Business Idea of the Day

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

An entrepreneur from Brunswick is hoping to save a lighthouse and keep it in the hands of the locals reports Mainebiz . Bob Muller, a consultant with a background in IT and high-tech image mapping, is scrambling to crowd fund between $75,000 and $150,000 in individual $49 donations in order to buy the lighthouse in Casco Bay, which the U.S. General Services Administration is currently selling at auction. He launched a website yesterday and has begun a social media marketing blitz. His challenge is raising the money in a matter of days.

Independent bookstores were battered first by discount chains like Barnes & Noble, then by superefficient Web retailers like Amazon.com. Now the electronic book age is dawning. The New York Times is reporting that with this latest challenge, these stores will soon have a new ally: the search giant Google. Later this summer, Google plans to introduce its long-awaited push into electronic books, called Google Editions. The company has revealed little about the venture thus far, describing it generally as an effort to sell digital books that will be readable within a Web browser and accessible from any Internet-connected computing device

Yahoo Finance : There are 10 independent YouTube stars who made over $100,000 in the past year, according to a study done by analytics and advertising company TubeMogul. From July 2009 to July 2010, TubeMogul used their viewership data to estimate the annual income for independent YouTube partners, which they define as anyone who is not part of a media company or brand. Here’s how they got their estimates: Revenue only comes from banner ads served near content (we ignored pre-roll or overlay since we can’t easily isolate by publisher). Since YouTube banner ads have a two-second load delay, we estimate 2.59% of viewers click away before an ad loads based on separate research

It takes more than just ingenuity to get a product onto retailers’ shelves and into the homes of millions of American consumers. It takes money, marketing and distribution–and most inventors don’t have any of these things. Michael Weinstein is an entrepreneur and internet marketer who runs the Internet division of Lipenwald Inc., a 60-person direct-response marketing company that finds, creates and markets consumer products through the internet, catalogs, direct mail, retail and television, reports Entrepreneur.com . As Chief Internet Officer, Weinstein is responsible for finding products, driving website traffic and increasing internet revenue, as well as ensuring effective online creative development and execution for more than 200 websites that offer thousands of products ranging from collectibles and horticulture to cosmetics and “As-Seen-On-TV” general merchandise

As Mario Jurcic gives business a second try, no one has to tell him to remain humble reports The News-Herald . The 25-year-old entrepreneur loves to talk about his year-and-a-half-old business, SECURE IT Asset Disposition Services, but he doesn’t mind talking about the operation he shut down before that, ESCRAPOHIO.

Vonda Dennis’ clients like to joke that she carries magic pixie dust in her pockets. After all, how else could a crying baby settle so quickly for her? According to the Los Angeles Times , Vonda says that what she does isn’t so much magic but common sense.

Watching fellow college students working for $7.50 an hour after graduation, Tana Walther, a fashion-design major at Kent State University in Ohio, snapped up an alternative offered by her father—to run a Pita Pit restaurant franchise he would buy. “I guess I bought her a job,” says her father, Jan Walther, of North Canton, Ohio. According to The Wall Street Journal , parents often say they would do anything for their child. Setting a child up in business is surely one big test of that bond.

Red boxes, red envelopes and the blue and yellow Blockbuster stores may dominate the movie rental landscape, but according to a recent survey, when Americans want to watch a DVD, they are most likely to turn to their local library. The Hartford Courant reports the survey, released this year by OCLC, a nonprofit library co-operative and research organization, found that public libraries in the United States lend an average 2.1 million videos every day, slightly more than the 2 million that Netflix ships.

If you’ve ever lived in a neighborhood that had an ice cream truck come through, then you already have a basic idea of what they look like. Basically they are big, bulky vans with a window in the side for handing out the treats you purchase. However one company is out to change your impression of what that truck should look like. The Cool Cycles Ice Cream Co. is a new breed of ice cream truck that isn’t even a truck