Business Idea of the Day

Via: TechnaBob.com

12 years ago you might have recognized the name Bill Bartmann. He was on the richest lists with thanks to his debt collection company, Commercial Financial Services. After a serious scandal hit him and his business that is when everything began to go under reports Inc. . We started CFS in 1985.

According to Website Magazine , e-commerce merchants who are still unsure of what consumers want this holiday season can direct their efforts toward providing user reviews, security verification and fair pricing. In a word, 2010 holiday shoppers are looking for online retailers they can trust. That was the fundamental message from ChannelAdvisor’s 2010 Consumer Shopping Habits Survey, the e-commerce solutions provider’s third annual report to help merchants prepare for the holiday season. An eye-opening 92-percent of the participating consumers said that they read product reviews, and nearly half admitted that reviews influence their purchasing decisions one way or the other. Shoppers also listed the top three most influential promotions that drive purchases as best price, free shipping and trusted seller status, and the top three indicators of trust were security verification, user reviews and website design aesthetics

Chris Schultz can divide his time in New Orleans into pre- and post-K periods: before and after Katrina reports Portfolio.com . For Schultz, founder of the technology incubator Voodoo Ventures, the difference is that stark. What Schultz—who founded and sold an Internet travel business, Destination V.I.P., before moving to New Orleans from Los Angeles in 2002—has seen in the last five years is new blood in the Big Easy. “We had an amazing ‘brain gain’ post-K of smart, passionate young people moving to New Orleans to make a difference,” the 36-year-old told Portfolio.com

The Washington Post reports that the number of babies born in the United States has dropped for the second year in a row, according to new federal statistics released Friday that provide more evidence that the nation’s economic troubles are affecting the birth rate. Provisional data for 2009 found that an estimated 4,136,000 babies were born in the United States in 2009, a 2.6 percent drop from 2008, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The drop follows a 2 percent fall in births that occurred between 2007 and 2008, which pushed the nation’s fertility rate below 2.1 per woman, meaning Americans were no longer giving birth to enough children to keep the population from declining.

If you’re having computer problems, who do you call? If your computer is outdated then tech support for your machine might be out of the question. However, to take your computer in to a repairman can cost $50 or more just for a consultation and if you want them to come to your home that fee only gets higher. One entrepreneur has found an alternative to the traditional tech support that allows you to pay for only the time spent helping you, whether it is 5 minutes or an hour. Computer Specialist Online was started by Ramanath as an alternative to fixed rate services that overcharged customers the only needed simple solutions

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Tom Quinn isn’t the kind of entrepreneur who needs help getting his ideas in front of the right people. So why is he pitching his latest idea—a portable system to convert food scraps and other waste into ethanol—on a website frequented by basement tinkerers and dorm-room startups? Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Quinn’s E-Fuel is among more than 1,000 companies, inventors, and students vying for funding in a General Electric contest called the ecomagination Challenge

According to a story at CNNMoney.com , “Made in USA still matters.” Is, and will remain Aegis Bicycles’ motto, even if it ultimately becomes the death knell for the company, promised owner Pete Orne. Orne bought the business in 2004 and like so many domestic businesses, it’s hanging on by a thread. Three years ago, Aegis was selling about 800 frames a year for between $3,000 to $4,000 each, making as much as $3 million a year. Then the recession hit. “The economy took us by surprise,” said Orne.

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, Raymond Stauffer was shopping at a New Jersey mall when he noticed something peculiar about the bow ties on display at Brooks Brothers: They were labeled with old patent numbers. Stauffer also happens to be a patent lawyer. He sued Brooks Brothers Inc. in federal court, claiming it broke the law by marking its adjustable bow ties with patents that expired in the 1950s.