Based in London, Made feel that consumers are currently not getting the best deal and have to pay top prices so long as they [...]]]> Made.com, (you should look at their website), are an innovative company that allow shoppers to select and order designer furniture at near factory prices by cutting out the high street middle men.

Based in London, Made feel that consumers are currently not getting the best deal and have to pay top prices so long as they are at the mercy of the high street chains. Made, by stripping out the middle man, are taking on the retail giants and offer original furniture design at affordable prices, with savings of up to 80%.

Furniture Made For You

In support of their objectives Made say they are obsessive about design and passionate about their customers offering only handpicked furniture items manufactured and delivered to strict quality control guidelines. Made source globally from specialist, trusted furniture makers who often produce for designer brands.

Unusually consumers can visit Made’s Lab section. Here you can vote for the furniture that you like and in this way the most popular items are selected to be made available to order.

Made believe that good furniture is worth waiting for and as such all items are produced to order and delivered to the UK, a process that takes around ten weeks. Shoppers can monitor the progress of their orders by using Made’s real time tracking. Deliver is arranged so that it is convenient for the customers who are notified by SMS. Within fourteen days of delivery the customer has the right to return the furniture to Made so it is really a fail safe process.

This business model (and web site) gets my vote as one of the best and most refreshing I have seen in a while. Try it out.

Search For Bargains

We have all heard stories of shops and stores making pricing errors that have resulted in a few lucky buyers saving a stack of money when the purchase at the erroneous price.

Apnoti is a real time price search engine gathering product prices in real time for the German, American and [...]]]>

Search For Bargains

We have all heard stories of shops and stores making pricing errors that have resulted in a few lucky buyers saving a stack of money when the purchase at the erroneous price.

Apnoti is a real time price search engine gathering product prices in real time for the German, American and French markets. Apnoti is the first and only real time price search engine on the planet. On-line stores sign up with Apnoti enabling them to reach a huge number of potential buyers. The search engine crawls over sixty five million products from more that ten thousand on-line stores that have signed up with them.

Apnoti are able to provide potential purchasers with price trends from the past four weeks and, importantly, current prices generated within the last few seconds. Most price comparison services can only provide current prices generated on a daily basis.

Apnoti have discovered that sudden price drops, sometimes as high as ninety percent, occur quite regularly and these price drops are most often due to a retailer error. German buyers can take advantage of these mistakes through Preispanne.de, which translates as price breakdown. Preispanne offers an email alert service which notifies subscribers of price drops greater than 50% within selected product categories. The subscribers can seize these mega bargains before the retailer has a chance to correct the pricing error.

Surely there are opportunities here for entrepreneurs to set up webstores using information provided by Preispanne and Apnoti?

design computer gaems

YoYo Games allows aspiring computer game designers to create, share and play games online – just for the fun of it even if the creators have no programming experience.

Game designers start by downloading the free Game Maker software. The software allows you to create professional looking games without having to write code. [...]]]>

design computer gaems

YoYo Games allows aspiring computer game designers to create, share and play games online – just for the fun of it even if the creators have no programming experience.

Game designers start by downloading the free Game Maker software. The software allows you to create professional looking games without having to write code. Game Maker uses easy drag and drop to create games with backgrounds, animated graphics, music, sound effects and even 3D. Game maker comes fully loaded with freeware images and sounds and you can unlock extra functions.

For $25 those who have developed a more serious interest can purchase the Pro Edition of Game Maker which produces games that are free of advertising.

Those with more experience can move onto a built-in programming language which provides more flexibility and scope.

Once you have produced your game you can share your game with other Yoyo users,  currently there over twenty five thousand shared games. You can even burn your games on a CD and sell them.

You can now download a portfolio of photos from the Internet and place them on a tough, polyester, water and crumple resistant material that can be delivered anywhere in the world.

The Dutch company Memolio allows you to upload twenty four images either from your own computer, from Flickr Pro or your Picasa [...]]]>

Mini Photo Albums

You can now download a portfolio of photos from the Internet and place them on a tough, polyester, water and crumple resistant material that can be delivered anywhere in the world.

The Dutch company Memolio allows you to upload twenty four images either from your own computer, from Flickr Pro or your Picasa photo album. Once uploaded you are able to edit each photo, arrange the order in which they are viewed and select the albums colour, title and description thereby making it your own. See a demo

Once you are happy with your arrangement you can preview your portfolio and save it. You can then elect to share your album or make it fully public.

Not only can you share your new creation on-line but you can order a hard copy for 14.99€, which includes tax and shipping around the world. Your print copy is 103mm x 62mm and 5mm thick making it pocket sized and easily portable.

The Memolios have a multitude of uses both personal and for business such as promotional brochures, guides, portfolios and teaching material.

It wasn’t so long ago that everyone was in a hurry to get everything on-line, now the opposite is happening with more and more ideas to get stuff from the on-line world back into the real world.

*emera’s elegant, quilted camera bags are designed to be both fashionable and practical. Beautiful on the outside they are strongly made and [...]]]> Camera equipment bags are almost always drab and unsightly affairs, best hidden under the seat. Now that has all changed with *emera’s camera and lens bag for the fashion conscious about town lady photographers.

*emera’s elegant, quilted camera bags are designed to be both fashionable and practical. Beautiful on the outside they are strongly made and water resistant. They are partitioned and padded to protect expensive and delicate cameras, lenses and other photographic gear.

High Fashion Camera Bags

Inside, the *emera bag has dividers that can be arranged to suit your cameras, lenses and other accessories. There are also smaller pockets for those all important memory cards and other miniature accessories.

Prices start at $149 for the canvas design rising to $169 for the quilted design. At these prices no fashion conscious photographer should be without them.

Now you can save money by finding out if those sports and concert tickets that you are about to buy are going to up or down in price. Seat Geek through its patented, complex algorithm can predict if ticket prices are set on an upward or downward trend. If they are [...]]]>

Save Money On Tickets

Now you can save money by finding out if those sports and concert tickets that you are about to buy are going to up or down in price. Seat Geek through its patented, complex algorithm can predict if ticket prices are set on an upward or downward trend. If they are going up then buy them now, if they are going down wait, save money and buy them at their cheapest.

Bing Travel (previously Farecast) started this trend by predicting the cost of flight tickets and Seat Geek does this for sports fixtures and music. In addition Seat Geek searches the Internet for the best real time deals by searching ticket merchants, including StubHub, eBay and RazorGator.

SeatGeek’s free service is able to make these ticket price predictions through its database which has the prices of millions of historical ticket transactions. The information from the database is passed through SeatGeeks algorithm which produces the price forecasts. The algorithm takes other factors into consideration beside historical ticket prices. For example with sports fixtures the teams’ performances are factored as are such things as the venue, the weather, the type of seat, the interest in the game (is it a championship playoff) and numerous other factors.

SeatGeek’s founder, Jack Groetzinger, reckons that its predictions are correct around eighty percent of the time and as its database gets bigger and its algorithm is improved the accuracy of prediction gets better over time.

This is a great value added idea, which helps the environment and benefits charities. Elvis & Kresse based in Poole, Dorset in the south of England collects scrap fire hose from across the UK and, cleverly, turns it into very fashionable handbags, purses, belts and other fashion accessories. What also [...]]]>

Fire Hose To High Fashion

This is a great value added idea, which helps the environment and benefits charities. Elvis & Kresse based in Poole, Dorset in the south of England collects scrap fire hose from across the UK and, cleverly, turns it into very fashionable handbags, purses, belts and other fashion accessories. What also sets Elvise & Kresse apart is that they give 50% of their profit to the UK Fire Fighters Charity.

The company has been recycling materials besides condemned fire-hose, including

• Waste coffee sacks
• Scrap sail cloth
• Used Air Traffic Control flight strips
• Repurposed sunglasses and optician’s boxes
• Reclaimed pewter for our belt buckles
• Parachute silk
• Decommissioned office furniture textiles.

From these they create belts, guitar straps, wallets (billfolds), iPhone cases, card holders, cufflinks, key rings, candle stick holders, table sets, bowling bags, clutch bags, messenger bags and kit bags.

In addition to supporting the Fire Fighters Charity Elvis & Kresse,because of their use of coffee sacks, provide support to two separate coffee grower initiatives in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Their high fashion products are available both online and from select retailers (see their site) in the UK, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Australia.

In 2007 Zlio started their on-line store creation website that allows minipreneurs to set up their own shop online in under five minutes. Since its inception Zlio has set up more than 362,000 stores covering everything from Arts to Weddings.

Now there is a new contender tinypay.me, which, they state, allows anyone to set up [...]]]>

Tinypay.me

In 2007 Zlio started their on-line store creation website that allows minipreneurs to set up their own shop online in under five minutes. Since its inception Zlio has set up more than 362,000 stores covering everything from Arts to Weddings.

Now there is a new contender tinypay.me, which, they state, allows anyone to set up a micro-store in 60 seconds.

Tinypay.me, based in New York, allows users to quickly create a store. No account is required, sellers chose what products they would like to sell, the images they would like to use to represent the products and their prices. Products can be either physical or virtual. For physical goods, sellers can provide a location where the goods can be inspected or collected from.

Tinypay.me then creates a page for each product and an imbed code lets users include those products on their own sites if they wish.

All payment are handled through Paypal and Tinypay.me charges a small commission of 5% of the sale price. If the seller donates to a charity, Tinypay will match that donation.

As shown by Zlio anything that makes selling easier is almost certain to be a success and this concept could be emulated on a local or niche basis.