Business Idea of the Day

Mashable: What’s the best selling office product on Amazon.com this New Year? Perhaps printer ink and paper for all those holiday pics? Cases for all the new laptops received this Christmas? Try: none of the above.

intellectual properties: Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate: “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.” But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more “distracting” all the time — like a virus.

Website Magazine: 2008 has drawn to a close, and many Web professionals are wondering what next year will bring. It may seem arbitrary to make predictions, but the Web business is not a static industry and forecasting often shines the light on our practical hopes for the future. 1

Mashable: With the recent explosion and expansion of online video, the biggest question is how to best drive viewer action and monetize this new medium. Even with these strong benefits, most agree that the video opportunity has yet to be fully realized. Companies struggle to best make use of this new medium, and have found that porting television-style advertising to the Web is regularly rejected by the online audience. Here are six steps to creating online video that works: 1) Make it Authentic 2) Make it Relevant 3) Make it Engaging 4) Make it Google-Friendly 5) Make an Action Path 6) Make it Shareable All in All: Make it Happen Photo by Travis Gray .

Making It Legal: The home office deduction sounds like it would be a great thing for small business owners. After all, many of us work at home, and it’s not as though the IRS is always so generous when it comes to deductions for the “little guys.” Deducting a portion of rent/mortgage interest, utilities, insurance, repairs, etc., is a very delicious prospect.

BusinessWeek: When Unilever (UN) challenged its scientists to come up with a detergent that uses fewer resources, greener materials, and less packaging, few thought it was possible. Yet Small & Mighty, the industry’s first super-concentrated liquid detergent, launched in October 2005 in a partnership with U.S. retailer Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), 18 months ahead of rivals such as Procter & Gamble (PG). What started as a means to boost Unilever’s green credentials now is opening up avenues of innovation that are helping to drive growth in the company’s once-lackluster laundry unit. Since rolling out Small & Mighty in Europe in January 2007, more than 30 million bottles have been sold.

HometownLife.com: Who knew that Jill Wylie, a stay-at-home mother in Northville Township, would turn out to be an inventor? But after some research and ingenuity, she now has a billiards-related product on the market - the Junior Shark Guiding Wheel. The small, white, plastic device’s use has two uses: It helps protect pool table felt from scrapes and tears and assists beginners by guiding their use of the cue stick.

When you open your garage door, what do you see? Like most people, I would bet that you hope to see everything organized for an optimum amount of space. However, that’s probably not what you see. Ross Nielson of Gorgeous Garage knows exactly how you feel

Funny Patents and Inventions: Is there anyone out there who isn’t familiar with the high five celebratory gesture made by two people, each raising one hand to slap the raised hand of the other? It dates back to 1944 when in the movie, Cover Girl (1944), Phil Silvers’ character, Genius, tears up a telegram and attempts to “high five” co-star, Gene Kelly. US # 5356330 is a patent for an American apparatus simulating a “high five.” It consists of a lower arm portion with an attached simulated hand, an upper arm portion, an elbow joint, which pivotally secures them both and a spring element, which directs them both nowhere near Nirvana but closely towards a pre-determined alignment

The New York Times: A New York couple is betting on the idea that at least one thing is recession-proof: demand for a convenient and clean public toilet. SitOrSquat , an ad-supported Web site and mobile application created by Danika Landers and Jonathan Glanz, delivers a handy listing of public bathrooms, from the ones at Starbucks to Saks Fifth Avenue, in various cities. The mobile version uses an iPhone or BlackBerry’s location detection capabilities to find nearby bathrooms. “Think of it as a restaurant review site, but for toilets,” Mr