Alternative Business Ideas » great business ideas

Beautiful Furniture Made For You Without High Street Mark Ups

Les — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:55:04 +0000

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.

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Create Computer Games Without Learning A Line Of Code

Les — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:40:03 +0000

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.

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High Tech Wheels Help Kids To Ride

Les — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:03:39 +0000

If you have older children I am sure you remember them progressing from tricycles to bicycles with stabilizers and then those more energetic days when you were running alongside the little ones while they learned to ride a bicycle without stabilizers or training wheels. You were the guiding hand. Well all that is about to change.

Two Wheel Biking Made Easier

A San Francisco company Gyrobike has developed and patented the Gyrowheel which replaces a bicycle’s standard front wheel. The Gyrowheel uses gyroscopic technology to keep kids steady on their new bikes. This smart wheel can sense when the rider is starting to lose balance and then re-centres the bike beneath the rider preventing the chid from falling off.

Inside the Gyrowheel is a relatively heavy disc that spins independently of the Gyrowheel, the disc works as a gyroscope. When the spinning disc is turned off course it creates a force that tries to correct the error, the force is known as gyroscopic precession and this stabilizes the bike. The Gyrowheel provides stability at low speeds making it easier and safer to learn to ride on two wheels.

Unlike training wheels or stabilizers the Gyrowheel promotes correct riding techniques helping children change over to two-wheel riding. There are three stability settings that aid the transition from assisted to two wheel biking. As the riders confidence improves the amount of stability provided by the Gyrowheel is reduced.

Currently available is the 12 inch wheel, with a 16 inch Gyrowheel coming out in May 2010, which will be followed by adult wheels and complete kid’s bikes. A 12” Gyrowheel costs around $100.

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Create Your Your Own Mini Photo Albums

Les — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:21:57 +0000

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.

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Save Money On Sports and Concert Tickets

Les — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:56:07 +0000

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.

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From Scrap to High Fashion

Les — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:43:40 +0000

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.

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 them 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.

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Grommet Redefined.

Les — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:36:08 +0000

According to Wikipedia the definition of a grommet is “Grommets and eyelets are metal, plastic, or rubber rings that are inserted into a hole made through another material. They may be used to reinforce the hole, to shield something from the sharp edges of the hole, or both.” However there is another, more interesting

According to the Daily Grommet a grommet is:

A wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery.
It has great utility, style or invention. Or, very often, all three.
It comes from a designer, inventor, artist, or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create. Someone who loves to share their creations and talk to people about why they do what they do.
It comes from a company that treats its customers well.
Finally, like any intelligent or beautiful product, it has a great story, ready to be told.

The Massachusetts based Daily Grommet features the story of a new product each day. The sort of products chosen go from Mandolin food slicers, DIY sandal designs, solar flashlights though to handcrafted jewellery and baby slings. At the present time they have well over two hundred product stories, many in video format.
Many products are submitted by site visitors, others are found through the team members own research.

One of the features I like was their Grommet widget which allows other websites to insert a line of code featuring todays product story.

This is a great site, great ideas, so I should never run short of a post again.

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