Thursday, October 25, 2007

ChoiceA.com helps both buyers and sellers find what they are looking for

What Company Is Offering::
ChoiceA.com helps you choose choice A by creating a site that has pulled together the useful material from the web and creating a space where buyers and sellers can connect directly without a middle man.

How It works:
ChoiceA.com helps both buyers and sellers find what they are looking for. There is a search engine on the site that lets buyers search for property with filters such as; property type, price range, location, and geographic range from destination. A list of properties appear, with a photo, address, and square footage of the property. You can choose to look at a map, or photo gallery to get more details or just click on the listing to get more information on the property and the connect information of the buyer. The listing provides lots of detailed information about the property like if it needs any repairs, how many rooms are in the property, etc… ChoiceA.com has many tools for sellers to aide them in what can seem as the overwhelming process of selling their property. ChoiceA.com has tools and forms that help users list their property, negotiate, and then sell. All of the information and tools on ChoiceA.com are free, so take advantage of this site and choose ChoiceA.com
more at:http://www.choicea.com/

"Tryvertising Trend "Marketing With Taste!

What company is Offering;
Effectively market your product's flavor to consumers, via our new, groundbreaking Peel 'n TasteTM technology.First Flavor, which converts flavours into Peel 'n Taste strips that can be mass-distributed in a broad-scale tryvertising campaign.

How It works:
Using the latest in taste-matching technology, we replicate the flavor of your product and deliver it to consumers in a compact, dissolving edible film that works seamlessly within existing promotional vehicles, while exponentially increasing their value. Peel 'n TasteTM is easy, safe to use, and consumers love it.
First Flavor's strips contain no sugar or calories, and all ingredients have been FDA-approved. They're produced in bulk quantities of 100,000 to 10 million or more, and quantity-based pricing ranges from 7 to 40 cents per strip. Possible uses for the strips include not just print advertisements but also direct mail, product-on-product, and in-store coupon dispensing applications. Though only four promotions have launched so far, First Flavor's customers range from small, entrepreneurial firms to large, Fortune 50 companies, president and CEO Jay Minkoff says. The US-based company, which was founded last year, already has sales representation in the EU, but it has also received inquiries from around the world. It's open to the possibility of nonexclusive partnerships to help bring Peel n' Taste to more consumers, Minkoff says.
Will It Work:
They've already shone the spotlight on the tryvertising trend, and this is yet another piece of evidence that it's taking hold. Only time will tell how consumers take to it in this form, but it's a concept worth considering for any business in food and beverages or beyond. We're just hoping a chocolatier will sign up soon.
More at:http://www.firstflavor.com/

Touch Order Seems Good Idea For Food Or Hotel Entrepreneurs

What Is it:
McDonald's in Korea is testing food ordering by RFID (radio-frequency identification). A pilot program in Seoul's Shinchon neighbourhood lets customers place an order by pointing their cell phone at the items they want.
How It Works:
Simple—they first need to download software to their phone and then, seated at their McDonald's table, plug an RFID reader into the phone and aim their handset at a menu with built-in RFID chips. Items are automatically charged to their cell phone bill. As soon an order is ready, a message is sent to the customer's cell phone, letting them know that they can pick up their tray at the counter.
Its first in World :

According to SK Telecom, McDonald's "Touch Order" system is the first in the world that lets customers use RFID to place orders at a restaurant. Like GoMobo, the company that enables members to order food by text message at a growing number of US restaurants, Touch Order allows customers to avoid queues, making the buying process faster and more convenient for both the restaurant and its patrons. One to watch if you're in mobile commerce or the fast food business! (Related: Food ordering by text message.)

Detail: www.mcdonalds.co.kr

Unique Business Idea

What Company is offering:
The British company's Street Art service uses high-pressure cleaning machines to wash brands, logos and adverts onto dirty pavements.
Street Advertising Services is offering a less antagonizing—and more legal—solution by creating images out of water.
How It Works:

First, clients provide their design, and SAS turns it into a giant stencil. Then, working at night, the SAS team blasts the stencil with water and steam on dirty walls, roads, pavements or even road signs. The result is a sparkling clean image in the shape of the company's logo or message. Nothing but water and steam are used, and it's all perfectly environmentally friendly and legal, SAS stresses. Pricing for a street art campaign with 15 to 20 adverts throughout a city begins at GBP 1,000 per city plus initial setup costs. Clients so far have ranged from newly opened businesses to global brands.
How That Idea Came:
The idea for the service, which launched last year, came to founder Kristian Jeffrey out of sheer frustration. Jeffrey explains: "I run several small online businesses, and was searching for cost-effective advertising to attract consumers to my sites. My potential customers were walking around me every day, and it was when I was walking through the dirty streets of London that the idea came to me: why not take advertising literally to the street? Having experimented with several different methods, we wanted to apply a technique that was not just eye-catching and effective but also friendly to the environment. What could be more natural than water?"

SAS has operated primarily in the UK so far, but it's open to projects anywhere in the world (as long as there's dirty pavement!). The company is also keen to explore reciprocal arrangements with other entrepreneurial enterprises.

Detail at: www.streetadvertisingservices.com

APML allows users to personalized marketing

What Company is offering:
APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.
How It Works:
With APML you’d be able to share your attention profile with advertising companies and marketers, thus enabling you to gain control over your info. You’d be given more filtering power, thus making it easier for you to select what you want to be known about yourself. As deep, behavior analyzing adverts become more popular, APML should be embraced as it gives consumers a mantle of protection over their private and sacrosanct data. Advertisers wouldn’t have to do so much snooping as it were, and it’d be much easier for them to sell you stuff. Of course, APML may not go over so well with consumers, what with questions of efficiency, privacy, and the sheer amount of work involved. Currently you can see APML at work on Engagd, Particls and Clutzr among others.
More at:http://apml.org/

mFoundry have completed a $15 million Series C round of financing

What Company is Offering:
mFoundry has become one of the foremost innovators in mobile financial services. The company’s Spotlight Financial Platform offers a comprehensive and equitable solution for financial institutions, wireless operators and other mobile banking and payment providers.mFoundry's Spotlight Financial Platform is a cross-carrier, cross-platform solution with the broadest device support of any competitor.

How Much they Got From VCs:
mFoundry, the leading provider of mobile financial services, announced today they have completed a $15 million Series C round of financing. Motorola, Inc. through Motorola Ventures, its strategic venture capital arm, led the round joined by existing investors as well as other strategic investors, PayPal, NCR Corporation and a leading wireless operator. In addition, NCR has selected mFoundry’s Spotlight Financial Platform as part of their mobility technology solution.
What's Their Reason For Rasing Fund:
mFoundry will use funds to meet the strong domestic and international market demand for their mobile banking and payments products.
“As consumer demand continues to grow for anywhere, anytime information access, mFoundry is playing a key role in creating and shaping the future of personalized mobile financial services,” said Code Cubitt, investment manager, Motorola Ventures. “mFoundry’s Spotlight Financial Platform allows for a more feasible and affordable mobile financial services experience for wireless operators, financial institutions and consumers. Motorola is excited by the synergies we see between our two companies both domestically and internationally.”
More at:http://www.mfoundry.com/

Expectnation.com is a new site that offers conference managers a tool to help organize conferences

What company is saying:
We’re not just satisfied with streamlining the mechanics of organizing a conference. We want to enable new conference experiences too. So look out for features that support and enhance the conference experience for attendees and staff alike.
As an example of this approach, take a look at the personal scheduler. Not only does it make it a breeze for attendees to plan out their conference, but it lets organizers know in advance of popular talks and potential room overcrowding.
Keep an eye on the Expectnation blog for news of new features, and handy hints on how to use what’s already available.
How It Works:
Expectnation.com is a new site that offers conference managers a tool to help organize conferences and keep their participants involved and in-the-know. The basic idea is that managers create a website for a specific conference and within the templates, can keep all important information and updates on display for the invitees. The manager controls the site through a content management system that allows for easy editing and posting. Site creators can include images and downloads with the asset manager, making distributing important material hassle-free. Conference managers have complete control over the navigation of the site and can customize the navigation board, create news feeds and choose to keep information (such as behind the scenes planning) private. Other features include online payment, flexible mailmerge, press registration and many other professional tools. A URL link will bring participants directly to the conference site, creating a community of invitees who can prepare for the conference as the site progresses and take part in any pre-conference forums or blogging.
More at:http://www.expectnation.com/

EarlyMiser lets you set up feeds that will notify you when the price of a selected product has dropped below a certain level

What Company is offering:
Earlymiser is a easy to use shopping comparison site. The best way to use the site is to understand one of the basic concepts behind the site - custom feeds. You can think of custom feeds as shopping list, a want list - it's really a list of items that you want to group together. Each feed can be set up with its own pricing trigger.
How It Works:
EarlyMiser lets you set up feeds that will notify you when the price of a selected product has dropped below a certain level (or has been reduced by a certain percentage). To use Early Miser, start by searching for a product. You can search by keyword, tag cloud, or category. When you find the product you want to buy, click “Add to feed” and select the price at which you wish to purchase it. You can add tags to your feed to organize products around it. For example, if you wanted EarlyMiser to aggregate music-related products for you, you might set up a feed called “My Music”, and add tags such as “albums”, “Johnny Cash”, “entertainment systems” “laptop speakers”, etc. The publication date on each provider changes in the feed when the price is updated, so keep track of these changes with your RSS feeder to stay informed about price fluctuations. You’re not limited to viewing the content of your own feeds either; you can check out others’ feeds and corresponding products as well under the “Recently Updated Product Feeds” tab. You don’t have to register to browse around on the site, but you will definitely want to sign up if you want to build your own feeds.
More at:http://www.earlymiser.com/

Validate For Saving money On your Wireless Bill

What Company Is Saying:
Validate: Our secure technology reads your bill and makes sure your charges line up with the plan you've signed up for.
Reports: We breakdown your charges in the language you need to approach your carrier and fix any inaccuracies. We promise that you have yet to see anything like this!
Save: The average Validas subscriber saves an estimated $240 per year.
How It Works:
Validas’ secure service that provides bill validation, itemized usage histories, and best plan advice within seconds. For companies with many mobile users, monitoring usage and managing costs can be difficult because the appropriate tools are rarely provided. Validas offers a tool for enterprises that it is easy to implement and immediately provides the information required to validate operator invoices, optimize employee expensed rate plans, and create itemized expense reports. Validas answers questions that are common to all wireless subscribers who are confused about their bills. Why is my cell phone bill different from the rate plan I was offered? Is my wireless plan the one that’s best for me? Was I billed correctly for my usage? Validas provides a thorough breakdown, using deep business analytics, to highlight information that provides each user with verification details for all of their charges and allows them to compare their current wireless plan to their providers’ latest options. Validas also insures that every bill is accurate.
More at:http://www.myvalidas.com/

Find yourself a reliable local tradesman

What Company is Offering:
Find yourself a reliable local tradesman… see what other people are saying about them… and write a review of your own.
How It Works:
Combining public recommendation and user feedback, ProblemSolved.co.uk is both comprehensive and up-to-date, and provides tradesmen with a unique one-stop marketing shop. Users can browse thousands of in-depth profile pages, blogs and galleries updated by ProblemSolved members. Users can also access the service on their mobiles, by texting the name of the trade they require and their postcode to ‘TRADE’ (87233). The site relaunched in September 2007 as a web 2.0 interactive site, however the database has grown organically for several years.
More at:http://www.problemsolved.co.uk/

41pounds.org is a community of people working to eliminate a big personal nuisance and environmental hazard – junk mail

What Company is Offering:
41pounds.org is a community of people working to eliminate a big personal nuisance and environmental hazard – junk mail. Our name comes from the amount of junk mail the average person receives each year (credit card applications, catalogs, coupon books, etc.) which for the most part goes directly into the trash can or recycling bin. Even with recycling programs all over the country, the majority of household waste is junk mail, and paper takes up about 40% of landfill space.
How it Works:
The team at 41pounds.org is dedicated to helping households cut down on the junk mail that is delivered daily. Complaining about sweepstakes and credit card letters is a thing of the past, now that we can complain about spam, but the fact is we are still receiving mountains of unwanted paper that have a toxic effect on the Earth. Companies who send out junk mail are wasting valuable resources such as trees and water and emit greenhouse gasses in production. Recycling is clearly a great solution, however, the ink in junk mail has high concentrations of heavy metals, which makes it a challenge to recycle. For a small price, 41pounds.org will eliminate 80-90% of junk mail received by contacting 20-30 companies that are responsible for the most common types of junk mail (i.e. credit card companies, sweepstakes, etc.). By cutting down the amount of junk mail you receive, you can save 1.7 trees, 700 gallons of water and stop 460 pounds of CO2 from being released into our atmosphere.
More at;http://www.41pounds.org/

WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world

What Company is Offering:
WiserEarth serves the people who are transforming the world. It is a community-editable international directory and networking forum that maps out and connects the largest movement in the world – the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment.
WiserEarth provides the tools and a platform for non-profit organizations, funders, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens to find each other, make connections, build alliances and where possible, to share resources.
How it works:
The wealth of information and opportunities available on this site is awe-inspiring yet searching for specific details is easy. Site visitors can search for jobs, events, groups, organizations and killer resources and find well-organized and bountiful results. The resources feature really brings WiserEarth to the head of its class with specific tools and information for actively protecting and cleaning up our Earth and daily lives and includes posts such as recommended books, websites, action councils, how-to guides and event promotions. Other great features include an interactive map to help users find worldwide opportunities and browsable WikiPages.
More at:http://www.wiserearth.org/