“I call it Rip Club, because you just rip it,” McLeod said. “In times of economic hardship, people don’t want to buy new clothes. It’s cheaper to repair what they have.”

McLeod and others in the sewing business are finding that altering and restoring old clothes is a profitable business in the recession that began in November.

Ruby Hageman, a tailor at The Alteration Shop in Fort Collins, has seen that in the recession, more people want their clothes to last longer.

“Clothes are really expensive, so if you can make a pair of pants last another year or two, you don’t have to buy new ones,” Hageman said.

Linda Clason, a Loveland resident who does alterations and custom sewing, has seen an increase in business every time there is an economic downturn.

“People can’t afford to buy new clothes, so they are going to fix up what they have in the closet,” said Clason, also a Sewing Professionals member. “They’re repairing or having repaired things they have in the closet that still fit.”

In most cases, fixing clothes is less expensive than buying new, said Linda Wrenn, owner of Sew Country in Berthoud, where she does alterations and custom sewing.

“The general consensus of our group is that it’s doing much better than normal times. People are getting their clothes fixed and altered instead of buying new ones,” Wrenn said.

reporterherald.com

Sewing businesses finding niche in midst of recession is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Laura Hunter and Jennifer Walker never thought of themselves as entrepreneurs until about five years ago, after a little advice from country crooner Kenny Rogers. Today they are published authors, Web site operators and sought-after consultants in a big niche market.

The two moms – they have eight kids between them – run Moms on Call LLC, which offers real-world advice and counseling to newly minted parents.

Their consultation business has exploded – it grew 600 percent in three years. Their book, “Guide to Basic Baby Care,” has sold more than 20,000 copies and been translated into three languages. They recently started online courses in child care on their Web site that take parents from infancy through age 5.

Walker and Hunter believe a good part of their success is due to the fact that modern moms often live hundreds of miles from their natural support network – the mothers, sisters and aunts in traditional extended families who aided in child care.

The two pediatric nurses admit that a lot of people have stepped up to help make their business a success. One of the first was singer Rogers.

About five years ago, he called Hunter to consult with him and his wife, Wanda. The couple had twins when Rogers was 65. At the time, Hunter was doing consultations using a few photocopied sheets of instructions.

“I was getting ready to leave, and Kenny was flipping through [my] folder and he said: ‘It’s not copyrighted.’ He said: ‘You’ve got something here. You have to copyright this.’ His attorney … called the next morning.”

Getting children to sleep through the night is the most common question they get. Sometimes, the calls and e-mails are just strange.

“I had one e-mail that just said ‘hit on head by chicken,’ ” Hunter said. “I called and the kid was screaming and the dad was panicked. He was standing by the freezer and dropped a frozen chicken on his child. It all turned out fine, but that was what was worrying that dad at that moment.”

Moms on Call LLC
An in-home consultation is $300 for two hours. Includes a book, DVD, swaddling blanket and six months of follow-up assistance. Phone version is $250. Online courses are $29.95 each. Their book can be ordered online for less than $20. On the web: www.momsoncall.com

ajc.com

Moms’ niche is babies’ care is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

From drop off to pick up every aspect of the pet’s comfort has been thought through, with pre- and post-flight walks, comfortable waiting areas, and boarding on either side if necessary. The animals are walked (or carried) onto the plane where they board the main cabin, escorted by pet attendants. The interior of Pet Airways’ planes have been converted to carry 50 pets and the attendants—not pet owners. Kennels in all sizes are mounted to vertical rows, and each pet travels in comfort and safety inside the cabin, not underneath.

Fly with Pets AirwaysFly with Pets Airways 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

Pet Living Wills cost $49 per yearly membership for one pet, and $39 for each additional pet. Pet parents can log on and access their Pet Living Wills at any time to reflect changes in their pets medical needs; which also gives partnering vets virtual access to the most up to date information. That way, if someone else has to take your beloved fur baby to the vet due to a medical issue, you’ll only be stuck with a bill that’s in line with treatment that you would have chosen for your dog or cat.

It’s certainly a unique business, but it’s up to you to decide if Pet Living Wills are worthwhile; or if written instructions left with a pet-sitter, boarder or vet would suffice.

inventorspot.com

Niche Business In Living Wills For Your Dog Or Cat 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

A new knife, meant to make impulse stabbings of a co-worker or a spouse more difficult, is ready for the market.

Manufactured by Taylor’s Eye Witness (a cutlery company whose amazingly apt name is a total coincidence), the New Point has a dulled leading tip that keeps the knife edge from striking anyone. The actual blade tip is recessed, so that it snaps on clothes before it can do serious damage. Seems like a hoax, right? Maybe not. The designer, John Cornock, says he was inspired to invent the knife because of a BBC report that showed an unusually high number of fatal stabbings in Britain, which called out long kitchen knives as being the weapon of choice. One doctor, responded–with total sincerity–by saying that pointed knives should be banned. Cornock thus responded with his “more considered” solution.

fastcompany.com

An Anti-Stab Knife is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

It has a simple drag and drop interface and you can use all of the features absolutely free. As Onyaka is online application that’s why you can use it from everywhere without any restriction on standard web browser.

Onyaka, The Simple And Free Staff Scheduling And Planning Software is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Fish pedicures are creating something of a splash in the D.C. area, where a northern Virginia spa has been offering them for the past four months. John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon with his wife, Yvonne Le, said 5,000 people have taken the plunge so far.

“This is a good treatment for everyone who likes to have nice feet,” Ho said.

He said he wanted to come up with something unique while finding a replacement for pedicures that use razors to scrape off dead skin. The razors have fallen out of favor with state regulators because of concerns about whether they’re sanitary.

Ho was skeptical at first about the fish, which are called garra rufa but typically known as doctor fish. They were first used in Turkey and have become popular in some Asian countries.

But Ho doubted they would thrive in the warm water needed for a comfortable footbath. And he didn’t know if customers would like the idea.

“I know people were a little intimidated at first,” Ho said. “But I just said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ “

Customers were quickly hooked.

Tracy Roberts, 33, of Rockville, Md., heard about it on a local radio show. She said it was “the best pedicure I ever had” and has spread the word to friends and co-workers.

“I’d been an athlete all my life, so I’ve always had calluses on my feet. This was the first time somebody got rid of my calluses completely,” she said.

First time customer KaNin Reese, 32, of Washington, described the tingling sensation created by the toothless fish: “It kind of feels like your foot’s asleep,” she said.

The fish don’t do the job alone. After 15 to 30 minutes in the tank, customers get a standard pedicure, made easier by the soft skin the doctor fish leave behind.

Ho believes his is the only salon in the country to offer the treatment, which costs $35 for 15 minutes and $50 for 30 minutes. The spa has more than 1,000 fish, with about 100 in each individual pedicure tank at any given time.

In addition to offering pedicures, Ho hopes to establish a network of Doctor Fish Massage franchises and is evaluating a full-body fish treatment that, among other things, could treat psoriasis and other skin ailments.

Fish pedicures is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Inventors Hope “Bataround” Is A Big Hit is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Haunted Places is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Entrepreneur Delivers Much-Needed Service is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Inventor Tells Mosquitos To Buzz Off is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

“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

Entrepreneur Sells Mug Shots is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Customized Lingerie is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Filling A Natural Niche is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Spiritual Perfume is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Entrepreneur Hopes Web Site Will Be Myspace For Walkers is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Rent-A-Pet is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Dog Vending Machine is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Beer Belly is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Farmer’s Cool Invention Turns Profitable is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

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

Hair Care For Men Without is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Salespeople who ignore the woman when a man and woman are looking for a car came up last month when Times-Dispatch readers voiced their customer-service pet peeves. So what’s a male-dominated industry like the car business to do?

Enter AskPatty.com, started by a couple of entrepreneurs who thought they could make money straightening out the problem. The site educates women about all things automotive, with female experts who write articles and answer questions on repair, maintenance and car buying.

AskPatty.com certifies dealerships as female-friendly after they have passed a course on how to communicate with women. A check of the Web site found no dealerships in the Richmond area that are certified. To be certified, members of a dealership’s sales team must read a book on how to communicate with women, “How to Get Rich Selling Cars and Trucks to Women,” and take a training course. Then they must pass a 134-question test, which takes about an hour to complete.

The Web site gets about 20,000 visitors each month. About 50 dealerships have signed on for certification services. Dealerships pay $225 per person for 12 months of training and $795 a month for the dealership certification.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Web Site Aims To Help Women Seal Deal is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Enter Tom Martinet, whose company, Arizona Cart Retrieval, operates every day of the year except Christmas to locate and return the carts to area businesses.

In an average week, one of Martinet’s contractors will have dispatched crews to round up and return close to 15,000 carts to Arizona retailers.

The retrieval service employs 18 flatbed trucks that serve more than 30 retailers and about 460 stores in the state. Clients include Fry’s, Safeway, Albertsons, Wal-Mart, Family Dollar and Lowe’s Home Improvement.

Once captured, the carts are steam-cleaned or refurbished on-site using equipment loaded onto the flatbeds. Most of the repair work is limited to replacing handles and seat straps and welding wheels. Carts that can’t be fixed are parted out.

Business can only continue to increase for the cart service, especially as the Valley becomes more congested. “In areas that are built up with apartment complexes, office buildings and condos, you’re going to see this continue,” Oliver said.

The average steel shopping cart costs about $100. Custom styles, such as the plastic race car kiddie carts, cost $400 to replace. The firm works on a contract basis with retailers to retrieve carts.

Arizona Business Gazette:

Rounding Up Shopping Carts is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Group DCA was pretty good at persuading physicians to try new drug therapies, but the company struggled when it came to reaching patients. Rebates, a time-honored strategy, were a hassle. Free samples didn’t always translate into paid prescriptions. Likoff, 53, needed a marketing tool that would slice through the clutter of an ad-mad world.

In early 2005 he heard about Serious, a New York City startup with a patented DVD technology called Cardz. The technology is expensive and requires major creative investment, but the results compare favorably to conventional direct mail. Likoff hired Serious to design Cardz for some of his clients, including Merck and Pfizer. He also paid $350,000 for the license to sell Cardz to other pharmaceutical firms.

While Cardz resemble ordinary rectangular plastic gift cards and can include a magnetic stripe to swipe at a cash register, they feature a DVD encoded on the back. Slip one into a DVD player or computer, and up pops a multimedia presentation offering video, text, photos, games and printable coupons.

The initial investment, which covers design, production and manufacturing of 25,000 Cardz, runs upwards of $75,000. For repeat campaigns, prices range between $1.50 and $3 a card, depending on features and packaging. Likoff spent about $100,000 on his first Cardz campaign, for a popular birth control pill, and has since launched 14 more Cardz campaigns for other drugs. He calculates that Cardz adoption has driven a 30 percent increase in revenue at Group DCA in the past two years, from roughly $16 million in 2005 to $21 million in 2006.

CNN Money

Cardz aim to make customers enjoy your sales pitch. is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Dellamura searched stores and websites for a product to protect her children, but came up empty-handed. That’s when Dellamura invented Gotta Go Mitts.

Her survey of more than 100 mothers — friends, family, even strangers in bathrooms — showed two out of three said they would buy disposable mittens for their children. The information she collected helped guide the development of Gotta Go Mitts, such as making a small package to fit in a purse or pocket.

A bookstore clerk suggested Tara Monosoff’s “The Mom Inventors Handbook.” It gives readers advice for conducting market research, developing a prototype, manufacturing and marketing a product. Dellamura found the guide practical and inspiring. She followed every step and enjoyed reading about several mom inventors who turned inspiration into action.

Dellamura made the first prototype on her kitchen table. Her mother-in-law and a friend helped cut and sew plastic sandwich bags into child-sized mittens.

Now the finished products, 2.5 million mitts in 125,000 packages, sit in her basement. Dellamura invested more than $17,000 to bring her idea to market, but she expects to start making a profit in fewer than two years — $5 at a time.

Frederick News Post

Necessity The Mother Of Invention is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

On a Thursday afternoon, his rig yelped, a shrill beep sounding through his headphones. To speed things up, Arnold attached his contraption to a tractor. He drove forward, tires pulling in the fine soil, and the detector crescendoed to an electric wail. After digging down about 5 feet, Arnold scrabbled into the hole with a shovel and started clearing. Finally, the blade clanged against something metallic. The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed.

About the size of a beer keg, the rock weighed 1,430 pounds, the largest pallasite ever found in the US. By Arnold’s reckoning, it was worth more than $1 million.

For the past decade, these Indiana Jones types have found a ready market among collectors and art gallery owners, who have come to see meteorites as high-end decorative objects.

wired.com

Meteor Farming is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

While feeding a baby, Debbie Stauffer and Kathleen Whitehurst came up with an invention that landed them a spot on “Oprah,” an article in Good Housekeeping and a hit new product. It’s a counter. A simple, cute digital counter in bright colors.

If you’ve mined moldy leftovers out of the refrigerator, over-fed your fish or killed plants by under-watering, you may need it.

MediaNews.com

Mothers Hit The Market With Invention is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

I’m a firm believer that the road to success for small companies is through specialization. A local hardware store has a hard time competing against home improvement big-box retailers, but if you specialize in unique knobs and fixtures, you can build a national clientele. It’s tough to get started as an accountant, but if you market primarily to health care providers, you can stand out.

Having a specialty — or niche — not only enables you to distinguish yourself in your market, it provides you with a built-in marketing plan. Imagine, for instance, if you made organic pet food (something of great interest with the recent pet food health scare). You could advertise in publications reaching readers concerned about the environment, sponsor Sierra Club events, and market to health food grocers.

How do you find a niche for your own business? You can break down your specialty by:

1. Industry. Specializing in an industry gives you credibility with potential clients, an easy marketing focus (you can go to conventions and trade shows of your target market) and enables you to develop unique expertise and become familiar with that industry’s practices and lingo. I know an accountant in the South with a national clientele of optometrists.
2. Demographic group. Ever hear of hair salons just for children? How about computer classes for seniors? Financial investing for women? Selecting a specific demographic group gives you an immediately recognizable way to attract customers and make them feel welcome.
3. Geographic area. In most cases, geography isn’t enough to distinguish a company. But in some cases, there may be distinctions that make your customers want to select a geographic-specific company.
4. Type of work. Another way to specialize is to select a specific aspect of the work you do and emphasize that. A graphic design firm I know specializes in preparing annual reports for publicly traded companies.
5. Unique knowledge. If you have truly unique knowledge, focus on that as your niche. For instance, a pet cardiologist can develop a specialty serving a large region.
6. Style. Choosing a specific style of service or product is another way to specialize. You can sell only all-wood furniture, open an all-organic restaurant, or provide hand-wash-only car washing.

Finding a specialty is one of the most powerful ways to set yourself apart from the competition and focus your marketing efforts. You’ll find another benefit, too: Companies that specialize typically charge higher prices. The pet cardiologist can charge more than your local veterinarian. The graphic designer who does annual reports can charge more than the designer who does everything.

USA Today

Find, Keep That Niche is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Enter CreditCovers, the decorative skin for credit cards. With designs that are sure to please the same folks who love slapping skins on their iPods (the only explanation for the “slick, cool, super-dope” and “sticks real good” product descriptions and artwork with names like Ohmigawd! and Mizz Lady Pink), the $4.99 CreditCovers are guaranteed not to damage or otherwise interfere with the use of your card. Strange looks from cashiers? You’re on your own.

CreditCovers: Skins for credit cards is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

It’s a pretty simple setup. Just go to the website, choose pickup and drop off locations, and the service will have a ride dispatched. Cab rides are billed at a flat rate that includes all applicable fees and tip, and payment is made on the website via credit card or corporate account. Airline pickups are “will call” when debarking so there’s no chance of a delayed flight causing a missed ride. If you don’t call the 800 number to confirm arrival there’s no charge to the credit card. It’s nice that they’ve kept it flexible because traveling can sometimes turn into a nebulous form of performance art.

popgadget.net

1-800-CAB-RIDE is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Quite coincidentally, she had read in a book that Native Americans used balsam trees as herb for many different home remedies. With her long-standing interests in herbs “that got me excited into thinking about balsams in a different way,” said Wendy. She became a supplier to the incense factory, which used her balsam fir boughs to stuff souvenir pillows.

Through the years Wendy has experimented with trade shows, catalogue sales, the QVC home shopping network, and many other avenues to showcase her products.

She recently set-up a web site, to widen her market reach and take a dip on Internet retailing. Her worldwide outlets now exceed 4,400 stores and her employees have increased to 12. Sales of Maine Balsam Fir Products have reached well over $500,000 per year.

Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Balsam Fir is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

When a new baby arrives, mom and dad’s brains seem to turn to mush; lack of sleep makes it challenging to remember the simplest things. Greg Sheldon learned this two years ago when he and his wife Kris became parents for the first time. He found that they were asking each other the same questions over and over: “How long has it been since his diaper was changed?”, or “How long ago did you feed him?” Sheldon, an engineer turned stay-at-home-dad, decided there had to be something more effective than scribbling on a notepad at 2:30 in the morning, so he invented the ITZBEEN Baby Care Timerâ„¢.

When Sheldon’s son was three months old, he decided to put his engineering career on hold to be more involved with his new baby. However, it wasn’t long before his inventive nature had him looking for ways to make the job of parenting a little easier. Sheldon created a simple, cell phone size device with four timers that allowed he and his wife to recall how long ago they changed a diaper, fed the baby, put the baby down to sleep, or gave the baby medication. Whenever they performed a task, like changing a diaper, they simply pressed the correct [diaper button; that timer would reset to zero and start counting up again. At anytime, day or night, they could look at the display and always know how long ago something was done. His timer proved to be so useful, that he filed for a patent and turned it into a real product.

Sheldon’s new company, Coast Innovations, introduced the ITZBEENâ„¢ to the juvenile products industry last September at tradeshow in Las Vegas, NV. “We were very happy with the industry response,” says Sheldon. “We were told by more than one retailer that the ITZBEENâ„¢ was the best new product at the show.” The ITZBEENâ„¢ hit the shelves in January, and it is now available in over 65 stores and websites across the US, Canada, Australia, and Panama. Suggested retail price for the ITZBEENâ„¢ is $24.99.

eMediaWire

Dad-Inventor Creates New Baby Care Product is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The first bottles of Coca-Cola Light (chilled 500 ml PET) with GLAM*IT mini-mag attached will be on the shelves in April 2007. Published by Sanoma, GLAM*IT is a Belgian fashion and beauty magazine targeted to a young, female audience. Which makes for a good fit with Light/Diet Coke buyers. As stated by Mie Van der Auwera, editor of GLAM*IT: “Adapting editorial content for another brand is only credible if brand values mutually match. In the case of Coca-Cola Light and GLAM*IT that was no problem. That’s why it results in a powerful communication tool for both brands.” The removable 24-page magazine is a ‘light’ version of GLAM*IT, featuring typical content for the mag, but reduced to fit the bottle.

springwise.com

Bottle Mag is a post from: Top Business Opportunities