After numerous prototypes and years of tinkering, Rick Chambers and Larry Kost believe they’ve invented the perfect apparatus to accomplish just that: The Bataround.

It doesn’t sound like much: an elongated stainless steel frame, connected to an aviation cable with a batting practice ball bolted to the end. But with one person swinging the device in a circular motion, a little wrist action and the resulting centrifugal force can provide a whole lot of practice cuts for a batter in a short period of time.

In the summer of 2006, five years and some $70,000 in research and development later, Chambers and Kost, the engineer behind the bataround, finally put their invention on the market.

Lodi News-Sentinel

Two Minnesota men have found their niche in the travel market by taking groups to scary places.

Dave Schrader of Circle Pines and Tim Dennis of Burnsville are leading groups on trips to haunted hotels and spooky cruise ships.

The two started an online radio show called “Darkness Radio” in January 2006. Within a year, their weekly broadcasts had made them celebrities among fanciers of otherworldly mystery.

They began asking stars of TV shows about the supernatural to cohost weekends at haunted destinations. Among the locations are the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado — made famous by the movie “The Shining.”

Travelers pay between $180 to $250 for the trips — not including transportation or lodging.
WKBT.com

Grocery shopping for Rene Lopez became magical after he moved Downtown. Lopez merely has to make up a shopping list, and the next day, his groceries are waiting at home for him after work, with the perishables in the fridge and freezer.

Michelle Harvey formed the Pittsburgh Town Shopper delivery service in September and works almost exclusively as a personal shopper and courier for Downtown residents who don’t yet have a neighborhood grocery store.

“There’s nothing here,” said Lopez, who moved here from Los Angeles last summer. “At one point, I didn’t even have a car, so that (Pittsburgh Town Shopper) was extremely convenient for me. I didn’t have to find a way to go out and get food or order from Dominos.”

Pittsburgh Town Shopper is hardly the first Web-based grocery delivery service, but there are few, if any, in the Pittsburgh area.

“I think I have a niche,” said Harvey, who declined to disclose sales figures or the number of customers she has. She said her services, which cost $39 for an average delivery, are in demand and she hopes business will grow to the point where she has employees to shop as well.

Pittsburgh Live

It was one “skeeter” bite too many for Austin lawyer Blair Dancy. Dancy’s two young boys had walked in from backyard play covered in mosquito welts from the garden and patio areas. The sight of his bump-covered, itching boys was the last straw and the mother of invention.

Most mainstream solutions on the market only address adult mosquitoes, he says. So, he focused on reducing the number of eggs, larvae and pupae.

Dancy’s trap is designed to be an ideal breeding spot for the Asian tiger and other container- or tree-hole-breeders. When the eggs hatch, the larvae and pupae will not escape. The trap itself is small, unobtrusive and easy to manage.

The trap requires a little water each week and the addition of a few dead leaves occasionally, and homeowners must be cognizant of other breeding areas around the home. Dancy’s trap has a patent pending and sells online at MosquitoSwallow.com. It will be released in some Austin-area garden centers in the coming months. The Web site also offers helpful information for homeowners to minimize the mosquito swarms this summer.

American-Statesman

America loves a good mug shot. The more frizzed, frazzled and frantic, the better. An Orlando entrepreneur has seized on that fascination, recently starting “JAIL,” a weekly newspaper filled with nothing but the unflattering thumbnails. Page after page, with only a few ads in between.

“A mug shot is a couple notches below your driver’s license picture,” said Devin James, 41, dressed casually in sweat pants, sneakers and a ball cap. “And everyone takes a messed up driver’s license picture.”

In JAIL, the stars are the readers’ neighbors, charged with everything from drug possession to prostitution to murder. Thousands of arrests each week in the paper’s three-county distribution area provide plenty of material, all obtained free from police and sheriff’s departments.

James carefully chooses the mug shots on the front page — issues with attractive women on the front move fastest.

“Sex sells,” James said.

James said he got the idea nearly a decade ago after a three-month stint in the Orange County Jail after he says he got into a loud fight with a girlfriend and the police sided with her. He denies hitting her.

Using $600 he earned moving furniture, James started the newspaper in December.

“The timing is right for this paper now,” he said. “America is in the midst of a crime wave.”

Associated Press

When Chicagoan Jenny Dombroski spotted the NikeID website where consumers can customize sneakers according to their preferences, she knew it was a concept that could work for lingerie too. So Dombroski, who loves lingerie but knew nothing about the apparel industry, spent six months networking, asking lots of questions and working in a lingerie shop. Then she hired a designer and Evlove Intimates was born. (Evlove is ‘evolve’ spelled backwards.) “A panty is a panty, a boy short is a boy short,” Dombroski says. “There isn’t a lot of variation in the design. We offer customers the opportunity to create personalized lingerie products and to have fun doing it.”

Customized Evlove Intimates lingerie is sold primarily through private home parties. Invited guests sip wine while they select from a wide array of designs, samples, fabric swatches and decorative touches including ribbons, appliqués, rosettes and bows. Dombroski hooks up her laptop to a TV screen where guests view and revise their choices courtesy of her online design studio. Prices for a lingerie set run around USD 100, with prices for individual pieces USD 35 and up. Purchases are delivered in about three weeks. Dombroski recently launched a website to enable customers to design and place orders online. But most of her business is through home parties, with the number of bookings increasing each month, mostly through word of mouth.

Dombroski’s ‘customerization parties’ are an inspired idea that could work just about anywhere for all sorts of products, including t-shirts, home fashions, fragrances and cosmetics. The founder’s advice for other fledgling entrepreneurs? “Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. If you love the product, ask questions and network—a lot. And above all, be persistent.”

Springwise

Chris Reed is founder and chief executive of Reed’s Inc., which produces a line of natural sodas. And he’s a fan — some might say a fanatic — of the pungent herb.

Each year, his company chops 1 million pounds of fresh ginger, enough to fill 28 big-rig trailers. In addition to sugared ginger candies and ice creams, he produces six ginger brews: Spiced Apple, Raspberry Ginger, Cherry Ginger, Original Ginger, Premium Ginger and Extra Ginger, the last of which packs 26 grams’ worth of the stuff.

In a business dominated by Coke and Pepsi, healthful soda sounds like a contradiction. But unusual beverage companies such as Reed’s are etching out a niche within the carbonated beverage industry, which sells about $28 billion worth of drinks annually to U.S. consumers, according to ACNielsen.

Natural sodas saw 36.5% sales growth in conventional food stores and 12.4% in natural food stores during the last year.

LA Times

Based upon an inspired Biblical formula, the world’s first spiritual perfume is designed to be a reminder of God, Christ, spiritual self and soul. “We turned to the Bible to seek inspiration about which items to include and became convinced that a formulation would reveal itself,” explains Rick Larimore, IBI’s chief executive officer. “Creating Virtue(R) has been an adventurous journey through fragrance and scripture, with remarkable miracles confirming our choices.”

Virtue(R)’s subtle blend includes top notes of apricot, pomegranate and fig that transition to a gentle heart of iris, warming to a golden base of rich, exotic woods of frankincense, myrrh, aloe, and spikenard. Several ingredients cost up to $4,500 per kilogram, making Virtue(R) a truly precious mixture of oils. It is available in a 1.7-fluid ounce French bottle and over cap, with 24-kt gold raised lettering on the bottle and embossed gold foil lettering on the box, pamphlet enclosed.

“The natural oils of Virtue(R) blend with the wearer’s own body chemistry to form your own signature fragrance. Uniquely beautiful and definitely unforgettable, it places the wearer in an ancient world of senses, enduring and timeless for over 3,000 years,” says Vicki Pratt, IBI’s president. “A gift for someone special or your own unique treasure, Virtue(R) brings a valued gift of scent and hope of a renewed spiritual self. No one has ever done this before in a perfume - developing a fragrance that reminds us of our, sometimes frail, conscious link to God.”

California News Wire

WalkStyles invited America’s fitness community to use its free, online service to form walking clubs. Participants can register, connect with like-minded walkers where they live or where they travel, and use the site to manage their group activities.

If all goes as planned, it could become the MySpace for walkers.

The target audience is huge and growing: Nearly 72 million Americans say walking is their favorite form of exercise, and older Americans favor it most.

The free online service complements the subscription-based service already in place on walkstyles.com. Walkers are encouraged to use a DashTrak to tally their daily steps and monitor their progress or to check it against others in the group. It’s a product that people all over the country - mostly women - have encouraged Parks to build, so they can find like-minded walkers wherever they go.

Sun Herald

Flexpetz recently launched in Los Angeles and San Diego, and offers consumers the option of having a dog for just a few hours or days a week. Which is a good solution for people who’d love to have a dog, but are too busy, travel frequently, or live in buildings that don’t allow dog ownership.

The company’s founder, Marlena Cervantes, views Flexpetz like an extended family: “When our dogs spend time with their extended family members, they are lavished with love and undivided attention. We feel our this concept allows our dogs more love and attention than single ownership can often provide.”

Membership is limited, and each dog generally spends time with a small group of people. Monthly membership costs USD 39.95 plus a daily fee, and members can reserve their pooch of choice online. Before being allowed to rent a dog, members go through a mandatory training session with a certified Flexpetz dog trainer. The service aims to expand to New York, San Francisco and Boston soon, followed by other cities in the United States and abroad. One to set up locally? Or how about starting a website that matches two or three owners, facilitating fractional dog ownership based on location, availability and personality?

Unusual Business Ideas That Work

When July hit Miami in 1998, everyone seemed to be enjoying the dog days of summer–except the dogs. As owners took giant swigs from their 32-ounce water bottles, their dogs ran to and fro, wearily retrieving makeshift toys in the afternoon heat. It was on one sunny afternoon in July that Carlotta Lennox rolled by a park on a pair of rollerblades, noticed that the dogs looked tired and hungry, and realized how she could give the day back to the dogs.

Seven years later, the first Hey Buddy pet vending machine was established in Bark Park Central, an off-leash dog park in Dallas. Lennox, 36, stocked the machine with dog treats, tennis balls, dog shirts, dog glasses–basically everything a dog might need for a walk in the park. And with its shingled roof and slated facade, the doghouse-inspired vending machine was hard to miss–which meant pets and their owners weren’t the only ones begging Lennox for more.

I see my machines at the Plaza in New York City, maybe gold-plated, carrying Louis Vuitton dog collars and Chanel pearls and everything else a celebrity would want for their dog,” says Lennox. She also lists apartment complexes, RV parks and veterinary offices as just a few more places she hopes to have Hey Buddy Machines in the future. “That’s really what we’re all about,” she says. “We just want to make it convenient for the customers who are out there with their dogs.”

Unusual Business Ideas That Work

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

When the air conditioner caught fire three years ago, Kate Khosla thought it was time to pull the plug — literally — on her husband Ron’s efforts to invent a better compressor-condensor-evaporator.

Khosla’s idea was simple: he thought he could build a gizmo that would allow an ordinary air conditioner to take a room’s temperature down as low as 32 degrees. Not all of his prototypes blew up, but neither did any of his early models last long enough to get the job done.

You could find Khosla juggling about a dozen small boxes at the New Paltz post office, sending his patent-pending CoolBot to farmers like himself. With next to no publicity or marketing, the CoolBot is becoming a very hot item. And it’s poised to go more places than the farm. He’s sold about 80 units at $250 a pop and has placed material orders that will allow him to build another 500.

It’s all a marvel to Khosla, who calls himself a “reluctant capitalist” who never intended to sell his invention. He’d thought initially to explain the process to other farmers and let them build their own. That idea didn’t work out, but the Khoslas don’t seem too broken up about it.

Times Herald-Record

In the late 1980s, Michael Jordan shaved it all off. Soon, the world was examining the scalps of Bruce Willis, Andre Agassi, Moby and just about one token character on every TV show — not to mention a swarm of Oscar nominees and presenters this year, including Jack Nicholson (who had shaved his head for a role).

The response is a booming market of products being developed and sold specifically to the unhirsute — a new front in the nearly $5 billion onslaught of male grooming products in the United States.

“I’m a former comb-over wearer,” confessed Howard Brauner, founder of the two-year-old company Bald Guyz. “I would spend half an hour in the morning making it look right, and then finally I just realized it was ridiculous. Once I decided to really go bald, my wife would get annoyed at me for using her expensive shampoos. But I had to use something to clean my head”

For that particular ablution, Brauner now uses a head wash that’s part of the line of products he developed in response to his wife’s complaints. Bald Guyz also puts out pocket-size individual head wipes, for use on the go. And there is a conditioner, to be used twice a week. “Your skin up there is either dry or irritated or oily,” he said.

New York Times News Service