempts...

It's amazing humanity survived the early part of the last century  When they weren't busy filling their time with intermittent bouts of genocide, all-encompassing global conflicts and inventing weapons that could kill the planet, here's how people relaxed...