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As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Lyle Small annoyed his housemates by spending days on end painting their Ping-Pong table in rainbow shades of ink. He brewed chemicals to create inks that changed hue when exposed to light and heat.

“I got obsessed,” says Small, now 41. “I thought all printing inks should change color.”

Two decades later his passion is paying dividends. Small’s Colorado Springs company, Chromatic Technologies Inc. (CTI), is booming while rivals in the ink industry are cutting back. Music distributors, foodmakers and the beer giant MillerCoors are using Small’s color-changing ink to make their packaging stand out. CTI landed 120 new customers in 2008. Small expects sales to double this year, to $10 million.

Thanks to CTI’s ink, the mountains on Coors Light cans turn blue when the beer reaches optimal drinking temperature (roughly 43°-50°F). Coors (TAP, Fortune 500) already used color-changing ink on paper labels for bottles, but the brewer had struggled to find a contractor that could create the same effect on cans. “CTI is the only one that delivered,” says Ray Toms, a MillerCoors scientist who worked on the project. MillerCoors signed a two-year contract to buy all of its ink for cans from CTI. The beer company will account for 40% of Small’s revenue this year.

The deal took persistence. When CTI first approached Coors in 2001, Small couldn’t guarantee that the ink would work in high-volume production. Coors printed 20 million cans of Coors Light every day; any downtime would be costly. So Small arranged painstaking tests in canning factories in eight countries. Three years later he was ready to ink a deal.

The brewer’s faith has paid off. Amid flat beer industry sales, Coors Light saw 3% growth this year. The color-changing artwork is prominently featured in the company’s TV ads.

cnn.com

Behind Coors’ color-changing beer cans is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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The new symbols, called GS1 DataBars, can store more data than traditional bar codes, promising new ways for stores to monitor inventory and for customers to save money.

One use of the symbols will be in sophisticated coupon offers that combine deals on multiple products, said Jackie Broberg, who leads coupon control management at General Mills in Minneapolis. A single coupon, for example, could offer discounts on three separate items like eggs, bacon and biscuits, all in one transaction.

The next use of DataBars at the supermarket will probably be for goods bought at the delicatessen counter, and for fresh meats and poultry, said Stephen Arens, director, industry development, at GS1 US in Lawrenceville, N.J. GS1 US is the trade organization working to move the DataBar standard forward in the United States. A poultry DataBar, for example, might contain not only the price and product category, but also a sell-by date. If a consumer chose an outdated package, the label would alert the cashier at checkout.

In the future, coupon bar codes will probably be read less from strips of paper, and more from cellphones that people hold out for scanning by the cashier.

Samplesaint Inc., a mobile marketing company in Chicago, for example, has developed technology that lets supermarket scanners pick up the image of a coupon bar code directly from the display on a cellphone. In Samplesaint’s system, coupons are sent directly to consumers’ cellphones by text message. The coupon’s bar code is small enough to fit on the screen of any mobile phone, said Walid Johnson, director of research and development.

nytimes.com

The Bar Code Is Taking a Leap Forward is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Jorge Lopes, a Brazilian designer, uses 3-D printing technology to create the plaster models that go on show at an exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London.

Dr Lopes, 42, first came across the 3-D printing method, known as rapid prototyping, when he was working on the reconstruction of archaeological finds such as dinosaurs and Egyptian mummies for museums. He is working at the RCA, on secondment from the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology.

Dr Lopes is now focusing on developing simple software that doctors would be able to use independently and on the spot.

timesonline.co.uk

Invention allows pregnant women to hold models of their unborn babies is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

It’s not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last month’s May’s Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

High school girl discovers styrofoam-eating bacterium.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn’t considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

mnn.com

Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

There are two reasons for this rapid growth. First, nanomaterials offer superior conductivity. They are often inherently more conductive than the equivalent non-nano formulations. Metallic nanoparticles are, for example, more conductive than simple metallic powders because of the higher surface area to volume ratio of nanoparticles. In other cases-carbon nanotubes are a good example here-the additional conductivity is due to the physical characteristics of the nanostructure. Note that this is something quite new in the development of conductive coatings. In the past, deviations from the use industry standard metallic coatings-to metallic compounds or conductive polymers, for example-have been prompted not by improved conductivity, but rather by reasons of cost, environmental suitability or other secondary physical characteristics such as ease of deposition.

Second, there is a growing list of applications for conductive coatings where this extra conductivity is more than just an advantage; it is actually a key market enabler (at least potentially) for the success of new products. While enhanced conductivity is presumably always a good thing to have in conductive coatings, conductive nanocoatings with commercial potential can actually prove to be an enabling technology. A case in point is in thin-film photovoltaic cells, where the primary measure of performance is energy conversion efficiency. It has been shown in the lab that the best performing cells, the champion cells, as they are called, depend heavily on the quality of their electrode materials. In some cases, certain kinds of photovoltaic materials may only be commercially useful in a given application if the conductive coatings used for electrodes are conductive enough to provide for adequate photovoltaic efficiencies. Some future breakthrough in conductive nanomaterials could, for example, enable organic photovoltaic cells to become useful in areas ruled out today by the current low efficiencies.

globalsmt.net

Opportunities for Nanomaterials as Conductive Coatings is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

In choosing Mr. Mirkin, a chemistry professor and nanotechnology research director at Northwestern University, the program recognized his invention of a disease-detection method that is sensitive to low levels of proteins and can help catch Alzheimer’s disease and several forms of cancer and heart disease at early stages. The school also recognized him for creating a miniature printing tool that allows researchers to study cancer cells and viruses in new ways.

Mr. Mirkin, who has more than 70 patents and many more pending, owns Nanosphere and NanoInk, two Illinois companies that sell his inventions. He also has started one other nanotechnology firm.

The program is scheduled to announce the award on Wednesday. It called Mr. Mirkin a “prolific inventor and entrepreneur” whose innovations have the potential “to transform the future of medical diagnostics and patient point-of-care.”

Mr. Mirkin’s products use nanotechnology, which is based on the science of very small particles, to help researchers study diseases. His disease-detecting method, branded as Verigene, is thousands of times more sensitive than conventional methods to low levels of proteins or nucleic acids that show a person could develop a certain disease. The method can return results in an hour as compared with several days, in some cases.

wsj.com

Inventor to Receive MIT Prize is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The $554 billion Desertec project will consist of transmission lines spanning from the Maghreb desert to Europe. Concentrated solar power plants (CSP)–potentially placed in countries with cheap land like Libya, Morocco, and Algeria–will feed massive amounts of solar energy to high voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines spanning thousands of miles to the European continent. CSP plants are already in operation in the United States, but the Desertec project would be the first instance of CSP transmitted over a long distance. If successful, the project could cover 15% of Europe’s energy needs.

In order for the project to be socially palatable, the Desertec consortium will have to make sure that African countries involved receive ample compensation. One suggestion is to allow host countries to keep a proportion of solar energy produced by CSP for free in return for providing sites.

Ambitious transmission line projects aren’t limited to Europe. The $10 billion Green Power Express, a 3,000-mile transmission project that would bring wind power from North Dakota to Chicago and Minneapolis, is currently in the planning process.

businessweek.com

Desertec: World’s Largest Solar Pipeline Charges Ahead is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The software, which is still in the prototype stage, will tackle the future issue of millions of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) charging at the same time and straining the electrical grid. Google’s software will use so-called vehicle dispatch algorithms to smooth the load on the grid, optimize use of on-the-grid solar and wind power, and generally make things easier for grid operators by helping to maintain a steady frequency on transmission wires. This steady frequency should reduce the need for utilities to increase or decrease electricity flow to keep pace with demand.

Vehicle-to-grid technology–a system where EV batteries feed captured electricity to the electrical grid when necessary–is still years away. Google’s one-way grid-to-car system, in contrast, could hit the streets much sooner. Of course, Google isn’t the only company working on smart charging software. The Chevy Volt will have a smart charging system when it’s released next year, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced in April the development of its own smart charger controller.

fastcompany.com

Google Developing Smart Charging for Plug-In Electric Vehicles is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Muziic software created by 15-year-old David Nelson enables computers to mine YouTube’s rich database of songs and play customised lists of tunes free of charge.

“The Muziic player is a pretty cool little thing,” said analyst Matt Rosoff of technology industry tracking firm Directions On Microsoft.

“It looks and works a lot like iTunes in that it is a downloable desktop application; but you get all the content from YouTube. You have an all-in-one-place library of music for free.”

Google has been trying to develop ways to make money off of YouTube and that goal could be undermined by a Muziic Player that lets users tap into the video-sharing website’s music while avoiding advertisements.

“Hopefully, they will work something out,” Rosoff said of Muziic and YouTube. “Muziic is analogous to a subscription music service, but it’s free.”

Nelson and his father, Mark, launched the self-funded internet enterprise this year and bill it as the first “YouTube for music.”

David Nelson is Muziic’s chief technology officer, having switched from public school to taking online high school classes from home in order to devote more time to the website and the player software, according to his father.

“We served thousands of downloads of the Muziic Player and Encoder in just a few hours!” a message about the incident on the website’s blog said.

“We’ve expected and anticipated extreme growth in our website and application … However, within less than a week of our ‘unofficial’ launch, we have been – over abundantly – blessed with huge amounts of traffic!”

watoday.com

Teen’s invention puts YouTube music on tap is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

More such plants are on the way in Spain. Solar Millennium and its Spanish partner expect to start up a twin plant, Andasol 2, next spring and plan to begin building a third 50-MW plant early next year.

Spain’s Abengoa Solar and Sener, meanwhile, are each testing solar thermal plants with integrated molten-salt storage. Both use a “power tower” configuration in which arrays of mirrors direct sunlight onto a central solar receiver where the light directly heats a molten salt. This configuration matches that of Solar Two, a 10-MW solar thermal demonstration plant at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, built in the 1990s. The power-tower design makes energy storage cheaper and more compact because the salts can be safely heated well beyond the limit of the synthetic oils.

ieee.org

Largest Solar Thermal Storage Plant to Start Up is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Researchers grow heart in lab is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. iPhone – which consumers camped out for prior to its June debut, is the obvious choice for any “Best of 2007″ list. Much more than a phone, it also features an iPod, a camera and the internet, all in one. The multi-touch display allows you to control everything with your fingertips. Zoom in and zoom out on maps to determine your driving route and use the Visual Voicemail to listen to your messages in any order you choose.
2. Kindle – Since it became available in November, Amazon.com has struggled to keep this new electronic reading device in stock. The revolutionary portable reader downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers. The Kindle features a high-resolution electronic paper display that looks like real paper. Readers can choose from more than 90,000 books available in the Kindle store, including new releases and New York Times bestsellers. Aside from the cost of books, which run around $9.99, there are no monthly wireless bills or service commitments.
3. ZPrinter 450 – This device can transform electronic 3D data into colorful, handheld physical models. It can be used to create architectural concepts, landscapes, engineering product designs, electronic entertainment objects and medical information. The ZPrinter 450 is the third 3D printer made by Z Corp. and is touted as the most compatible with contemporary office environments. The ZPrinter 450 breaks down 3D printing into seven easy steps. It also includes automatic setup, power loading and self-monitoring of materials and print status.
4. iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot – iRobot, maker of the Roomba, says it’s the first product designed to make gutter cleaning faster, easier and safer. The robot is controlled by a wireless remote that’s also a detachable handle. The Looj can clean a 60-foot section of gutter in just 10 minutes. It drives under gutter straps while dislodging and eliminating dirt, leaves and debris. The robot works with standard K-style, aluminum, copper, metal or vinyl gutters.
5. QwikGrip – After eight years of development, inventor Leonard Duffy has created the Velcro of the future–a fastening technology that snaps into place and slides into full engagement. His “slidingly engaging” systems are applicable to many industries, including apparel, sports, health care, safety and military. Duffy says his invention can bind a new plastic cast or even take the place of shoe laces. Right now, the fastening technology is on the market as a business-to-business licensing opportunity, though it’ll be available for consumer purchase in 2008.
6. GreenSwitch – Originally, the GreenSwitch system was designed for controlling energy use in hospitals and hotels. After reducing energy costs by 25 to 45 percent in those industries, the technology has now entered the consumer market. The wireless system can reduce home energy consumption by turning off all designated light switches, wall plugs and air conditioning with the flip of a switch. After flipping the switch back on, all plugs and systems return to normal modes. The system can be retrofitted in an existing home or added to a new home during construction.

Entrepreneur Dot Com

Revolutionary Inventions of 2007 is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

After racing bicycles professionally for two years and realizing that I was no Lance Armstrong, I found another way to make a living on a bike. I had spent 20 years organizing bike treks with friends through the Alps, the hills of Tuscany and the countryside of Provence. Noticing a growing appetite for such trips, I founded Destination Cycling (destinationcycling.com) in 2002. I now run tours on my bike 70 days a year.

We began offering trips for serious cyclists that duplicated famous races such as the Tour de France in 2005. Our clients are typically Fortune 500 executives. The journeys are very complex for me to manage. We ride 100 miles or more a day for 21 days. I never know when a tire will blow or a hail storm will strike. Our customers pay us $30,000 for the experience of a lifetime and, in some instances, six figures for exclusive tours. They expect us to plan for the unexpected.

FSB Magazine

Destination bike tours go wireless is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of San Francisco-based Pure Digital, said the company hopes to make it easier for people to record and share video online. To that end, the camcorder comes with built-in software that makes it easy for people to upload their videos onto Google-owned YouTube or Grouper, an online video site owned by Sony.

Pure Digital is selling two versions of Flip Video, one that can hold about 30 minutes of video and another that stores an hour. The 30-minute version will cost about $119 while the 60-minute version will sell for around $149. Both devices run on standard AA batteries.

CNN Money

Pure Digital, cheap camcorder that syncs easily with YouTube. is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Spending on online video advertising will more than triple in the next three years, growing from $775.0 million this year to $2.90 billion in 2010, according to research company eMarketer.

With the anticipated surge in spending, media companies are scrambling to get in on the action, as demonstrated by the partnership announced last month by NBC Universal and News Corp. to form an online video ad network.

In announcing the as-yet-unnamed venture, News Corp. President-COO Peter Chernin called it “the largest ad platform on earth,” with an audience that will reach about 96% of the U.S. Web viewing audience. The video network will be distributed by partners including Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, News Corp.’s MySpace, Time Warner’s AOL and Yahoo.

Already, the video venture has lined up charter advertisers including Cisco Systems, General Motors Corp. and Intel Corp.

BtoB Magazine

Online Video Generating Excitement is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

GrandCentral in a nutshell

1. “One number for life”. Users pick one out of probably 20 given by GrandCentral. Users then can assign upto 6 numbers to this new number; when a call comes in, all phones will ring simultaneously.
2. No applications to download. Just a computer with internet connection.
3. How much? It’s FREE with unlimited incoming calls and core features.

What can users do with GrandCentral?

1. Customized greetings — Record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book. Specify, on a per person basis, which phone rings, which ringback music plays and whether the call goes directly to voice mail.
2. Web button — Install a “call me” button on Web site — a great, free way to field calls from eBay, MySpace or dating-service Web page.
3. Quick changes — With a quick click at GrandCentral.com, direct all calls to voice mail; direct all calls to a new, temporary number (like a hotel); or prevent home line from ringing during work hours.
4. Record calls — Users can record a conversation at anytime by pressing 4 on the phone, and pressing 4 again discontinues recording.
5. Switch lines — Anytime during a call, press the * key to make all phones ring again, so that users can pick up on a different phone in midconversation without the other person knowing.
6. Listen in voice messages — Don’t want to pick up? Press 3 to listen in while someone’s leaving a message. Press * to pick up the call.
7. Ringback Music — Replace the ringing sounds the caller hears while waiting with music—in GrandCentral’s case, any MP3 file of choice.

All of this works smoothly and quickly, and the Web site does a noble job of organizing that dizzying number of functions. And all of these features are free, even those that would be expensive or unavailable from your phone company.

Downsides

1. Local numbers might not be available. So neighbors would have to call long distance
2. Specific numbers require annual fees.
3. GrandCentral offers a huge list of additional features that aren’t so simple. If you’re not careful, GrandCentral can turn into a full-blown hobby.

nytimes.com

One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network is already capable of providing 100 Mbps and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.

The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by the cable industry’s research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity. The laboratory said last month it expected manufacturers to begin submitting modems for certification under the standard by the end of the year.

In the presentation, ARRIS Group Inc. chief executive Robert Stanzione downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it long before a standard modem worked through an estimated download time of 16 minutes.

Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster’s visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.

“If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,” Roberts said. “The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks.”

AP

Comcast’s new super fast cable modem is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Click-to-chat and click-to-call features, of course, have existed for years, but now there’s a new, more viral twist. Starting today you can test out a new service that attempts to combine the best of social networking with Internet-based telephony. In short, it gives visitors to your Web site or a blog a free local number to call from virtually anywhere. All you have to do is add a widget to your site, blog or e-mail signature.

Jaxtr has been in private beta testing, but now you can see and hear it for yourself as the company today announced the launch of the public beta of its service. After you sign up for a free Jaxtr account, you can link your mobile or landline phone with your online network. And while it’s not strictly an e-commerce tool, it could prove itself to be a new way for you to interact with your customers. For example, the VoiceBlast feature allows you to record your own voice to automatically greet and update customers who visit your blog or Web site. By adding a “Jaxtr widget” to your online profile or blog, you can take calls from prospects worldwide while keeping both parties’ phone numbers private.

Ecommerce-Guide

Voice Advantage is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

How much money could you make from a technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it get? “The sky’s the limit,” says John Shearer, Powercast’s founder and CEO. He estimates shipping “many millions of units” by the end of 2008.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”

money.cnn.com

Death of the cell phone charger is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

EZPay Small Businesses Solutions eliminates the need for business to print checks in the workplace and mail them to customers, clients or suppliers separately, saving time and resources, the company said.

“This is the first of several new products designed for small and medium-sized businesses who have been traditionally unwilling to take advantage of electronic payments due to a lack of IT resources and the inability to seamlessly integrate with their accounting software,” Ronald Ehli, CEO of EZPay, said in a statement.

Jim Blasingame

EZPay, Payment Tool for Small Biz is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Owners of pricey SLRs solve the problem by popping a wide-angle lens onto the camera body; Kodak (EK) engineers gave the EasyShare V570 pocket camera the same capability by equipping it with two independent lenses–one zoom and one wide-angle–that switch automatically. To draw attention to Kodak’s breakthrough configuration, industrial design consultant BlueMap highlighted the dual-lens system and shrouded the camera in a retro-cool design.

Read the review.

A wider angle on the market is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The free service also allows advertisers to reach consumers looking for their type of business, and as such can be used as a branding and direct-response media channel for targeted messages, the company said.

Inc.

Phone-Based Yellow Pages Search is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

“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.

Cellphone Billboard is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Gone are the days when a fledgling business required a large investment of start-up capital. With a phone, a computer, and a great idea, it’s possible to join the legion of people who have started businesses from home.

Home-based businesses now comprise almost half of the estimated 26 million small businesses nationwide, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data. New technologies have made it possible for a solo entrepreneur to begin a business that once would have required the resources of a much larger organization. Thanks to new tools, the range of home-based industries stretches far beyond consulting or even eBay businesses.

Many solo entrepreneurs are finding success with service businesses, particularly those that cater to specific demographics, such as overworked professionals, children, or the elderly.

“Service businesses can be more fluid and flexible than retail businesses because they do not have the challenge of sustaining inventory,” says Terri Lonier, author of Working Solo and founder of workingsolo.com. “Because they are not tied down with manufacturing or inventory costs, service businesses can be more responsive to the market.”

Low-cost, Internet-based tools are currently driving the home-based business boom, says Bruce Judson, senior faculty fellow at Yale School of Management and author of Go It Alone: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own. “It is literally now possible for an independent businessperson to rent, for $20 a month, software capabilities that were only available to Fortune 500 companies a few years ago.”

Solo entrepreneurs can now create databases, manage e-mail lists, or do sequenced mailings at reasonable costs. Communication technologies, like VoIP phone service and online conferencing make it easy to create a home-based office with full-service functionality.

Such technologies are also making it possible for entrepreneurs to do business anywhere — even remote, rural locations. In one example, a recent study found that eight of the top 10 most active eBay communities for buying and selling were small towns, not major cities.

Inc.

Make Millions — From Your Living Room is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The 39-year-old Stanford professor of electrical engineering is the world’s most successful manufacturer of self-driving vehicles: He and his graduate students built Stanley, the first car to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131-mile robot car race across the desert near Las Vegas organized by the research arm of the Pentagon.

That historic success in 2005 netted Thrun a $2 million prize. He reinvested some of it in an even more intelligent Stanley, which will be unveiled at the next iteration of the robot car contest – one that takes place on city streets. Obstacles include stop signs, lights, and cars driven by humans.

Thrun is confident that Stanley is the Model T of self-driving cars. “It might take 20 years, but people said we would never fly massive numbers of people over the Atlantic,” he says. “There’s an enormous waste of productivity in commuter traffic. We could increase the capacity of highways with precision driving.”

That means the auto industry gets to sell us more cars, not to mention safer ones – there were 43,443 U.S. highway fatalities in 2005, and Thrun thinks self-driving vehicles, equipped with cameras and motion sensors and all networked with one another, could reduce that number by 50 percent.

Read complete story here.

Sick of driving? This robot car takes the wheel is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.

Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.

He had originally planned to sell DVD compilations of his best tricks, before discovering that he could earn more, and reach a larger audience, by posting his videos online.

The New York Times

All The Internet’s A Stage is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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: a way to find just the good stuff and skip the junk.

His self-funded startup, VodPod, was born in San Francisco in June and so far shows a lot of promise. VodPod allows consumers to build their own “pods,” which is Hall’s rather fancy term for online video channels. The idea is that you grab the videos you like from any of the other 100-odd video-sharing sites already online – say, every bird-watching vid you can get your hands on – and build a channel called the Birding Pod. Anyone can watch it, and anyone can add videos to the channel.

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.

CNN Money

Taking YouTube to the next level is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. RESILIENCY & RELIABILITY. VoIP is dependent on your electrical power service. If you lose electricity, you also lose VoIP services. Landline services, on the other hand, can run for days without external power because they are independently and redundantly powered.
2. COMPATIBILITY. Many security alarm monitoring services don´t work with VoIP. VoIP lines may also present problems working with some fax machines that need to use a phone line.
3. QUALITY. VoIP services still lack the same level of consistently high quality as landline service. The Internet is not as stable as landline service. VoIP users sometimes experience echoes and “over-talk” (the inability of one party to hear what the other is saying if both talk simultaneously), and dropped calls, among other problems.
4. SAFETY. Some small business owners are hesitant to go “VoIP only” because of uncertainty about 911 response. Enhanced, E911 service mitigates many of these concerns, but E911 service is not yet available everywhere. Prospective VoIP customers should ask their providers about E911.
5. SECURITY. Because it runs on the Internet, VoIP traffic is subject to the same security risks as Internet traffic.

allbusiness.com

VOIP a Good Idea for Small Business? is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Created by British Boxbrands, ChargeBoxes have six lockers with each locker containing four different chargers. The user picks the appropriate locker for their device, opens the door and attaches the device to a charger inside. Payment is then made either with a GBP 1 coin or by sending an SMS to a specific code. Once payment has been received, the door can be locked and charging begins. The device is charged for 40 minutes, or less if a user is in a hurry and doesn’t need a fully charged battery. The locker aspect, which means users can leave their device behind, makes ChargeBoxes more useful than the charging kiosks we covered a few years ago.

The system offers a charging solution that covers 90 percent of handsets on the market, and also replenishes batteries of Blackberries, PDAs, iPods and PSPs. The first machines will be placed in easyInternetcafes, Novotel hotels, Vodafone stores, and various airports. One hundred ChargeBoxes are being launched this month and BoxBrands has ambitions to have over 1000 in the UK by the end of 2006.

In a world that’s addicted to communication, and where mobile devices have reached almost universal adult penetration, drained batteries are a definite chokepoint. While we’ve seen similar examples of public charging points, they’re far from commonplace, and would be a welcome addition to hotels, gyms, airports, train stations, hospitals, coffee shops, cinemas, festivals, shopping malls, etc.

springwise

Charge Lockers is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Now add to the list synthetic fuel, made from carbon-based products like natural gas and coal in a process that dates back to the 1920s. In December the Air Force successfully tested synthetic jet fuel in a B-52 bomber; it plans to test the fuel’s cold-weather performance early this year.

That’s a boon for Syntroleum, the Tulsa, Okla., company that manufactures the fuel. “The technology is ready,” says Ken Agee, founder and CEO of the 22-year-old company. With the United States holding 27 percent of the world’s coal reserves, he adds, “it’s exciting to think we could control our energy destiny.”

Better yet, the fuel will work in any vehicle powered by a diesel engine without any retooling. And the price is right: Coal-to-liquid fuel should cost about $45 a barrel. A government tax credit would then kick back $21 a barrel to Syntroleum, making the fuel very competitive anytime oil prices are above $30 a barrel.

Only one snag: scale. Agee says it would take at least $1 billion to build a plant capable of producing 10,000 barrels per day.

Business 2.0

Synthetic fuel: A perfect energy fix? is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

It’s a just the thing for podcasters who want to add interactivity to their work. And BlogTalkRadio is clever in its implementation: all audio input is via the telephone. Podcasters get a private dial-in number to the BlogTalkRadio service, from where they are streamed out to the Net (and also archived for later replay). Callers get their own number, too, and BlogTalkRadio provides a Web-based console that the podcaster uses to control the show.

Like standard broadcast radio, BlogTalkRadio podcasts can be supported by advertising. Audio advertisements are inserted, live, in the audio stream; the host gets a warning on his or her console before the ads play, so he or she is able to gracefully cut to the commercial. BlogTalkRadio will split ad revenues 50/50 with the podcast hosts.

Anything that makes podcasts interactive is a great idea, and other tools out there do this too; see RadioHandi, Skype’s Skypecast feature, and Waxxi.

BlogTalkRadio does not allow hosts to broadcast from a computer.

BlogTalkRadio allows you to create an interactive live podcast that can be broadcast from any location where you can get a cellular signal. That’s a pretty cool thing.

Cnet.com

Start Your Own Radio Talk Show is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The next day, he uploaded the clip onto the video-sharing Web site YouTube. Within a month, more than 2,000 people had viewed the 90-second snippet. A few fans even linked to it on their personal MySpace homepages.

What fans may not know is that MerlynDHZ and the other skaters in the video work for Heeling Sports Ltd., the Carrollton, Texas, company that makes Heelys. Heeling Sports is one of a growing number of businesses seeding YouTube with short videos to generate buzz on the cheap.

So-called video viral marketing has exploded over the past year, thanks to increased broadband capacity and sites like YouTube, which make it easy to upload and share videos online.

Indeed, seven out of 10 Internet users have watched an online video, and 30 percent of those people have shared one with friends, usually via e-mail, according to a survey by the Online Publishers Association, a research group in New York City.

The same study shows that viral videos translate into sales. Sixty-six percent of the people who watch videos online have seen an ad clip. About one-third of those viewers visited the marketer’s Web site, and 8 percent made a purchase.

inc.com

Clever Marketers Infiltrate Video Web Sites is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

You might have heard, but soon there will no longer be a need to risk your laptop in precarious situations in the kitchen. Modeled after a spatula, coo.boo is a digital cookbook that fits into the kitchen environment better than any laptop or printed cookbook. Recipes stored on the user’s computer are automatically synchronized through a wireless docking station and displayed on the face of the device. Digital function allows the cook to choose the degree of support wanted, from simply displaying recipes to full audiovisual cooking lessons. Not fragile like other high-tech digital devices, coo.boo is washable and can be placed on the counter top or hung up next to other kitchen utensils.

http://www.coolbusinessideas.com

Digital Cookbook is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

This spring Saturn is looking to roll out a nationwide version of an online ad for its new Aura sedan built on Google Earth technology. Web users don’t have to download the mapping software; they just watch as the screen zooms all the way down from space into the nearest Saturn dealership – located by their IP address – where a salesman offers them a test-drive.

A beta version of the ad, targeted at just six U.S. cities, received millions of click-throughs, according to Gokul Rajaram, product management director for Google AdSense. (You can view this 3-d ad here.

CNN Money

Online ads find new landscapes is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

How to create your own TV channel is a post from: Top Business Opportunities