Archive for May 2010
Inspired by the products that can be found in an everyday kitchen, Gönül Paksoy is taking a new approach with food. Rather than judge it by taste or smell, Gönül is judging it by appearance and turning it into jewelry reports Daily News. Beads have never stopped being popular over the years whether they were [...]
According to Fast Company, there seem to be as many business models as colors in the rainbow … yet few have the charitable cachet of “Causium.” This is a wildly successful and public-spirited invention by software company Atlassian. Atlassian announced that through their Causium software distribution model they’ve amassed a grand total of $500,000 in [...]
The first time Darcy Plunkett launched Chic Mom she was just looking for a little joy reports Dayton Daily News. The second time, the Oakwood wife and mother was looking for a business partner and an opportunity. She found both in Yellow Springs custom magazine publisher Ertel Publishing. Chic Mom, the magazine Plunkett started five [...]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Chuck Pretto couldn’t figure out how to carry around his new iPad. So he decided to wear it. After ordering Apple Inc.’s new multimedia tablet last month, the 52-year-old property manager realized it might weigh down his briefcase. He didn’t have another bag or carrier to cradle the 9.7-inch, [...]
More Older Americans Start Own Bizs
After toiling for three decades in finance, it wouldn’t be surprising if 65-year-old Patrick Althizer kicked back and lived off his savings and Social Security. But with a spirit not ready for sedentary retirement — as well as college costs for two daughters — he veered off to a new career path: leading shutterbugs through [...]
Business Is Blooming For Green Entrepreneur
Known by friends as “The Slug Man,” Callum Davis is on a quest to help you in the garden according to Guardian.co.uk. Davis is still a month shy of his 20th birthday but his company, EcoCharlie, employs five full-time staff and is set to turn over £150,000 this year in sales of a fast-expanding range [...]
Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Duct Tape
A wise person once said “Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.” Although, how much do really know about what is likely one of mankind’s most useful inventions? Luckily, Answers.com’s huge database of knowledge revealed five things you probably didn’t know about [...]
Some Thoughts About The Holiday….
Photos: Creative Commons Flickr.com Music: Excerpt ‘Reveillez-Vous – Peter White
On a recent Tuesday morning, Lev Ekster paced around his future storefront in Manhattan’s newly opened Limelight Marketplace. He adjusted the 1960s kitchen-kitsch inspired décor and awaited the delivery of a cupcake display case. According to Inc.com, it would be the first non-mobile location of CupcakeStop, the gourmet cupcake truck he debuted on the New [...]
One Company Took On The NFL And Won
Illinois-based American Needle, a company that dates back to 1918, had been producing NFL-licensed caps and apparel for nearly 20 years. All that changed, however, in 2001 when the NFL awarded an exclusive contract to Reebok. As the Chicago Tribune reports, sales of NFL gear represented nearly 25 percent of American Needle’s annual sales. The [...]
How’s this for a unique restaurant idea: The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. Photo via Dvorak.
Keeping Your Great Employees In A Bad Economy
photo credit: nosha It can be quite difficult as a business owner to hold onto your employees in a tough economy when you no longer can provide the incentives, benefits and other bargaining chips that most employees now a days look for in their career. So how do you hold onto your great employees then? [...]
photo credit: Lori Greig I recently found a great article located on CopyBlogger for all of you professional bloggers in business. Blogging is a wonderful way to reach your audience, customers and clients, however if you’re not careful you can make some very severe mistakes that can also cost you all of those things in the [...]
photo credit: Dyanna For any college student who is looking to launch a business and make a little extra cash for their expensive college life is sure to find this article recently posted on Inc.com very interesting and useful. College can be quite expensive for anyone so I have put together a small list of [...]
USPTO Seeks Students For Collegiate Inventors Competition
The Invent Now Collegiate Inventors Competition is inviting graduate and undergraduate students to enter its 2010 Collegiate Inventors Competition. The deadline for entering this year’s Competition is June 25. Entries are judged on originality, process or technology, and their usefulness to society. For more information, go here. Photo by Invent Now, Inc..
The National Lawn & Garden Show features guaranteed, pre-set appointments between qualified, decision-making buyers and manufacturers. As a result, the show is known as the most productive, focused efficient event in the industry. Every lead is genuine; every appointment is a new opportunity to do business with one of the industry’s leaders. Experience the most [...]
A team from Columbia University Medical Center has pioneered a technique to regrow adult teeth from a person’s own stem cells. An animal-model study has shown that by homing stem cells to a scaffold made of natural materials and integrated in surrounding tissue, there is no need to use harvested stem cell lines, or create [...]
Building a Castle in the Ozarks
A Frenchman is building a 13th century castle in the Arkansas Ozarks with local laborers and 13th century tools. The goal is tourism, of course. But when it comes to the castle itself, Mr. Guyot makes no concessions to modernity—except for those mandated by federal workplace requirements. Workers, though dressed in medieval garb, must wear [...]
Swimming Pool in the Middle of the Ocean
If you have a hankering for a swim in the sea, but all of the dangerous creatures in the ocean have you scared, why not just install a swimming pool in the middle of the ocean? “Mesh covered holes allow the Magic Swim to fill with water once it’s deployed, but also keep unwanted visitors [...]
Disability Doesn’t Hold Back Saudi Inventor
Saudi Gazette: Two years ago, Abo Dayah’s car broke down on his way from Jizan, where he was studying, to Riyadh, where his family lives. When he got out to examine the engine, he was hit by a speeding car. Abo Dayah slipped into a coma for 20 days and lost his eyesight. To make [...]
Unique products to inspire and amuse. Lightsaber Chopsticks. Just don’t invite Darth Vader over for Chinese. Creepy Hand Wrench. The perfect gift for your creepy plumber buddy. Daily Affirmation Gum. Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me! Sing-A-Long Salad Tongs. Nothing says songfest like tossing some greens. Photos by [...]
A lucrative patent or a popular copyright can provide a creator’s heirs with solid streams of revenue for decades. Some great artists and inventors decided that they’d rather give the rights to their best creations to charity, though. Mental Floss takes a look at a few well-known bits of intellectual property that have found their [...]
It’s Friday before a long holiday weekend, so we thought we’d lighten things up a bit with the movie trailer to the prequel to the Iron Man series. Enjoy. via HolyKaw
Footprint Makes An Imprint On Down Syndrome Awareness
The Chippewa Herald: Katia was looking for a Down syndrome awareness idea — something she could display to show she is the proud and loving mother of a Down syndrome child. All she could find was a blue and yellow ribbon that, frankly, few people know about. “No one ever asked me what my blue [...]
Machinist Turned (Legal) Moonshiner
When Lee Palleschi was a boy, his dad made wine in the basement. He loved to watch the stomping of the grapes and the sweet smell of the fermenting grapes. His father explained the entire winemaking process to him,but being a young boy, he was more interested in other things and didn’t grow up to [...]
Popular Science’s ‘Garage Invention’ Awards 2010: ECO-Auger
‘Garage inventors’ is a term used to describe individuals or groups of inventors that create independently. They are not on a salary or salary/incentive basis, paid by their companies to invent; they work alone, on their own or in small groups, generally in someone’s garage or other part of the home. Popular Science recognizes the [...]
According to story at Entrepreneur, it’s no secret that busy parents are willing to pay for help around the house. In fact, child care, sports coaching and tutoring are expected to be a $47.5 billion industry in 2010, according to the research group IBISWorld. But it doesn’t stop there. Wendy Sweeney has the big job: [...]
The Tofu Steaks That Launched A Business
The Orange County Register: In 2002, Stephen launched Helen’s Foods Inc., to produce vegetarian frozen entrees, named after his mom. The brand became Helen’s Kitchen. “She said, ‘You can use my name for your company if you promise that when the steaks are produced for market, they will still taste as delicious as they do [...]
Denver Startup Takes Pawn Shops Online
Denver, Colorado-based Internet Pawn, which said it is creating the first dedicated online pawn shop nationwide, recently announced it raised $1.5 million in its first round of venture funding from Daylight Partners and Access Ventures, reports Reuters. The company offers pawn loans – cash advances based on the collateral of customers’ assets – at no [...]
Why Lawyers Don’t Start Businesses
To a carpenter, every job looks like it needs a hammer. To a lawyer, everything situation looks like a legal problem and not a strategy question, as Steve Blank describes: The issues our lawyer had raised about the contract, while correct, were strategy questions the founders needed to answer, not legal questions. Negotiating deal points [...]
Stop Being Annoying On Twitter
photo credit: jmilles With the many people that make up the Twitter community, its not hard to find a lot of annoying Twitters on there. It’s bound to happen with such a large community and people having access to not only so many people but so many features and tools as well. Below are some [...]
photo credit: Kelly Sue Today many people are contemplating making a switch from the corporate office to the home office. This can be a great switch but you should know it’s not for everyone. When many of us think about working from home we think it will be easier then working from a corporate office. [...]
Improving Your Presentation Skills
photo credit: Brymo In business we find ourselves having to give presentations from time to time in order to create knowledge and bring in more business for our company. The problem with giving presentations is that not only are many people afraid of public speaking but they also don’t really know how to put together [...]
Tasty Biz: Spoonful Of Comfort
Untold numbers of entrepreneurs are selling everything from customized yoga mats to homemade food. One of them is Marti Wymer, founder of Spoonful of Comfort, a Bradenton, Fla., company that delivers chicken noodle soup, dinner rolls and chewy oatmeal raisin cookies, made fresh daily. A 64-ounce jar of soup is $32; sides are $6. Your [...]
Inc.com reports that a cheaper tablet is on the horizon. It will run Google’s Android operating system and it will likely be sold by a Chinese computer company. That’s the gist of reports in Bloomberg and The New York Times about tablet offerings by the likes of Via and Foxconn. Ashlee Vance of The Times [...]
Entrepreneur Spices Up Her Finances With Salsa
Cindy Holleman is the founder of Stick Figure Salsa, a California based company that sells at Jensen’s Finest Foods and Harvest Health Foods in the Palm Desert area, reports mydesert.com. In short time, Holleman’s salsa venture has gone from idea to a 27-case-a month business that produces a small profit, she said. Her foray into [...]
WalletPop went to the recent NYC Pet Show to find doggie products that were best in show. Would you pay $79.99 to find out whether Bowser was part-Schnauzer? Or any other kind of breed? With doggie DNA test. You take a cheek swab of your mutt and mail the sample back to the lab. Three [...]
Have you ever found a straw so awesome that it was simply Strawesome? For Daedra Surowiec, the mind behind the straw, those are her awesome creation. Each straw is made of glass but they’re extremely durable and reusable. Surowiec launched Strawesome in March 2009 to sell reusable drinking straws that are both durable and stylish [...]
Popular Science’s ‘Garage Invention’ Awards 2010: KOR-fx
‘Garage inventors’ is a term used to describe individuals or groups of inventors that create independently. They are not on a salary or salary/incentive basis, paid by their companies to invent; they work alone, on their own or in small groups, generally in someone’s garage or other part of the home. Popular Science recognizes the [...]
Like a lot of small business owners in early 2009, Ruth Klahsen found herself desperately seeking capital and finding nothing but refusal everywhere she looked. Until, that is, the Ontario cheese maker hit upon the idea of asking her customers to help finance a $1 million new dairy, reports AOL Small Business. Abandoning the search [...]
Tech Support For The Consignment Industry
No matter what industry you’re in, computers are almost always a necessity. They make it easier to keep track of your inventory but their upkeep also costs money. Dean Casey and Cara Bronico are well aware of the needs that consignment, retail and resale stores have when it comes to keeping their computers online. Between [...]
Brainstorming Might Hinder Great Ideas
You walk past a group of employees gathered in one of your company’s meeting rooms, laptops and notepads are strewn along a table the size of a small state. There are charts and graphs and PowerPoint presentations and three-quarters of the people in the room have a hand in the air. There’s a lot of [...]
Where To Find Money For Your Start-up
photo credit: h.koppdelaney OpenForum.com: Research shows that over 90 percent of new ventures start with whatever money entrepreneurs can scrounge from personal resources. The other 10 percent relied on external sources with family members (parents and spouse) as the most common (5.0 percent). Private investors fund less than 3 percent of start ups. Venture capitalists [...]
Making Customer Experiences Memorable
Entrepreneur.com: It is often the little details that customers recall even more than the product they purchased or the service they received. Little details that customers notice, and that makes them feel good about not only making the purchase, but making the purchase from you, is a significant part of the overall customer experience. [...]
Traditionally, companies like Google Adsense pay publishers more than thirty days after the’ve run their advertisements on the publisher’s site. Other ad networks can sometimes have as much as a 100 day lag between the time that they say you’ve earned money and when they send it. This delay can really hamper the growth of [...]
A few interesting links I’ve posted to Twitter today: A Rebellious Teenagers Guide To Starting A Lawn Care Business 13 Bad Excuses For Not Starting Your Business Quirky Crowdsources Your Product Ideas into Reality Start A Handyman Business Reuters: For some, oil spill a business opportunity FedEx restores flight hours to pre-recession levels Ouch: The [...]
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 companies we’ve posted about this week: 7-eleven a franchise Anytime Fitness a franchise Arbonne International a business opportunity Baguette Express a franchise Bakers Delight a franchise Baskin Robbins a [...]
Library Of Congress’ Hidden Twitter Room
The Library of Congress recently made headlines by announcing an unusual acquisition: every public tweet ever sent on Twitter. Cleverly, it made the announcement by Twitter — and the interest brought the library’s servers to a standstill, reports WalletPop. In the humming computer stacks in the James Madison Memorial Building of the Library, preserving digital [...]
According to trendspotter Springwise, catering to consumers who don’t want the hassle of buying ingredients and following recipes, Cocktailbox is a London-based venture that offers ready-mixed cocktails freshly made by a professional bartender,and home delivered in fridge-friendly boxes. Launched in October, CocktailBox takes online orders for four popular cocktails—margarita, mojito, cosmo and strawberry daiquiri—and dispatches [...]
Making DVDs Out Of Old VHS Or Slides
PatriotLedger.com: Janet Gilmore launched VideoKin in January 2009. Her firm, which she runs out of her house, takes old VHS tapes, slides, and photos and uploads them into DVD format and video montages. Gilmore graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a major in film and later worked at Boston-based Pieces Production [...]
