Michigan Business Review – MLive.com:

It’s always hunting season for the next great idea.

The Edsel and the smartphone have vastly opposite records of success, but they both came from the same source: an idea.

In their book “The Idea Hunter,” Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer observe that the key ingredient for discovering great ideas comes less from genius or off-the-charts creativity and more from persistent searching and observing what is happening around them.

Entrepreneurs and other leaders in Southwest Michigan are no strangers to the search for great ideas. Some of these ideas, such as the Kalamazoo Promise, have gained national prominence. Read more.

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FreshBusinessThinking.com:

Online social network for homeworkers Enterprise Nation is giving £100 to 100 businesses and would-be businesses for their “good ideas”. The competition, in association with PayPal, is asking its members how they’d spend the money on their ventures, awarding £10,000 in all.

Ideas 101 in association with PayPal launches today and asks, “if we gave you £100, how would you spend it?” And the question’s not hypothetical! PayPal and Enterprise Nation are giving £100 to 100 of its members with the best business ideas. The money can be spent on anything from training, to equipment or branded t-shirts.

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Springwise:

Lucky Seven makes custom caps that bear the logos of fictional companies featured in cult films and television shows. Founder Jay Jay Burridge is a self-proclaimed seventies kid, who spent much of his childhood wearing a Star Wars cap. Burridge, who is an artist by trade, founded the London-based company as a hobby, and turned it into a successful online business.

Lucky Seven’s caps are all made to order. On the company’s website, customers are invited to design their own caps by choosing either a mesh or army style cap, a colour combination from an extensive palate, style of captain’s laurels, and the preferred fictional company’s crest. Want to declare your loyalty to the promise and opportunity of Blade Runner’s Off World Colonies? Done. Prefer people to think you shot J.R. because of your Ewing Oil cap? No problem. Every order is shipped in a Lucky Seven hat box, and caps are priced at GBP 30.

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Startup Costs: $50,000 – $100,000 About
Franchises Available? No
Online Operation? Yes

Entrepreneur.com:

Business Overview
The increasing trend toward conducting business enterprises from a home office continues to grow at a record pace in North America. Due to this fact an entirely new business requirement has surfaced. What do you do if your business is homebased, yet you require short-term meeting facilities? There’s one simple solution to the question if you’re an enterprising entrepreneur: you start a boardroom office facility that can be rented and utilized by homebased business entrepreneurs, employees and traveling businesspeople. The best way to reach your target market–which, of course, is homebased business owners–is to join local business associations in your community and start promoting your boardroom rental service. Almost every city and community across North America now has a Homebased Business Owners Association or Chamber of Commerce. Most of these associations host networking meetings, and these networking meetings are fantastic forums to meet other business owners and introduce them to your new boardroom service. Likewise, you’ll want to get the message out to corporate and business travelers that may also require this type of service while conducting business in your area.

The Market… read on.

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Ethiopian:

1. Translator. In a multi-ethnic society such as the United State, translation service is in big demand. American Translators Association can be a good source of information on how to establish a home-based translation service.

2. Tutoring. You can start a business tutoring students by advertising at schools, the local YMCA, and other places frequented by families. If you have children, talk to their teachers and determine the needs of your school district.

3. Consulting. If you are an expert in your industry, such as finance, marketing, or mediation, consider beginning your own consulting business.

4. Medical and legal transcription. If you have transcription skills and the necessary equipment, you can easily work from home for a variety of different companies. Check local community colleges or online for transcription training courses. Medical transcription involves picking up dictation via tape, voice file and digital system using foot pedal for “start-stop” control, ear phones and a “word processing program”. You can either choose to conduct medical transcription as an independent worker or an employee with benefits.

5. Medical claims billing. This industry is one of the most popular work-from-home businesses — so much so that suspect companies have been popping up on the Internet and in classified advertisements. ELearners.com can help you locate transcription training courses online. Home based medical transcription is one of the most popular choices for a home business. Medical transcription provides flexibility, ease of training and the ability to be your own boss without the high cost of getting started. Medical transcriptionists quickly and accurately interpret through doctor’s dictation, the medical records of patients into medically and grammatically precise reports. The interactions between the patient and his physician require transcription. Some of these include: Surgical procedures, Medical consultations, Diagnoses, Prognoses, Prescriptions, Radiological or other laboratory results, Dissemination of the patients “medical history”, Autopsy reports

6. Accounting. There are many franchises and opportunities available for certified public accountants. If you are interested in getting certified, take a look at the Web site of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for information on specific state requirements.

7. Web design. If you can design quality Web sites, consider turning your skills into a home-based business. Although the software and hardware costs can be steep, good Web designers tend to be well-compensated for their efforts.

8. Desktop publishing. Do you have a creative flair for putting together brochures and newsletters? You can offer your own desktop publishing services to other small businesses. Software can be expensive, so make sure to give applications a trial run or take a course before investing in one.

9. Photography. If you are skilled with a camera, you can open your own photography studio in your home. Keep in mind that you will need space to shoot the pictures as well as a light-free space for a darkroom if you decide to process your film and print your photographs yourself.

10. Home inspection. The National Association of Certified Home Inspectors Web site provides information on becoming certified to inspect homes.

More tips here.

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TrendHunter:

US parents can now hire a private service to check if their teenagers are getting involved with drugs. Sniff Dogs offers a way of checking out drugs in private homes for the first time. The service is billed as discreet, as parents can not only conduct a search without their teenager’s knowledge, but guarantee that the search will be thorough. Sniff Dogs also offers similar services for employers.

Many young people do use drugs long before their parents know. The Sniff Dogs website quotes a Pride Survey result: “Every day, approximately 4,700 American youth under the age of 18 try marijuana for the first time.” Marijuana is known as a gateway drug that leads to trying other illicit substances.

Sniff Dogs was started by a mother of teenage boys who caught one her sons smoking pot. Her trust shaken, she wanted other alternatives to really know that drugs were no longer in the house.

Sniff Dogs operates in New Jersey and Ohio and charges $200 an hour for the services of a highly trained dog and its handler, both of which are certified by the National Narcotic Detection Dog Association.

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Unusual Business Ideas That Work:

Renee Wood says she’s used to weeping at work. She runs an online bereavement-gift outfit, Comfort Co., from suburban Geneva and gets calls all day from people who want to buy something special for someone who has just lost a loved one. Compassion comes naturally to Wood—she was a social worker in a neonatal unit in Little Rock for years before she moved to Illinois—but it was only in 2000 that she figured out how to make money from it. Her sister-in-law’s father died, and Wood couldn’t find a suitable gift. She crafted a pendant out of her daughter’s Play-Doh and took it to a silversmith to make into a necklace.

Wood put a photo of the pendant on the Web and sold 150 of them. After getting a $6,000 home-equity loan from Harris Bank, she went to gift shows and found more items to carry on her site, thecomfortcompany.net, including Christmas tree ornaments to remember lost ones at the holidays. Wood, 42, has added Spanish-language products and would like to expand her pet-sympathy line. Revenue jumped to $625,000 last year, from $53,000 in 2003. “The more I grow, the more people I help feel better.”

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Springwise:

When consumers celebrate special occasions, a little gravanity goes a long way and bigger tends to be better.

5starbaby‘s movie poster birth announcements, which we covered earlier this year, are one case in point, and recently one of our spotters hit upon another: poster-sized wedding invitations.

Seattle-based Poster Bride makes invitations to celebrate weddings in grand style. Each hand-printed serigraph is custom-designed for the client using a wide range of papers. Sizes available range from the standard A7 invitation all the way up to a 19-by-25-inch silk-screened poster that serves not just as an invitation but also as a timeless gift of art for wedding participants. Invitations are sketched by hand, rendered onto film, transferred to a silk screen and then carefully printed by Poster Bride. Poster-sized invitations cost USD 15 each, with a minimum order of 50 pieces.

One to bring to a market near you, or—perhaps even more compelling—how about extending the concept to other types of invitations? When the gravanity is poster-sized, so too must be the invitations—whether for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, quinceaneras or retirements. Let the super-sizing begin!

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BusinessWeek:

Can developing free software for mobile phones be a business? It can if you’re Illusion Labs, a fledgling company in the Swedish port city of Malmö.

Illusion Labs was started a year ago by Carl Loodberg and Andreas Alptun, who had worked together at another Swedish company called TAT, designing software for companies including Samsung and Nvidia (NVDA). They set up their own company so they could concentrate on developing applications specifically for Apple’s iPhone. “When the iPhone came out, we were excited about the big screen, the graphics chip, and the good components,” says Loodberg. “We thought it was an opportunity too big to pass up.”

It looks like they were right. The first game they developed has become one of the most popular pieces of software for the iPhone.

The game is called Labyrinth, a digital update to the old wooden box on which you maneuver a small silver ball through a maze while avoiding cut-out holes the ball could plunge into. The game, which is available for free from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, is being downloaded 80,000 times a day, according to Loodberg, and is getting rave reviews from users. “Controls extremely precise,” wrote one person on iTunes. “Smooth, very fluid, and is realistic,” wrote another.

While the game is free, its success could mean rich rewards for Illusion Labs. The company is selling a souped-up version of the game, which is also quite popular, for $6.99 on iTunes. More promising, advertising agencies have contacted the company to develop variations on the game with the logos of advertisers embedded in them.

Marketing and Mobile Phones… read on.

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Associated Press:

Seventeen-year-old Alexis Corocan spends about $5 a month on clothes, accessories and eyes of various shapes and shades for her online persona on IMVU, a popular Internet hangout.

For 29 cents, for example, she can buy a set of deep gray eyes framed by dark lashes. Sixty cents gets her a white tiger. Or for $1.21, she could have an infant named Baby Candy.

Five dollars a month doesn’t sound like much, but through these microtransactions — payments of little as a quarter for a virtual item — IMVU Inc. reaps roughly $1 million in revenue each month.

Micropayments have been one of the Internet’s most-hyped and least-successful ideas — until now, as virtual world creators and video game companies are beginning to expect, and even depend on, players to buy virtual goods in little chunks.

The idea has already taken hold in Asia, where piracy is widespread, making it harder for companies to profit from the traditional model of selling the games themselves. Now some game companies in the U.S. are taking a stab at micropayments as a serious source of revenue.

Instead of charging for each virtual item separately, companies sell chunks of credits — through PayPal, credit card transactions or physical game cards bought in stores like Target — usually for $5 to $25 at a time. Users then spend the credits in small installments, which often amount to just a few cents.

Corocan, of Aurora, Ill., says the money she spends is worth it, but anything more a few dollars a month “is taking it too far.” Read more.

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Bizcommunity.com:

New product researcher
Staff: One to start.
Fee: R300 to R450 per hour, R7 000 to R10 000 per project, or a percentage of sales.
Premises: Small office or home office.
Qualifications: Technical experience, market knowledge, research and interviewing skills.
Equipment: Scanner, copier, computer, internet access, fax and phone.

Whenever a company comes up with a new idea, a viability study is done. Big corporations often have employees managing this task, but smaller companies cannot afford a full-time person to attend to this and need to hire outside assistance. With market competition increasing, each company that generates new ideas wants to know whether their product is viable. Your job is not only to find out how the product will do in the marketplace, but also to see what the competitors are up to, as well as the cost, trends and consumer needs.

Errand service
Staff: Start with one messenger and yourself and build from there.
Fee: Flat rate per errand depending on distance and time.
Premises: Home based.
Qualifications: Organisational skills, time management and energy.
Equipment: Cell phone, reliable car or bakkie and GPS (or a good old fashioned map book).

There are just not enough hours in the day to do what you want to. Paying the bills, grocery shopping, getting the kids and renewing the car license become a stress factor that leaves most people too busy to do these things as they cannot leave work to attend to them.

An errand service takes care of all these concerns during the day when everyone else is at work. The private market is also not the only avenue to pursue, as many offices would have to hire a driver to do the job. An errand company will do the work at a fraction of the cost.

If you have a bakkie there is also the opportunity to get delivery work at auctions where people buy goods but do not have the transport to take it to its destination.

Online internet researcher
Staff: One person to start.
Fee: R100 to R400 per search.
Premises: Home or small office.
Qualifications: Knowledge of the internet, marketing and business background.
Equipment: Computer, fax, internet access and phone.

Internet access is expanding in South Africa and leisure time is decreasing. People are doing more online shopping, especially around Christmas when the shops are too crowded. Companies need to know which products are popular and what their competitors offer. This service can be rendered with a little networking knowledge and an internet connection. Trends change extremely quickly. For instance, last year the top-selling product on the internet was car satellite navigation systems. This may not be the case for long, and the internet researcher can provide breaking industry news to companies.

Small business consulting
Staff: One person to start.
Fee: From R100 per hour depending on experience level.
Premises: Home or small office.
Qualifications: Background in the field that you want to consult in, some experience is also beneficial
Equipment: Computer, fax, internet access, phone and specialty equipment if necessary.

Gain experience by offering your services to small businesses who are not able to afford the rates of established companies. While as a recent graduate you cannot offer a track record or experience you can off-set that with affordable rates and offering innovative solutions that work. You have to know everything about the company that you consult with as well as their products if you have to help them find solutions.

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Marketing Web:

A special edition of Trendwatching.com‘s Trend Briefing lists 41 new business ideas, aimed to stimulate the imagination of entrepreneurial types.

We’ve picked some of those that caught our eye, and could be popular in South Africa.

Crowd Clout
One trend that Trendwatching.com has reported on is the rising power of crowds. It gives the example of a new, San Francisco-based site called Carrotmob which used the clout of crowds (thus the trend is known as crowd clout) to reward companies that do good. The group wants to create a broad network of consumers and form partnerships with larger advocacy groups.

Mobilising these consumers, Carrotmob will approach companies in a particular industry with suggestions, and invite them to make the changes they have identified. It will then choose one company in that industry to implement the suggestions. If it does so, Carrotmob’s members will reward the company with “an unprecedented kind of shopping spree” to boost short-term company profits, as well as proclaim the company the most responsible in its industry.

Carrotmob’s first campaign took place in March when Carrotmob members physically turned up at San Francisco’s K&D Market. All receipts were collected to keep track of the total gross revenue that the mob brought to the store. As agreed on prior to the event, K&D Market took 22% of that amount and spent it on upgrades to make their store more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. At least 300 people turned up, spending US$9,276.50 (including a Yahoo! donation of US$1,000).

It would be great to see South African consumers get involved in these kind of initiatives and take back the power from major retailers.

The Me-factor
Trendwatching.com has come up with the term MECONOMY to refer to popularity of all things “Me, myself and I”

One self-centred trend it focuses on is 5starbaby.com which offers personalised birth announcements fashioned after movie posters. Each movie poster is tailor-made for the new arrival, complete with the critical stats about the baby’s birth and the names of loved ones as “supporting cast.” Parents are listed as “producers,” the doctor is named as “director” and the hospital is listed as the “filmed in” setting, for example.

And another one for proud parents: Japanese Yosimiya sells bags of rice printed with a newborn’s photo, name and date of birth. The bags are shaped to resemble a swaddled baby. But the key feature is that the bags contain the baby’s exact weight in rice. Holding the bag will therefore feel like holding the baby. Read more.

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CNNMoney.com:

It was too weird to be true. In late 2006, a series of videos appeared on YouTube about a Willow Springs, Ill., resident named Kyle Bone who’d created a successful product called “the anti-shirt” – a shirt that exposed the area of one’s torso that a normal tee shirt would cover and revealed the area that would otherwise be exposed. In short, said Bone, it cured the age-old problem of “farmer’s tan.”

Viewers who investigated Bone’s site found a link to another site, www.ideawins.com, where they could enter an American Idol-like search for the best small business idea in America. And, oh, they would also download a free copy of Microsoft Office Accounting.

As you’ve probably guessed, Bone doesn’t actually exist. He was invented by StrawberryFrog, a ten-year-old ad agency based in New York City. StrawberryFrog is one of those small, self-styled renegade shops like Mother, Brooklyn Brothers, and Our Man in Havana that big companies call when they are having trouble moving products and don’t feel they are getting results from their large agencies.

Thanks to StrawberryFrog, more than two million people have downloaded the free version of the accounting software. (The company won’t disclose how many users have upgraded to the paid version, but it claims the number was substantial.) Meanwhile, the agency’s campaign was short-listed for a prestigious Lion award in June at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. “StrawberryFrog hasn’t been around that long,” says Jane Bedford, founder of The Bedford Group, a consulting firm that helps large corporations select ad agencies. “But they are very well known for their creative work and their digital skills.” Full article.

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Wall Street Journal Blogs:

1. Tap your own experiences. Stick with industries and topics you know and preferably have worked in. You’ll be best-positioned to spot great business opportunities and take advantage of them – and have a leg up on any competitors who don’t share your expertise.

2. Solve problems. The most successful businesses are those that solve problems many people grapple with. And problems are everywhere – you just have to figure out what they are, and devise the most profitable and practical answers. Remember, it’s execution – not the idea – that makes a business work.

3. Corner the experts. Figure out who the smartest people are in the industries you’re looking at, and tap their brains for ideas and the types of problems they think need solutions. They can even act as an advisory board while you’re building your business.

4. Network online. Many Web sites let users post their business ideas and get feedback from other users.

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