Archive for July 2010
Mom Turns Doodles Into Eye Patch Fashion
One mom’s drawings have turned into a business and now she’s helping children deal with vision problems around the US reports KNDO KNDU. Julia’s worn an eye patch her whole life, it makes her weak eye work to get stronger. She’s an outgoing and friendly six year old, her mom made sure of it. “One [...]
You’ve heard of cat-sitters, dog-sitters and, of course, babysitters. But chicken-sitters? According to CNNMoney, in Portland, Ore., a city known for its deep do-it-yourself streak and poultry-permissive laws, two backyard farmers have stepped up to meet an unusual need: watching hens when their owners go on vacation. In May, Rhonda Piasecki, 43, and Sharon Rowland, [...]
Sam’s Club is hosting an open house beginning Friday, August 6 through Sunday, August 8 for members and guests alike to take advantage of savings from everyday needs for home and work, and throughout key back-to-school departments including electronics. Sam’s Club limits open house events and has only held a few throughout its history, including [...]
Looking for something fun to do with kids of all ages this summer? Fenway News Online reports that Design Squad, the PBS engineering reality competition series, is offering kids a chance to get in on the action this summer. The 2010 Trash to Treasure Competition challenges kids, ages 5-19, to recycle, reuse, and re-engineer everyday [...]
Some of us may have chosen to work from home full time, and others of us work from home part time while still maintaining an office at our company or place of employment. Either way, I think it’s more than beneficial to offer some tips on working from home, as this can be a challenge [...]
Gain More Business At Networking Events
Entrepreneur.com: Businesspeople unfamiliar with referral networking sometimes lose sight of the fact that networking is the means–not the end–of their business-building activities. They attend three, four, even five events in a week in a desperate grasp for new business. The predictable result is that they stay so busy meeting new people that they never [...]
Gaining New Perspective On Dull Content
If you are one who often writes content for your business whether it’s a blog online or you are the content writer within your company, I’m sure that at some point in time you realize that your content sometimes is a little boring, blah or just doesn’t have that spark feeling to it. I recently [...]
Those Japanese are so far ahead of us in snack technology. Via: TOYS.BRANDO.COM
Slinky…Fun For A Girl Or A Boy
Who didn’t spend hours as a child sending a Slinky down the stairs? The metal toy has entertained kids and adults alike since it hit Gimbels department store shelves in November 1945. How much do you know about the helical spring toy? Luckily, Answers.com has the facts about everything, including the Slinky. 1. During the [...]
Aspiring Entrepreneurs Get The Camp Experience
delawareonline: It was just another day at the office as 60 young business owners set up shop in the middle of Rodney Square. Rows of tables lined the inside of a white tent in the square — each one a mock business run by young entrepreneurs — for Thursday’s Market Day, the culmination of Chasing [...]
According to paidcontent.org, Jeff Bezos is bullish on mobile, whether it’s Kindles, smartphones or what he calls the “new category” of wireless tablet computers. Why? Amazon customers spent more than $1 billion via mobile device in the past 12 months, including sales by Kindle, and Bezos used the Q2 earnings release to suggest that tablets [...]
A Beer Only Grizzly Adams Could Love
According to Adweek, BrewDog, a Scottish craft brewery has just released perhaps the most masculine product ever invented: a beer that contains 55 percent alcohol and comes packaged inside a taxidermied rodent. It costs £500 (about $760) per bottle and is called The End of History. Photo by BrewDog.
Startup Offers Learning Experience For Young Entrepreneur
According to The Bellingham Herald, Chase Larabee found himself bit by the entrepreneurial bug at a young age. As many entrepreneurs already know, that urge is hard to ignore. Larabee, 21, started ALLFBO.com in June, an online program to help airport fixed-based operators handle refueling, hotel and transportation reservations and other requests from private pilots. [...]
Start A College Entrepreneurship Club
Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton met at an entrepreneurship club while attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Within three days of meeting, the two had the idea for their company iContact that helps small businesses manage their e-mail marketing, reports Inc.com. iContact now has 63,000 customers and generated $26.5 million in revenue [...]
It Makes Biz Sense To Improve Your Credit
No one likes discussing credit, but, now more than ever, it’s critical to improve your credit as part of running your small business. According to Rhonda Abrams over at USA TODAY, there are ways to improve your credit even if your credit is lousy now. • Get help! The single most important thing I did [...]
Danil from Moscow writes, I want to share a business idea with you and learn your opinion on it. The idea is to produce sticky flash-notes for learning languages etc. You take a post-it pad and print different foreign words on pages. There will be a ready-to-use set of notes in a pack, area-oriented (house, [...]
Window Screens and PVC Oil Spill Cleanup
LA Times: Gerry Matherne recently built a helicopter from “a bit of this and a piece of that,” which made him a minor star on YouTube when the engine died in midair and he didn’t. He somehow landed the crippled craft beside power lines. “I’m always inventing something,” said the gruff 61-year-old captain of an [...]
The Boston Globe reports that for the second year, advertising and public relations firm Conover Tuttle Pace has held their Summer Sublet desk swap, a lottery that forces most of the firm’s 35 employees, from the rookies to the boss, to sit somewhere new until Labor Day. To determine who was going to move where [...]
Obscure Entrepreneurs In Nevada
Steve Wynn, who is known mostly for his work in the Strip casino resort business, is the entrepreneur that many think of when they think of Las Vegas. However there are many lesser-known entrepreneurs that are also doing quite well in Southern Nevada reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. [Many kids] still want to grow up [...]
Fill ‘Er Up! A Smart Coffee Mug
ReadWriteWeb reports that a company called Smug Coffee has created what it says is the world’s first smart mug, or “smug.” Instead of opting for wasteful plastic cups, coffee drinkers can instead buy a special mug with embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that store account information and purchase habits. Customers simply present their mug [...]
Patent Office Snuffs Out High Hopes For Marijuana Sellers
For three months, ending last week, legalized marijuana dealers had something that they could have only dreamed of before, the apparent approval of the patent office reports the Wall Street Journal. On April 1, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created a new trademark category: “Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana.” The [...]
Seventeen-year-old Steven Ortiz is fairly sure he is the only student at Charter Oak High School who drives a convertible Porsche to school. Steven started with an old cell phone and eventually traded up to his impressive ride. It didn’t happen overnight, but with the help of the Craigslist website and a lot of patience, [...]
Fast Company is reporting that Internet-phone service Skype has announced Click & Call, its first foray into advertising. And with more than 560 million registered users worldwide, the new service is almost guaranteed to be a success. Click & Call enables customers to call certain phone numbers for free that are sponsored by advertisers. “[It] [...]
According to Women’s Wear Daily, 88-year-old Betty White has more street cred than people a quarter of her age. After appearing on “Saturday Night Live” with Jay-Z (and earning the TV show its best ratings in 18 months) and landing a new comedy series called “Hot in Cleveland,” White is launching her own line of [...]
Mom Turned Farmer And Goat Soap Entrepreneur
Behind every farm there is a unique story and for Mike and Shannon Wiggins it all started with a couple goats. Their daughter became involved in 4H and they soon learned what exactly would need to be done if they wanted to be seen as a serious farm. After registering with the A.D.G.A they became [...]
American Basketball Association Sports Marketing
Sports marketing and licensing brands are growing niches in the consumer marketing industry. The ABA, a well-known brand developed over 40 years ago when the American Basketball Association was first launched, is in the midst of expansion. The colorful basketball and ABA league logo are well known to millions of people. The ABA was relaunched [...]
David Warren’s father died in a 1934 Bass Strait air crash. Warren graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science. He became the principal research scientist at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation’s Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne from 1952 to 1983. In 1953, Warren was involved in the investigation of the [...]
A Joke iPhone Sticker Turns Into a Business
The funniest jokes are the ones that turn into successful businesses, like Antenn-Aid. NY Times: After Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference last week, Szymon Weglarski and Jon Dorfman, two designers from Brooklyn, decided they would have a little fun with the iPhone 4’s antenna problem. They designed tiny bandages that fit perfectly around the edge [...]
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Wired: The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is calling for small businesses to build what it calls an Intelligent Robo-Pallet: mechanical platforms that can haul stuff onto its planes autonomously. It’s got to be able to move on its own, lift and stack as cargo masters instruct, possess a [...]
How to Make Money from Old Electronics
Gazelle turns your old electronics into cash. At their website, they ask you questions about your old cellphone, MP3 player, digital camera, etc., and they immediately tell you what they’ll pay you for it. If you like what you see, they’ll send you a postage paid envelope and you send back the item and then [...]
Tina sent us an email wanting to know if drop shipping really works. So I checked in with James Maguire over at Ecommerce-Guide. Maguire says as Internet retailing was getting started in the mid ’90s, online storeowners assumed drop-shipping would be the answer to their every worry. Filling orders through drop-shipping (sometimes called “virtual inventory”) [...]
Dig This, the construction theme park business I wrote about earlier today and first mentioned in August 2008 is now offering franchises. According to the company, the initial Franchise fee for starting a DIG THIS® Franchise is $75,000. In addition to your franchise fee, you can expect to invest another $100,000.00 to $200,000.00 in the [...]
If You Build It, Will They Buy It?
They built it and boy-oh-boy did they come. The Boston Globe reports that an estimated 1 million visitors have journeyed to the “Field of Dreams’’ movie site since the Academy Award-nominated film was released in 1989. But the owners of the farm, Don and Becky Lansing, say they have gone the distance, and now the [...]
Teen Creates Jewelry From Broken Skateboards
While most teens are spending their summer sleeping in Alex Wells has been hard at work creating jewelry for his business, Rebound says the Daily Press. For almost a year and a half, Wells has been taking used and broken skateboards and creating aesthetically and artistically creative pieces of jewelry. The idea for the jewelry, [...]
Construction Theme Park: A Super-Sized Sandbox for Adults
A Nevada entrepreneur wants to open a theme park called Dig This outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, where people can operate bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks. Sounds like a great idea to me, especially in the wide open spaces of Nevada. Unfortunately, the neighbors don’t agree. MyNews3 has more: The project has been envisioned as [...]
Erich Spangenberg makes a fortune by buying patents and then suing large corporations that are infringing on them. Good.is takes a look at his unusual and vilified profession: Trolling works something like this: First a shell company, which is incorporated but has no significant assets or operations, is created. Orion IP is one of Spangenberg’s [...]
How To Compete With Groupon Clones
This article makes a good point. It’s titled How To Compete With A Million Other Groupon Clones: Find A Niche. Groupon is a “daily coupon” website. It’s basically an email list that charges advertisers to send out their “coupons” called Groupons. Many small businesses I’d likely never hear about otherwise send me their coupons this [...]
According to BBC News, Gurcharn Sahota works on some of the world’s fastest cars at his workshop just outside Derby. But if you’re used to spending £5 on getting the car cleaned at the local garage, forget it. Gurcharn says he uses painstaking cleaning methods to make £1 million supercars look almost better than new. [...]
Mompreneur Starts Tech Company To Help Kids With Disabilities
The Roanoke Times: Margaret Ellis talks expressively and laughs often about her work and family, two parts of her life intertwined. “Running a business is nothing compared to raising Mary,” the Blacksburg mother said. Margaret, 35, started DevelopEase LLC, an education consulting and application-development company, last year. She focuses on helping children with disabilities learn [...]
They call America the land of opportunity, but few would question the notion that it is also the land of contrasts. Mint.com reports that all you need to do is look at the statistics compiled on a regular basis by the Department of Labor, Census Bureau and other government institutions to see the stark differences [...]
More Dads Are Taking The Stay-At-Home Route
The term “stay-at-home dad” is just as accurate as “stay-at-home mom” considering they are hardly ever home says the poughkeepsiejournal.com. In the Schmitz family, it is Judy Schmitz who boards a train each morning to her job in Albany. She is marketing and web services manager for the SUNY Learning Network, a system of online [...]
This hack by David Rudolf Bakker, in which he affixed binder clips to the side of his desk and placed his component wires into the curvy niche of the clip handles. So simple! Photo by David Rudolf Bakker.
Inventor’s Journal: Bill Phelps
Here’s another episode of our new program, Inventor’s Journal. This week Rich Whittle interviews Bill Phelps about his word game Yamodo.
Most of us start planning our tax season in the beginning of each new year, this way we are prepared for when tax season is actually upon us. Below is a few tips on how to plan your taxes so that you get the most out of it that I recently read on Open Forum. [...]
Good Tips Are Not A Dime A Dozen
Many of us has heard that saying “tips are a dime a dozen”, which is not always true. Yes you may be receiving a bunch of tips every day in your business, but that does not mean that those tips are worth listening to. Good tips can be hard to come by sometimes, and those [...]
Why Would Someone Write A Book That Gives Away Their Secrets? (Used Books: Big Profits Part 2)
Yesterday, at the end of very positive review of Adam Bertram’s ebook, Used Books: Big Business, the reviewer, Rich Whittle, expressed confusion at why Bertram would be selling an ebook that describes exactly how to compete with a business that he’s running: Reviewer’s Note: Books like this always make me wonder. If Adam Bertam is [...]
Here’s a weird dog food story out of the UK: A new ice cream truck will be the local dogs’ best friend. Called the the K99, the ice cream truck delivers gammon (a kind of bacon) and chicken ice cream, complete with a crunchy canine biscuit bone.
Men’s Wearhouse is Missing Out, Are You?
Ryan Moulton: Every male in the U.S. who goes to a prom or is someone’s groomsman has likely been fitted for a tuxedo at the Men’s Wearhouse. Theoretically, the Men’s Wearhouse should have the most comprehensive database of men’s sizing information of any company. There have been a lot of weddings among my close friends [...]
NY Times: The Shopify Build-A-Business competition for new Web stores today announced the winner of its $100,000 grand prize. The store that achieved the highest revenue total during any two consecutive months from January to June — using Shopify’s e-commerce platform to sell its wares — was San Francisco-based DODOcase, makers of protective cases for [...]
One of my favorite parts of running this blog are the great emails I get from all over. I just got this one: Dear Sirs, I would like to inform you that we are the best manufacturer and exporter of brass casting and brass sheet pet, funeral, cremation and memorial design urns, cremation jewelry in [...]
