| 2009 Boost Your Business Contest Posted: 23 Jun 2009 11:47 AM PDT 
There’s not a lot of time left to enter Forbes’ 2009 “Boost Your Business” Contest. If you’re interested, you’d better get cracking. Forbes.com, home page for the world's business leaders, invites entrepreneurs to enter its third annual "Boost Your Business" small business contest. Contestants can now submit their entries at www.forbes.com/byb. In the first round of the contest, open through June 30, contestants submit a 500-word write-up about their small business, including a description of the business model, current capitalization and theoretical plan for investing the prize money. Entries will be judged by small business experts, Forbes.com editors as well as readers. Contestants who survive the first round will be asked to provide more information, including a 30-second "elevator pitch" video recording. Twenty semi-finalists will make it to the second round, and five finalists will ultimately be selected to compete for a grand prize worth $100,000 in cash and premium advertising on Forbes.com, based on more detailed business plans and live presentations before a panel of expert judges. The contest runs through November; the grand-prize presentation will honor the winner at an awards ceremony held in December. "Our contest aims to identify young businesses that, with a bit of nourishing capital, have a real chance at serious growth," said Brett Nelson, Forbes Entrepreneurs Editor. "Better yet, we hope to educate millions of aspiring entrepreneurs along the way." Complete information about the contest is available within the "Boost Your Business" section of Forbes.com's Entrepreneurs channel, at www.forbes.com/byb. Here, readers can enter the contest and browse tips for raising capital, writing a good business plan, navigating increasingly competitive markets and much more.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| Boy Creates Creature That Eats Plastic Posted: 23 Jun 2009 11:29 AM PDT 
 photo credit: Jim Doran
Keep and eye on this, there’s either a real opportunity here in a few years, or a monster movie in the making. Mother Nature Network:
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 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. 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. 
photo credit: mugley
Daniel’s experiment was, could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster? He selectively bred microbes that ate the plastic the fastest. After several weeks of breeding, he had created an organism that that could break down plastic by 43% in just six weeks. From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| The Death Of The Corner Pharmacy Posted: 23 Jun 2009 11:11 AM PDT 
CNNMoney.com:
Each morning that he unlocks the doors of Cottage Pharmacy, owner Ken Villani fights a losing battle. Revenue at his Woodbury, N.Y., store has been dropping for months. But unlike at other retail establishments, sales at his pharmacy may not rebound in tandem with consumer confidence. That’s because more and more of Villani’s customers are getting their drugs in bulk from mail-order companies and no longer need to set foot in his store at all. “I’m a dinosaur in the industry,” Villani says proudly of Cottage Pharmacy, which has been open for more than 30 years and today fills between 300 and 400 scripts a day. “Service has enabled us to survive up to this point, but we’re losing the customer traffic we had. If they don’t come in for the prescription, the less likely it’ll be that they’ll come in to buy shampoo or gum.” Villani can’t fight mail order competition through store quality alone. Ironically, he relies on mail-order companies just as much as he contends with them. The mail-order drug business is run by a few huge corporations that, since the 1980s, have acted as middlemen between drug manufacturers and consumers. Health insurance companies contract with these companies, known as “pharmacy benefit managers” (PBMs), to administer their customers’ prescription plans. Photo by rx340b.com.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| Let Me Sleep On It Posted: 23 Jun 2009 10:10 AM PDT 
Physorg.com:
The study by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and first author Denise Cai, graduate student in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology, shows that REM directly enhances creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state. “We found that - for creative problems that you’ve already been working on - the passage of time is enough to find solutions,” said Mednick. “However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.” Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas. Importantly, the study showed that these improvements are not due to selective memory enhancements. A critical issue in sleep and cognition is whether improvements in behavioral performance are the result of sleep-specific enhancement or simply reduction of interference - since experiences while awake have been shown to interfere with memory consolidation. The researchers controlled for such interference effects by comparing sleep periods to quiet rest periods without any verbal input. Photo by ywel.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| Moms Scrambling To Make Some Extra Money Posted: 23 Jun 2009 09:09 AM PDT 
TheLedger.com:
In an unusual twist, many moms are finding themselves in a new scenario: seeking work-at-home arrangements driven not by flexibility - think soccer practices and piano recitals - but as the best option to supplement family income. With a surge in male breadwinners out of work, mothers are selling jewelry out of their kitchens, running businesses out of their living rooms and seeking Internet opportunities to make up for the shortfall in household budgets. Indeed, women are scrambling to find anything that they can get their hands on to pay a few bills. Some are even working from home to supplement their part-time income. For most men, the main priority still is finding a full-time job, devoting almost all their day to their search. But with four unemployed workers for every job opening, moms like Kim Perez of Pembroke Pines are moving into action. A few months ago, recession reality forced Perez, mother of a toddler, to look for new money-making possibilities when her hours as a retail sales associate were cut in half. Her husband, a builder, has been out of work for almost a year. Perez considers herself in transition. She has set up a makeshift office in her bedroom and sells glass jewelry. “I’m hoping I can turn this into a full-time arrangement and make good money.” The numbers are jarring: 800,000 women have lost full-time positions in the past 12 months, and those on payrolls part time grew by nearly 900,000. For the women who work part time, first-quarter median earnings were $269 a week. But men are increasingly seeing their schedules reduced, too. As of March, the number of men working part-time positions increased 14 percent from a year earlier. Photo by Miami Herald.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| The Real Scoop On Grants For Small Bizs Posted: 23 Jun 2009 08:08 AM PDT 
The Houston Chronicle:
You've heard the adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is? That definitely applies in the world of government grants. The government just does not give out money to open a "regular" business like a restaurant, bookstore or car wash, with no obligation to pay the money back. Instead, the government gives grants to nonprofit organizations such as colleges, universities and research institutions so that they can use the money for projects and activities that will benefit the community as a whole, or perhaps help a special interest group. Some examples are grants to provide job training to displaced workers, finance a downtown redevelopment project, or create a substance abuse treatment program. About the only grants given to businesses are awarded under the Small Business Innovation Research. or SBIR program. But SBIR grants aren't for businesses that are just starting or hoping to expand; they're for very specialized businesses that are involved in unique and innovative research projects. The companies that win the grant money use the dollars to develop and commercialize ground-breaking new technologies that have a broad benefit. Of course, you've probably also heard it said that there's an exception to every rule. That applies to funding for grants, too. Depending on who you are, where you are located, and what type of business you want to start, there may be some grant money for you. For example, if you are a veteran, or disabled, you may be eligible for assistance to learn new skills, or perhaps buy needed equipment for your business. If you are in a distressed area, your economic development organization may have aid to give you if your business will bring jobs to the area. But this type of money is extremely scarce, and there are very particular guidelines as to who gets it and how it must be used. Photo by acf-fr.org.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| Free Small Town Business Marketing Books Posted: 23 Jun 2009 07:29 AM PDT |
| Legal Quirk Lets Anyone Sue Over Patents Posted: 23 Jun 2009 07:07 AM PDT 
Associated Press:
Look carefully at the lid to your coffee cup or the handle of your disposable razor. A recent ruling on an obscure, century-old statute has opened the door for people familiar with the finer points of patent law to sue companies that stamp their products with expired patent numbers. A couple of sharp-eyed lawyers are shooting for a financial windfall through the nearly forgotten law, and the Justice Department says they have a case. The ruling in federal court in Alexandria appears to be the first of its kind upholding the constitutionality of a law allowing anyone to sue in the name of the government if they have evidence that a company is guilty of “false markings” — namely, claiming patent protections that have expired or never existed. The person who sues gets to keep half of any money awarded, with the rest going to the government. Damages of up to $500 per violation are allowed, which for mass-produced items with “Patent” stamped on every product could theoretically run into billions of dollars. Despite the financial incentive to sue, lawyers in the Virginia case say no one other than businesses with a financial stake availed themselves of the law. Continue Reading: “Legal Quirk Lets Anyone Sue Over Patents” Photo by premierpatents.com.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| Intro to Server Virtualization Posted: 23 Jun 2009 07:05 AM PDT 
photo credit: Ronnie Garcia
It’s not my usual fare, but my latest article, Introduction to Server Virtualization, is up on Mid-Market Innovators. Here’s a snippet: A typical data center contains many servers. Traditionally, since hardware was cheap and applications were complex, many administrators installed one application per server. Though this provided their applications with security and isolation from other processes, it resulted in server sprawl. Workload on these servers would vary widely depending on the time of day and user activity. Many of the servers would spend a large percentage of their time idling away, doing practically nothing. Average server utilization levels are typically about 10%. Server virtualization increases each physical machine's utilization by dividing physical servers into multiple virtual servers. Each virtual server contains its own operating environment and applications; it looks and acts exactly like a real server.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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| PeoplePond Helps You Corral Your Online Identity Into One Source Posted: 23 Jun 2009 05:21 AM PDT  PeoplePond understands the networking individual. Through SEO (search engine optimization), they help their members take better control of their online identities. They help train search engines to rank the most relevant information higher in the search while also guiding prospects to a place where they can find all the information they need about you, instead of the bits and pieces that they might find around the web. If you ever needed one place to control all of your virtual identities, this is the place to do it.
Tell us a little about PeoplePond. People have been told to create lots of content across the Internet in order to improve their chances of reaching their best prospects. What has been discovered from this is that prospects will locate a part of someone's online identity but will not know that there is much more in the other locations. PeoplePond increases the visibility of each location while also serving as a central online identity hub that not only trains the search engines to promote the right content but also serves as a great landing page to link to that exposes prospects to the entire online identity. In short, PeoplePond provides a boost to one's personal SEO, and identifies their entire online identity to visitors. Additionally, increased exposure is enabled by increased visibility in search engines, distribution of the PeoplePond profile information using blogging platform plugins, Facebook applications and the free and open ADAM API.
What does one of your profile pages do for the user? The PeoplePond profile is designed from the ground up to give the owner complete control over associating their online identity with relevant topics, terms, industries, etc. This in turn will train the search engines to rank higher the locations which make up their online identity when people search for them. Additionally there is the opportunity on the profile page for visitors to reach out to the author and request their contact information.
How much does your service cost? PeoplePond is currently offering free profile page hosting and the "Bubbling to the Top" SEO package. This package enables all the needed search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities and tools of the PeoplePond profile while also eliminating any advertising for visitors. This package is an annual subscription service for only $36 USD per year. Some people have struggled to compose what they see as the best "About Me" biography for their profile. For them we offer two services. For only $99 USD, we can write a professional and SEO optimized biography for them or for only $49 USD we can proof and edit one they provide. There is another item available on our additional services menu which no one purchased yet. For only $3 USD we offer verbal abuse. I don't know why that hasn't caught on as well as the other services ;)
What separates you from the competition? There are companies which each offer a part of what we do but there is no one that we know of who is offering everything harmonized into a single service. Our company is uniquely equipped to be the first to accomplish this since they are the same people who created PRWeb, the first online press release company that revolutionized that industry. PeoplePond will soon be revolutionizing how people treat and develop personal brands.
Approximately how many members do you have? We still have a lot of growing to do. We are not heavily promoting PeoplePond yet since there are still some capabilities we want to roll out first. Probably the most important of these can already be seen on the profile page. Identity verification will soon be available to PeoplePond users. It will enable them to prove that they are who they say they are and also that they control the Web sites in their online identity. Given the ease with how someone can quickly and easily hijack another's online identity and ruin their brand, this will provide brand holders a means of providing bona fide authentication of their online assets.
What is your growth rate? Our approach is to maintain manageable growth as we work through bugs and continue to develop our feature offerings. At our launch at SXSW in March of this year, we learned that we were right on target with our service offerings and we continue to pay especially close attention to customer feedback going forward during this early phase in our product's release into the wild.
How long did it take to build PeoplePond from idea to launch? PeoplePond has been in development for the last 10 months but has been in the concept stage for much longer. The idea had been churning in its founder's, David McInnis, head for quite a while. He is also the founder of PRWeb and sold that company to Vocus™ a couple years back. David is accomplishing the same type of goal here, pointing all this SEO knowledge and technology directly at the users' personal brands.
What goals would you like to reach over the next year or so? We have learned to be patient and not rush development, preferring to do it right, rather than first. We have a number of features and additional distribution channels we are planning to build into PeoplePond in the near future. There are also opportunities to take this outward to provide additional visibility in specific verticals. We'll see where the market takes us.
What are some of the lessons you can take from aiding in the creation this service? I have learned many things in my short but intense history in building startup web companies. Several primary things are culture, availability and liberation. One of my friends recently visited PeoplePond's offices and noted, “you are all like a family.” We do maintain this attitude in our work environment by combining play and work in the office. I relate it to my experiences with mountaineering; when on a rope team you only move as fast as your slowest member and everyone is critical to the success and safety of the whole team. This extends outward towards our clients as well. Some of the earliest adopters came onboard when we had some bugs on the website. Yet they stuck with us purely for the fact that we responded to their problems, letting them be part of the solution. Finally, a person must feel liberated to be what they want to be on a service like PeoplePond, we give our customers a blank palette to build their own persona, wrapping content around them that best suits them. Whether it is a web designer looking for work online or a master violin builder looking for a powerful way to reach a bigger audience, PeoplePond is the place to be.
From Business Opportunities Weblog. 
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