Archive for 2007
ReadWriteWeb: Mobile Web is another Next Big Thing on slow boil. It’s already big in parts of Asia and Europe, and it received a kick in the US market this year with the release of Apple’s iPhone. This is just the beginning. In 10 years time there will be many more location-aware services available via [...]
Mom Getting Rich With Snap Blankets
NBC5.com: It’s the dream of so many moms to start a home business and get rich! A Texas woman is on her way thanks to one of those ideas that makes you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It all started when Amy Long realized she didn’t have enough hands. “I was actually walking [...]
Unusual Business Ideas That Work: MommyMixer is a networking event that brings together selected university students and parents who need babysitters. A cost effective alternative to childcare agencies, the events allow parents to interview a number of candidates in an informal setting. Parents pay a $100 entrance fee. On arrival, they’re handed a ‘Babysitter Book’ [...]
Ideas Pave The Way For Products
Fast Company: You wouldn’t pay $30 for a can of soup. Or $80 for an undershirt. Yet many of you reading this have paid upward of $300 for jeans. What happened to the Lee Jeans era? In a flash, our price threshold for jeans has increased from $50 to $300. And it’s not just jeans [...]
One Woman Takes Fresh Approach To Market
Times Herald-Record: Eileen Piasecki-Couch was this close to getting her soups and seasonings on supermarket shelves when she learned a hard lesson in big business. As she was trying to cut a deal with Price Chopper to carry her Pine Island Herb and Spice products, it became clear that the spice market isn’t so easy [...]
Almost Peed My Pants Advertising
From Hemmy A life size sticker for the horror movie ‘The Maid’ in Singapore placed near the toilet round the corner. The kind of advertisement that makes you pee in your pants. Photo By: Hemmy
From Intentor Spot Using transportation as an advertising medium has brought forward some of the most creative ads. Photo by Inventor Spot.
Taking The "Time-Out's" You Need Anywhere You Go
WHAS11.com: Lisa Carvajal’s oldest son was 2½ and needed to be disciplined for hitting, biting and throwing. “I began using time out,” she says. “In order to use it consistently you need to have a spot that’s consistent. All the books on discipline say be consistent with your spot — make sure you use the [...]
Woman offers advice on Casual Fridays for getting a raise while not looking like a hooker. [youtube]tUwYy4wCgb8[/youtube]
TechnaBob: Kikkerland’s USB Hub Man has flexible wire arms and legs with a port at the end of each one. His body houses all the electronics and a tiny green power indicator LED in place of a heart. The only bummer about Hub Man is that only one of his ports runs at USB 2.0 [...]
Texting for College Students’ Cash
eMarketer: When it comes to money, the perception of the starving college student applies less and less. According to findings in the “American Freshmen: Forty-Year Trends 1966–2006″ report from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, entering freshmen in 2005 “came from households with a parental median income [...]
From Hemmy An advertisement for a job recruiting company in Berlin, Germany. Depicting people working in the vending machines, ATMs, it delivers the message that ‘Life is too short for the wrong job’. Photo By: Hemmy
Invention Protects Boat Gauges
The Chronicle-Telegram: During a fall fishing trip with a friend in the Florida Keys, Jeff Murray noticed that the expensive LCD gauges on his friend’s boat were faded and yellowed by the sun. The expensive instruments also became so foggy when exposed to the heat from direct sunlight that they were impossible to read. While [...]
Future Web Trends: Rich Internet Apps
ReadWriteWeb: As the current trend of hybrid web/desktop apps continues, expect to see RIA (rich internet apps) continue to increase in use and functionality. Adobe’s AIR platform (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is one of the leaders, along with Microsoft with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix is Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform [...]
Global Insight: As part of the study process, Global Insight reviewed a wide range of previous studies that indicated that the efficiencies that Wal-Mart has fostered in the retail sector have led to lower prices for the U.S. consumer. These results were supported by statistical analysis which found that the expansion of Wal-Mart over the [...]
Music School For YouTube Generation
Springwise: At Bird, music and technology come together. The San Francisco-based school of music encourages students to use the latest technology to enhance their musical creativity. Providing instrumental instruction and band supervision to children and teens, Bird goes beyond traditional lessons. “Working with the latest digital audio workstations, all experience levels have the ability to [...]
Do Stupid Names Hurt Startups?
Wired: The search for a unique corporate name and identity may be backfiring in the Silicon Valley. Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo or Meebo all might be acceptable if they were exceptions to the rule. But when every startup in the Valley begins opting for whimsy (and a non-stop barrage of vowels) for their handles instead of, [...]
10 Tips For Balancing Parenthood And A Direct Sales Business
The Mom’s Cafe: 1. Plan – Sit down with your calendar and write out everything non-direct sales business related first. Decide which of those things are non-negotiable no matter how many people want to do parties on that day. 2. Power Hour – One of my favorite speakers in the direct sales field is Belinda [...]
Live As A Tastefully Simple Biz Op Owner
Entrepreneur: In April 1999, Gina Lenard’s less-than-stellar career in home party sales had finally come to an end. Hungry for business ideas, Lenard posted a query online. But what she received was an inbox full of e-mails from companies soliciting everything from selling dishes to stuffing envelopes. One e-mail came from a consultant at Tastefully [...]
From Tree Huggers In an age where we have electric everything, we forget that things were not always so easy. This Oregon woman thought that pedalling her sewing machine was not an efficient use of her energy, so she “devised a plan whereby her sewing machine pedal could be made to do the work of [...]
Business Consulting Gone Terribly Wrong
Two consultants attempt to solve a morale problem. [youtube]ZPTsltGe_d0[/youtube]
No wonder we’re losing out to India in the computer tech industry! [youtube]e5ejY-Q38uQ[/youtube]
TechnaBob: The brilliant minds of industrial design firm Sonic Design came up with this design for an iPod-inspired bottle opener called the iDrink. In keeping with Apple’s DRM (Drinker’s Rights Management) policies, the iDrink opener will only open bottles which have been purchased from the iDrink store (99 cents each). In addition, the opener features [...]
Springwise: After years of being ignored, female drivers are finally getting recognized by the auto industry as an important part of the market. What could make more sense, then, than an emerging market for women-specific automotive tools? The Pink Toolbox Co. packs its Pink Car Kit with essential emergency supplies such as jump leads, mobile [...]
Mashable: eMarketer reports that spending for online advertising has surpassed ad dollars spent on radio advertising for the first time in 2007, with online marketing reaching $21.7 billion while radio reached $20.4 billion. This would indicate the dominance of online marketing, and make some speculate that radio is a dying part of our culture. eMarketer [...]
Future Web Trends: Artificial Intelligence
ReadWriteWeb: Possibly the ultimate Next Big Thing in the history of computing, AI has been the dream of computer scientists since 1950 – when Alan Turing introduced the Turing test to test a machine’s capability to participate in human-like conversation. In the context of the Web, AI means making intelligent machines. In that sense, it [...]
Wise Women Investor: Recently, I attended a women’s leadership meeting where the question “Can a great idea mixed with passion make you money?” was the subject of discussion. I listened to several professional women business owners discuss the keys to growing a successful enterprise. Here are the top 5 answers straight from the top! 1. [...]
The Enquirer: Rebecca Walker – founder, co-owner and president of VeilShop.com – was inspired to become a business owner after watching her mother run her own orthodontics lab while growing up in Fairfield. “I liked the lifestyle flexibility it offered her and the time it gave her to spend with the family,” said Walker, 46. [...]
Endicott Company Hiring WAHMs For Part-Time Work
PressConnects.com: It could be just another day at the “office” for any of the 67 employees out of goFluent’s Endicott office who work part time from home, fine-tuning the English language skills of clients in such countries as Russia, Italy and France. Many international companies want their workers abroad to improve their English fluency for [...]
Future Web Trends: Semantic Web
ReadWriteWeb: Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. Indeed it’s become almost mythical, like Moby Dick. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is about machines talking to machines. It’s about making the Web more ‘intelligent’, or as Berners-Lee himself described it: computers “analyzing [...]
Body Shop Founder Anita Roddick
Associated Press: Anita Roddick, founder of the international Body Shop cosmetics chain, died Monday night after suffering a major brain hemorrhage, her family said. She was 64. Roddick, who died at a hospital in Chichester, had revealed in February that she contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion while giving birth to a daughter in [...]
Bad Day At The Office? Watch This
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Self Defense Against Crack Dealers
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TechnaBob: Bulbs Unlimited sells kits that let you create fixtures like the ones pictured here from your own recycled bulbs. The kits include everything you need to make these cool designer fixtures except for the bulbs themselves. A special bulb marking template, adhesive and âsnapsâ? let you arrange your bulbs into a variety of cool [...]
Fast Company: What kind of job did you have at 17? I posed that question to the grown-ups I encountered recently while exploring Whateverlife.com. The teen-girl site and company was started by Ashley Qualls, an entrepreneur from a working-class neighborhood outside Detroit, who happens to be 17 herself. One of the many fascinating things about [...]
Terri Lonier at Working Solo eNews: The Inc. 500 list has just been published, and every year I find it intriguing to chart how many firms are SOHO (small office/home office) companies — generally defined as having 20 or fewer employees. This year, nearly one in four (23%, or 115 companies)are members of the SOHO [...]
BloggingStocks.com: Most young companies dream of getting their first heavyweight customer — a huge player, central to their industry, like Google Inc., or better yet, a General Electric. Snaring such a customer can change an entrepreneur’s fortunes overnight. Of course. But how do you gain the attention and trust of a large and important company? [...]
Inventor Leads Way In Graffiti Busting
PendleToday: Ray Britner transformed himself from tree feller to inventor after an accident which left him with sight in just one eye. The local council now uses his most famous creation, a special blast cleaner named Doris, to clean graffiti from public places. John David, Executive member for the environment, said: “Before Doris came along, [...]
Outsourcing Can Minimize Operating Costs
Tennesseean.com: Operating costs include expenses necessary to produce a product or provide a service. That includes salaries and wages, raw material costs, and the cost of any facilities that go directly toward producing the product or providing the service. Bootstrapping operating costs through outsourcing can help owners get to break-even sooner and improve profit margins [...]
Stricting Carding Policy At Supermarket
From Yahoo News A 65-year-old woman who went into a Farmington supermarket to buy wine was turned away because she didn’t have an ID with her. But Barbara Skapa of Mount Vernon says that won’t happen again. “I’ll be bringing my driver’s license with me from now on,” Skapa said. She normally carries her license. [...]
De Niro Way Of Dealing With Customers
Dealing with annoying customers – The De Niro way. Robert De Niro demonstrates how to deal with pain in the ass customers – funny! Watch The Video
Fire Protection Business Gone Wrong
From BoingBoing Daniel says “If anyone ever asks you for the definition of irony, you can show them this photo I took about a mile from my apartment.” Photo by BoingBoing.
Those gorillas got skills! [youtube]Wy52yueBX_s[/youtube]
Kid Arrested For Throwing Cheetos At Dad
From Diablog It was a real bell-ringer for a Des Moines, Iowa, man when he was charged with domestic assault after bonking his father in the face with a bag of Cheetos. Patrick Hamman, 22, was arrested for throwing the bag of Cheetos at his father, Michael Hamman, hitting him in the face and covering [...]
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From Concierge I long ago gave up traveling with bananas, even though they’re one of my favorite fruits, because they never survived the journey all that well. Apparently I’m not the only one, because someone else with a much more entrepreneurial spirit decided to invent the Banana Bunker. This nifty device, which I just discovered [...]
Man Scans Butt At Work – Caught
Watch the whole thing and laugh at the end… its the best! [youtube]aRO46bURQWM[/youtube]
Selling Watches Just Got Easier
From Hemmy An advertisement by Jung von Matt/Alster for watchmaker IWC. Bus straps have been fashioned from images of IWC’s Big Pilot’s Watch to allow bus travellers near the airport to try before they buy at Berlin, Germany. 16 more advertisements after the jump. Photo by Hemmy.
From WikiHow Do unflattering photos or embarrassing blog postings pop up when someone Googles your name? Or are you concerned about your privacy in this new digital age? With Google’s excellent indexing of the Internet, the reality is that friends, family members and employers can find out more information about you than you potentially want [...]
