Archive for December 2006
Guy Kawasaki Blog: Guy Kawasaki recently asked Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, co-authors of Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message what inspires people to create digital content? We think there are three reasons: The first is that the people who helped build sites like Wikipedia, TiVo Community, or Mini2 aren’t part of mainstream culture. [...]
Gen Y Makes a Mark and Their Imprint Is Entrepreneurship
USA Today: They’ve got the smarts and the confidence to get a job, but increasing numbers of the millennial generation — those in their mid-20s and younger — are deciding corporate America just doesn’t fit their needs. So armed with a hefty dose of optimism, moxie and self-esteem, they are becoming entrepreneurs. “People are realizing [...]
The Big Skinny On Wallet Inventor
BostonHerald.com: Does the world really need another wallet? Kiril Alexandrov certainly hopes so. He plans to build an entire company, The Big Skinny, around his “better mousetrap.� It started as a side project. He didn’t like the bulk and heft of traditional wallets. He had resorted to carrying his stack of plastic cards and bills [...]
6 Secrets Of One Way Inbound Links
The following is a guest post by Matthew Peschong of the Caffeine Marketing blog. Creating an effective online presence begins with quality content. After you put your heart and soul everyday into your works online, you might start to wonder when traffic will start rolling into your website. It’s no secret that having quality inbound [...]
Niche Biz: Tie-Of-The-Month Club
The Wall Street Journal Online: As a former lawyer who dreaded tie-shopping, Greg Shugar knew other businessmen probably shared his feelings. So not long after founding an online store called the TheTieBar.com with his wife, Gina, in 2004, he added a service to make shopping more convenient for customers — not to mention, lucrative for [...]
Tips for Wellness: The Entrepreneur Diet
HR.BLR.com: Employers big and small are coming up with creative ideas for encouraging employees to live a healthy lifestyle, says Tom Weede, author of The Entrepreneur Diet: The On-the-Go Plan for Fitness, Weight Loss, and Healthy Living. Weede offers the follwing tips and examples from his book for starting a workplace wellness program: Make exercise [...]
ContraCostaTimes.com: Robert Pazornik says he can get you what you want, and he can get it for you now — for a price. Pazornik, co-founder of San Francisco start-up LicketyShip, believes that online buyers will pay a premium for quick delivery. The company promises that its selection of electronics products such as MP3 players and [...]
How To Handle Business Etiquette Meals
The following is a guest post by Matthew Peschong of the Caffeine Marketing blog. Hosting a business dining event for your employees and associates means that you are taking on a very large amount of responsibility. As the leader and organizer of such an event you much user your power and make the dining experience [...]
Google Extends Free Checkout Payments
AuctionBytes.com: Google announced it is extending its promotion for Google Checkout for another year. The checkout service, used by online merchants to process payments from customers, launched in June with lower fees than PayPal’s payment service, as well as an incentive for those merchants using Google AdWords. In early November, Google announced that from November [...]
Protect Your Invention When Pitching It
Forbes.com: If you’ve developed a potentially marketable invention, you are faced with a dilemma. To make money from the invention, you must generally license the rights to it to another business, often a manufacturer or distributor. But in pitching the invention to potential licensees, you run the risk of disclosing so much information that the [...]
eBay Sues Big Day Out Over New Ticket Policy
INTERNET auction site eBay is reportedly suing the organisers of the Big Day Out concert tour over their new anti-scalping ticket policy. eBay claims the promoters are breaching trades practices legislation by tightening their ticketing conditions, Melbourne’s Herald Sun reports. The changes mean Big Day Out tickets brought from eBay will not be valid Australian [...]
According to reports, Google will be eliminating fees from its online payment, Checkout. To compete better with PayPal, Google is letting merchants use its Checkout system to process payments without taking a hit on transactions. Traditionally, merchants who use PayPal take a 2.9-percent hit on the total value of a transaction plus another 30-cents for [...]
eBay Hires Lee Away From Yahoo for China
EBay, the world’s biggest online auctioneer, announced Tuesday that it had hired Daniel Lee from a rival to head its development center in Shanghai, as the company seeks to increase share in China, the world’s second-biggest Internet market. Lee, who was most recently chief technology officer for Yahoo’s North Asia unit, will lead the center’s [...]
CNET News.com: Hoping to capitalize on the booming popularity of Internet video and online advertising, TurnHere, an Emeryville, Calif.-based start-up, has come up with a formula for producing professional video ads to slot into Web sites. The company will film, edit and package a minidocumentary 45 seconds to 2-plus minutes in length. The minimum price [...]
Inventor Escapes From Alcatraz
hometownlife.com: Magician Brian McDermott grew bored of his usual tricks and was in search of new ideas. His quest led him down a path of familiar tricks he had already used. He began pondering the idea of his own invention. Through a long trial and error process of sketching shapes and patterns, he formed a [...]
Dutch Inventor Creates Right Mouse Advertising
Free Press Releases: Dutch entrepreneur,Johan Struijk, has came up with a revolutionary idea. The use of the right mouse button for advertising purposes. The idea is simple. When a surfer enters a web site that has RightMouse integrated, the surfer will be redirected to a RightMouse advertiser when he or she uses the right mouse [...]
Viral Marketing For Business Success
This article was written by the Caffeine Marketing blog. Viral Marketing is commonly confused with word-of-mouth marketing. This is mainly due to the fact that viral marketing can create a buzz about your business that stretches beyond the scope of newspaper, television, and radio ads combined. Viral marketing is a like a virus that can spread [...]
The Sims Entrepreneurial Lifestyle
My wife just pinged me to say that it now possible for your Sims to live the entrepreneurial lifestyle with The Sims 2: Open for Business Expansion Pack. This may be just the thing that the budding entrepreneur would love to find under the Christmas tree!
Entrepreneur Hits Road To Push Pricey Pogo
SFGate.com: The man who can jump 8 feet high on a pogo stick was bouncing through San Francisco, on a mission. The mission is to figure out if the world is ready to spend $380 on a pogo stick. Brian Spencer has sunk a good chunk of his life savings into designing, manufacturing and promoting [...]
InsideBayArea.com: Michael Bradley and George Gonzalez of Oakland are like so many entrepreneurs in the Bay Area. They talk excitedly and effusively about their new business. They spend odd hours night and day working on their business plan. They wear T-shirts with the company logo on it. But unlike most entrepreneurs, Bradley and Gonzalez are [...]
StarNewsOnline.com: Life was dark for Harold Thompson in 2001. Corning laid him off. He got divorced from his second wife. When former co-worker Mary Burden came in to shop. She had been laid off, too, and they got to talking. At some point, she suggested: “You know, there are rings for high school football, anniversaries, [...]
Craftsman Makes Unique Niche Product
BYU NewsNet: Dave Giles owns and operates The Gavel Store, an online distributor of handcrafted gavels, from his home in Provo. Giles learned woodworking as he worked with his father when he was 18 years old. He began selling old-fashioned wooden yo-yos, but the product wasn’t moving as well as Giles would’ve liked. He tried [...]
10 Big Ideas Coming From Small Businesses In 2007
FSB Magazine: When a new product from Microsoft debuts, it doesn’t arrive quietly. Instead it gets tracked through the R&D pipeline by trade magazines, bloggers and carefully controlled announcements from the marketing department. Small-business innovations don’t work that way. They tiptoe into the market, heralded by minimal PR (if any) and propelled instead by the [...]
Jail Time for eBay Ticket Scam
A YOUNG man has been locked-up for six months for selling non-existent tickets to online music fans. Adam Cuthbertson, 21, of Penarth Road, Cardiff, was caught out when police arrived at his home following complaints from shoppers over the tickets sold on auction site eBay. He had been banned from the site, but changed his [...]
Shopping eBay For All Your Holiday Needs
You won’t find Marsha Collier fighting for a mall parking space on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The author of Santa Shops on eBay and eBay for Dummies practices what she preaches and does all of her holiday shopping at the world’s biggest auction site. Collier, who lives in Los Angeles, recently chatted with Rocky Mountain [...]
eBay Seeks German Executives Help in US
Current eBay Europe head Philipp Justus will be switching to corporate headquarters in San José on January 1 to direct the entire group. The 37-year-old German will be the first European to direct the core business of the largest of the group’s 33 marketplaces, eBay announced on Friday. Before being appointed head of European business [...]
Taking Small Business on the Road
BusinessWeek.com: Tim Kennedy, co-owner of Office Lube, decided to create a mobile oil change company that works the corporate parking lots on scheduled days of the month. Though Kennedy admits his company wasn’t the first to provide such a service, he says the market is underserved. His business has caught on fast, and sales have [...]
MetroWest Daily News: Holiday shoppers are lighting up the Internet in hopes of chopping the price down for Christmas trees. Tree dealers welcome the comparison shopping, saying it’s helping business. PickYourOwnChristmasTree.org, Christmas-trees.org and Christmas-Tree.com are among the sites driving customers to call the farm. The news comes just in time for consumers who face increased [...]
Niche Biz: Graduating Students
Pressroom.UPS.com: Mary Wayman wanted her son to finish college in four years. During her son’s college planning, she realized that few parents recognized the startling statistics associated with college entry and college graduation: Only half of all college entrants will obtain a college degree. Of those students that remain in college, 80 percent will need [...]
Million Dollar Homepage Entrepreneur Launches New Site
Pocket-Lint: The man behind the million dollar homepage is at it again, this time with a carrot in the form of a million dollars to lure advertisers to his crowded webspace. Alex Tew will make Pixelotto live December 5th. It works along similar lines to the million dollar homepage, in that it sells pixels for [...]
Entrepreneur Aiming To Clean Up Ovens
The Franchise Magazine: Peter Wetzel has swapped a career as a sales director for a cleaning products company to become his own boss. He has purchased an Ovenu franchise, which is popular with householders across the UK, taking the pain out of one of the most hated and neglected chores. Since 1994 Ovenu’s UK-wide network [...]
Offer Your Employees This No-Cost Job Perk
Associated Content: If you own or operate a small business, you probably have looked for perks that you can offer your employees to help boost morale, increase productivity and generate some loyalty. However, you don’t have the budget of a big company, so extras like company cars, gym memberships and in-house babysitting are probably too [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at The Real Estate Tomato.
Time: American troops in Iraq have become masters of improvisation, like bolting jury-rigged armor to humvees to shield themselves from sniper fire and shrapnel. Lately, an even more novel item has joined their battle kits… Silly String. Marines working in Iraq have shown Army combat engineers how it can be used to detect trip wires. [...]
Creative Ways To Help Charities
Personal Finance Advice: The holidays are a time for giving. There seems to be an assumption that the only way you can help a charitable cause is by donating money, but there are ways you can help without spending any money. 1. Donate Your Time. While this may seem obvious to a lot of people, [...]
Biz Idea: Create Your Own Gift Card
Gift cards are more popular than ever. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans will spend $24.8 billion on gift cards this holiday season, a $6 billion increase over last year and an all-time high. If you offer a product or service, you can create your own gift cards. Offer a low cost promotional item [...]
Entrepreneur Helps Others With Alzheimer’s Store
Pressroom.UPS.com: Mark Warner graduated with a degree in architecture and a certificate in gerontology. His interest developed into a passion and he wrote The Complete Guide to Alzheimer’s-Proofing Your Home, identifying strategies and products to make homes more dementia-friendly. Once the book was published, readers began calling and asking for the products featured in it. [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Show Me the Money.
Cashing In On Your Intellectual Property
Greg Brown at Work.com: Every small business that suddenly grows big is based on an innovation of some kind. What’s less common is that the actual innovator has the focus or financial reach to turn the idea into cash. Learning how to protect your big ideas can mean later turning know-how into a business unto [...]
Entrepreneur Offers Tips On Finding A Business
Marco Island Sun Times: Each year, thousands of people make new year’s resolutions. In addition to “This year I will lose weight,” “This year I will stop smoking” and the ever-popular “This year I will stop watching reality TV,” one of the more common resolutions made by many this time of year is “This year [...]
Student Building His Future On Ebay
Web@Devil: Before even graduating from college, Corey Kossack started an online business that raked in sales of half a million dollars last year. Kossack, a computer information systems senior, started Koss DVD – which sells DVDs, video games and books on eBay – two years ago. The business became more successful as he learned how [...]
Business 2.0 Magazine: Sean Morgan dreams of becoming a new type of media mogul. As CEO of Critical Mention, Morgan is plotting some fancy footwork himself. Going up against the likes of Google and NBC Universal, he’s bringing search to TV – and TV syndication to the Web. With Critical Mention, he has a Web-based [...]
Young Entrepreneur Starts Apartment Shopping Site
The Arizona Republic: Eric Wu and friends thought there had to be a better way for college students to find apartments and rental homes via the Web. Jon Lange, director of sales and a friend of Wu’s since seventh grade, said they started the company because of the frustration they experienced moving every year in [...]
One Cent Auction: Beta Testers Wanted
Do you participate in $0.01 eBay auctions to raise your rating? I’ve written a new webservice to make it easier. If you’d like to participate in a free beta, send me an email at dane@carlsoncarlson.com.
One Cent Ebay Auctions: Beta Testers Wanted
Do you participate in $0.01 eBay auctions? I’ve written a new webservice to make it easier. If you’d like to participate in a free beta, send me an email at dane@carlsoncarlson.com.
Episode #9 of the Business Opportunities Weblog podcast is up. In this episode: 2007 is right around the corner. What are you doing in your business to get ready for it Tim Grahl and Dan Portnoy discuss the steps you need to take in order to ready your business for the new year.
