“Good Morning America Weekend” kicked off its third annual Mothers of Invention Challenge today, in partnership with Mom Inventors, Inc.

If you’re a mom who has a great idea for a new invention, you can enter to win. One grand prize winner will receive $10,000 plus a 5 percent royalty from the net sales of the invention. See full official rules below for complete details.

All entries must be postmarked by March 24, 2007, and must be received by April 2, 2007. Please see contest rules below for complete information and entry requirements.

abcnews.com

Mark Hall, a former executive with RealNetworks, fell in love with online video two years ago, thanks to an ultrafast broadband connection in his London home. When he returned to San Francisco last year, he decided to address the growing need in online video, VodPod: a way to find just the good stuff and skip the junk.

This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators. The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to … a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics.

Growing in Google’s shadow — Smart sites evolve, that is, from aggregators to hyperaggregators. To see what I’m talking about, take a look at another hyperaggregator, ViralVideos.com, which simply lists the most watched videos from the most popular sites, such as YouTube and Metacafe.

A more sophisticated example is Original Signal, which takes a dozen of the biggest Web 2.0 tech blogs and puts their headlines on one customizable page. On the site each blog is known as a “signal.” You can change the order of the signals displayed, have any signal delivered to your cell phone or RSS reader, or even hyperaggregate the signals on an Original Signal widget that you can add to your own blog.

CNN Money

E-commerce businesses, like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, face the challenge of converting browsers into buyers. But because the Web does not allow for face-to-face interaction, it has historically been much harder for an e-retailer to offer the same level of service that customers can find when they walk into a store.

A new Web-based service, ZaZaCHAT, allows e-retailers to provide live help to website visitors via online chat. The tool lets customer-service representatives communicate directly with customers, answering questions about products or making recommendations.

The service also provides website owners with tools to monitor their traffic and examine the demographics of their visitors in real time. When customers visit a site, ZaZaCHAT gives the retailer their location, IP, host name, and the URL of the site from which they were referred.

A beta-version of ZaZaCHAT is available for free. Once the product is out of beta, a limited version will be offered for free, while a PRO version will cost $24.99 per month per operator.

inc.com

1. Customer Support — Got a small business online? Want to offer some customer support without spending a fortune on telephony costs? Skype’s graphical click-to-call SkypeMe buttons are ideal for this. Create your SkypeMe button (free account needed) and embed the code in your website, weblog, template, email, or wherever you want it to appear. When someone views your web page (or email message), the button will indicate whether you are online and accepting Skye calls, busy, or offline. If you’re on the go and want to receive calls, just leave your Skype client running and set call forwarding.

2. Sell your Services — You’ve got information that other people can use, and with the Bitwine Skype add-on you’ll be able to leverage that information into an income stream. Whether you’re a lawyer, a mechanic, or a talented collector, there are people willing to pay for the information you have, and using Bitwine makes selling that information easy. Through Bitwine, you set up your hourly rate, then customers approach you about the topic they would like to discuss, you set up a meeting time, and at the end of the meeting Bitwine tallies up the time and will even coordinate payment via PayPal through another add-on, Bitwine extra.

3. Collaboration — If you’re running a small business or working as part of a team on a single project, real-time collaboration is essential. There’s no better way to supplement your Skype conferencing than with a collaborative desktop provided by Skype add-on Unyte. Unyte lets you choose which applications or documents to share with the other people on your conference call. Then everyone can be looking at the same documents at the same time, and when changes are made they appear on everyone’s screen so that there is no confusion. Pricing depends on the number of people you want to bring in on the conference, but you can give two-person collaboration a try for free.

25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience

voip-news.com

Offering free stuff as a marketing tactic is an accepted practice in most industries.

However, in most cases, the party offering the free information or bait is actually interested in charging for it. Even if that charge is the exchange of a name and email address. So, for some, free isn’t free and may be too expensive. Take the “free” evaluation. Free in this case might mean that the recipient must take time, accept an appointment and sit through veiled sales presentation.

Free is one of the most powerful marketing words on the planet but, what makes free really free is trust. In order to use this tactic effectively the recipient must trust that you won’t abuse their permission. If you have no previous relationship with a prospect you cannot go overboard assuring them that you won’t misuse their information. You must actively sell your free information by communicating just how valuable it really is.

Taking steps to build trust with testimonials and referrals, providing great free information with no strings attached and being consistent is how you lower the barrier to free. Once this is done effectively, and you haven’t abused the trust you’ve earned, you can move to steps that provide greater education and demand greater involvement.

In fact, now your free information might actually be something they would pay for.

Duct Tape Marketing

Want to make a living playing your favorite games? There are many ways to break into the videogame industry, according to experts. These job types offer the fastest path into sought-after studios like Electronic Arts, THQ and Ubisoft.

Paying your rent playing videogames sounds fun, but the reality can be far more tedious, says Kaos studios associate producer Dennis Allard Crow. When he started his career as a game tester, he played the game Tony Hawk’s Underground for days at a stretch, searching for errors. It might sound mind-numbingly monotonous, but the job is one of the few left in the industry for inexperienced youngsters. The problem: The secret is out, and studios are inundated with applications. Crow says that for every tester at his studio, they have 10 applicants. To get your resume noticed, write summaries of 10 games you played, detailing what you liked about the game and what you didn’t. “Demonstrate a love for videogames,” says Crow.

forbes.com

In The Netherlands, Elkhuistekoop.nl (Every House for Sale) encourages people to fill in an online form if they’ve spotted the house of their dreams and it isn’t yet for sale. Elkhuistekoop then contacts the property’s owners to find out whether they have short or long term intentions to sell. If an owner’s dormant desire to sell is awakened, Elkhuistekoop hooks up the buying party with a real estate agent, and the agent pays a finder’s fee. The service is free for house seekers. Elkhuistekoop is definitely less elaborate than Igglo, which took pictures of every building in Helsinki. On the other hand, it offers consumers an easy and discreet alternative to knocking on dream house doors themselves.

In the U.S., online real estate service Zillow lets home owners take the initiative, by allowing them to set a Make Me Move price without actually putting their house on the market. Once owners set a price (”that magical number you just can’t refuse”), potential buyers can contact them anonymously via email. It’s then up to the owner to decide whether they really want to sell.

Zillow identifies a few different reasons for owners to use Make Me Move. If they’re thinking about selling in the near future, the service helps to start gathering interest. Or they may have long term plans to sell, but could be motivated to do so sooner if the right offer comes along. Zillow launched Make Me Move a week ago, and already has 3,682 prosperities listed with MMM prices.

springwise.com