CoolBusinessIdeas Newsletter Issue 17

CoolBusinessIdeas Newsletter Issue 17: 23/05/05 – 05/06/05
New Business Ideas/Opportunities Featured In This Issue:
AGRICULTURE
Clean Gardening
About this time of year green thumb urbanites are struggling to find corners of land, or more realistically window sill space, to grow a few little herbs or vegetables. Garden in a Bag, available at Wishing Fish, makes the process a bit smoother by including all the necessary elements to grow various herbs and even some vegetables.
Clean Gardening
Urban escapists looking for the perfect artisanal farm like the idea of raising animals for fun and profits that don’t involve slaughter.
HEALTH
Period Balm
Fortunately Amy Galper, a New York-based aromatherapist and shiatsu therapist, has created Girl Balm to ease menstrual pain and even some of the histrionics associated with it.
DESIGN
Aesthetic Counts
As we’re rapidly moving towards Dan Pink’s right-side brain, design-loving, aesthetics-driven economy, an abundance of opportunities has opened up for smart designers. One sector ripe for the picking: computers.
FOOD & BEVERAGE
Chicken Fries From BK
Hungry to lure in customers at all hours, Burger King is tentatively planning the launch this summer of a spicy, 4-inch-long, fried white-meat chicken snack that looks like a cross between a chicken strip and french fry.
Toilet Restaurant
Displaying fancy toilet seats studded with flowers and shells, colourful bathtubs, faucets, mirrors and shower curtains, the well-lit window in this southern Taiwan city looks like a showroom for a trendy bathroom brand.
ONLINE
Thank You, BitTorrent
Thousands of consumers are using the software to download hundreds of movies and hours upon hours of television programming.
MOBILE
M-Coaching
French Wireless operator Orange has just launched an “SMS mobile coaching service” to help students study for their Baccalauréat exam.
MARKETING
Consumer Evangelists
There is no stopping the trend of creative consumers contributing to, or even owning your advertising campaigns, both authorized and behind your back.
Knowing Your Behavior
Picture this, you’re shopping online for a new minivan, surfing automaker websites and buying guides. You then head to the homepage of your local paper to check out the headlines, and at the top of the page is an ad for a local car dealer. That’s behavioral marketing for you.
GADGETS
Tulip Laptop
The Tulip E-Go Diamond notebook is inlaid with solid palladium white gold plates in which thousands (80 carats) of top-quality, brilliant cut diamonds have been pave set with surgical precision.
Friendly Touch
Millennials get a chuckle out of cheeky products that play off of intricate relationship interactions.
TECHNOLOGY
Voice Privacy
Babble provides voice confidentiality and security of information in open-plan work environments.
Smart Sleepers
Are you a real grump in the mornings? Do you wake up every day feeling tired, embittered, aggrieved, and all too ready to hit the snooze? The SleepSmart clock will help you!
Sleeping Partner Music
Aura is a prototype background communication device that aims to create a sense of emotional presence between two people who are separated by space or time.
RETAIL
One Buck Concept
When siblings Jackie Bell, 48, and Wayne Bell, 46, realized high-quality items were no longer readily available to stock their industrial salvage yard, they knew it was time to change gears. So they stuck with the concept of one person’s junk being another’s treasure and opened up a secondhand clothing store.
CONSUMER GOODS
Reflective Wear
Reflective Material helps you to be seen at dawn, dusk, or night, in all weather conditions. Versatility, performance and fashion come together in Scotchlite reflective material.
LIFESTYLE
Virtual Parking
Refinery, a Top 25 U.S. interactive agency, announced that it is building an application for the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) that for the first time will link the City’s more than 1,000 off-street parking venues, even those not managed by PPA, through a consumer-friendly Web site.
MUSIC
In Search of the Music DNA
In a downtown office building an hour’s drive north of Silicon Valley, the technology revolution beats on. Welcome to Savage Beast Technologies Inc., a five-year-old software start-up that is busy building a ”music genome” to identify the world’s recorded music.
GAMES
Be A Boardgame Boss
Playing games is an important part of every childhood–but for sisters Callie and Pam Weiant, the homemade game their mother created for them as children inspired them to become entrepreneurs.
FASHION
Love Fakes?
As fakes become harder to spot – and more expensive – taking the low road has become more acceptable. And Millennials just love to make a stylish statement.
WIRELESS
Blink Contactless Credit Card
JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Thursday introduced a credit card that allows a consumer to merely wave it past a sensor to make payments, a function already common at many U.S. gas stations.
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