Being Consistent Helps
On every credit card statement I get every month, there's a little message reading: "A paper trail is an identity thief's best friend. Sign up now to pay your bill online at..." The implication being that if I pay my bill via the Internet instead of snail mail, it's less likely to be stolen by someone mischievous. About five or six times a year, I also get an envelope from my credit card containing five...
What We Consider Polite
Before the long drive to move out to California from Michigan, I took my car into a dealership for an inspection. Turned out (big surprise!) that it needed a couple thousand dollars worth of repairs done to the engine, so I told them to fix what was needed and I went to the waiting room. You've been there before: a small, cramped room with a row of chairs, a cheap television, and a carafe of...
Starbucks vs. Caribou Coffee
There's a split in the members of my girlfriend's extended family. It's about the choice of coffee: some of them prefer Starbucks, and some of them prefer Caribou. The debate comes up from time to time. Each side believes, stubbornly, that their choice of coffee is superior to the other. I think it's a silly argument, since we have both, so which one is actually "better" doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Okay,...
Order Out of Chaos
The Internet is a mess. There's value in its content, but in order to get at it, you need to wade through a ton of junk first. Successful web companies help users make order out of chaos. Google did it by making sites with more inbound links rank higher in search results. If you link to a site on your web page, it's as if you're casting a vote for that site to rank higher....
A Tennis Ball For Dogs
Not all product innovations are brand new things. When PetSport came out with TuffBalls, they did nothing more than take a couple of tennis balls, repackage them in a new way, and put them in a pet store to sell them to pet owners for way more than you could buy tennis balls in athletic shops. You could hardly call that a "hard" innovation, but it worked. People bought the tennis balls. Is that just...
Pop Artist Collaboration
Here's an idea for the music industry that might make them some money: Get a bunch of popular bands and artists who are interested in collaborating with another band/artist on an album. Create a list of the ones interested in this project (the reason they'd be interested will shortly become apparent). Once you have the list of bands will to do this, put that list up on a web site, so that the artists are...
The Top Internet Surfers Make Waves
According to the book Citizen Marketers, the ratio of surfers to active contributors on the Internet is about 100-to-1, which is 1% of the total. So, in the blogosphere, 1% of the people reading blogs are also writing on their own blogs. On YouTube, 1% of the people watching videos are making and uploading their own. On Flickr, 1% of the people browsing photographs are taking pictures with their own camera and sharing them with...
The Creative Outlet
The outlet for your creativity determines, in a big way, what shape your ideas will take as you develop them. Imagine that you're a comedy writer for your favorite television show. At the moment, mine is "30 Rock". If you're being paid to come up with ideas for dialogue and plotlines, all of the sudden, everything you read in the newspaper becomes a challenge. You start thinking, "How could that be turned into something interesting...
Proprietary Content in Business Ideas
While managers have "The Apprentice", married couples have "Wife Swap", and those on the dating scene have "Blind Date", the television show "Shark Tank" is the reality television show for entrepreneurs. If you've never seen it, it takes five successful entrepreneurs (the "sharks) who have lots of money to invest. The show contestants come into the room to present their own business startup ideas and product inventions, and ask the sharks for money in exchange...
Brainstorming with a Grievance List
Here's a idea I came up with last month for generating up with new business ideas: create a grievance list. Write down a list of things that really irk you about something, and then try to come with ways that you would change them to make them better. I live in California, in a city where real estate is priced quite outrageously. For a small one-bedroom apartment, I'm paying nearly double what people would pay...