Business Opportunities Weblog

Big Idea Blog:

Danny Deutsch over at the the BIG Idea Blog offers this quick test to see if you are sabotaging yourself in your quest to run your own business.

1. Do you ever ask “Why should I try to be successful?”

2. Do you consider money dirty , un-cool , or pretentious?

3. Do you have negative opinions about wealthy people?

4. Are you afraid of making more money than your parents?

5. When you walk into a room, do you prefer to remain unnoticed?

6. Do you tend to refuse opportunities to give to charity?

7. When you lose money on a bad deal, do you hold onto it as a regret?

The more questions to which you answered YES, the more you may be standing in the way of your own success.

Photo by duchesssa.

With Mother’s Day approaching this Sunday it’s obvious to see why this mom-owned business is a good representation of that. Gillian Beerman is a mom whose business is to serve moms and the mom-to-be with their excellent line of Moby Wraps and their Simone Layne knitwear line which offers very stylish clothing that will adjust through pregnancy.

Gillian is truly a business success story. She took her business from start to international recognition in only a period of 5 years. Her business also puts emphasis on teaching mothers about baby wearing and the benefits that come from it. She wants to help aid parents with the transition into parenthood using her great products.

We also owe her a big thank you. With today’s interview we will be offering up two products as a giveaway. The first is the shawl on the left in the photo from the Simone Layne collection. The second item is an organic Moby Wrap which is pictured to the right in the photo above.

If you’d like the chance to win one of these great items then leave a comment here telling me which one you’d like to be entered to win. Comment with “Wrap” for the organic Moby Wrap or “Shawl” for the Simone Layne shawl. The contest starts now and ends on May 15th at 11:59pm. I’ll choose the winners on May 16th. The item ships within the USA.

What is the ‘Moby Wrap’?

The Moby Wrap is a long piece of 100% breathable cotton fabric, that can be utilized in carrying babies up to 35 lbs. in a variety of positions. The Moby is an ergonomically supportive baby carrier, that distributes the weight of the baby over the wearer’s back, shoulders and waist. The Moby, is used in hospitals for Kangaroo care, recommended by lactation consultants, enjoyed by nature lovers for hiking and can even carry twins. The uniqueness of the Moby fabric lends support and comfort to both the baby and wearer, making the experience of baby wearing enjoyable for long periods of time. The Moby aids in the development of the newly forming parent-baby relationship, allowing the baby and the parent to feel connected, close and communicate. It’s a wonderful parenting tool!

What was your inspiration behind the name?

Moby comes from Mother and Baby - it was that ulimate feeling of having my baby so close to me that led me to the name.

Continue reading Celebrating Mothers Day With Moby Wrap

InformationWeek:

One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers.

Markus Frind has been getting a lot of attention lately. He’s been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and numerous other mainstream consumer and business publications. Much has been made of the fact that Frind only works part-time — by his estimate, only 10 hours a week — to keep his free online dating site, Plenty of Fish, up and running.

The site was founded in 2003, and, according to Frind, is netting more than $10 million annually from advertising and affiliate marketing revenue. In a typical display of showmanship, Frind last year posted a photo of a nearly-$1 million check from Google AdSense for just a two-month period (Google confirmed the check was real.)

Automation is key to Frind’s success. He wrote the site using .Net, which gives users the tools to post their profiles online themselves, without handholding. He also created an algorithm that allows him to automatically separate legitimate forum posts from spam.

But Frind also depends heavily on his user base. Volunteers pour over the more than 50,000 photographs of new members that are submitted every day, and weed out the ones that seem suspicious or which involve nudity. Additionally, Frind noticed several years ago that in his user forums people had started rating and voting on the photos of other members.

At the same time, he was constantly being contacted by users who were reporting offensive or inappropriate threads or posts that they felt should be deleted. Frind realized he could spend all his time moderating such activities. Instead, he created an automated system to allow users to vote on everything from whether a string should be deleted to ranking other users to deciding if a member photo is of too poor a quality, or too obscene, to be posted. “I allow people to vote on whether something should be deleted. If seven out of 10 respondents want it gone, it’s gone,” Frind says.

“Like with any job, it’s not an issue of how much you work, but how smart you work,” he said.

“This is pretty much a business that runs itself,” he said. The fact that technology costs are dropping so fast has made his business scalable and flexible enough to accommodate the kind of growth necessary to remain competitive with competitors like Match.com. “This wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago,” he said.

Photo by National TV Canada.

Washington Post:

If the thought of working for a nimble, fast-paced new company gets your blood flowing, you might be interested in a new job-aggregator site that pulls together listings from almost 20 different online sources, large and small.

Hotstartupjobs.com scans sites ranging from big names like hotjobs.yahoo.com and monster.com to smaller players like ajaxian.com and jobcoin.com. Posts are first split into ‘All Jobs’ and ‘Mostly Tech’ categories, and then divided by source.

It’s easy to scan jobs on the cleanly organized page, and clicking any given opportunity takes you to the original job posting. Being able to check out listings from across the country from so many different sources could be a real boon to a job-seeker.

Photo by Hotstartupjobs.

Scientific American:

So much of life involves “auctions,” whether it is buying a used car or making health care choices or even choosing a mate. Most of us are motivated by the desire for a fair deal, and we employ some sophisticated cognitive tools to weigh offers, fashion responses, and so forth—all the to-and-fro in getting to an agreement.

But how does life’s dickering play out in the brain? And is it a trustworthy tool for getting what we want? Psychologists have been studying cognitive bartering for some time, and several basics are well established. For example, an opening “bid” of any sort is usually perceived as a mental anchor, a starting point for the psychological jockeying to follow. If we perceive an opening bid as fundamentally inaccurate or unfair, we reject it by countering with something in another ballpark altogether. But what about less dramatic counter offers? What makes us settle on a response?

University of Florida marketing professors Chris Janiszewski and Dan Uy suspected that something fundamental might be going on, that some characteristic of the opening bid itself might influence the way the brain thinks about value and shapes bidding behavior. In particular, they wanted to see if the degree of precision of the opening bid might be important to how the brain acts at an auction. Or, to put it in more familiar terms: Are we really fooled when storekeepers price something at $19.95 instead of a round 20 bucks?

Janiszewski and Uy ran a series of tests to explore this idea. The experiments used hypothetical scenarios, in which participants were required to make a variety of “educated guesses.” For example, they had subjects think about a scenario in which they were buying a high-definition plasma TV and asked them to guesstimate the wholesale cost. The participants were told the retail price, plus the fact that the retailer had a reputation for pricing TVs competitively.

There were three scenarios involving different retail prices: one group of buyers was given a price of $5,000, another was given a price of $4,988, and the third was told $5,012. When all the buyers were asked to estimate the wholesale price, those with the $5,000 price tag in their head guessed much lower than those contemplating the more precise retail prices. That is, they moved farther away from the mental anchor. What is more, those who started with the round number as their mental anchor were much more likely to guess a wholesale price that was also in round numbers. The scientists ran this experiment again and again with different scenarios and always got the same result.

Why would this happen? People appear to create mental measuring sticks that run in increments away from any opening bid, and the size of the increments depends on the opening bid. That is, if we see a $20 toaster, we might wonder whether it is worth $19 or $18 or $21; we are thinking in round numbers. But if the starting point is $19.95, the mental measuring stick would look different. We might still think it is wrongly priced, but in our minds we are thinking about nickels and dimes instead of dollars, so a fair comeback might be $19.75 or $19.50.

Read more.

Photo by daylife.com.

The Wall Street Journal:

Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience.

But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

A team of five at-home moms hopped on a one-month project at Lending Tree to rewrite 600 job descriptions after several acquisitions and integrate them into its organization chart. “I was very impressed with the caliber of women” delivered by MomCorps, an Atlanta staffing firm, says Kathy Fritzsche, vice president, rewards, for the online lending exchange.

Ivanna Garibaldi Campbell, Charlotte, N.C., a former Bank of America senior manager who led the Lending Tree team, headed project meetings with her baby in tow. Once she became a stay-at-home mom, she says, it was “tough to go from 500 mph to stepping back. … I found myself a little stir-crazy.”

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

Photo by MSDesigns.

OnStartups.com:

I’ve been in the startup business for a while and it still amazes me how many founders (including me at various points in my life) have completely irrational views on how life at a startup is going to be.

As it turns out, lots of success requires a sprinkling of luck to work, but counting on this luck to come up at the magical times is foolish.

Stop Hoping for Magic and Start Working

1. Somebody’s product is going to “go viral” this year. Someone is also going to win the lottery. Just not you. Don’t count on virality, but add some simple elements to your product that make them easy to spread. This will increase the probability that your product will go viral to something slightly above zero (instead of zero).

2. Venture capitalists are not swash-buckling risk-takers that are going to fall in love with your startup at first sight – and write you a check. Unnecessarily daring people do not become VCs — the industry filters most of those out. Work at not needing the money. If you could use the money, get multiple VCs interested.

3. Smart people are not going to be lining up to work for your startup, without salary, just for the sheer thrill of “the startup life” and an ability to be associated with the brilliance that is your idea. Be reasonable about it. Expecting team members to take some risk for some time is fine. But, that’s not a great strategy to recruit a great team.

Read more.

Photo by MSDesigns.

InformationWeek:

One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers.

Dave Novak was just 21 when he started his eBay business in 2002. A recent graduate of the Art Institute of Phoenix, his first job had been as a graphic designer with large Internet company. After the company floundered and he got laid off, he got another corporate job, but soon rumors began circulating of a merger and more layoffs.

About that time Novak’s first daughter was born, and he decided he was sick of the whole corporate scene. “I wanted to be home around my family, and so my wife and I invested $2,500 and opened up our eBay store,” he said. Because he was a bit of a handyman, and knew something of home improvement, he did research on emerging trends in that industry sector. He decided to go into the business of selling high-end steam showers. “And we’ve been riding this wave ever since,” he said.

SteamShowers4Less.com was profitable right from the beginning, and has grossed over $1 million for the last three years. Novak is the only employee. He manages the Web site, answers the phone, responds to e-mail inquiries, and provides after-sales support.

Not having any e-commerce experience, eBay was the easiest place to start an online business, he said, because the technology infrastructure was there to do everything from listing the product for sale to communicating with potential buyers to accepting payment.

He started small, and cautiously: buying only one steam shower unit at a time, and only purchasing another one after he had sold that one. “We kept our overhead very low,” he said.

But success brought its challenges. Two years ago, Novak made a difficult decision. Because his business had been growing so fast, he had been having trouble handling it all himself.

So he had begun hiring employees. Soon he had four workers on payroll, doing everything from helping him in the warehouse with shipping and handling, to answering the toll-free number, and providing customer support. “I can’t say I loved it,” he says now about the experience of being a boss. “It definitely took a load off me, and allowed me to ramp up and start selling a lot more.

But everything got more chaotic, and I had to spend time managing employees. I just decided, in the end, that it wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

So Novak laid off his employees, and made the deliberate decision to scale back. “My priority is my family,” he said. “I want to keep it simple.” He had the opportunity to open a retail store selling steam showers, but declined for the same reason.

Naturally, Novak couldn’t do what he’s doing without leveraging a broad range of technologies. There’s his Web site — now independent of eBay — that is set up for e-commerce with an online catalog, shopping basket, and checkout. He has an 800 number and fields quite a few calls. Although most of his sales come from the Internet, he’s found that because it is a relatively large purchase — units range from $2,000 to $4,000 — many people like talking on the phone before handing over their credit cards.

Tomorrow’s Solo Entrepreneur: Markus Frind

Photo by SteamShowers4Less.

One of the riskiest things for a business is what accidents can happen. Worse case senario being someone who slips and falls down because the floor is a little wet. Sure Step is a business that does something about it.

With their long lasting chemical treatment the floor will create an invisible, micro tread design in the surface of floors. For those at home, it also works in places such as bathtubs and showers. All the surfaces the product is approved for include glazed brick, marble, terrazzo, porcelain, enamel along with a variety of tiles and concrete.

Continue reading A Slip-Free Business Opportunity

Chicago Tribune:

Henry Rich kept a low profile as he passed out samples of his top-selling mint mojito breath lozenges, but he knows Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. is on the trail of his tiny business.

Wrigley recently launched a mint mojito flavor of its own, teaching a lesson in market power to the youthful Rich, who started the Oral Fixation candy company five years ago fresh out of Harvard University. “It was really a heartbreaker when they came out with that,” he said. “We’re the David. They’re the Goliath.”

The planned acquisition of mint-and-gum kingpin Wrigley by giant Mars Inc. promises to boost the clout of both companies, and potentially make life more difficult for would-be competitors. Their combined 28 percent share of the U.S. market would surpass Hershey Co.’s 24 percent as well as that of all other candymakers—Oral Fixation and its five employees included. “Now it’s a double Goliath,” Rich said.

Consolidation in the global confectionery business opens niche opportunities for small, nimble companies such as Oral Fixation, but only to a point, some marketing experts say.

When a category or brand develops momentum, the industry leaders notice. And with their growing distribution power and marketing leverage, the dominant players are capable of taking over almost any sliver of business that shows promise.

They dominate shelf space, cut promotional sales deals and shower value-added services on retail clients, noted Scott Davis, senior partner at Chicago’s Prophet Inc. “These bigger companies are set up in effect to call the shots,” he said. “If I’m one of these smaller guys, I’m concerned.”

Photo by Oral Fixation.

If someone looks hard enough they’re bound to find a business opportunity that suits what they are interested in. For the editor in someone there is a publishing business opportunity which is licensed through ProfitAbility Magazine. For those that don’t know who they are, the products they are most commonly known for is their “Complete Idiot’s Guide” books.

The magazine is a “How-To” magazine. It’s filled with tips, strategies and ideas that focus on the restaurant industry. The content is written by successful people, such as business owners or executives. The readers will be love the magazine because of what it has to offer.

Continue reading Publishing As A Business One Magazine At A Time

The New York Times:

Is there still money to be made from “Matlock”?

Within the last few months, television distributors have opened up their libraries of classic content online, making thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available free.

Warner Brothers is expected to add a new twist, announcing the rebirth of the WB broadcast network as an Internet destination and offering programs like “Everwood” online.

In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved, and while syndicated and DVD sales remain dominant sources of revenue, the repurposing of long-dead shows is creating another new revenue stream for distributors.

Advertising-supported TV streaming sites like Hulu, Veoh and Joost are forming a time tunnel to 50 years of television — to shows like “Bewitched” and “Seinfeld” (and even 26 episodes of the 1966 drama “The Time Tunnel”).

“We have all this library content, and we’ve been surprised at how much interest there is in it,” Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said recently. “Frankly, if there is one person interested it — and there are streaming costs so you have to make sure you’re covering that — we’ve found it’s a new opportunity for our content.”

Editor’s Note: Just another example of the long tail of niche content. What other niche content like public domain videos could be monetized?

Photo by MTM Entertainment.

Entrepreneur:

How did Brian Fried, a marketing director for a mortgage bank, get into selling apparel and accessories?

The entrepreneur says he simply turned his hobby of inventing into “a real side business.” Fried, 34, is the creator and licensor of IM:It apparel, accessories and school supplies–brightly colored gear featuring acronyms such as “LOL” and “GTG,” and various emoticons.

Tapping into his 6-year-old daughter’s inside knowledge of kids’ fashion and the ever-increasing number of tweens and teens who use IM and text messaging obsessively, IM:It is the latest of Fried’s numerous endeavors, which include an ad specialty company, kitchen houseware products and a few toy inventions.

Fried began IM:It by trademarking logos and conducting grass-roots market research surveys at Barnes & Noble. With the help of a licensing agent, he began to build the IM:It brand. Fried is working on getting his products onto shelves in Hot Topic, J.C. Penney, Macy’s and Target stores. He also recently completed successful test runs at a few Toys “R” Us locations and is now in talks to create a full line of merchandise for the toy store.

Photo by IM:It.

Forbes:

Duncan Fitzsimons is a tinkerer. When he was 5 he put together Lego spaceships in seconds. When he was 15 he made a wooden rocking chair. At 26 Fitzsimons has decided to reinvent the wheel.

Standing in his London workshop, Fitzsimons picks up the bicycle wheel he designed and pushes on the sides. In one smooth movement it collapses, inflated tire and all, into an oblong shape the length and width of a skateboard. After three years of modifications and scores of prototypes Fitzsimons has come up with the world’s first collapsible bike wheel, aimed at couriers or commuters who might need to throw a folding bike into a trunk or overhead compartment.

It could be a few years before the design hits the market. Folding-bike makers like Brompton Bicycle Ltd. have been slow to pick it up, partly because they can’t produce such an unusual model and partly because bike designs have barely changed over the last century. “I’m getting an incredibly enthusiastic response from everyone except the bike industry,” the inventor says.

Photo by Tom Fecht.

InformationWeek:

One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers.

As the first one-person business to make the Inc. 500 — Inc. magazine’s annual list of the fastest-growing private companies — Jim Fairchild does no marketing, has no Web site, works out of his home, answers his own phone on the first ring, and is resolute that he is going to remain solo for the rest of his professional life.

“I made the decision years ago to work out of my home when my kids were small, and my wife decided to home school them. I wanted to be part of that,” said Fairchild. He had a business partner at the time, but bought him out and for years has been the sole employee of Coggin & Fairchild Environmental Consultants, in Elgin, Ill. He made $3.6 million and was No. 121 on the Inc. 500 list in 2006.

How does he do it? By keeping things simple, leveraging relationships with other companies that he uses to build specialized virtual teams for specific contracts — and knowing which technologies are necessary for running his business, and which ones would just distract from his core business of cleaning up contaminated ground water and soil for corporate and governmental clients. Although he physically handles the testing and monitoring work personally, he pulls in contractors as needed to do the heavy lifting of actually cleaning up sites.

Much of his work is for companies that must obey environmental regulations — both from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as numerous state and local jurisdictions — and all that data is posted on the Web. But because Fairchild is constantly away from his office, he needed mobility to have ubiquitous access to this information. For simplicity’s sake, he didn’t want to carry around different devices for different purposes. For that reason, he now leaves his laptop at home, and traded in his cell phone for an iPhone.

He creates, signs, and sends his contracts over the Internet, and uploads any documents — including complex technical specifications — as needed from either his iPhone or his office computer. “I keep everything electronic, so I never have to print anything out or file any papers,” Fairchild said.

Fairchild used to feel he had to hide the fact that he was a one-person enterprise working out of his home. “That’s why I kept my partner’s name on the company even after it was just me,” he said. Now, however, it doesn’t seem to matter. “There’s so many people doing this today that no one blinks,” he said.

Tomorrow’s Solo Entrepreneur: Dave Novak

Photo by mjamesno.

Etsy has become well known for their collection of estores that offer handmade products. It’s been a good starting ground for many people because they cater to those that want these handmade items.

A work-at-home mom, Lotta sells her vintage styled jewelry and other items through her Mom O Matic’s Automat Etsy shop. All her items are very unique and easy to love. Such as the necklace shown here.

Lotta has been kind enough to donate thie stylish necklace to be given away to one of our readers. If you’d like a chance to win this necklace just leave a comment on this post. The giveaway starts now and ends May 14th at 11:59pm. The winner will be chosen on May 15th by me and contacted through email.

What is ‘Mom O Matic’s Automat’?

Automats were coin operated vending machines that served up treats like hot coffee, sandwiches and cake back in the 1900s. What was so great about the Automat was that even though it was a vending machine there were actual people sitting behind the glass; making the goodies and handing them through the slots. Mom O Matic’s Automat is based on this cool concept. I’m sitting behind the machine that is Etsy, making goodies that use vintage materials for anyone willing to toss in a few nickels. I hope people feel that they have received a treat when they get my packages.

How long have you been selling your jewelry at Etsy?

I had my first sale on January 9, 2008 - the same day I opened the shop! So the shop is just about 5 months old. I can’t imagine not having it now so it’s hard to believe it’s only been 5 months!

Continue reading An Etsy Automat For Handmade Jewelry

Fast Company:

Given the ubiquity of the all-beef patty and the global spread of the golden arches, one can be forgiven for struggling to imagine America before the burger.

In The Hamburger New York magazine food writer Josh Ozersky traces the origins and obstacles of a sandwich that—more than apple pie or hot dogs—defines the nation’s diet and forever shaped the American business model. “The hamburger—compact, standardized, and mass-produced, coming at the world as an irrepressible economic and cultural force—matters because of the infrastructure created for it and how it changed the world,” Ozersky writes.

Into his grinder go bits of history (the sandwich’s sloppy evolution from chopped Hamburg steak to all-beef burger atop a soft, golden-brown bun) and market-shaping innovations (Bill Ingram’s custom White Castle spatula, that flattened burgers into the mass-produced patties we take for granted today and boosted business by allowing one flipper to efficiently handle more burgers on the grill).

The very franchisees who allowed McDonald’s to dominate the fast-food landscape were the same independent-minded entrepreneurs who bristled at Ray Kroc’s innumerable rules. Yet their corporate-bucking inventions have gone on to become some of McDonald’s biggest sellers—the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin, to name just two.

Wendy’s square patty was meant to suggest nonconformity and homemade hamburgers; Burger King’s Whopper was introduced at the whopping price of 29 cents at a time when most all burgers cost 15—yet it dominated the big-burger market for almost 20 years before McDonald’s fired back with the Quarter Pounder.

As a whole, The Hamburger is a quick, nuanced and—all right, we’ll say it—juicy read, if slightly on the lean side at only 133 pages. Like a good burger, it hits the spot.

Photo by Yale University Press.

Fortune Small Business:

I recently ran across foodie entrepreneur, Paige Ohliger, who is thriving despite the downturn.

Her winning secret? Extreme customer service.

Ohliger is one of four founders of Time for Dinner, launched in 2004 in St. Louis, Mo. Her niche is the meal-assembly business - those stores you visit to prep ingredients for complete, pre-made dinners for the month ahead. While nationally franchised competitors closed up shop all around her, Ohliger kept her business profitable and recorded sales just shy of $1 million in 2007.

So what’s her secret recipe to maintaining sales while rivals struggle?

Get in tune with the community.
Ohliger encourages people to hold parties at her store with a do-gooder angle. Neighbors can come in and prepare meals as a group. If 10 people come together and each order a full set of meals (12 meals per person, each serving 4-6 people), Ohliger kicks in a free eleventh set. Groups often earmark that for a sick friend, or one who has just had a baby.

Show customers you care.
Ohliger’s deliberately high ratio of staff-to-customers helps keep the kitchen sparkling and ensures that customers can quickly get any needed assistance.

Use customer feedback to gain new customers.
Ohliger gets in sync with customers by being sensitive to the tough economy. Everyone wants their dollar to go farther, and she’s not shy about broadcasting the fact that people who use her service can save money. Feedback from current customers suggests they’re saving $100-$150 monthly by using the service; Ohliger plays up that statistic in her marketing.

Photo by SBTV.

Wired:

Ready to taste envy? To burn with regret? Meet Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe. They’re selling words at a buck per letter. Donnelly, 22, and Munroe, 23 — graduate students at the University of Ulster-Belfast — dreamed up the Big Word Project while brainstorming a mass collaboration Web site that would let Donnelly use his viral marketing ideas and Munroe hone his Ruby on Rails skills.

“Words mean different things to different people,” Donnelly says, “so we thought, why not let people redefine them?” When you buy a word on thebigwordproject.com, you can link that term from the dictionary-like site to any other site, which then becomes the word’s new “definition.” It’s also a cheap way to place an ad.

It’s reminiscent of the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold a million pixels for $1 a pop. But with nearly all 291,500 Oxford English Dictionary entries in inventory — plus verb forms, plural nouns, comparatives, superlatives, and American spellings — Donnelly and Munroe estimate they could do half a million better.

Two weeks after launch, the duo had unloaded more than 2,000 words, from “a” ($1) to “zyzzyva” ($7).

Photo by James Ellerker.

Paul Kedrosky Blog:

There is a new report out from my friends at the Kauffman Foundation on precisely this question: The age (and education) of U.S. tech entrepreneurs. What is the distribution? How is it changing?

Perhaps surprisingly, the report shows that U.S. tech entrepreneurs are, if anything, older than expected. People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs — and older than many of us might have thought.

Photo by spekulator .

InformationWeek:

One-person companies are earning upward of $1 million in revenue annually. How do they do it? With high-speed Internet connectivity, mobile apps, automation, and a little help from their customers.

InformationWeek profiled one-person companies that are currently reaping more than $1 million in revenue annually. These businesses have a number of things in common. First, all of them use the Web to leverage their limited financial and personnel resources for everything from marketing and sales to sourcing raw materials and products to customer service and support. Second, they depend on high-speed Internet connectivity and mobile applications to work from anywhere and create virtual teams and partnerships that can be either permanent or brought together on an ad hoc basis. Finally, they depend heavily on their customer bases/user communities to pitch in and help with essential operations.

Today: Nick Bradbury. Bradbury is a legend among the independent, grassroots, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Web-developer set. A serial entrepreneur, he is the creator of the HTML editor HomeSite, the CSS/xHTML editor TopStyle, and the RSS reader FeedDemon, all of which have achieved a near-fanatical user following over the years.

He won’t divulge how much NewsGator Technologies paid for Bradbury Software in 2005 — or what his annual revenue was prior to that, when he was a one-person business for more than 10 years — Bradbury admits that they were both “considerable” and provided for “very good living.” And although now technically an employee of NewsGator, he refused to move to Denver, preferring instead to continue working solo in his home outside of Nashville.

Although now part of a large organization, he is continuing to work on his own creations — just with more resources behind him. “I’m allowed to just work on FeedDemon out of my house,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle decision. Every developer who grows his business ends up not developing anymore. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I’m still doing the things I like doing — designing new applications and then coding them.”

Tomorrow’s Solo Entrepreneur: Jim Fairchild

Photo by NewsGator Technologies.

Entrepreneur:

Excuses, excuses. I’ve heard them all. “It’s faster if I just do it myself.” “I’m afraid I’ll forget to tell them something important.”

Sound familiar? You know that in order to grow your business, you need to grow your team.

Yet as small-business owners, there’s something in us that fights against asking for help. It’s almost like there’s some right of passage in being able to “do it all” ourselves. But the reality is, you can’t do it all and focus on your strengths without stretching yourself in too many directions.

Delegation is about handing over authority, and for many small-business owners, that’s a scary concept because you don’t know what will happen when you give up control. But the good news is, delegating doesn’t have to be scary-you have more control than you think.

Because when you’ve clearly defined what’s to be done and what the outcome should be, it’s difficult for a skilled assistant, employee or virtual assistant to be unsuccessful. The key to controlling delegation is to establish what the tasks are, how they should be completed and what the final outcome looks like before you assign the task to someone.

Photo by brokenarts.

The New York Times:

Last month, Betsy Stein made a beeline for Bloomingdale’s to buy a shirt, but the top she found was $280. Stein, told herself that in the current economic climate, she shouldn’t charge it.

“With the scare of the downturn,” she said, “I decided to cut back on my shopaholic problem and exercise some restraint.”

But the next day at Sephora, she made a substitute purchase. “I could buy one or two lipsticks for about $40,” she said. “That’s far less than $280.”

Ms. Stein’s rationale for buying lipstick echoes a theory once proposed by Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estée Lauder Companies.

After the terrorist attacks of 2001 deflated the economy, Mr. Lauder noticed that his company was selling more lipstick than usual. He hypothesized that lipstick purchases are a way to gauge the economy. When it’s shaky, he said, sales increase as women boost their mood with inexpensive lipstick purchases instead of $500 slingbacks.

With the specter of another recession, brands like Clinique and DuWop Cosmetics are preparing for a big year in lip color, for two reasons.

First, they would like to see a return to lipstick, which usually costs slightly more than gloss. Second, the companies believe that in down times women will continue to splurge on lip lacquer even as they make do with last season’s dress.

Photo by MSDesigns.

BusinessWeek:

Leading up to Google’s first-quarter earnings report on Apr. 17, investors couldn’t have been more bearish. They had knocked the stock down 35% since the start of the year, concerned that a weak economy would finally hurt the search giant’s advertising business.

But Google defied skeptics—and the economic downturn—with a surprisingly strong showing that sent the stock soaring 20% the next day. More than anything, Google’s continued prosperity is a testament to its ability to keep innovating, both in search and advertising operations and in new lines such as online office-productivity software.

In a recent interview, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told BusinessWeek Bureau Chief Robert D. Hof how Google manages the tricky process of innovation.

Do companies have to manage innovation differently in a downturn?

Innovation has nothing to do with downturns. A hot product will sell just as well in a recession as it will in a nonrecession. Let’s imagine that we invented a better advertising product for television. What would our revenue growth be for that? Well, you’re into a $50 billion market, so it will be driven not by whether there’s a television ad recession but by what degree we can get people to substitute [our product] for the other. The strong companies understand this, and during a recession, they invest.

Can other companies emulate Google’s famous model of letting engineers spend about 20% of their time on projects outside their main job?

The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [This is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. If you’re the employee and I’m the manager, and I sit down and say, “Our product’s late, and you screwed up, and you gotta work on this really hard,” you can legally say to me, “I will give you everything I’ve got, 80% of [my time].”

It means the managers can’t screw around with the employees beyond some limit. I believe that this innovation escape-valve model is applicable to essentially every business that has technology as a component.

Read more.

Photo by Ana Nance.

eMarketer:

One-third (33%) of online US adults say they are more likely to shop online because of high gasoline prices, according to a recent iCongo-sponsored survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

More than four out of 10 respondents also said they planned to make retail purchases with their rebate, if they got one. About the same percentage of respondents in a recent National Retail Federation-sponsored study said they planned to spend their rebate.

A recent CCH study yielded more conservative results, with just 21% of respondents saying they planned to spend their rebates.

Respondents said that 24-hour shopping, free or discounted shipping and online-only pricing were all factors.

eMarketer estimates that US retail e-commerce is growing by more than $20 billion annually, and will continue to grow by about that same amount through 2012.

Photo by MSDesigns.