Archive for July 2010
Have you ever wanted to own your very own tourist town? A place famous for its antique shops, civil war memorabilia and quirky attractions? On July 22nd, much of Strasburg, Virginia will be up for bid including the former Museum of American Presidents and the Jeane Dixon Museum. The auction is a result of the [...]
Interview from a Classified Ad: Real Estate And Money Brokering Services
Lyle Seales recently purchased an ad in our classified advertising section. His ad Real Estate And Money Brokering Services! reads in part: Wes-State Mortgage Inc is well established Mortgage Company (1976) that offers business opportunity and complete training in Real Estate Investment, Money Brokering and Credit Card Solution with unlimited consultation. They require no experience [...]
Office Worker By Day, Inventor By Night
Maria Luisa Ruvio, a Whitestone mother of two and executive assistant by day, is an innovator when she gets home, creating and trademarking a unique beverage, reports Your Nabe.Com. I was always very creative, but I never really thought of it because I was raising two kids and didn’t have the time to dedicate to [...]
Ice Cream Experience Turned Phenomenon
It was a simple twist of fate that turned an art history student into an ice cream entrepreneur reports 10 TV News. Jeni Britton Bauer stumbled upon the idea when she was studying art history at The Ohio State University and tried to spice things up by mixing cayenne pepper with chocolate ice cream for [...]
Maywood is a small working class city in Los Angeles County, California, with a population of over 30,000. At 1.14 square miles, Maywood is the third-smallest incorporated city in Los Angeles County. According to The New York Times, as of July 1, 2010, Maywood became the first municipality in California and perhaps anywhere, to dismantle [...]
According to The New York Times, Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage [...]
According to BusinessWeek, if you were to ask Josh Reich for his thoughts on the traditional bank, he’d simply tell you that they suck. Reich, a former equity researcher at a New York investment fund, last year co-founded BankSimple with former McKinsey consultant Shamir Karkal, a fellow graduate of Carnegie Mellon business school. Though the [...]
David Hartstein is betting on an innovation he calls the Moses Miracle in an attempt to reinvent his privately held Brookline flower company. The Boston Globe reports that the Moses Miracle doesn’t seem like much of a technology stretch. At first glance, it looks like a glorified water balloon that has been tightly cinched around [...]
Apps For Children A Profitable Niche
According to The Washington Post, 18 months ago, Lynette Mattke’s husband, Manuel, brought home an iPod Touch. Mattke went looking in the iTunes applications store for audio books. She found very little geared for young kids. Four months later, she started working on a picture book app for babies, toddlers and grade schoolers called PicPocket [...]
Quirky.com takes users’ ideas and turns them into actual products – with improvements made by other site members. CNNMoney takes a look.
Web Design Has Gone To The Dogs
Until you’ve had to design a website, no one ever truly appreciates the work that goes into it. Designing the perfect page takes a lot of time and dedication which is exactly why web designers like Michael Ayalon are so valuable. Michael is the founder of PetWebDesigner.com and the man behind the many animal-centric pages [...]
Many businesses enjoy receiving referrals, but feel they come by mixing good work with chance mentions from satisfied customers. Certainly, many referrals happen this way, but if you understand the realities of referrals listed below you might rethink your approach to referral generation, with an eye on taking a more proactive view of the process. [...]
Make Your Meetings More Productive
I recently came across an article located on Entrepreneur.com that spoke about how you can make your meetings more productive rather than a waste of every one’s time. Look below for some really great ideas that I think will make all of your meetings a lot more note worthy. Make sure that the meeting has meaning [...]
We all know what kind of danger lurks around the corner every time you turn on your computer at home or at the office. We have all seen the television commercials advertising predators and way’s to protect yourself from them. With all of the way’s to steal your identity, credit and personal information, it should [...]
Used Books: Big Business – The Secrets to Selling Books Online for Big Profits
Part 2 of this post is now online: Why Would Someone Write A Book That Gives Away Their Secrets? (Used Books: Big Profits Part 2). Have you ever thought you’d like to start a business from home? Do you have some books laying around collecting dust? If you said yes to both questions, selling used [...]
Kindle Books Now Outsell Real Books on Amazon
In a statement today, Amazon said that, “over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.” If you’re not profiting from this, you should be. Look for [...]
Don’t Let Employees at Big Companies Scare You
When exploring new business ideas, people often assume that just because something doesn’t exist that there’s no market. An often heard expression of this belief is: If there was money to be made in this, Google (or whoever) would have released a product already. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although large corporations might [...]
Can You Use This Technique To Fund Your Business Expansion?
The Schumacher Institute offers this case study of a local business person expanding his business without means of bank financing… I just ate today at a local Deli that changed hands recently. I wonder if the owner is wishing right now he had some extra capital to expand? Maybe I need to mention this to [...]
GroovyBalls is a new toy made from 216 rare-earth magnetic balls formed into a cube shape, which can be used to make millions of different shapes and patterns. Video after the jump.
Man Cave: A Party Business for Men
A reader wrote: I just received an invitation to a Man Cave MEATing. What is it? Glad you asked. Man Cave is a sales party business for men. As Man Cave explains on their website: “Thousands of companies demonstrate and sell products to groups of women in their homes. Man Cave is finally doing it [...]
Niche Biz: The Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit
This real product and is available at BSRemoval.com.
When That Crazy Idea Hits, Run With It
According to Women Entrepreneur, Julie Hall knew her entrepreneurial time had come. Here’s how she did it. Through my passion for buying and selling estate items, I uncovered a huge, unfilled niche. My elderly clients had too much stuff in their homes. They needed help downsizing when they moved into assisted-living facilities or made decisions [...]
ArgusLeader.com: Bouncing cartoon-fat arctic tires across a clover-covered grass runway near Brandon, pilot Wes Hebert gunned the Piper Super Cub 18′s 160-horsepower engine, pulled back on the stick and lifted effortlessly into the air at a harsh, 50-degree angle of attack. “That was about 100 feet, I’d guess,” Mark Erickson, owner of Dakota Cub Aircraft, [...]
A New York baker wants to change the images of cupcakes. Traditionally, most cupcake bakeries have been targeted at women. The Butch Bakery targets men with their beer, whiskey and bacon flavored cupcakes. SkyNews has more.
CNNMoney reports Inland Surfer founder Jeff Page started his business 10 years ago after friends introduced him to lake surfing behind boats. Photo by Inland Surfer.
The Mercury News recently interviewed Gina Bianchini, founder and ex-CEO of Ning, about her time with the company, her parting and what might happen next for this inspiring female entrepreneur. Q What was the original idea behind Ning? A We had a very simple premise. What if we gave people an opportunity to create their [...]
The invention and application of the digital players marks that mankind has entered the Digital Age, during which period people seldom use vinyl records or CD players. But we never forget them, and designer Pavel Sidorenko has applied the clock idea to vinyl records, creating several clocks of various shapes. INewIdea.com has a look at [...]
They have become a filter for our world. Through them we can access information, games, entire virtual worlds. Not the internet, nor our computers, not tablets or laptops – just little programs on our phones. Millions of little programs. What are the real numbers behind these programs, and why are there so many of them? [...]
Colorado Warns Bizs Of Theft Scam
Colorado’s Secretary of State and other officials are warning the state’s 800,000 or so registered businesses to watch out for scammers who have been forging business identities to make fraudulent purchases from several big-box retailers in recent months, reports PC World. The corporate identity thefts itself were possible because of what appears to have been [...]
Inventor’s Journal: Bill Phelps
Join Rich Whittle as he talks with inventor Bill Phelps about his game creation, Yamodo. Wednesday on Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog.
How Some Sugary Treats Got Their Names
We reach for them when we need a sugar fix, but how well do we know the stories behind our favorite ice creams, cookies, and snack cakes? Mental Floss takes a look at the names behind some of our guilty pleasures. 1. Häagen-Dazs What does the upscale ice cream company’s name mean? Nothing! Polish American [...]
Webpreneur Aims To Boost Local Economy With Search Engine
While watching his father struggle to find affordable and effective advertising Clifton Cooper was inspired. He went to work and created a localized search engine called Coachella Valley Webpages. Now locals have a place to search when they want to find a new business to visit reports The Desert Sun. The new local search platform [...]
Comic: That’s Not How You Start A Business
That’s Not How You Start a Business #1
Bloomberg Businessweek reports that fear of financial collapse has enhanced gold’s glitter, with prices soaring more than 300 percent the past decade, including 30 percent just in the last 12 months. And just as strong U.S. real estate prices a few years ago created a burgeoning ecosystem of entrepreneurs exploiting that bubble, gold’s surge has [...]
Mom And Daughter Team Launch Golf Fashion Line For Women
According to WNDU.com, Cindy and Laura Ormson started their business in 2007. It has been 3 years since they launched their clothing line and their basement-based business is still booming. Laura Ormson, co-founder of Wear to Win, has been golfing since she was kid and didn’t like the options available when it came to outfits [...]
Cavemen Could Charge This Battery
Cavemen don’t have electrical outlets to plug in their rechargeable batteries, but they do know how to shake things. Soon, based on a new product from the Japanese company Brother Industries you’ll be able to buy AA and AAA batteries that incorporate vibration-powered induction generators that’ll charge up when you shake them.
A reader asked: Why is the pizza the only food you can get delivered? What’s the history of pizza delivery? According to PizzaDelivery.com, in 1889, King Umberto and Queen Margherita had the privilege of getting the first known pizza delivered by Raffaele Esposito, the most famous Pizzaaiolo (pizza chef) in Naples, Italy. In honor of [...]
Waiting on hold stinks. Free service LucyPhone can listen to the hold music for you, then call you back when a real human picks up. Lifehacker says head to Lucyphone’s site, look up the number of the company you’re calling (or add it to their database), then hand over your own number. Lucyphone calls you [...]
The Salt Lake Tribune: Davinci Suites has started an entrepreneur-support program in which it offers office space and services for as low as about $50 a month to startup businesses. The Salt Lake City company that provides flexible office space and business services in four locations in the Salt Lake Valley is offering about half [...]
According to the Gazette-Times, Kaichang Li, a professor of wood science at Oregon State University, receives a dozen calls each day from businesses interested in his laboratory’s latest invention: an inexpensive adhesive made of natural materials. He said they’re interested in the adhesive’s use of simple, reusable ingredients, including vegetable oil, which keeps costs down. [...]
Mile Meter likes to think of itself as the “anti-insurance insurance company.” It sells auto insurance by the mile — which means that the less you drive, the less you pay for insurance. See how Chris Gay, founder and chief executive, managed to keep the company alive. Video via New York Times ‘You’re the Boss’ [...]
Business Idea: Cupcake Liner Website
Today’s free business idea is to start a website that sells cupcake liners. Cupcake liners are the sheets of thin paper pressed into a round, fluted cup shape. Liners can facilitate the easy removal of the cupcake from the tin after baking, keep the cupcake moister, and reduce the effort needed to clean the pan. [...]
Economies of Scale and Business Start Up
The book Big Box Swindle:The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses raises important questions and suggests some interesting ideas that should be of interest to work at home entrepreneurs who struggle to overcome the “Big Boys’” economies of scale. The main argument against the “Big Box” and it’s “low low [...]
Back to School 2010 to Be Big!
Back-to-school spending is expected to be robust this year as parents replenish their kids’ wardrobes and backpacks after two years of weak demand for school gear. Having outgrown shoes, shirts and even backpacks they’ve used the last two years, children heading back to school this year will arrive in style. The National Retail Federation’s 2010 [...]
New Bizop Classified Ads This Week
New listing this week on the Business Opportunities Weblog Classifieds. Directv 1st Month Free Service With Directv Noahs Ark Animal Work Shop Noahs Ark Animal Workshop $1000 Commission Per Sale Corrected – Make Money With Ashmax (corrected) – Can You Take A Simple Photograph? Get Paid To Travel Web Researcher – Get Paid To Surf [...]
The founders of Diapers.com today launched Soap.com, a new retail website for household products, vitamins, toliet paper and well, soap, at competitive prices over the internet. I know that my wife has been excitedly awaiting the launch. She’s a big Diapers.com fan is hopeful that low prices from Soap.com will mean that she never has [...]
BallStars is a sports-affiliated business that uses a proprietary technology to reproduce full color images on sports paraphernalia, such as baseballs, soccer balls, baseballs, hockey pucks, volleyballs, and footballs. In addition to the sports balls, the photographs can also be applied to other curved surfaces and materials. Licensing a BallStars business offers plenty of opportunities [...]
Ray Charles’ Copyrights A Lucrative Biz
Music legend Ray Charles capitalized on music publishing angle: he began recording a lot of public domain songs, like “America The Beautiful,” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” where he published the arrangement. Reuters reports that today, the Ray Charles Marketing Group represents about 500 songs from those companies, including about a dozen Charles wrote [...]
Entrepreneur Thinks Outside The Spa Box
With all of the rocking chairs and antique furniture sitting around Stephanie Grenadier’s new business you might think this was more like a cozy room than a massage studio. However she intentionally avoided that spa-like look reports the PatriotLedger.com. “(Spas) have a conveyor belt type of mentality. It’s like in and out,” she said. “You [...]
