Business Idea of the Day

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.

The New York Times reports that although women are still slightly in the minority among global Web users, they are closing ground with men and, once connected, spend about two more hours online a month on average. According to data from comScore, females exceed males particularly in communications, devoting about one-third of their online time to social networking, instant messaging and e-mail messages compared with about one-quarter for men. Women 45 and older exhibited the greatest growth in social networking.

According to paidcontent.org , Jeff Bezos is bullish on mobile, whether it’s Kindles, smartphones or what he calls the “new category” of wireless tablet computers. Why? Amazon customers spent more than $1 billion via mobile device in the past 12 months, including sales by Kindle, and Bezos used the Q2 earnings release to suggest that tablets “over time” could “become a meaningful additional driver for our business.”

According to The New York Times , Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying. An Internet content reviewer, Bess sifts through photographs that people upload to a big social networking site and keeps the illicit material — and there is plenty of it — from being posted. His is an obscure job that is repeated thousands of times over, from office parks in suburban Florida to outsourcing hubs like the Philippines.

Waiting on hold stinks. Free service LucyPhone can listen to the hold music for you, then call you back when a real human picks up. Lifehacker says head to Lucyphone’s site, look up the number of the company you’re calling (or add it to their database), then hand over your own number

While reading Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors , Joseph Collins had a unique thought reports DenverPost.com . “I was reading Charlie’s book and I thought it was very unfair that Eliot Spitzer could just walk into companies and demand their email,” Collins recalled. Spitzer was New York’s Attorney General when the Internet busted, and he exposed a steady stream of embarrassing emails from Wall Street cheats

Until last year, NAP, Inc.’s best known product line was its Sleepy Wrap baby carrier. But when the company launched the Boba Baby Carrier last year, it focused its efforts on social media, especially Twitter, according to a story at Inc.com . Prior to that, we were just using traditional online and print advertising,” says Ashley Jewell, director of social media marketing for NAP.

According to Mashable.com , while most law firms, big and small, tend to err on the traditional side, social media has created new opportunities for attorneys to flourish as thought leaders and entrepreneurs. A recent survey from communications consultancy Greentarget notes that, “While the more traditional marketing channels for law firm credentialing continue to dominate … in-house attorneys now are using new media platforms to deepen their professional networks; to obtain their legal, business, and industry news and information; and to enrich their social and personal lives. Most importantly, they expect that trend to accelerate in the future.” But social media is still uncharted territory for many lawyers, particularly in big firms, said Rachel Zahorsky, a legal affairs reporter for the ABA Journal

Website Magazine takes a look at one of the most creative uses of Twitter we’ve seen yet, and how it landed 300,000 visitors onto the site of online footwear retailer SuperShoes.com in less than two hours. SuperShoes recently held the first-ever known games of Twitterbingo to promote its new Drag & Share feature, which it introduced as a way to integrate social media onto its e-commerce site. The Drag & Share feature prompts customers to drag an item from a product page and drop it and its corresponding link information onto a Twitter (or Facebook or e-mail) icon to initiate two-way communications between merchant and consumer (and consumer’s social networks). Modeled after the classic game, Twitterbingo took the new feature a step further by assigning hidden messages representing each of the five letters of “BINGO” to five predetermined products, and then dropped hints throughout the two one-hour games to help customers find the products they needed to earn letters

Two weeks ago, YouTube celebrated when the number of videos viewed daily on its site reached two billion , a milestone. But according to The New York Times , it also used the occasion to express its envy of television’s continuing hold on viewers: “Although the average user spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube, that’s tiny compared to the five hours a day people spend watching TV,” the company observed on its blog.