Business Idea of the Day

Deluxe Enterprise Operations will randomly award a $10,000 gift certificate from Target Commercial Interiors featuring HON furniture and a $5,000 DeluxeBucks gift certificate to use toward logo and Web site design, promotional products and additional marketing and branding solutions. Ten second-place winners will receive $500 DeluxeBucks gift certificates. Enter by November 30, 2009 . More information here . From Business Opportunities Weblog

TCBY (the frozen yogurt stores) is holding a competition to give away a brand new TCBY franchise store for FREE . To enter you must create a video up to 2 minutes long indicating why you should win a TCBY store. Complete the application form and submit it with your video. Legal residents of the U.S. who are 21 and older are eligible to participate

Inventors are made, not born, and anyone has the potential to come up with new ideas, said Jack Mandelman, a retired electrical engineer, in a story in The Times-News. He should know. Many people have never heard of the Flat Rock resident, but every time they turn on their computer or use a cell phone they are using products that contain his inventions

Suzanne Plafcan couldn’t find real-estate space for her Clix Portrait Studio franchise right away, reports Entrepreneur . So instead of waiting, she opened just the event-photography side of the business in March 2008. “It turned out to be the best thing I could have ever done,” she says. It allowed her to keep costs down by working from home with only one employee. She was also able to introduce the Clix brand to her targeted demographic–parents with young children–by offering her photography services to day-care centers

Deidre Booker works hard during the planting season tending her mums, pansies and marigolds in the front yard and a garden of herbs, tomatoes, cabbage and peppers in her backyard, writes The Sun Times . So when Booker heard about the “ Glam Can ” — a black, 3-gallon, mount-anywhere garbage and recycling can — she snapped one up to put on the fence next to her home in the Pill Hill neighborhood.

Kimberly Aya’s career choice was an easy one. When she was just 8 years old, she started designing cakes for her chocolate-loving father–and she hasn’t stopped since, according to a story in Entrepreneur magazine . So her first order of business upon returning home to Michigan was to open a specialty cake shop.

TerryStarbucker had been thinking about looking under rocks for several weeks lately – I always worry about complacency, and it was a perfect analogy for me. Because there’s always a better way to do something – or a better way to analyze something – or present something.

Emily Shankman of Chicago graduated from college earlier this year with plenty of hope for her career. The 22-year-old had studied vocal performance and was learning how to turn her passion for music into a paying career, reports The Wall Street Journal. As a way to get hands-on experience in arts administration, Shankman, who graduated from Lawrence University, took an unpaid internship at the Lyric Opera of Chicago through December.

Emily Shankman of Chicago graduated from college earlier this year with plenty of hope for her career. The 22-year-old had studied vocal performance and was learning how to turn her passion for music into a paying career, reports The Wall Street Journal. As a way to get hands-on experience in arts administration, Shankman, who graduated from Lawrence University, took an unpaid internship at the Lyric Opera of Chicago through December. She spends her days archiving materials, advertising auditions and helping with fund raising.

SignOnSanDiego.com: A small La Jolla company thinks it has a technology that could represent the future of scientific publishing. The company, MolSoft, recently launched a platform it calls ActiveICM that enables authors to include three-dimensional, interactive graphics with the text of their articles. That means readers can click at the appropriate point in an article, call up an exhibit and view it from any angle