Books Lambert, who runs TheBeerbelly.com as president of Under Development Inc., is also someone who might have been viewed by some as having a less-than-perfect business model for his venture. But — after the press picked up on his contraption and he got 1 million hits to his fledgling site, as well as about 80 calls from offline media, including CNN and the like — he sold his electronics company, turned toward inventing full-time and his beer belly is jiggling as he laughs all the way to the bank.

Lambert also uses a potent mix of marketing savvy and passion, spiced with some serendipity, to run his site. The Beerbelly, by the way, is a neoprene bag that fits under a shirt and can be used to avoid paying $9 for drafts at sporting events.

eCommerce-Guide

“We’re calling the phone ‘the brand in your hand’ — you’re never more than a foot away from it, 24 hours a day,” said Fareena Sultan , associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration. The challenge, Sultan said, will be to produce an advertisement for the phone “that excites the person holding it.”

Fueled by faster wireless networks, more capable phones, and increasingly popular data services, the cellphone ad space is poised to grow, according to industry watchers, and a cluster of Boston start-ups have positioned themselves as the middlemen who bring brands to the screen.

Boston-based Enpocket Inc. partnered with Sprint Nextel Corp. to place banner ads on the carrier’s mobile browser homepage last year. Third Screen Media Inc. , also in Boston, builds cellphone-sized banner ads for major brands such as Burger King Holdings Inc. , Bank of America Corp. , and Toyota Motor Corp.

uLocate Communications Inc. in Framingham plans to unveil mobile advertising that uses global positioning technology to send ads to phone users in specific locations later this year. Lexington-based Mobot Inc. used its mobile visual search — in which users search and browse the Web using pictures taken with a cellphone camera — to power a Starbucks Corp. visual scavenger hunt and Acura sweepstakes this summer. VeriSign Inc. bought m-Qube Inc. , a Watertown company that provided mobile marketing services, for $250 million last year. MobileLime in Watertown turns the phone into a mobile membership card that receives coupons and store alerts from grocery stores and fast-food restaurants.

Many amateur inventors dream of creating a million-dollar product in the garage, but usually the only thing that ever comes out of that garage is the family car. Roger Adams, the creator of a new kind of skate-shoe, beat the odds.

Mr. Adams founded Heelys Inc., a Carrollton, Texas, company that makes sneakers that work like skates when the wearer shifts weight to the heels. The company has sold more than 4.5 million pairs of Heelys, as they are known, world-wide since they debuted in 2000 and they keep rolling: In the six months ended June 30, 2006, sales rose to $44.6 million from $16.1 million a year earlier.

In the fall 1998, he was sitting on a friend’s porch in Manhattan Beach, Calif., watching roller skaters, skateboarders and bicyclists on the boardwalk, thinking back to a “happier, simpler time” at his family’s roller rink. That led him to an idea. “It occurred to me that all those things — roller skates, skateboards, bikes — had been around for a hundred years,” he says. “It seemed to me that there had to be some new way to have fun on wheels.”

His friend had a workshop in his garage. He heated up a butter knife and began cutting apart some Nike sneakers and experimenting with metal balls and wheels. He “cannibalized at least four pairs” of sneakers in the first few hours. He tried them repeatedly and kept falling until he accidentally discovered the proper stance — one foot in front of the other to maintain balance.

He took the prototypes to seven different shoe companies and six sporting-goods companies, but none of his meetings resulted in a deal. Finally venture capitalist Patrick F. Hamner offered funding. Heelys was incorporated in May 2000 and had an initial public offering in Dec. 2006. The company now has a market capitalization of $932.77 million.

startupjournal.com

With help from a curious cat, Blue Line Innovations found a way to make people more aware of how much electricity they use.

When Danny Tuff was growing up in Newfoundland, his father often prodded him and his siblings to switch off the lights and turn down the heat. If only there were a way to plainly show how electricity translated into real money, his father used to say, people would waste less. Years later Danny and his brother Maurice launched Blue Line Innovations and chose a home meter reader as one of their first projects.

“We wanted a device that any customer could install without the help of an electrician,” Danny says. But technical hurdles seemed too high. Then one afternoon, after Maurice’s cat had been chasing the dot from his laser pointer, Maurice shot a beam through the bottom of a power meter. Could that be the answer? After modifying the idea to use low-power infrared instead of a laser to track a mark on the meter’s spinning disk, they dropped other projects and raised $4 million in financing.

The brothers presented their Power Cost Monitor to Ontario utility Hydro One, which found during a test that newly alert customers used an average of 6.5 percent less electricity. Hydro One bought 30,000 units, netting Blue Line a cool $4 million. Now at least 50 more utilities, including NSTAR (Charts) in Massachusetts, are eyeing the device, which is cheaper and easier to install than technologies that let people track power use online. In the end, it seems Dad was right - electricity can indeed translate into real money.

FSB Magazine

Many famous thinkers got their bright ideas while they were relaxing and not thinking about the problem. Archimedes got his sudden flash of genius while taking a bath and Darwin figured out evolution while driving down the road. These flashes of insight happen because the unconscious mind continues to process information in the background while you are doing other things. If your subconscious figures something out, it will seem like the idea came out of nowhere.

One way to encourage this is to periodically review your notebook to remind your subconscious mind about some of your recorded ideas. Then give your conscious mind a break from concentrating on the topic and do some novel and interesting activities. When you do this, it gives your subconsciousness a chance to freely explore the idea without the constraints that you impose upon your conscious thinking.

braingle.com

Patience and ingenuity has led a Windsor man to invent a home sanitizing system that was named this week by Time Magazine as one of the top inventions of 2006.

Using an electrical charge to infuse tap water with ozone, the system acts as a natural powerful sanitizer and removes the need for chemical use in the home.

Steve Hengsperger, who almost five years ago embarked on inventing a new water purification system, happened on the sanitizer idea “while doing research for the original idea.

“I had no idea how powerful ozonated water was and how it could be used as a more powerful sanitizer than hydrogen peroxide or any of the over-the-counter bleaching and cleaning agents.” Read the rest of this entry »

Betty Beauty is the name of a hair coloring made especially for pubic hair.

Apparently many hair salons have made the practice of providing women with a brown bag of hair coloring to match the coloring they just got put on their heads. A woman named Nancy Jarecki decided why not sell a product like this over-the-counter.

The Betty Story

I hadn’t planned on starting a cosmetics company. But sitting in a hair salon in Rome a few years ago, I made a discovery. As I saw women leaving the salon, I couldn’t help noticing that some would linger by the door. After a few minutes, their colorist would come back with a little paper bag, hand it to them and send them cheerfully on their way.

When I inquired about this mysterious ritual, the receptionist said: “Per sotto, per farli combaciare,” meaning: “For the hair down there… to make it match.” I thought, “How genius… A home coloring kit for the hair down there!” I knew there were no specialized products like this in America.