Archive for February 2010
Inventor Aims For A Hole-In-One
Ralph Blanchard’s putt left a lot of room for improvement. When he tried to look for something that would help him improve his putt he was left feeling like it simply was not enough. After talking with fellow golfers about his situation he soon found that he was not alone, reports Florida Today. That spurred [...]
Growing Industry Helps Owners Find Lost Pets
“C’mon, Salsa, find your dog, find Sweetie,” called Sam Connelly, Salsa’s owner, handler and partner. The pair set out from a 7-Eleven on Silver Hill Road in Suitland in search of Sweetie, an errant beagle, reports The Washington Post. Connelly waved a little patch of Sweetie’s dog bed in front of Salsa’s nose, and almost [...]
Entrepreneur Is Playing Her Greeting Cards Right
Unfazed by the trend toward e-everything, Maureen Stern is defiantly selling a product made of dead trees. And in launching Canadian Capers, her own line of greeting cards, the 52-year-old Montrealer is not intimidated by Hallmark or the other titans of the industry, according to a story in The Gazette. After moving down from the [...]
Entrepreneurs Turn 401(k) Into Startup Capital
When Don Poffenroth was reading through a magazine while on a flight a few years ago, his attention was drawn to a specific article that talked about using 401(k) savings to fund a business startup without penalty. Motivated by that article, Don and a partner decided to do just that, reports USA Today. “Neither of [...]
Cestas Help Aspiring Latino Biz Owners
Communal lending pools known as cestas help aspiring business owners in Latino communities, and banks are beginning to partner with them to help the informal borrowers establish credit, Paul van Slambrouck reports in the Christian Science Monitor. Eight members strong, the Champions have come together in an upstairs office in this city’s predominantly Latino Mission [...]
New Credit Card Rules Don’t Apply To Biz Cards
The new rules for personal credit cards, which don’t apply to business cards, are making entrepreneurs rethink what plastic they choose, the WSJ‘s Emily Maltby reports. Small-business owners who rely on their company’s credit card to purchase big-ticket items or finance day-to-day operations won’t see any benefits from this month’s federal credit-card reform—unless they put [...]
How much are you willing to pay for an eBook (equivalent of a NY Times Bestseller)? More than $15 $15 $9.99 $4.99 Less than $4.99 Other View Results Results and comments Friday. Photo by Newsweek.
If you’re not familiar with the notorious muffin top and what it does to women, Elizabeth at the Philadelphia Inquirer describes it as “love handles that gush over too-snug waistbands and single-handedly eviscerate the sex appeal of an exposed midriff.” Any woman that suffers from such a problem generally find themselves in need of a [...]
Internet Prompts Publishing Itch In Over-60s
Reuters reports that the Internet is helping older British readers rekindle a love of books and writing, and an overwhelming majority of senior citizens see the medium as a positive development, according to a survey. Some 31 percent of people over 60 are keen to go online to publish short stories and join book clubs, [...]
When Domain Name You Want Is Already Taken
Q: I want to use my company’s name, plus dot-com, for my Web site. But that name is already taken. It will expire later this year. Is it possible for me to reserve it so nobody else can get it or renew it? A: If you haven’t done so already, find the individual who currently [...]
Services To Help Us Stop Dawdling Online
Even after spending hours behind a computer screen, we’re often surprised by how little we get done during a workday, reports The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, frittering time away is epidemic in the office: A 2007 survey of 2,000 workers from Salary.com Inc., a Web site that provides compensation data, found that Americans waste about [...]
Online Cobblers Repair Footwear From Afar
Last year, women purchased 728.8 million pairs of shoes in the U.S., and men purchased 327.4 million pairs, according to market research company NPD Group. Even with all that footwear out there, shoe-repair shops are becoming increasingly rare. The Wall Street Journal reports that stepping up are a number of online cobblers, who accept and [...]
Patent Lawyers Give Your Big Idea An Edge
The Kansas City Star reports that there’s a patent behind millions of products — from fishing lures to life-saving medical devices to the icing on a cake. And behind many patented products (and services) is an attorney — preparing and filing applications, drafting legal documents to license the use of inventions, defending clients against charges [...]
Making Geekdom Cool And Profitable
Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, remembers the first time he saw the Internet – in a research laboratory at the University of Minnesota, circa 1990 – and likens the moment to the California Gold Rush, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. By 1994, the former computer-science student had dropped out, turned [...]
Broomfield High senior Kyle Myhra has big ideas. He demonstrated one of them last week, when he showed off his latest invention — the Spot Sucker. He poured some red wine on a section of cloth “50 percent cotton, 50 percent polyester,” he said as he placed a pad with cleaning solution underneath it, reports [...]
On a somewhat chilly Thursday evening, AOL Small Business reports that a group of young college students have driven 10 miles because of a tweet. Their destination: a bar in Costa Mesa. Or, to be more specific, a food truck parked outside a bar in Costa Mesa. Their goal: the nachos served by Taco Dawg, [...]
Google Launching Ultra-Fast Internet Service
Are you ready for Google to become your ISP asks WalletPop? If the new Google ultra high speed Internet connection trial goes well, you might be able to enjoy 1 GB per second Internet connections to your home and all at what they are calling competitive rates. To put the speed in perspective, 1 GB [...]
Bizs Using Shared Kitchens Need To Know Regs
Photo by airtechrefrigeration.com. WalletPop reports that operating a new catering company or food-related business is difficult to do from home, so the concept of shared kitchens is compelling. Rent space or buy a membership to a shared facility, and a budding chef gets access to commercial equipment in a sanitary space. In many locales, it’s [...]
Turn snowmageddon into a windfall by starting your own snow-shoveling business. With help from Mike Stevens, owner of the industry newsletter Snowplow News, and Kevin Arroyo, the owner of R and A Cleaning Services in Staten Island, N.Y., WalletPop offers the following advice to get digging: Money talks: Charge what the market will bear. “Be [...]
Some Entrepreneurs Put In Olympic Effort
For Olympic athletes who double as small-business owners, the more challenging feat sometimes takes place off the slopes, so says The Wall Street Journal. Trying to juggle Olympic training with the demands of running a small business can be grueling. For some of the athletes, training during the peak winter months is so intense and [...]
Five Keys To Success For Freelancers
Richard Greenwald, writing in the WSJ, outlines five keys to success for freelancers. The image of the freelancer is too often that of the struggling journalist or writer, who needs to wait tables to pay the rent. No doubt there are many such examples still out there. But there also are plenty of consultants and [...]
Haiti Earthquake Affects Microbizs
NPR’s Planet Money team reports on how one very small business in Haiti has been affected by the earthquake. Adam and Chana hung out at a tent city in Petionville. There they spied a woman with a huge tub on her head. It was filled with chicken necks, which she was selling for a few [...]
Mileage? There’s an App for That
Have trouble keeping track of your mileage for tax deductions or reimbursements? Let your iPhone do it. Taxgirl has the details. Despite the much ballyhooed drop in the IRS’ standard mileage rates for 2010, they’re still not bad. For 2010, the rates are: • 50 cents per mile for business miles driven • 16.5 cents [...]
Popcorn Tweets Lets You Eat While You Tweet
If you consider pushing a button on a microwave one too many steps between you and a bowl of popcorn, a new invention may allow you to cook up a steaming pile of Orville Redenbacher from the comfort of your own Twitter account, according to a story at Switched.com. Created by Dave Britt and Justin [...]
New in the Directory This Week
One of the often overlooked sections of this website is our directory. Over 2300 different bizops, franchises, dealerships and online opportunities are listed there. Here are the new companies from this week: Business Opportunities Alco-Buddy BidABuilder.com Growing Flowers for Profit Growing Herbs for Profit How to Be an Independent Field Inspector How to Start a [...]
If you love wine then there is a good chance that you’ll love Wine Shop At Home, a direct sales company that specializes in a variety of wines and wine tastings. Elizabeth Moore loves good wine and often found herself hosting a wine tasting or being the guest of one. With a little urging from [...]
Frisbee Inventor Fred Morrison Dies At 90
The origins of the ubiquitous Frisbee, friend to picnicgoers and college kids everywhere, are shrouded in legend. But the disc’s lineage can in fact be traced back to one man, Fred Morrison, who died Feb. 9 at his home in Monroe, Utah, according to The Washington Post. Morrison got the idea for a flying-saucer toy [...]
Make and Sell Your Own T-Shirts with AnaJet
The AnaJet SPRINT is a Digital Garment Printer, aka T-shirt printer, suitable for printing on all types of garments, textile materials and decorative items. AnaJet offers a profitable opportunity to entrepreneurs. With an AnaJet Digital Apparel Printer, new business owners can print and sell custom t-shirts to corporations, schools, sports teams, clubs, and more. The [...]
Dog walking is typically the kind of business that you start up in the summer to save money for a car, while you wait the two or three more years until you’re old enough to actually get your drivers license. It also means it’s often a fly-by-night service, where professionalism is the exception, according to [...]
Invention Sanitizes Green Grocery Bags
Earl Yerby was watching a television newscast and saw a report about how quickly germs and bacteria grow inside reusable shopping bags, according to a story in The Raleigh News And Observer. He thought someone ought to come up with a way to sanitize those bags. So he did. After doing online research, Yerby, 56, [...]
Three Decks Of Cards: 125,000 SMB Marketing Ideas
Australian ChildsPlay Marketing aims to help business owners create their own marketing campaigns without spending an arm and a leg hiring experts, reports trendspotter Springwise. Toward that end, it now offers a set of cards containing 125,000 different marketing ideas. The first deck helps businesses identify the target audience for their campaign—first-time clients, journalists or [...]
Program Offers Money to Banks to Help Small Biz
The Treasury Department will invest up to $1 billion from the federal bank bailout fund in small banks and credit unions that make loans to small businesses in some of the communities most ravaged by the economic downturn, according to a story in The New York Times. About 210 institutions will be eligible for low-cost [...]
Website Connects Small Bizs To Temp Help
When Inaki Berenguer moved from Boston to New York to start Pixable, a company that prints photo albums from Facebook pictures, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the chance on hiring a full-time employee. Realizing the odds for a nascent start-up staking claim in an economy that’s still rickety at best, he decided [...]
Truly Nolen is a pest management franchise best known for their mouse eared cars. They were founded in 1938 in Miami, Florida and continue to be a family run business today. Their founding story is great: The Truly Nolen Company started in Miami Beach during the great depression. Truly (called Daddy Truly by his family) [...]
Cookbook Store: Taste Before You Buy
There’s a bookstore in Singapore that only sells cookbooks. Called 25°C (25 Degrees Celsius) it also features a cafe and an onsite test kitchen. Shoppers are encouraged to try food prepared from a recipe from one of the books before they make a purchase. Experienced chefs regularly pick recipes from one of the cookbooks and [...]
Mompreneurs Live! Expands Into Long Beach
A networking group that is open to entrepreneurial moms is creating a new chapter in Long Beach, California, according to Everything Long Beach. “This will give savvy and driven entrepreneurial moms in Long Beach and surrounding areas the opportunity to support and connect with other like-minded moms and share resources throughout our own neighborhood,” said [...]
When was the last time you drank out of the cup you use to scoop the dry food into your pet’s food bowl? I imagine the answer to that is never. Pet owners have kept their petware and tableware separate for years. Even after it has been washed most people don’t feel comfortable with the [...]
QuikDine: Surfing the Web and Eating Out
QuikDine is a restaurant delivery business opportunity out of Missouri. Unlike most other restaurant delivery businesses in small towns, they offer you the ability to order your food from different restaurants via their website. As they explain it, they combine two very popular and widely practiced activities: surfing the internet and eating out! I recently [...]
Does your dog need to get out more? Could she use some more socialization? The Zoom Room is a dog agility training center and canine social club franchise that might be just what she’s looking for. Zoom Room specializes in dog agility training, including weave poles, A-frame, tunnels, jumps, dog agility walk, teeter totter, and [...]
To stand out, sometimes all it takes is a little trade. A cab driver in New York and a cab driver in London have traded cabs, the NY Times reports. The cabs stand out amongst their peers and didn’t really cost the drivers anything. Behind these cab-out-of-water foreign fleets is the relationship between two men [...]
Grow Your Biz By Teaching Others Your Biz
For years, copywriter Allison Nazarian watched potential clients pass her by. Again and again, she heard from business owners who needed copywriting services, but who didn’t have the money or inclination to hire someone to provide them, according to a story at Entrepreneur. Then, about three years ago, she figured out a way to get [...]
Stimulus Cash At Work: Carpet One Commercial Flooring
From fighting forest fires to laying carpet in day care centers, CNNMoney.com takes a look at what some small businesses that got stimulus-funded contracts are doing with taxpayers’ dollars. Carpet One Commercial Flooring in Cheyenne won a $75,000 stimulus contract to update the flooring in a day care/child development center at nearby F.E. Warren Air [...]
The DVDNow Kiosk is a DVD rental vending machine similar to RedBox. DVD rental machines are very popular with consumers, but they’re still relatively new. I live in California and have only seen a couple. According to DVDNow, their primary competitor Redbox is primarily targeting the large national or regional big box stores. There are [...]
Alco-Buddy Alcohol Breathalyzer Vending Machine
Alco-Buddy is wall mounted, vending machine-like alcohol breathalyzer. It is designed to be installed in bars and restaurants. The machine is about the size of a payphone. After the user inserts cash or swipes his credit card, the machine dispenses a straw from the bottom. The user them inserts one of the straw into a [...]
Quirky Makes it Real, Makes You Money
It was just an idea tossed around the dinner table a few months ago, reports ABCNews.com. Jenny Tyler, 32, was out with three iPhone-toting friends who wished that their phones had a camera flash like Tyler’s BlackBerry. So, throughout the evening, the group played armchair inventor and came up with the concept of an iPhone [...]
“Gadget Nation” author Steve Greenberg presents offbeat innovations.
How Local Economies Benefit From Big Sporting Events
Local economies are historically the biggest victims of recessions. When the market takes a turn for the worst, it is local shopkeepers, restaurant owners, hotels and other merchants who feel the squeeze most personally, reports Mint.com. Accordingly, most cities are eager for any economic stimulus they can get. Over the years, one of the great [...]
Inventor 911 At The Housewares Show
The International Home + Housewares Show is March 14-16 at McCormick Place in Chicago, with a special pre-event “Inventor 911 educational day as well as an Inventors Corner area, according to a story at Inventors Digest. Inventor 911 is an education and networking event for inventors and entrepreneurs. Featuring topics of special interest to those [...]
New Bizop Classified Ads This Week
New listing this week on the Business Opportunities Weblog Classifieds. Dream Job – Career – Opportunity 888-886-1789 No Fine Print – No Pyramid Scheme – No Auto Orders – Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme – Call Me And We Can Chat For A Few Minutes!!! You Can Become A Millionnaire In One Year Or [...]
Mom’s Salon Keeps Daughter’s Dream Alive
Just a few years ago Cheryl McMillan lost her daughter, Brittney Redd, to cancer. While her daughter was going through chemotherapy they had to struggle just to find the right style of hairpieces that would work the best. It was then that she made her mom promise that when she opened up a salon of [...]
