This website is not like all of the others. Since 2001, we've posted 15322 different business opportunities and ideas, so you're sure to find something here to inspire you!
Sher-Lee’s kids were intrigued by the idea of receiving mail but, unfortunately, they almost never received any. Inspired by their interest, Sherri-Lee formulated a business that would deliver postcards to those kids who loved to receive mail.
Triantafyllos Tafas is best known for his complex inventions. But now he’s won an important legal and regulatory victory that, he and his lawyers believe, will assist small companies and individual entrepreneurs across the country writes The Connecticut Law Tribune.
A lawsuit Tafas filed in 2007 halted new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rules from going into effect. The rules would have imposed strict limits on how many times an inventor could make revisions to a pending patent application.
Opponents of the rules limiting so-called “continuations” said they would hurt small businesses and individuals who could not afford the high cost of repeatedly filing for entirely new patents. “It was going to be an extremely costly exercise to be in compliance with those rules,” said Steven J. Moore, one of two attorneys at the Stamford office of Kelly, Drye & Warren who represented Tafas. The other is James E. Nealon.
Now, with a new administration in Washington, it’s clear that those proposed rules will never go into effect. On Oct.8, new patent office Commissioner David J. Kappos officially rescinded the highly controversial “anti-continuation” regulations, and moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Information on where you can find, and how you can apply for, grants is publicly available and free.
If your small business meets all of the necessary qualifications, you may just be able to receiving federal funding, writes CNN Money.
Federal grant funding programs, such as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, award more than $2 billion each year to qualified small businesses. While technology-based companies have historically won the majority of these grants, it’s possible – if not a bit tougher – to receive funding as a non-tech business.
Find out if your business qualifies for any special small business certifications, and investigate local government websites for an economic development agency you can get in touch with.
Or, you can try Grants.gov to find and apply for federal grants.
On the wish list at Weecycled Bundles of Joi in Ledgewood: Jog strollers, toddler/child car seats (5 years old or newer), furniture in excellent condition, and outdoor playsets.
On the store’s hot list: Tabletop changers, portable cribs and glider/rocking chairs.
The hot list grows every day, as does the wish list — a prime example of supply and demand. The growth is symbolic of the clothing, furniture, bedding, toys and other items shed by pint-sized consumers and teens whose development and taste are changing — almost by the hour.
“You can ask for the silliest thing, and it may be in the next day,” said Meredith Joi DeMarco of Landing, whose middle name supplies the Joi portion of children’s and maternity consignment shop’s name.
The specialty consignment shop, the brainchild of Meredith and her husband, Dan, caters to newborns through teens and maternity — demographics that are, well, growing. And, as evidenced by the store’s name, the DeMarcos abide by a green philosophy. Plastic bags? We don’t think so.
Daunted by piles of their own hardly used nearly new and brand-new merchandise, the mom-and-dad team approached the business from a personal angle.
The DeMarcos say the 4-month-old business has generated a “fantastic” response from the public, because of — rather, despite — the grim economy.
The Dallas Morning News has an interesting look at the sweet dilemma of the day after Halloween.
If there’s one thing worse than running out of candy on Halloween, it’s having too much when it’s over.It’s bad for your kids’ health, their teeth and the teachers who have to calm down candy-crazed kids the next day and, possibly, a week afterward, depending on how much is in their stash.
Phillip Done, a 25-year teaching veteran, he says he is thankful for parents who don’t send their kids to school with a backpack full of sugary loot. His favorite solution? The Candy Fairy.
“The Candy Fairy is similar to the Tooth Fairy,” he explains. “Instead of taking teeth, she takes Halloween candy and gives it to all the children who cannot go out trick-or-treating. Children leave out most of their candy and write a letter. The Candy Fairy visits at night and leaves a gift.”
The kids don’t mind giving up their loot as long as they still get to have some, he notes.
“And the kids love getting a gift and writing a letter. I think in a couple of years, you’ll be hearing a lot about this Candy Fairy!”
Billy Mays III admits it sounds a bit odd; a guy who unexpectedly lost his dad just four months ago starting an online contest encouraging people to dress like his departed father for Halloween, reports TampaBay.com.
He has asked fans to email a photo of of themselves dressed like his famous pitchman father, infomercial king Billy Mays. The elder Mays died in his sleep June 28 at age 50, after building a career as a TV pitchman on his high-volume delivery and distinctive look.
The younger Mays said he got the idea after seeing someone at the airport dressed like his father. “I realized the number of people dressing like him was going to be like, triple the (typical number),” he said, noting he’s gotten 10,000 hits since gossip site TMZ.com featured the story today. “I figured we might as well have fun with it.”
Ed Moody carved his first pumpkin at age 6. He is now one of the premier pumpkin carvers in America reports The Chicago Sun Times.
Moody has carved 23 giant pumpkins — weighing more than 200 pounds — that sit in his front yard.
It is a Halloween Stonehenge.
Around this time of year, Moody’s house is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Michigan. More than 50,000 pumpkin fans — 5,000 on Halloween weekend — will visit the Moody homestead.
During my visit, Moody was carving a 1,489-pound pumpkin. He installed a small back door so kids could climb in.
The Michigan state record is 1,478 pounds. The world record is 1,658 pounds, announced earlier this week at the 36th annual World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in California.
Jordan Renda has always loved Halloween, not so much for the trick-or-treating, but for the opportunity to scare family, friends and now, complete strangers.
The Jacksonville Business Journal reports the 16-year-old Creekside High School junior and now Haunted Productions LLC president is experiencing his first year in the professional haunted house industry as the creator and owner of the Night Terrors Haunted House. While he admits it’s been a steep learning curve, he’s already making plans for the future.
Deep down, I probably never actually thought it would happen,” Renda said, but “the ultimate goal is to make it a career.”
Although always interested in the macabre and things that go bump in the night, Renda presented his parents with reams of research and a business plan for his haunted house idea when he was 14. Impressed with their son’s entrepreneurial spirit, Shari and Phil Renda started to take the idea very seriously, attending haunted house trade shows with Jordan, investing the family’s savings and eventually hiring two industry veterans, Dan Faupel and Nate Mitchell, to help them through the learning process.
David’s lunch — and those of many of his classmates — are no ordinary school lunches. Instead, these lunches are the creations of two Orlando moms who grew tired of the parade of processed foods their kids were eating — and decided to do something about it.
The result was a small business with a revolutionary idea. Led by moms Samantha Gotlib and Debbie Blacher, a team of workers at Wholesome Tummies makes healthy lunches every morning and delivers them to schools, primarily private schools that don’t have kitchens or food staffers.
The two started their business in August 2008, and five private schools signed on. This year, they are delivering hot and cold lunches to 27 area schools, ranging from preschools to private elementary schools.
The lunches cost $5 to $6 each, but Gotlib and Blacher say many parents don’t blanch at the price because the lunches are healthy — and because they’re introducing kids to the taste of hummus or edamame (soybeans).
Although dishes such as the Asian noodle bowl or the Greek pita stuffed with hummus, feta cheese and sliced cucumbers may appeal to kids with sophisticated tastes, Gotlib and Blacher know many kids are picky eaters. So they make some traditional kid dishes with a healthy twist.
For instance, their macaroni and cheese is made with whole-grain pasta and served with a homemade cheese sauce that contains pureed carrots. The chicken nuggets are made with hormone-free and antibiotic-free meat and are baked.
The Daily Mail reports that Japanese designers Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura built a real-life breakfast machine.
The impressive device can prepare everything from omelettes to freshly-squeezed orange juice, and can even spread butter and jam onto toast. It will also grind coffee beans before brewing them.
Working out of a home office can feel pretty solitary. With the kids at school and the wife out teaching, it’s just me, my computer and the dogs. So I take every opportunity I can to get out of the office.
I’m not complaining. On the contrary, I love it, and not just because of the time I get to spend with the kids. You see, I’ve discovered the big secret of suburban life: pocket communities. Every place has its own little community, its own social dynamics, its own rules.
You do not, for example, tell cute kid stories at the bus stop. The ladies there all have their own cute kids, and they’re not interested in hearing about yours.
It is acceptable, however, to complain about one’s spouse. It’s kind of like Vegas: What’s said at the bus stop stays at the bus stop.
Not that I ever would do such a thing, of course, but I could, and that’s a nice feeling.
Soccer practice is an entirely different world. No complaining there. It’s a place to talk sports, to listen to people tell stories about how amazing their kids are, to ooh and ahh and chuckle at what happens on the field. In short, it’s a fun place to visit, but I’m glad I don’t live there.
news:lite tv is reporting that James Halliburton originally pitched his water-buoy idea – an auto-inflating, strengthened and illuminated balloon that would be attached to items which could be accidentally dropped in water.
But he found success after he saw children playing with his invention and adapted the idea into the ‘Illoom balloon’ essentially a ballon with an LED inside. Once turned on the balloon is illuminated for 15 minutes.
Halliburton is now celebrating – after selling five million of his light up balloons.
So much of life has to do with making connections.
A meeting in the summer of 2008 between Westport’s Kevin Carroll, his daughter, Claire, and Norwalk game inventor Mary Ellroy has resulted in a fast-paced game called “Pickles to Penguins,” where participants shout similarities between objects as dissimilar as a sea conch and a cupcake so writes The Connecticut Post.
You just try to think up the relationship between the card you’re throwing down and the card in front of you,” said Ellroy, who has seen about a third of the 100 games she’s invented hit the market. “The idea is to get rid of your cards first.”
After a few brainstorming sessions, Kevin Carroll and Claire, 14, came up with the idea and name for Pickles to Penguins, Ellroy said.
“He went home and took it to the stratosphere,” said Ellroy, founder of inventor consulting firm Game Bird. “The moment I saw this game I knew it was a winner.”
Carroll said he met with Ellroy after telling business coach Jane Pollak about his idea for the game, which Adelaide, Australia-based Imagination Games began manufacturing a few months ago after several months of development.
The game, which uses cards with images on both sides and is for “ages 6 to 106,” also tests players’ confidence, because a connection can be shot down by another player, requiring the first to take back his card and grab three more, Carroll said.
Three years ago, twenty-somethings Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang were would-be web entrepreneurs in search of a business idea writes Entrepreneur.
Their top criteria: something they could start with limited funds, and something with big potential to scale.
Avid consumers of tailored dress shirts, they decided to capitalize on their knowledge of custom-made clothing and offer men a more convenient, affordable, hands-on alternative to visiting their neighborhood tailor. The result was Hong Kong based e-retail company ShirtsMyWay, which launched in February 2009 and boasts more than 7 trillion possible designs for men’s dress shirts.
Meet one of the hottest startup trends–mass customization.
The internet is now host to countless companies selling custom-designed furniture, throw pillows, rugs, eyeglasses, T-shirts, shoes, handbags, computers, skateboards–you name it.
Technology has obviously made reaching customers from the far corners of the globe possible. But how do mass customization companies make selling one-off products profitable?
Reuters reports that according to the 2009 National Small Business Cybersecurity Study, small business owners’ cybersecurity policies and actions are not adequate enough to ensure the safety of their employees, intellectual property and customer data.
The study, co-sponsored by the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec, as part of this year’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month, surveyed nearly 1,500 small business owners across the United States about their cybersecurity awareness policies and practices.
The survey confirmed that small businesses today are handling valuable information – 65 percent store customer data, 43 percent store financial records, 33 percent store credit card information, and 20 percent have intellectual property and other sensitive corporate content online.
Sixty-five percent of the business survey claimed that the Internet was critical to their businesses success yet they are doing very little to ensure that their employees and systems are not victims of a data breach.
The survey shows discrepancies between needs and actions regarding security policies and employee education on security best practices. Only 28 percent of U.S. small businesses have formal Internet security policies and just 35 percent provide ANY training to employees about Internet safety and security.
At the same time, 86 percent of these firms do not have anyone solely focused on information technology (IT) security. For those small businesses that do provide cybersecurity training, 63 percent provide less than 5 hours per year.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that more Americans are ditching office camaraderie and regular work hours for the chance to work from home in pajamas or while sipping lattes at their favorite coffee shops.
The American Time Use Survey, which measures the amount of time people spend doing various activities like work, childcare and volunteering, shows that about 12% of full-time workers with a single job did some work at home on an average day between 2003 and 2007.
But it’s not clear, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if people are leaving work early and completing their 40 hours at home or taking on part-time virtual work in addition to their day jobs.
Virtual internships, where interns don’t have to meet their boss or go into an office so long as they have a working computer and internet access, fit into the latter category.
They give interns a convenient way gain experience in other industries while going to school or maintaining a day job that pays the bills.
For entrepreneurs, working virtually is the most economic way to launch a start-up while lowering or eliminating keeping overhead costs.
The survey backed this trend, showing that self-employed workers were more prone to work at home than wage and salary workers, spending 24% of their total weekly hours at home, compared with 4% for salary workers.
In January, with her youngest child approaching a year old, Jennifer Auer figured it was time to get back to work.
She found the perfect opportunity through a friend of a friend – a Cape May County woman looking to sell her business, which uses costumed characters to bring alive make believe for children’s parties and special events.
Fitness Playhouse became Fairytale Entertainment, and Auer’s three sons, Nicholas, 5, Zachary, 3 and Matthew, now 15 months, became models for face painting – a favorite feature at Fairytale parties.
“The previous owner focused on females,” Auer said in an interview at her home office Sunday, Oct. 11. “I’ve introduced boys: Superman, Batman and Spider-Man.”
She said the business of arranging and hosting events was ideal for her.
“I had been doing special events since ’92, either as a volunteer or working full-time,” Auer said. “I worked lots of places, mostly nonprofits – setting up events, doing PR or managing volunteers.”
Short of any junk mail that you might give them, it’s pretty safe to say that kids don’t get much mail. For children of all ages, receiving a piece of mail just like mom and dad can be an exciting experience. Depending on what the mail is, it can also be an enlightening one.
Every time Sherri-Lee Pressman would get the mail her children would ask if there was anything for them. Like many kids, they were intrigued by the idea of receiving mail but, unfortunately, they almost never received any. Inspired by their interest, Sherri-Lee formulated a business that would deliver postcards to those kids who loved to receive mail. Not only would the experience of getting something be fun, but each postcard would offer a little bit of education as well. This idea became Mail4Kids. Since the launch of her business, Sherri-Lee has expanded on her idea to include a crafts program with 2 more projects in the works. Each venture falls under the umbrella of 4 Kids Enterprizes.
As Sherri-Lee celebrates her birthday today, I have the pleasure of being able to share her story and the inspiration behind it.
Tell us a little about Mail4Kids and Crafts4Kids.
Kids love getting mail, so I created mail4kids in Sept of 2008 to address this love with something fun, educational and collectible. mail4kids has been very well received and I decided to continue to grow that model and expand it to include a monthly themed craft project club. Out of that came crafts4kids.
Fortune Small Business has an interesting article about dispensing advice and vaccines for world travelers.
While running health services at the University of Baltimore in the early 1990s, Fran Lessans met a law student who was petrified about the prospect of attending her mother-in-law’s funeral in Ghana.
The young woman had visited the country once before but ended up getting sick and spending two weeks in the hospital. For the funeral trip, she’d done her homework and gotten the right shots, Lessans recalls. But no one had counseled her about water purification and what foods to avoid.
In 1994, Lessans founded Passport Health to provide counseling and vaccines for travelers headed overseas. “I noticed that when people got good counseling they stayed healthy, so we spend about an hour with each of our travelers,” says Lessans, 61.
In 1997, she started franchising the company, which has since grown to more than 160 locations nationwide. Franchisees pay a onetime $35,000 franchise fee, as well as 7% of all revenues. Altogether they deliver 30,000 to 40,000 injections a month.
In the two years since he lost his job as a cook, Kevin Boudreau has learned the subtle art of how to ask strangers for money. But now, with winter approaching and an aversion to shelters, the homeless man with the grizzled goatee and skull tattoos covering both arms needs more than spare change reports The Boston Globe.
So Boudreau has traded his scribbled cardboard signs for a keyboard.
In recent weeks, in an effort to acquire warm clothes, camping gear, and other necessities for living outdoors, Boudreau has posted ads on Craigslist under the heading, “Help Me Winter in Woods.’’
The novel pitch for help is part of a new phenomenon among the homeless: digital panhandling.
Some homeless people now have blogs where they seek donations. There are web forums where the homeless exchange ideas, sites where people can donate money, and bulletin boards where penniless artists and foreclosure victims ask for cash.
On Homelessforums.org, thousands of people post questions and comments about everything from how to stay safe on the streets to where to camp for free. There are pleas for money on CyberBeg.com, which compares itself to a lottery, and Begslist.blogspot.com, which describes itself as a “source for free . . . e-panhandling, online donations, debt help, finding financial resources, and a great place to ask for financial help from the kindness of others.’’
More than 60 clothing companies, including well known brands like Adidas, Eddie Bauer and Dockers, are using a material designed by a Colorado company which employs coconut shells to create clothes that dry faster, smell better and save energy while laundering reports 9News.com.
It may sound crazy, but Boulder-based Cocona actually uses carbon from left over coconut shells in clothing products. The company started in 2000, when the company’s founder began looking for ways to utilize activated carbon to adsorb chemical agents, so it wouldn’t come in contact with the users’ skin as part of a chemical defense project.
That process turned out to be too messy, so Dr. Gregory Haggquist began looking for a way to use the carbon to limit smells in sweaty clothing.
As part of the process, he used tiny bits of coconut carbon, which are too small to be used by companies that create water filtration units, and looked for a way to combine the molecules with yarn and thread.
“The aha moment was the methodology was how to put these particles into yarn so they stay in there permanently and still have the added functionality we’re looking for,” Haggquist explained.
The best part is that each of the features Cocona provides to a piece of clothing makes it greener too. Cocona products require less time in the dryer because of their quick drying properties and needs less washing because of its ability to absorb odors.
If you happen to be on Pike Street In New York’s Chinatown between now and November 14th, you might catch a glimpse of “R-O-B” the bricklaying robot building a 7,000 brick “Infinite Loop” sculpture along a pedestrian island so reports gadget blog Gizmodo.
Designed by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, the Infinite Loop has been pieced together without mortar, one brick at a time since late September. A remarkable feat of robo-accuracy for sure.
About.com reports that the baby boomer generation is so large that it encompasses a whole range of life events.
One of the larger subsets of the boomer demographic is those who are currently dealing with aged parents or soon to be about to. Many baby boomers feel incapable of dealing with their parents’ problems themselves.
They want to know what the options are or are looking to hire people to help with specific problems such as home care or moving an elderly parent from his or her home to new quarters.
How to profit from this trend: Care consultant, Senior care provider, Senior relocation specialist.
It’s not personal–it’s business. A mantra heard by business people through the years, but when it comes to our business websites, it’s more personal than business. Living online today is social, and that means personal. To attract customers and keep them, you need to think about the social touches that can give your website a way to connect and increase customer loyalty. Here are three ideas to get you started.
Entrepreneur.com suggests adding a video to your website. By including a video on your website whether its business to business or business to customer, it gives people a sense of personally knowing who they are about to do business with, it provides them with a face to put with a name and information regarding the company.
Launch a blog connected to your website, this is your best and number one way to connect with your audience. You can blog about various topics regarding your products and services and well as information regarding you as a business owner and how your company came to be. You can provide advice, suggestions and tips to your readers as well as them give you feedback regarding your company, website and articles that have been posted.
