Business Opportunities Weblog

August 20, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Reporter-News:

On a warm Wednesday morning, David Dantzler pulls out a couple of pages of meticulously written charts that detail just how many eggs his 36 chickens have produced.

For about nine months now, David, 13, has commanded the clucking crowd, selling their eggs as part of his own in-home business.

Later, as he reaches in to extract one of the brown-speckled bundles from beneath one of his flock in the gloom of the family’s chicken house, where the birds are tucked in safely at night, he displays his still-warm prize proudly.

So far, he hasn’t become rich. Expenses — about $50 a month — often eat into his profits. The family also keeps about two dozen of the eggs a week for themselves.

But even if his venture hasn’t turned to pure gold (at $3 a dozen), he said he’s having fun working with, and learning about, the animals under his care.

And the 13-year-old has had to learn plenty of grown-up lessons about running a small business — supply and demand, the effects of the seasonal demand and production, and just how much a hungry brood of hens can eat.

Photo by Reporter-News.

In Small Biz, Teens | 1 Comment

August 20, 2009 by Jaclyn Wells | 0 Comments

 
photo credit: antjeverena

In today’s world of technology, booming Internet applications, and businesses, many online business owners are going out and finding themselves a VA (Virtual Assistant). There are many different aspects to having a VA versus a regular assistant. Open Forum recently listed some thing’s to remember when working with your VA.

• You may never even meet your VA in person even if they have been working with you for 10 years or more. Most, if not all, of your communication will be online or via telephone and faxes.
• Always remember the geography aspect, meaning that they live in a different state than you. Make sure that you are familiar with their laws and regulations as well as they are familiar with the ones residing in your state.
• Always make sure you are providing specific details of instructions on what you want them to do and what you do not want them to do. Since there are time zone aspects and the fact they are not sitting 5 feet from your office, you’ll want to make sure they are clear from the get go on what to do.
• Ask them for progress reports. Lets say that a project you give is going to take them 3 day’s. You could have them report back to you the morning of the second day to let you know what their progress is on that project, that way you know for sure they are on track.

The first month you work with your virtual assistant, it might actually take you more time to accomplish the task. By the time you write up instructions, vet candidates, get used to working with the remote employee, send back work with more instructions, and spend your time fixing mistakes in the final product, it might take considerably more time than if you had done the task yourself.

In Employees, Ideas, Online, Virtual | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

Richard Branson is now accepting “micropitches” via Twitter for new startup ideas. Tweet your business idea to @PerfectBusines and use the hashtag #micropitch. (Unfortunately, that does mean you only have 111 characters left.) It’s all part of The Perfect Pitch 2009 Entrepreneur & Investor Conference

Pitches will be evaluated on clarity, viability, consumer need, growth potential, marketing strategy, team capability, scalability and competitive advantages.

In Competition, Twitter | 1 Comment

August 20, 2009 by Jaclyn Wells | 0 Comments

photo credit: luc legay

Many business owners are looking for ways to grow their profits every year. They keep hoping there will be easier ways to see their profits go up on their charts, but sadly many of them don’t know of any easy ways to help their profits grow. Below are some tips on growing your profits easily, located recently on Entrepreneur.com.

Your number of leads on customers you contact and those who contact you regarding your business are an important key factor in your profits. The amount of those people who actually make a purchase in your store are another important key factor. Figuring out your conversion rate is rather simple. Say 4 people out of 10 purchase something in your store that day, your conversion rate would be 4 out of 10 people or 40% for the day.

Average number of transactions: The number of purchases the average customer will make over the course of a year. Again, it can be an estimate. This number will probably be larger in a retail setting than in companies that operate in a professional services industry.

Increasing the profit margin for your store is another great way to grow your profits for the year. Your profit margin is simply the percentage of each transaction that is just profit. So if you sold a sweater for $100 and your profit from that sale was $25 dollars, then your profit margin would be 25%. Many get intimidated by handling all of these numbers but with a quick course in finances, profits, and sale margin’s you will better understand what you are looking at on a daily basis.

In Advice, Growth, Information, Money, Profit | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Jaclyn Wells | 0 Comments

 
photo credit: Emery_Way

When starting a new business, through all the transitions and setting up, many people sit down and begin to wonder if they are truly going crazy. This is a normal feeling when starting a business as stated on Open Forum. Starting a business makes everyone at some point think they are going nuts, and it is because there are so many different stages one must go through that it can sometimes become very overwhelming.

• The first stage that one goes through is when they make the final decision to go from being an employee for someone and becoming an entrepreneur. This can be overwhelming and even scary because nothing is normal or familiar to you anymore.
• The next stage you go through is your dreaming stage. This is where you will come up with every idea known to man on what you could do as an entrepreneur. Let your imagination go free and think up everything that you can, you can edit your list at a later date to narrow down your possibilities.
• Once you find the idea that you are going to build into your dream business, many things go wrong and may be completely different from how you saw it going. People will criticize you and you will begin to think you are going crazy.

The Promised Land. When you get through the awful growing pains of Square Three, business will stabilize. You will have paying clients, make a profit, and get the right team in place.

In Advice, Entrepreneurship, One-Person, Stress | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Jaclyn Wells | 0 Comments

 
photo credit: ArtemFinland

Many businesses today have quite a few great employees that they want to keep on their staff, but they can not necessarily offer them more money. Many think that if they can’t offer more money, those employees will walk. Some might if more money is a need of theirs, but some will still stay on your staff if you follow the tips that were posted on Nytimes.com.

• The general rule of thumb is that if you have proved your loyalty to your employees over time, they will in turn do the same for you by providing their loyalty to you as well.
• While you may not be able to give them a raise right now, you may know that you can give them a raise in 6 months or a year. If you explain the financial situation and let them know that there is a raise in their near future, then that often times is incentive enough for them to stay.

“Let workers follow their interests, and help them to develop their skills,” said Julie Stich, senior information and research specialist for the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans in an interview with The San Francisco Business Times. “Also, consider allowing employees to work in different areas of the organization. This will help to keep them challenged.”

• When all else fails, always be honest with your employees. Explain every situation that is related to them and their job, and explain why raises are not being offered at this particular moment. Most likely they will understand the situation and appreciate your honesty.

In Communication, Employees, Ideas, Jobs | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Jaclyn Wells | 0 Comments

photo credit: =Lonely.X.Poet=

I recently came across an article located on Business Week that may give some small business owners peace of mind and a new sense of hope for their businesses future. Everything that has a beginning must have an end, this is even true for depressions and recessions, and we may be looking at a turning point in small business credit.

A recent survey showed that one bank out of the 55 that were surveyed had stated they were easing up on the standards for small business credit. Now, I know many people are going “wow, one bank out of 55″, but the thing to remember is that it’s a start! Someone has to be the first one to make the move on easing the standards and soon others will follow suite.

The studies before this one were showing no sign of banks easing up on their credit standards, so even just one bank shows signs of easing their credit standards it is considered to be a very good sign and a positive step towards the right direction for small businesses.

On the whole, the survey shows that we may be approaching a turning point where credit standards for small business borrowers level off and begin to ease. But for now, many more banks are still raising credit standards than easing them, albeit not as severely as over the last year.

In Banks, Credit, Financing, Small Biz | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

Springwise:

When heading out to their local watering hole for a drink, some customers prefer to serve themselves.

The TableTender system, available in Britain and the United States, is designed and built for each specific venue. There’s a tap (or several) located at each table, which allows patrons to pour at their leisure—to a point.

The system is designed to comply with drinking regulations, shutting off after dispensing around 11 pints of beer and only resuming once a waiter has checked the table.

The amount dispensed is displayed on a meter at the table, as well as recorded on the proprietor’s database to monitor sales and consumption by hour, day, month and table.

Like installation, pricing is bespoke, but for a ballpark figure: the first bar to install the system paid USD 110,000, excluding a monthly fee for maintenance and software licensing.

While the upfront costs may be steep, ease of drinks purchase combined with lower costs for wait staff could make for a profitable addition to bars seeking to stand out from the competition.

Photo by TableTap.

In Beverage, Customers, Delivery | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

Al’s Morning Meeting:

The U.S. Patent Office is sitting on a mountain of applications that would take at least six years to clear, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found in a two-part investigation.

The newspaper points out that a patent could be the key that protects an upstart company or idea. It could ignite the economy, but the backlog of applications means an inventor can wait at least three and a half years to get action.

The Journal Sentinel contends the Patent Office’s practice of publishing detailed applications on its Web site 18 months after the inventor files them — regardless of whether the office has begun to examined them — invites competitors anywhere in the world to steal ideas.

“For more than a dozen years starting in 1992, Congress siphoned off a total of $752 million in fees from the Patent Office to pay for unrelated federal projects, decimating the agency’s ability to hire and train new examiners.

“Staff turnover has become epidemic. Experts say it takes at least three years for a patent examiner to gain competence, and yet one examiner has been quitting on average for every two the agency hires.

“In many cases, applications languish so long that the technology they seek to protect becomes obsolete, or a product loses the interest of investors who could give it a chance at commercial success. ‘Patents are becoming commercially irrelevant to product life cycles,’ said John White, a patent attorney and former examiner.”

Photo by USPTO.

In Government, Legal, Patents | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Angela Shupe | 0 Comments

examiner.com:

Clever mompreneur, Sherri-Lee Pressman, took note of just how much her kids loved getting mail. In fact, she says her kids would often ask, “Is there any mail for me?”

“I literally came up with the idea standing at the mail box with my then three year old son asking if there was any mail for him… As I stood there thinking of his little sad face a light bulb went on and things snowballed from there,” she says.

That’s when Pressman started her journey to launch “mail4kids.” The premise is simple: Once you sign up, mail4kids automatically sends a piece of mail to your child each week – usually a collector’s card that features a different animal or object. This benefits the child in many ways as he gets to experience the joy of getting mail and feeling grown up and important, and he gets to learn about the world through the fun images and detailed information on the collector’s cards.

Image from Mail4Kids

In Children, Mompreneur, News | 0 Comments

August 20, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

BusinessWeek:

The Internet has changed a lot of things over the past decade or two—including how we search for jobs.

Sure, the basics are the same: Find an opening and apply for it. But the Web has permanently altered the employment process. And with more than 1.2 million info tech jobs lost this year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a lot of people are going to be using every tool they can get to find their next job.

While networking is (and has traditionally been) the best way to find a new job, the second-most effective tool is another type of networking: sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, according to a poll released by placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Old-school employment search tricks like attending job fairs and reading newspaper classifieds got the lowest ratings.

Here’s how the Web is changing how we look for jobs.

Social networking sites are exploding in popularity, as people look to connect with pretty much everyone they know, from friends to co-workers to potential employers. Facebook claims it has more than 250 million users; Twitter’s traffic has grown tenfold in the past year; and LinkedIn—while not as flashy as its social networking brethren—is perhaps the most useful of the bunch for job hunting because of its employment- and recommendation-focused profiles. It’s seen its total visitors double since last year.

Continue Reading: “The Web Has Changed Job Searching”

Photo by ilco.

In Advice, Employment, Internet, Social Network | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 0 Comments

I just picked up a copy of Small Business Ideas: 400 Latest & Greatest Small Business Ideas by Terry Kyle. If you enjoy my site, and all of the ideas we present here, you’ll definitely enjoy this book.

A full review is coming soon.

In Books, Ideas | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

photo credit: makelessnoise

In The Shark Tank has up a recap of Episode 2 of ABC’s The Shark Tank.

You can watch the full episode online, for free.

One highlight from the recap:

The last in front of The Sharks was Marc Furigay and his product Classroom Jams. Classroom Jams is an educational record label and publishing house. He was looking for $250k for 10% equity in his company. Marc is a teacher who was having a hard time relating Shakespeare to his class. He composed songs that helped his class relate to Shakespeare. The song was actually pretty good, a class set with 30 CD’s and a teachers guide would sell for $499. Shakespeare is the most taught playwright in the English language but Marc had plans to expend to different subjects. The Sharks talked about the deal together, and offered $250k and 5% royalties, but he would have to give up 100% of his company. Marc wanted to be one of the partners. Robert then offered $250k for 100% with an option to buy 49% back with the profits from the business, but there would be no royalties. Marc still wanted to have a deal with all five sharks so Robert sweetened the deal for the same price but this time lowered what he wanted to 51%. Marc rejected Roberts deal and wanted the royalties from the first deal increased to 8.5%, The Sharks said no but agreed to let him use his royalties to buy into the company and become a partner with The Sharks. This was one of the best deals of the season, I have no dough this company will be a success.

Links to all of the companies after the jump.
Continue reading Shark Tank Episode 2 Recap

In Entrepreneurs, Television | 1 Comment

August 19, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 0 Comments

PostalMethods is a convenient method for small businesses to automate the sending of postal mail directly from the computer. You create a document and upload it. They print it, address and mail it. All for one flat rate. Their system also interacts directly with programs like Quickbooks and Simply Accounting.

In Mail, Paperwork | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

Are you a personal chef, or an entrepreneur developing recipes? Do you want to bottle/develop a recipe?

If you want to start a food business in the state of Florida (or in most other states), you’ll need a commercial kitchen. State and local laws require that all food prepared for sale to the public must be prepared or produced at a commercially licensed kitchen. Unfortunately, the cost of setting up a licensed commercial kitchen is a huge obstacle to many food entrepreneurs. This is an expense that most folks are not prepared for or do not have the knowledge of designing a kitchen which will pass inspection.

Your Pro Kitchen offers a professionally-equipped, commercially licensed multi-station kitchen facility for professional cooking and baking. In addition, they are flexible enough to support many different uses, such as cooking classes, private events, and the production or bottling of your products.

Your Pro Kitchen also offers a traditional business center with desk space, internet access, a fax machine, copy machines, a telephones.

In Featured, Food, Ideas | 1 Comment

August 19, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

Springwise:

Razor blade refills are one of those purchases that tend to irk many consumers, primarily for the frequency with which they’re needed and the relatively high prices at which they’re often sold.

Aiming to salve irritation on both points, Raz*War offers subscription plans for home delivery at prices beginning at EUR 27.50 per year.

Launched late last month by Brussels-based Growth Bridge, Raz*War sells blades by the box—priced at EUR 1 per blade—as well as a starter kit including razor, blades and travel bag.

Deliveries are made in installments every four months, and a starter kit with razor and travel bag is included in the first shipment.

Similar in many ways to Alice, which aims to take the pain out of shopping repeatedly for basic household necessities, Raz*War currently ships only within the EU.

Photo by Raz*War

In Delivery, Ecommerce, Ideas | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Fast Company:

Getting a kid off to college later this summer? You could schlep around to Bed Bath & Beyond and Target, or try a new startup called Dorm-In-A-Box that’s taken aim at that ad nauseam shopping for what is, let’s face it, a pretty predictable set of goods.

This offshoot of a private-label product design company–that is, they’re the type of company that designs the cheap, in-house brands that you’d find at places such as Target and K-Mart–leverages its deep expertise when it comes to bringing goods to market for cheap. And proverbially passes on the savings to you.

The company’s implicit promise is that it’s figured out everything your kid needs for his or her first year of college, and it’s designed the produccts and negotiated with the suppliers, en masse. The resulting goods are bundled into three suites of goods that range in price from $69 to $199, ranging from bed sets to office supplies.

All together, Dorm-In-A-Box claims that the full array of goods provides $1,200 of value for $349. And it’ll even deliver each one to your kid’s new dorm.

True to the times, the pitch from Dorm-In-A-Box has a green angle–claiming that the time savings for one university’s incoming class would amount to 22,800 hours of shopping; 64,500 miles of driving (72,750 pounds of CO2); and 14.4 tons of packaging waste.

Photo by Dorm-In-A-Box.

In College, Students | 1 Comment

August 19, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

The Press-Enterprise:

Even if Trevor Schultz weren’t the inventor of the Swing Heeler, he’d likely be a fan.

And he certainly would’ve tried the product that looks like a sci-fi cross between a spatula and a bee stinger and is designed to provide golfers weight resistance on their hind leg, so they stay planted and produce more power during their swings.

“I have tried just about everything,” said Schultz, who played at UC Riverside. “So I guess that would be a reason why I’ve come to the conclusion about the lower body being so important. The fact that I’ve done just about everything is why I’ve really honed in on what’s really important with the proper golf swing: If the lower body works properly, the rest follows along.”

“He was going through a tough time, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life,” friend Paul Rothchild, who helped develop the Swing Heeler, said by phone. “We were brainstorming, and he showed me this idea he had, and I said, ‘Well, this is something tangible, this is something you could really make a go of.’ ”

Schultz and Rothchild, who as a prosthetist makes a living developing prosthetics, hunkered down in Rothchild’s Pasadena garage to build one crude prototype after another. Eventually, they brought a model to another prosthetist, Kevin Mohlman. A golfer and biomechanics expert, Mohlman developed the final prototype for the Swing Heeler that Schultz is busy exhibiting at free demos at courses and ranges around the Inland area.

Photo by Swing Heeler.

In Invention, Sports | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

TechCrunch.com:

This post is written by Marcelo Calbucci, the founder and CTO of Sampa, a personal homepage creator that will be shutting down this month. He’s writing a series of posts about the lessons learned from the venture.

“In the middle of 2008 we decide to do a qualitative analysis of our user base. People of all kinds were creating sites on Sampa.

There wasn’t an automated way to know if it was a baby site, a family site, a small business, a technology blog, etc. We looked at more than 300 sites, randomly selected and created a spreadsheet with the category, the demographic of the author (if we could figure out) and we plugged that into our own analytic system to split our averages and totals for each site category. The results sucked!

Just 20% of our users were on the target audience. That meant 80% were not building any kind of family or baby site. Ok, maybe we can live with that. But it turned out that more than 25% were by pre-teens.

There are two problems with that: First, It?s actually illegal in the US and most countries to allow a younger than 13-year-old to sign up to your service without parental consent. Second, pre-teens are not a great audience to build an advertising-based business model.

However the data showed an even worse picture. Pre-teens were a quick burning flame. They would come, upload lots of pictures, write lots of blog posts, bling their site, invite 20+ friends and they would be completely gone in a month.

That behavior skewed our data enough that once we looked at our growth, viral rates, and everything else, our business didn’t look so great.

We proactively removed pre-teens websites. They weren’t easy to find, but every time we found one, we would remove the website and notify the owner she was 12-years-old. They would be mad at us and tell that Jamie, Emily and Sally also have a website on Sampa, and we would say thank you and delete all their friends websites too.

We would also proactively delete porn websites. There is nothing wrong with porn. It’s not illegal or immoral in my view, but it didn’t go well with our family-oriented business proposition. Also, most UGC porn sites are infringing in someone else copyright and we just didn’t want to deal with DMCA or lawyers.

We also found criminal websites, from people trying to steal credit-card and passwords to the ugly side of online pedophilia. We had the FBI come over twice to collect evidence.

Pretty much every Social Network-builder, website builder or content sharing site deals with the same issues we dealt with.

A good number of entrepreneurs (and most investors) will be oblivious to those facts and just think that everything is going great and the growth is sustainable and proof they are creating great value and soon will be able to turn a huge profit or to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, until someone takes the time to figure out what people are using their service for and finds out it?s really not what they thought it was.

Photo by Leeny.

In Entrepreneurship, Internet, Investors | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Angela Shupe | 0 Comments

examiner.com:

Examiner: What is your business all about?

Carol: The company, MyPacifier.com, was started by our family in Denmark when the founder, Pia Callesen, was tired of picking her son up from daycare and finding another’s pacifier in his mouth. She was tired of being told to write the name with a Sharpie on the pacifier, so she came up with the personalized pacifier idea. Not only do parents put the name on the pacifier, but they have become a fashion statement with different quotes, like Mute Button, Grandpa’s co-pilot, Lil Celtics Fan and Kisses 25 cents, to name a few.

Examiner: What is your favorite product that you make or sell and why do you like or recommend it?

Carol: As the original personalized pacifier company, we started out 3 years ago with only 2 different color combinations to pick from, the boys and the girls color. Since then we have added more styles and colors than any other personalized pacifier company. We recently added accessories, which include adorable pacifier clips and pacifier cases. I would say my favorite combination right now is the girls pink/lavender/white combination. Since there are several different nipple styles, it’s important for the buyer to choose the nipple style carefully.

Images from MyPacifier.com

In Babies, Interview, News | 0 Comments

August 19, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 0 Comments

Slurls.com:

What’s a slurl? To be a slurl it must abide by 4 rules. 1. There’s a website AND 2. It’s an active website AND 3. There’s a double meaning AND 4. It’s not deliberate.

Here’s some examples:

1hourscrap.com - Rapid scrapbook making

carsexpress.com - Vehicle leasing and sales

teacherstalk.co.uk – Teachers’ discussion forum

therapistfinder.com – Californian counsellors directory

blindsexpress.com – Blinds shop

childrenslaughter.com - Children’s charity

choosespain.com - Holiday rentals

Photo by newenglandnatural.

In Branding, Internet, Mistakes | 0 Comments

August 18, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

photo credit: Valerie Everett

Slate:

A hot dog vendor was kicked from the curb outside New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last week for failure to pay his monthly rent—of $53,558. Pasang Sherpa was under contract to pay the Parks Department $362,201 a year for a stand on the south side of the Met’s entrance and $280,500 for another on the north side. That’s a lot of hot dogs. With rent astronomically high, how much do New York City hot dog vendors actually make?

In Food | 1 Comment

August 18, 2009 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

USA Today:

North Carolina gold tends to be small flakes. The largest found at the Cotton Patch since owner Jeff Pickett took over two years ago was 8 grams — about the size of your pinky nail. At current prices, that would be worth about $240. “Anything larger than that is a heart attack,” Burns says.

Pickett charges prospectors by the amount of dirt they sift. The dirt is partly crushed rock — gold is often found in the presence of quartz, which has to be pulverized to extract the gold. The rest is dirt from the lode on Pickett’s property.

For $12, you get five 2-gallon buckets of dirt, a pan and a small bottle for keeping your gold. Panning takes patience, dipping the pan into the water to wash away the lighter dirt, tossing aside the bigger stones, and watching for tiny flecks of gold in the fine black sand that’s left. It’s not easy. “I’m getting a strong right arm,” Burns says.

Some prospectors use a Gold Magic wheel, a kind of motorized pan that can process dirt about five times faster than panning. More-eager gold-diggers use a sluice, a long, metal tray with riffles on the bottom to catch the gold. You put it in a creek bed and sift the pay dirt into it, letting the stream wash away the dirt.

In Ideas, Profiles | 1 Comment

August 18, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

Star Community Newspapers:

Seeing that Tweeters were posting “worthless dribble,” programmer Jonathan Leger decided to come up with a site that has focus.

“People were tweeting thoughts with no application, like what they ate for breakfast or that they’re walking the dog,” he said. “I wanted to have something focus on a subject matter and have useful information. TipDrop.com is practical micro-blogging.”

Leger launched TipDrop.com on July 17 and provides a place where people can go and offer advice on a specific subject matter. Other “tipsters” can vote the tip’s credibility positively or negatively, which moves the tip higher or lower among the other tips provided in the query.

If a tip receives a certain amount of negative votes, it will be deleted.

Photo by Tipdrop.Com.

In Internet, Social Network, Twitter | 2 Comments

August 18, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Good:

Most people seem to be in agreement these days that simple ideas often offer the best solutions. Here’s an invention that fits the bill perfectly. Prepara has invented NASA-technology enhanced at-home plant growers that don’t need soil. Which, if you have a black thumb and an incurable love of plants like I do, could be a godsend.

“You’ll see the simplicity of the power plants growing technology allows you to be bug, worm and dirt free,” says the site. “It sits discreetly on your sunny window sill, is very low maintenance, grows quicker and fuller plants and takes the guesswork out of growing.”

This is especially appealing because for people who don’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, apartment gardening can present it’s share of problems. (Specifically, bug infestations in pot soil—to which I’ve lost many a plant.) This eliminates that, and the black-thumb conundrum.

It might not be for everyone, and it might not have the same aesthetic appeal as good old terracotta planters, but it does seem to mean idiot-proof herbs at your fingertips.

Photo by Prepara.

In Eco-friendly, Farming, Innovation | 1 Comment