Archive for July 17th, 2006
AllBusiness: If you sell products on eBay for your home-based business do you allow for local pickups? eBay does offer that as a shipping option and I’m sure it works very well for businesses who have a physical location away from home. But it doesn’t work very well for home-based businesses. The more we sell [...]
Free Entrepreneur Podcasts and Videos
Michael at Young Entrepreneurs Journey just came across these Free Podcasts and Video Clips of Entrepreneurs in the Educators Corner at Stanford. Recent interviews include: Ryan Phelan (Founder and CEO, DNA Direct) Marissa Mayer (VP of Search Products & User Experience, Google) Pam Morrone (Founder, Agraquest) Gil Penchina (CEO, Wikia) Stephanie Keller-Bottom (Director, Nokia, Innovent) [...]
Ant Farm Inventor’s Secret: Perseverance
CNBC: “When we first made this, I didn’t know what the hell ants were,’ said 92-year-old Milton Levine, better known as “Uncle Milton,” who is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his original ant farm. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be 50 years,â€? he said. “Never. And here we are.â€? In [...]
Aspects of Passion-centric Web Communities
Dogster, Inc.: Passion-centric web communities (for the sake of convenience, let’s call them PCWCs) are online spaces that focus entirely on one shared passion or topic. There are many of these communities thriving on the web today that span a wide variety of subjects. Some of these subjects include: cars, gaming, electronic gadgets, sports and, [...]
Adsense Tip: Match Your Ad Colors to Your Link Colors
WorkBoxers: I recently approached Alborz who runs a blog with car advice and told him I wanted to do a little experiment with his Google Adsense adverts. I told Alborz that I wanted him to change his Adsense link color to match his sites link color. At the time, Caradvice.com.au had the default blue that [...]
An Illegal Market That Could Save Your Life
John Stossel: More than 60,000 people whose kidneys have failed are waiting for transplants. Many survive by enduring hours hooked up to dialysis machines. The machines clean their blood, pinch-hitting for diseased kidneys. But they cannot do it as well as a kidney. Dialysis is painful, exhausting and expensive. So 60,000 Americans pray for a [...]
Shawn Hessinger : There’s no need to find a conventional supplier for merchandise, and selling the same thing as every other site on the Internet or every other catalogue might be a great way to guarantee no revenue. When thinking about drop shipping as a technique for starting a bootstrap retail business, why not create [...]
Giving up on Your Venture Too Quickly Versus Pursuing a Dead One
Matt Inglot: The truth is that if your business isn’t succeeding then your problems are far more internal than a simple need for more money or for a feature on Oprah. Your business plan itself needs re-evaulating and tweaking so that you hit the right formula and it becomes viable. Ignoring this fact is a [...]
Aaron Swartz: When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk. [...]
The More People, The Less Meetings
Michael Coté: My theory is this: the more people you have working on a project, the less meetings you should have. If you have 1-10 people, you could all sit in one room together, having a never ending meeting. This is the One Big Room people like me dream about because I had such a [...]
The Top 10 Unintentionally Worst Company URLs
Independent Sources: Everyone knows that if you are going to operate a business in today’s world you need a domain name. It is advisable to look at the domain name selected as other see it and not just as you think it looks. Failure to do this may result in situations such as the following [...]
Barbara Payne: Along with blogs and podcasts and so on, virtual trade shows are becoming the way to go for many organizations in our high-tech society. Here’s one hosted by Ziff Davis on technology for SMB/entrepreneurs. If you’ve never attended one, ZD is sure to do a good job so this is a good opportunity [...]
Skype May Get Competition Soon
 Engadget Earlier this week, a gentleman named Charlie Paglee received a Skype call from a colleague in China — nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that this particular call was coming from an unofficial, homemade Skype client. Paglee, who cofounded the VoIP startup Vozin Communications, claims that the Chinese friend he spoke [...]
eBay Gets Help Protecting Endangered Animals
 Central Florida A renowned marine research institute is working to help keep endangered animals in the water and off of Internet auction sites. Scientists at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory are helping internet auction sites like eBay identify endangered marine animals before they’re sold.  Selling endangered animals for any purpose is illegal. They hope what [...]
Santa Cruz Sentinel On the day that Ken Walton’s book “Fake: Forgery, Lies & eBay” was released — April 25 — there was a knock on his door. The man at the door was dressed in a suit and tie. When Walton opened the door, he expected to hear the opening spiel of a Jehovah’s [...]
Google Audio to Revolutionize Radio Advertising
Steve Rubel thinks that Google is going to change radio advertising for the better: According to those who have seen the demo [of the new Google radio advertising product], if it’s really hot in one area, McDonalds can switch from their regular burger ad to one that touts their cool drinks and frozen treats. In [...]
Canada’s eBay Growing At A Furious Pace
 Canoe Money With more and more budding entrepreneurs plying their trades online, Canada’s underground economy is soaring through cyberspace in a big way, experts say. “There’s always been an underground economy with some businesses, but the Internet’s going to cause a proliferation in the opportunities available,” said Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based expert on electronic commerce. [...]
 azstarnet Online bill-payment firm PayPal will open a technology development center in Scottsdale by the end of the year and hire more than 400 professionals by 2009. PayPal announced it will locate its planned center in a new 92,000-square-foot building on the northeast corner of Mountain View Road and 90th Street, bypassing Scottsdale’s planned SkySong [...]
How to Build a Reputation Before You Have Any Customers
Scott Allen: Your reputation is perhaps your single most valuable asset in business. Conventional wisdom is that knowledge and experience are, but those can be hired, acquired and outsourced. A reputation takes time to build, and yet can be lost in an instant. Reputation drives word-of-mouth marketing, the most effective marketing for entrepreneurs (studies show [...]
This week’s Carnival of Business is up on David Maister’s blog.
This week’s Carnival of Marketing is up at Kicking Over My Traces.
This week’s Carnival of Investing is up at Free Money Finance.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at AnyLetter.
