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With the power of the internet, and it’s endless reaches, you don’t need to be a wholesale club to offer your customers volume discounts.
At Groupon, the idea of offering discounts to large volumes of customers is becoming a reality to many businesses. Groupon works by offering one deal from a different business each day on anything from food, activities or merchandise to its hundreds of thousands of members. The members, who store their credit card information securely with Groupon, can either decide to take advantage of the discount, or not. If the deal generates enough interest, everyone who expressed their interest gets charged for the amount of the deal, and receives a gift certificate from Groupon to use at the business. If not enough interest is generated, the discount is canceled, and no one is charged.
The site benefits from having a large membership base, and the viral nature of the deals that are offered. The site even jokingly instructs members to “either beg, or threaten your friends” in order to make sure enough interest is generated in the deal you’re shopping for.
Groupon offers one deal per geographic market per day. It’s website currently lists over 130 cities in the US where they offer their daily deals, with more to come. Recent deals included $70 off a 1 year membership to the Art Institute (4,913 Groupons purchased), $95 off of a round of golf for two (763 Groupons purchased), and $81 off a recent Cubs vs Marlins baseball game (248 Groupons purchased).
It’s pretty obvious that everyone is looking for a bargain these days, and Groupon is taking advantage of that trend.
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Well, it’s not really soup. It’s photography.
Alphabet Photography, based out of Ontario, Canada was inspired by the children’s book Alphabet City. Alphabet Photography was founded by a husband and wife team who spent two years taking photographs of hundreds of objects found in their natural surroundings, which resemble letters of the English alphabet.
You can visit their website, www.alphabetphotography.com to create a word using the photographs they have taken by simply typing the word into the form on their website. If you don’t like the default images that appear, you can click the image to select another image that represents the same letter. For example, I typed the word “Dream” into their site and it came back with the handle of a coffee mug for the “D”, the arm of a park bench for the “r”, a shadow of an archway for the “e”, what appears to be the top of a ladder for the “a”, and a window for the letter “m”.
You can also find their pre-framed inspirational words at major retail stores such as Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, and other home and gift stores across the US and Canada.
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Remember the days, not too long ago where you actually had to leave your house to buy something? Often times shopping was even a social event where friends would get together to share ideas about the products they were shopping for. With the increased popularity of online shopping, consumers have lost the social experience that used to come with shopping.
FriendShopper is working to change online shopping so it’s more of a social experience. The application installs a bookmarklet in your web browser’s toolbar, so that when you are shopping at virtually any online store you can add products to your FriendShopper “My Items” page to share with friends. From there, you can add products to a chat between you and any of your friends. You can chat in real time with your friends if they happen to be online at the same time as you, or you can send them a message letting them know you have shared an item with them while they were away from the computer.
Entrepreneurs could benefit from offering similar services in other activities where a once social experience now becomes a solitary venture when done online. Think about watching a movie online with a little chat window next to the screen. It certainly beats having to listen to unwanted outside conversations in the theater.
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Playing at some of the world’s nicer golf courses, you’ll often times receive a course guide, which provides you with information about each hole. The yardage to the green from key landmarks on the hole are usually given to provide the golfer with some assistance in choosing the right club. You’ll even see the pros checking these guides from time to time when they are about to hit their approach shot to the green.
Shotzoom Software has come out with an enhanced version of these guides with Golfshot: Golf GPS rangefinder. The application is currently available for download for the iPhone, with over 15,000 courses worldwide supported. In addition to telling you the distance to the green like a traditional course guide, the application also offers the following features:
Distance to layup at 200, 150, 125 & 100 yards/meters.
Set your layup club distances & the application will tell you which club to use.
Tracks the distance of any shot.
Measures your statistics such as: Fairways hit/missed, greens in regulation, sand saves, putts per hole, and more.
Scorecards, which can be sent to your email address.
With this app, gone are the days of guessing how far it is to the green, a hazard or even the ideal spot to hit your second shot on a par 5. In just a few clicks, you can have all the information you need in order to decide which shot will best suit your current situation.
Popular iPhone apps have been known to reward their developers handsomely, with some of them netting out in the millions. If you’re a software developer who hasn’t ventured into this market yet, it might be time to start thinking about it.
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These days there are very few companies who haven’t been impacted by the global economy. Everyone is tightening their belts a little more, especially in their advertising campaigns.
This is where Zooppa has found their niche. The company is using the internet to allow brands to collaborate with talented and creative individuals to help create their next new advertising campaign. Their website allows companies to launch a competition, in which Zooppa’s community members compete for prizes by submitting ads they have created, which depict the image of that company. In addition to receiving a new advertisement, the company also gets some valuable market research by letting consumers create their ads for them.
Before a company decides which ads they will run, Zooppa’s community members get the opportunity to vote on which submission is the best. They also have a viral impact on the ads by sharing the advertisements on sites like You Tube, their personal blogs, and other social networks. All of which translates into free advertising for the company.
In addition to allowing the community members to express their creativity in the ads they create, users can also win cash prizes for their efforts. More than USD 330,000 has been awarded to date! Each user’s profile also highlights their best work so they can help market themselves down the road.
Online communities have made plenty of advertisements popular on their own in recent years. Sites like Zooppa will play a big part in the ads we get exposed to on the internet, television, radio, and in print in the future.
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We’ve all rushed out at the last minute to purchase a birthday, anniversary or even a Valentine’s Day card just to find slim pickings in the card aisle at the convenience store. Half the time all the cards that are left don’t really express what we want to say, but we’re stuck buying them anyway.
PigSpigot is a new greeting card site that features user-generated cards to send via email and snail mail. Taking after the user-generated models of Wikipedia and Threadless, the company allows professional and semi-professional graphic designers to upload their designs to be featured on the cards they sell.
The site is geared towards the 18-34 demographic, and offers free e-cards, as well as inexpensive traditional paper cards that are sent on your behalf. With a new technology, PigSpigot can print individual cards on demand and have them on their way to their intended recipients all in the same day that they were ordered. Additionally, the site even features a rating system that displays the most popular cards, as well as the editor’s top picks.
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Many online sports and concert ticket vendors have a mobile site for customers to purchase tickets on the go.
eSeats.com has recently gone a step further by introducing an application for the iPhone that utilizes the phone’s built in GPS. The eSeats application makes it easier to locate hard to find tickets to most major concert, sports and theater events by identifying events near your location using the iPhone’s GPS, simultaneously displays ticket listing and expandable seating charts, sorts tickets by section, row, quantity or price, and additionally will store your billing and shipping information for future purchases.
The application makes it easier for business or vacation travelers to find things to do wherever they might be traveling, with the One Click Event Finder. By simply clicking one button on the iPhone, the application will use the phone’s GPS to list a number of events near your area depending on the search area radius you specify.
To see the application in action, check out the company’s video on YouTube.
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With world-wide concerns over the H1N1 (swine) flu, more and more people are turning to hand sanitizers as their first line of defense against diseases.
With this in mind, SteriLyfe, LLC offers a line of various hand sanitizer kiosks, which offer plenty of advertising space for custom graphics, coupon or business card dispensers, brochure holders, and menu boards. The light weight plastic and slim design allows the kiosks to be used in public areas where advertisers can benefit from the volumes of people who would enjoy the convenience of a hand sanitizer where soap and water might not be readily available. Public places such as train and bus stops, restaurants, malls, and sports arenas are prime candidates for this method of advertising.
In addition to allowing businesses to generate an additional income stream, the kiosks also allow businesses to show that they care about public health concerns. ”In today’s economy, finding new and innovative ways to advertise your message to gain the competitive edge is crucial in maintaining and growing market share” said SteriLyfe President David J. Stob in an Email to Entrepreneur Review.
While the kiosks are fully capable of handling traditional printed advertisements, they can also incorporate an LCD video screen to display multimedia advertisements instantly on any enabled kiosk via an internet based application, which schedules and manages the transmission of the content to thousands of kiosks around the world.
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During these difficult economic times, more people are opting for a night in rather than a night out on the town.
With this in mind, Fun Flicks Outdoor Movies is offering portable, inflatable movie screens for rent to PTAs, schools, pools, apartment complexes, neighborhoods, park & recreation departments, or for throwing a graduation or birthday party. With inflatable screens big enough for 5 to over 100 people Fun Flicks franchises are popping up all over the country. Currently their events are offered in 16 states, with more locations to come.
The idea for an outdoor movie night party stemmed from Fun Flick’s founder when he got the idea to show a movie for his son’s 3rd birthday party on the side of the family’s barn. The idea was such a hit amongst the parents and kids invited to the party, he decided to make a business out of the idea. While the screen quality, projectors and sound systems have all been dramatically improved, the idea of an outdoor movie party is still as family oriented as the first barnyard event.
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Getting to the store or even finding the time to shop for clothes online can be time consuming. Especially if you have complex style tastes.
Covet.com takes all the work out of shopping. The site, which boasts thousands of brands from hundreds of stores will get you into the hard to find styles you’re looking for. After signing up with the site, you will be shown a series of images where you’ll be asked to select the ones that fit your style. You then fill in your size information, and instantly your personalized style profile is complete. Additional options are available to further enhance your profile by selecting color and pattern preferences, as well as listing the brands you want to see more (or less) of.
Currently Covet.com only offers this service for women, however there are plans to introduce a men’s and children’s category soon.
Since the site doesn’t actually sell products, their free service is based on their relationships with thousands of online retailers. The emails you’ll receive are completely personalized to your style, size, and brand preferences, which then sends you to the retailer’s website when it finds a match for you. Additionally the service will alert you when the brands you like are on sale.
Personalized services like Covet.com can be huge in other markets, such as vacations or other travel related services, where a person might know what type of trip they would like to take, but they don’t want to spend the time researching the details.
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