Murray set up the company in September last year after spending five years in R&D to get the technology up to scratch. She invested £200,000 of her own cash into the start-up, but it was tough going from the off. “I could have given up a thousand times,” says Murray. “There were so many complexities involved in designing the actual device. Radio is a black art, you can’t theorise a working system. It’s all about trial and error.”

The service currently boasts 4,000 customers. Murray predicts this figure will hit 10,000 by 2009 and pull in a turnover of £4m

http://www.realbusiness.co.uk/news/business-woman/5315506/tracking-device-firm-snares-4m-in-its-first-year.thtml

Waiting around for the cable guy tops the list of customer grievances about cable service, according to a recent survey by TeleNav, a company that makes GPS tracking devices. But one entrepreneur, Herve Aimable, sees opportunity in frustration. He runs a service in New York called Wait For Me. It’s exactly what it sounds like: He has hired and bonded five people who do nothing but wait in people’s homes for the cable guy. Each four-hour block costs $250. Since 2006, Aimable has brought in $60,000 from cable-sitting. “This is a valuable service, but it’s sort of a paradox, because you are getting paid for waiting,” Aimable says. Well, not just waiting—these are mostly actors. Says Aimable: “They sit around, they think, and they vocalize.”

READ THE STORY HERE

Back to BWSmallBiz April/May 2008 Table of Contents

Quittner is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York

This is a video from the inventor or founder of Ruby on Rails .

Click here to read

I dont know anything about this site but I keeo getting invitation mails from people I know . The site is about 1 month old and they already have an Alexa Ranking of about 2000

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pimpmysearch.com

I dont know if they are making any money but this is a product that encourages viral marketing .

Dr. Kevin Ham - everyone in this industry knows the name but only a handful of people really know the man. When you run a domain business that reportedly generates well over $1 million a week from various domain-related ventures and a portfolio of approximately 300,000 names, it is easy for the statistics to overshadow the human being behind them. Especially when that person is as humble and self-effacing as the 37-year-old Canadian doctor from Vancouver. 

Like many of the other great entrepreneurs who have blossomed in the domain business, Ham’s drive and work ethic were tempered by circumstances dating back to his childhood. He grew up watching his parents create something literally out of nothing to make sure their kids had a better life than they did. Their values became his values.

Full Story  http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2008/may.htm

There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions.

Since I have started two such businesses already, here are thirteen tips from my own experience.

What to build

1. Build for someone specific

It’s very tempting to create a product for the widest audience. “Everyone can use our product, therefore if even a tiny proportion use it, we’ll be rich!” Beware the generalised product. If your product is not built for anyone in particular, it will not be good for anyone in particular. The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.

On the other hand, if you build something that is directly useful for even just one real human being, chances are there will be others like that user and your product will have some success.

2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche

Niches have numerous advantages. There’s less competition in niches, which means that your marketing dollars will go further to get you new customers. It’ll be easier to target likely buyers since there are probably already channels (blogs, magazines, trade shows) targeting that niche, that you can make use of.

Niches also tend to be very badly served in today’s world. If you look into almost any niche you will find a plethora of awful products that are just begging to be replaced by something better suited. Being able to build great products cheaply is a fairly recent development, and most pre-existing businesses have had to make do with duct-taped, poorly conceived solutions that are begging to be replaced. The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.

3. Solve a real problem that costs money

As DHH pointed out, the way to realistic profitability is not through gathering an outrageous number of eyeballs, but through creating a product that people are willing to pay for. The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself

Full Story Here http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creating-a-successful-new-online-product/

ATLANTA — Hundreds of young Atlanta women are signed up on a Web site that some critics are calling total exploitation. The founders call it free enterprise. And just about everyone Channel 2 showed it to called it shocking. It’s called MyFreeImplants.com and it’s a donation site for young women who want free breast implants. But it’s what they do to get the big money that’s troubling for some.

“Everyone uses sex to sell. That’s what this really is. It’s marketing and this is America,” said MyFreeImplants.com founder Jay Moore.

MyFreeImplants.com is a business venture hatched at a bachelor party in Las Vegas to help young women raise thousands of dollars for breast augmentation surgery through online donors.

The Web site has taken off. Five-thousand women are now signed up. One woman took her bid for new breasts to YouTube.

The surgery isn’t cheap. It’s usually $4,000 for silicon implants and $5,000 for saline. The money is held in an account until the goal is reached and then sent directly to the surgeon selected.

But it’s how the women get the donations that is raising some people’s eyebrows.

Read Whole Article http://www.wsbtv.com/news/16061686/detail.html

Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs.  In the post, ”February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce.  Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas’ initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million. 

For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.

On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar.  Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision.  See ”Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more. 

The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers?  On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out).  On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.

http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/twenty-years-later-no-longer-just-a-hobby/

Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).

Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.

“You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/technology/23howto.html?em&ex=1209441600&en=feb7bd02817e4a02&ei=5087%0A