Have you ever had a great idea for an invention but wasn’t sure how to make it a reality? That’s what Quirky.com is all about. This New York based startup is literally the stuff dreams are made of.

“We started the company to make invention accessible,” says founder and CEO Ben Kaufman. “People come to our site, submit their ideas, and the best new ideas make their way all the way to retail shelves and we do all the heavy lifting in between.”

Kaufman came up with the idea for Quirky in 2005 when he was a frustrated high school student trying to create iPod accessories.

That led to him creating Mophie, a company that now makes add-ons for the iPhone. He sold the company for an undisclosed amount in 2007.

Then in 2009 he started Quirky, which has already put 98 products on store shelves. Those products can be found everywhere from Target to Walgreens, to Bed Bath & Beyond and Amazon.com.

“I wanted to build a business where the best product ideas in the world actually got out there into the world,” Kaufman told Breakout. “So we started the company to make sure that no matter what disciplines you know or don’t know, you’re augmented by both an expert team and a community that can make sure your product idea gets out there.”

This Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of summer and millions of Americans will take to the beaches and lakes across the country. Many more will flood the gates of the country's many amusement parks. Among those parks is one sitting on a spit of land on Lake Erie. For the last 15 years, Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio has been named the "World's Best Amusement Park" by industry magazine "Amusement Today." For the record, Disneyland and Disney World’s Magic Kingdom came in fifth and seventh respectively last year.

Related: Bye, Bye Mickey! Disney Is Ready for the Next Generation

So what makes Cedar Point so great? Rollercoasters. The park has a whopping 16 of them, the second most in the world, that together have nearly 10 miles of track.

The newest addition, the Gatekeeper, broke all sorts of records when it opened earlier this year, including the highest inverted drop in the world.

"I don’t think it’s about big anymore. I think it’s about better," says Matt Ouimet, the CEO of Cedar Point's parent company Cedar Fair (FUN). "The best example that we have recently is GateKeeper here at Cedar Point, so not only is it a great coaster but it allowed us to reinvent the front gate and it also is a coaster that one hundred percent of our guests can experience it. Most will choose to ride it, but all enter the park through Gatekeeper."

Ouimet told Breakout that your favorite rides, including many at his parks, get their inspiration from fighter jet maneuvers. It helps them figure out G forces and comfort levels and helps designers make the ride both exciting and repeatable so guests want to come back again.

Are you tired of long lines at the airport, waiting forever at security to be patted down by some TSA agent ? Have you ever wished you had a private jet to whisk you away from all this? BlackJet is here to help but it’s gonna cost you.

"There’s a national treasure out there of these smaller community airports that are widely underutilized," says BlackJet's founder and CEO Dean Rotchin. "Wealthy people have found this kind of shadow transportation system, private aviation, and we figured, why not bring it to more people?"

In 2007 Rotchin took his own money, along with help from friends and family, and started an airline. Using four thousand planes cross a hundred different operators they built a reservation system and launched the company without having to buy actual jets and hire pilots.

Related: Can Uber Car Service Revolutionize City Transportation?

BlackJet quickly caught the eye of the wealthy and successful, including actor and serial investor Ashton Kutcher.

"Ashton is one of my favorite investors," Rotchin told Breakout, "because he’s been a customer of the service and was a customer of the service for two years before he decided to invest."

The future has landed on Windy Knoll golf course in Springfield, Ohio where the first flying golf cart was officially launched this weekend. It hovers nine inches above the ground gliding of land and water alike.

It’s the brainchild of New York viral marketing firm Thinkmodo who asked 2012 Masters Champion Bubba Watson to become the face of the vehicle.

"I think it's gonna get more people involved," Watson says in the original Thinkmodo video. "They're just gonna want to drive the hovercraft and not play golf. But that's how I got started, driving the golf cart and then golf got in the way."

To make the idea a reality, Thinkmodo tapped a small Midwestern company called Neoteric. For more than 50 years the company has produced hovercrafts that have been used by the U.S. military, search and rescue units, and even Walt Disney World.

"Originally hovercraft were invented as a way of going fast over water," Neoteric's founder and President Chris Fitzgerald told Breakout. "The thing about boats is when they’re pushing their way over water they waste a huge amount of energy...that’s what hovercraft were invented for, to solve that problem. However, the thing that’s really come out is the hovercraft’s amphibious quality is more valuable than its energy efficiency."

It soars over grass, sand and water; all the terrains on your average golf course. Sounds like a perfect fit right? Not so fast says Fitzgerald.

In an age of soaring corporate profits and bloated CEO salaries it may seem like fantasy for a company to put charity before profit. In this Breakout profile, we meet TOMS. On the surface they look like just another trendy footwear company, but for every pair of shoes TOMS sells, a pair gets donated to a kid in need. Last month, after less than seven years in business, they donated their ten millionth pair.

The company’s founder and “chief shoe giver” Blake Mycoskie started the company after vacationing in Argentina in 2006. He competed in there with his sister as a part of CBS’ “The Amazing Race” in 2002, but it was when Mycoskie returned that he met a group of aid workers collecting used shoes and handing them out to children who had none.

“I saw the absolute joy that these kids got and their families got and the gratitude from a simple pair of shoes,” Mycoskie explains in the attached video, “and that’s when I really wanted to do more to help.”

He started small. Mycoskie brought back 250 pairs of shoes from that first trip. They were modeled after a traditional Argentinian shoe called an "alpargata." The plan was to sell them on the boardwalk near his Venice, California home, go back to Argentina with the profits, and make shoes to donate to the kids he saw on his trip.

“I said if we sell a pair of shoes today, we can give away a pair tomorrow and we’ll call them 'tomorrow's shoes,'” Mycoskie explains, “but tomorrow is too long for the little tag, [we] shortened it to TOMS, and of course people have called me Tom ever since.”

Business has exploded since those first 250 pairs of shoes and here are three things you may not know about this philanthropic company, even if you're wearing a pair as you read this.

1. TOMS has no advertising budget

Success came by word of mouth and profiles in publications like the L.A. Times and Vogue. The company has succeeded without outside investors and has never had to buy an ad. “It allows us to stay focused on our mission,” says Mycoskie, “and also allows us to have a long-term vision. That’s a very rare situation in business.”

Have you ever given a kid your iPad only to have them drop it? If you have, you know how expensive that can be. Well, gone are the days of child-proofing your tablet.

John Barbour, the CEO of LeapFrog (LF), isn’t worried about your kid dropping his company’s brand new LeapPad Ultra. It’s designed from the ground up specifically for your son or daughter.

Breakout got an exclusive sneak peek ahead of today’s product launch.

"The LeapPad Ultra is today’s best tablet for kids that delivers what the others do and more," says Barbour. "We’re really the only kind of broad-based entertainment company for children that has this life-changing educational aspect built in."

This is the first LeapPad tablet with Internet capabilities, and LeapFrog made sure they did it right. The company has figured out a way to keep kids connected — without exposing them to the more unseemly parts of the web.

Jill Waller, LeapFrog's vice president of multimedia learning, explained that she and her team "filtered out anything that’s inappropriate for kids. Everything that you can find on this tablet is appropriate for ages four to nine." They did so by creating an ever-growing list of LeapFrog-approved websites and built their web experience to allow access only to the sites on that list.

As with all their products, LeapFrog tested the new LeapPad Ultra at their Emeryville, California "kid lab."

With summertime comes weddings, proms and parties that demand you look your best. For many women that means spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars on new dresses for each event, or wearing the dress, hiding the tags and returning it to the store the next day. But Rent the Runway gives women another option --renting dresses that are in season, capture the hottest fashions, and doesn't require bending the rules.

"We’re actually legalizing a behavior that women have been doing kind of on the DL [down low] for many years," says co-founder & CEO Jennifer Hyman. "We’re taking away some of the worst customers from a department store and converting them into positive luxury customers on our end."

Hyman and her Harvard Business School classmate Jenny Fleiss started their company in 2009. It's been called the Netflix of fashion; they offer short-term rental of designer clothing at a fraction of the department store prices.

For instance: a $3,500 Carolina Herrera gown can be rented for four days for $450 dollars. If that's still outside your budget you could rent a $425 Diane von Furstenberg dress for 50 bucks. There are all sorts of price points available to customers who log onto RentTheRunway.com. Once there women can browse dresses by style, designer and price. They can even input their measurements and see user-submitted pictures of dresses being worn by someone with a similar body type.

"We think this is really empowering for women," says Hyman, "both that we’ve turned our customers into our models...[and] letting our own customers make the decision as to whether they think that someone like them looks good in [a particular dress]."

The company recently partnered with Beyonce. The international superstar has chosen her favorite Rent the Runway styles and put them all in one place on the website. This allows customers to get a Beyonce look without paying Beyonce money.

From the controversial to the awe-inspiring, 3D printing is used to create everything from guns, to functioning body parts, and even food. The possibilities seem endless for an industry that shapes ideas into actual products.

Among the companies trying to capitalize on the growth of 3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, is Pennsylvania-based ExOne (XONE). The company makes and sells the machines that do the printing and also takes orders to create specific products.

Artists have tapped them to print intricate sculpture designs, kitchenware companies have ordered frying pan handles, and the company has even printed prosthetic arms for wounded veterans.

"Each day you see another article about something that’s being produced additively and how the additive world is going to make this tremendous difference," says Kent Rockwell, chairman & CEO of ExOne, in the attached video. "I believe that the additive world will make a tremendous difference."

ExOne prints in plastic, glass and even sand, but the most common material is metal.

Here's how it works: Customers email their design to the company and it is loaded into the 3D printer's computer which splices it into thin digital layers. The printer takes that design and lays down a small amount of steel dust in the shape of the first layer. It then adds a coating of special glue, then more steel dust is layered on until the entire design is molded.