Archive for January 8th, 2007
Teen Hits Paydirt With myYearbook.com
Gannett News Service: Catherine Cook is 17 years old, and runs a business that brought in millions in sales in its first year. The Montgomery (N.J.) High School senior founded myYearbook.com in 2005 with her brothers Dave and Geoff Cook. Her inspiration came during spring break as she flipped through a paper yearbook. This should [...]
Finding An Owner That Wants To Sell
The Wall Street Journal Online: Many business-acquisition opportunities aren’t widely known about, even by investment bankers, because sellers fear roiling employees and customers by taping a for-sale sign in the window. Instead, they wait patiently for the right buyer to knock. There are many businesses today “owned by 70-plus-year-olds that don’t know what they’re going [...]
BusinessWeek.com: Momofuku Ando’s invention of the instant noodle had a classic discovery-by-accident moment. Just after World War II, Ando was a failed businessman experimenting at home with a newfangled idea for packaged ramen noodles. He remained an unsuccessful tinkerer until August, 1958, when he made a breakthrough while watching his wife deep-fry vegetables. Fried noodles, [...]
Inside Canada’s $4-Billion Pet Industry
TheGlobeandMail.com: Canadians spend $4 billion each year on their pets. More than half goes to the bare necessities: food and trips to the vet. But there’s a huge new market for luxury animal products—designer clothes, posh resorts, organic treats, even insurance policies. Why the sudden urge to pamper our pets? Some say it’s because people [...]
Can Small Businesses Help Win The War?
USA Today: The U.S. military is studying small companies such as 24-employee Craigslist to see how the online bulletin board has all but terrorized the newspaper industry by siphoning classified advertising. Such research may unearth ideas that will help the United States fight the war on terror. It may seem a stretch that within the [...]
eBay’s 4th Quarter Below Estimate
Piper Jaffray is surprisingly negative on eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), saying their proprietary count of worldwide eBay listings suggests total Q4 listings of between 578M-590M. These results are between 8%-11% below their 639M listing estimate for the quarter and could potentially be sequentially down in the seasonally strongest quarter (listings were up sequentially 19% in 4Q05 and [...]
Two-thirds of Scams Revolve Around eBay & PayPal
Examining the blacklist that Google maintains has revealed some interesting, but not all that surprising, information on common phishing tactics. Of all the scam sites that have been blacklisted, nearly two-thirds are composed soley of scams revolving around eBay, PayPal and Bank of America. eBay and PayPal are rather self explanatory, being some of the [...]
To Help Your eBay Business Be Prepared For Emergencies
We know that you’re busy doing everything you can think of to make your eBay business successful. You eat, sleep, and breathe your business, analyzing each potential move for its risks and benefits. But, as busy as you are, you’ve got one more task, and it’s imperative. You have to answer the following question. What [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Diary of a Startup.
