Archive for November 2010
Mini Market Kids Boutique Offers Stylish Clothing Kids Love
While you’re searching the isles for yourself, where are you kids at? In Merrick, NY there is a good chance that your kids are shopping in their own section at the Mini Market Kids Boutique reports the Merrick Patch. “There are not a lot of stores that focus on this type of product,” Scarfone said. [...]
Ingenious Machine Can Print Cobblestone Roads
A road printer. This machine can build 400 yards of road per day using cobblestone. You just have to keep feeding it bricks. Via: Gizmodo
Tracking Your Businesses Social Media Presence
The days when the corporate message could be controlled by a few managers are long gone thanks to social media. However, what would happen if you decided a few years down the road that you need a list of all the messages you’ve put out on the web? According to The New York Times, Tribal [...]
Governments Clearing Way For Small Biz Creation
The New York Times reports that governments have responded to the financial crisis by making it easier for entrepreneurs to start new businesses, paving the way for employment growth amid an uncertain economic outlook, according to a World Bank report. The study, Doing Business 2011, found that governments in 117 of the 183 economies it [...]
Obama Administration To Appoint Web Privacy Czar
According to Ars Technica, the US government is preparing to appoint a privacy czar and introduce legislation to address growing concerns over Internet privacy. The announcement is expected to come within weeks along with a report from the US Commerce Department, though at this point, the details are apparently far from being hammered out. The [...]
Listen Now: Or download: Weekend Wrap-up November 13, 2010
Unique Products To Inspire And Amuse. Now I can REALLY use my iPad. Soft, warm, blue and enormous, ’nuff said. Honey, I had a dream I was at Denny’s. Heck, it worked for ZZ Top. These products are actually a product themselves…Prank Packs. Arik Nordby makes fake gift boxes, and his company 30Watt is releasing [...]
Game Inventor Hopes To Spawn New Craze
Put down your Monopoly counters and pack up your Cluedo pieces because a new board game has arrived in Wokingham. The Wokingham Times reports that entrepreneur Phil Annets revealed his first toy venture, Whirred Play, last week when he showed the game to residents at Barkham Post Office. The game is a clever word challenge [...]
Free Holiday Shipping At Walmart
Walmart ups the ante for holiday shopping. They have announced free shipping on 60,000 holiday items, including electronics, video games, toys, jewelry and furniture. There is no minimum purchase amount and returns are free, too. The free shipping offer ends Dec. 20, 2010. WalletPop says Walmart estimates the free shipping offer will save shoppers $25 [...]
Why So Many Entrepreneurs Get Divorced
Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is a journalist and the wife of Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, she writes at Inc.com: No one, as far as I know, breaks out divorce statistics for entrepreneurs, but I’d wager they’re higher than the U.S. average. Fortunately, my husband and I are not among that number. The [...]
via: The Pajama Pundit
There’s an old business adage that goes like this: “You’re wasting half of your marketing dollars. Unfortunately, you don’t know which half.” What was true fifty years ago at the height of the print and radio advertising market is also true today in the digital age. Small advertisers on limited budgets can’t compete dollar-for-dollar with [...]
As the years have passed, there hasn’t been much that has changed about the transmission that is used in vehicles today. One inventor aims to change it completely reports The Calgary Herald. Gary Lee, a Utah inventor and his company VMT Technologies, has recently developed a transmission concept that if successful might just forever change [...]
Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain and famous for stories such as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, also was an inventor and received a total of three patents. According to a USPTO press release, while living in Hartford, Conn., Twain, received his first patent for an adjustable strap that could be used to [...]
Miami Expo Teaches Women Entrepreneurship
Yesterday the Miami Museum of Science was filled with women in business suits handing out business cards reports the Miami Herald. They networked and learned how to brand themselves, become entrepreneurs and earn more money at the Empowered Woman’s Success Summit & Expo Miami. The two-day event ends Friday and has more than 800 people [...]
Baby Boomers Buying Habits Change
Because the way we think and process information evolves as we age, experts say the way we behave as consumers also changes. According to Jim Shea at The Hartford Courant, as a result, members of the baby-boom generation are now at a stage in life where emotion and gut feelings play a bigger role in [...]
Vet Realizes Entrepreneurial Dream
Cornell Irons has spent 29 years in the U.S. Army but now he is taking on a new challenge: entrepreneurship. Officially retiring in December, he has created a new life for himself as a Charley’s Grilled Subs entrepreneur reports RGJ.com. “Even before I went into the military, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” [...]
Coca-Cola And The Birth Of The Coupon
“Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!” When John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, not even that adrenalized ad slogan could persuade customers to try it over all the other carbonated wonder tonics on the market. According to Wired, his bookkeeper started giving away tickets for free tastes of Coke, but Pemberton chided him for “extravagance.” Then along [...]
Readers of a certain age will remember the fun of getting the giant Sears Wish Book in the mail at the start of the holiday season and paging through it to mark all the desired gifts. According to AppScout, the Wish Book is online now and Sears has added social features this year. Just in [...]
Anyone Can Create And Launch iPhone Apps
According to Venturebeat, GameSalad hopes to usher along the era of user-generated apps with its new GameSalad Studio, which makes it easier for people to create, test, and distribute their iPhone games. The Austin, Texas-based company says that no programming knowledge is necessary for people to use its tools and create their own apps that [...]
Target has come up with a clever way to sell more gift cards. Incorporate the card in a game. In this case a baby shower game. Via: the dieline
Growing Market For Bizarre Foods
Deep fried eel bones. Goat eyeball tacos. Breaded blowfish. All badass-sounding items featured at New York City restaurants both luxe (bones at Sushi Yasuda and blowfish at Oceana) and low (eyeballs at Taqueria Puebla in Staten Island). Inc.com says ingest one of these babies and you’ll have a story to impress your foodie friends—and gross [...]
Bigger is not always better, says a recent article in The New York Times. As retailers struggle to save money in a sluggish economy, they’re starting to downsize – literally. After all, a smaller space will have a lower rent, fewer costs for storing inventory, and a need for fewer employees. The Times notes that [...]
Open-Data Boon For Entrepreneurs
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order last year asking city departments to publish data under their control. Since then, hundreds of sets of data have been released. And the bounty is feeding creativity among app designers. Fast Company reports that at least 50 new apps have been built using the open data, [...]
According to Fast Company, the jeans manufacturing process can be surprisingly water-intensive. Most jeans are washed in industrial washing machines between three to ten times during the finishing process–and that adds up. So when Levi’s went looking for ways to save water this past year, it focused on the finishing side of jeans manufacturing. And [...]
A.J. Khubani, infomercial king, is looking towards an unlikely group of people for his next big idea reports The Washington Street Journal. The chief executive officer of Telebrands, the As-Seen-on-TV marketing company behind peel-and-stick adhesive light bulbs and mini-stairs for pets, is holding the first Student Inventors Day on Wednesday in partnership with the Liberty [...]
Though designed to enhance customer experiences, post-service customer surveys might actually harm a business’s relationships with consumers, reports Futurity.org. Companies that use immediate follow-up customer surveys or multiple follow-up surveys may open themselves to negative consequences, a new study finds. Customers who were satisfied with the specific service they received may jump to the conclusion [...]
Dogs Love Running! Franchise Gets Animals Moving
The pet industry is a billion dollar business. The American Pet Products Association (APPA) has estimated that over $47 billion dollars will be spent on pets this year alone. With numbers like that, we can all agree that this industry is booming. Dogs Love Running! are taking in their own piece of the pet market [...]
The Friday after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, and the Monday after is Cyber Monday. What about small business? The mayor of New York City and the American Express Chief Executive Kenneth Chenault are working together to create Small Business Saturday in NYC, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving reports Crain’s New York Business. Mr. Chenault said [...]
WalletPop reports that Mr. Peanut, the iconic mascot of Planters peanuts, is ending 94 years of silence in a new commercial. Given stop-action life (and the voice of Robert Downey Jr.), Mr. Peanut hosts a memorable Christmas party in one ad and plays The Christmas Song on the rims of glasses in a companion follow [...]
Name It And Webbies Will Buy It
A new study suggests online consumers judge a site’s or a software’s credibility by its name—and the more specialized the better, reports Futurity.com. Researchers randomly assigned a group of 124 undergraduate students to buy wine with websites, recommendation agents, and computer monitors that were labeled either as specialized wine purchasing-technologies or as general e-commerce technologies. [...]
When A Product Gets The Obama Effect
How the Slurpee got street cred. Easy: President Obama mentioned it. In recent campaign speeches, Obama said Republicans stood around drinking Slurpees while Democrats did tough legislative work. And at Wednesday’s day-after-the-election press conference, he joked that he might hold a “Slurpee Summit.” 7-Eleven is jumping on the opportunity for additional buzz. Officials representing 7-Eleven [...]
Ditching Politics For Entrepreneurship
Two campaign seasons ago, a group of young staffers schooled in new media helped President Barack Obama win office. Now according to The Wall Street Journal some have left politics behind and are using similar skills, plus lessons learned on the campaign trail, to start their own entrepreneurial ventures. One even funded his start-up by [...]
Creativity Improves Negative Moods
The anguished artist may be a popular stereotype, but as it turns out, exploring negative feelings through creative work can actually transform a sullen attitude into a bright one, according to Dr. Shelly Carson in an article at PsychCentral.com. The creative process provides a form of “auto-therapy,” which tends to improve moods. What type of [...]
Via: DailyInfographic
It is almost impossible to get a moment with Blake Mycoskie. His schedule is broken down right into half-hour blocks reports The Dallas Morning News. That’s the life of the undisputed rock star of socially conscious capitalism, a man who’s made charity cool and heralded a new wave of money-making businesses that also benefit those [...]
Book: The Intelligent Entrepreneur
This book sounds interesting: In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates (two men and one woman) turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their ten-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They’d made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs—and left their mark [...]
A front runner hasn’t emerged in the toy-of-the-season race reports The Chicago Tribune. But there are some contenders. Something called Squinkies tops the list. The “soft and squishy figures” can be worn as jewelry, put on top pencils or collected. But more importantly—they’re cheap. Industry experts say inexpensive collectibles are one sector of the toy [...]
Baby Butt Cream Gets Mompreneur Recognized
It’s not just any butt cream though, it’s a natural product that is animal cruelty-free, zinc-free, and cloth diaper friendly. As more moms make that switch to more natural alternatives, it should come as no surprise that Jen Casey’s product, Bum Bum Balm, is getting the recognition it deserves reports The Record. “After the birth [...]
The Emmy® award-winning reality series, Everyday Edisons, featuring “ordinary people with extraordinary ideas,” is back for more for Season 4. This time around, Everyday Edisons is coming to you and casting Season 4 online at Edison Nation. They will pick 10 outstanding innovations. All it takes is a great idea. Give yours a shot at [...]
Hockey Shield Inventor Ready For Battle
Growing up in the northeast, hockey was a major part of Bill Everett’s life. Now a TV executive for a well known company, when he was younger he had expected to play it professionally reports The Denver Post. A slap shot shattered Everett’s dreams in 1970 and left a plate in his skull. But the [...]
Living Grass As Indoor Advertising
Curb Media’s DesignGrass is completely natural grass created solely for indoor environments. According to trendspotter Springwise it can be designed in any shape, pattern, image, brand or word and installed on indoor surfaces such as walls and ceilings; once installed, the grass never requires any watering or trimming. Already in use by brands including Electrolux [...]
Via: Daily Infographic
Ronald and Bryan Williams, two entrepreneurial brothers from New Orleans who run the successful music company Cash Money Records Inc., are turning their attention to the book business according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. The brothers, whose company counts rapper Lil Wayne among its artists, plan to use the same techniques that [...]
Finally, a chip that understands a nacho-eater’s need to enjoy each and every topping without stealing all the middle chips: Spoonachos! Best thing since the spork. Designer Denis Bostandzic deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this one. My question is…why did it take till the 21st century to come up with this product? Via: Holy [...]
According to ABC-TV News a new phenomenon called “haul videos” means teens can show off their purchases to the whole world. There are more than 110,000 haul videos currently on YouTube, and some videos are racking up tens of millions of views. Hauls are short product review videos. The “vlogger,” or video blogger, shows off [...]
The Young Entrepreneur Council, an advocacy group that works to overcome youth unemployment by teaching young people how to build successful companies got together to answer this question. The council’s members include Generation Y entrepreneurs and experts in a variety of fields. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com: Hire an expert.If you’re sure that what you’re [...]
New TV Series ‘Homemade Millionaire’
The Learning Channel has joined forces with HSN and Milojo Productions to premiere the six-part series HOMEMADE MILLIONAIRE on November 19 at 10pm ET/PT, according to a press release. The series offers aspiring female entrepreneurs the potential opportunity of a lifetime – to have their innovative ideas sold on-air and online through interactive multichannel retailer [...]
Paul Blair was playing fetch with his dog, Razzle, when he noticed that the stick cut his mouth. Sure that there must be a better way to play fetch, Paul created Safestix reports the Salisbury Journal. The flexible rubber stick has won the approval of the Royal Veterinary College and The Dogs Trust charity. Professor [...]
Stylish Pillows For Every Room
When you want to add a little pizazz to a room, what do you do? Add a few accessories. While you might be able to rearrange the furniture or paint a room, the only way to really make it stand out is by adding a few extras in the right places. PillowFolly is a business [...]
