Tanvir Killer Business Ideas

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Integration for Contacts & Companies

2010-10-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

Profile pictures, activities and tweets should be integrated from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter so that when you look at a contact or company record you can quickly see who they are and what information is available through public sources. If you have account information for either network and add it to your Salesforce user account the system should be able to pull even more information for your direct contacts / friends.

MS Outlook 2010 is already doing this and it provides a lot of context that can be missing and is really powerful. I think that it would be a very important addition for Sales Reps so they can get a better understanding of new leads or existing clients. e.g. If an important deal is supposed to be closing and the prospect posts on LinkedIn that they're heading on vacation for 3 weeks that's going to extremely important information which affects their forecast.

A few extra fields may need to be added to the contact to link properly (to twitter and if the contact uses multiple email addresses). For companies there would need to be a linkedin company URL (though a default search could be fired on name) and corporate twitter account (if one exists). Any information brought across should have indicators showing where it came from. e.g. symbol in corner of picture and symbol preceeding activity post.

Site alearts consumers to product recalls that affect them

2010-10-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of posts on traceability, supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet.

Product recalls can have potentially serious health consequences, but the sheer number announced each year makes it almost impossible to keep track of them all. Aiming to help consumers stay abreast of the recalls that affect them, SafetyBook lets users register the products they own and then notifies them immediately of any relevant safety-related alerts or decisions.

The majority of recalls occur in three main product categories, SafetyBook says: child products, home appliances and automobiles. For that reason, those are the products it focuses on with its service. A yearly membership is now priced at USD 19.95. Once consumers sign up and register the products they own, the Chicago-based company actively monitors recall alerts from manufacturers and federal agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA). When a relevant product has been recalled, SafetyBook notifies affected members via its company’s “Direct-Alert” email system.

The CPSC has already recalled nearly 45 million products this year, 32 million of which are a child-safety threat, SafetyBook says. Plenty of opportunity here to use smart tracking to deliver a little peace of mind!

free water saving tool with toilet paper purchase

2010-10-13T17:43:00.000-07:00

Where Stop the Water aims to get consumers to use less water in the shower, Kimberly-Clark is focusing its attention on all the gallons that are flushed away each year. Recognizing that toilet flushing is actually the No. 1 use of water in the home, the company last month launched an initiative whereby it's giving out a free water conservation tool with every purchase of its Scott Naturals bath tissue.

The Smart Flush bag offers a safe and easy way for households to save water. When placed in the toilet tank, the material in the bag absorbs water and expands. By taking up space in the tank, the bag makes less available for water, with the result that each flush uses up to one liter less water than it normally would. A family of four, in fact, could save as much as 2,000 gallons of water per year by using the Smart Flush bag, Kimberly-Clark says. The Smart Flush bag is now being given away on Scott Naturals 8- and 12-pack bath tissue while supplies last at US retailers nationwide.

http://www.scottbrand.com/community/products/bath_tissue/smartflush

touch screen machine for interactive machine

2010-10-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

The International CES trade show is always good for a peek at consumer technologies to come, and this year's was no exception. Such innovations are rarely short on press coverage, but one we couldn't resist mentioning anyway is a new, touch-screen vending machine from Samsung.

Developed in conjunction with Sapient, Samsung's uVending touch-screen technology brings a whole new level of consumer interaction to automatic vending. The technology uses animation and an interactive menu on its 46-inch display to advertise the product choices within the machine and guide users to make their selection. Demonstrated as part of a multimedia vending machine for Coca-Cola, the technology is also equipped with Wifi for automatic refill ordering and content updates, along with motion sensors and a built-in camera to document attempts at vandalism, according to PSFK. The new machines will appear soon in the US in the Simon mall chain, with a UK debut planned for sometime in 2010, PSFK reported. A short video demonstrates the technology at work.

What's better than technology that sells a product? Why, technology that also features ads and an interactive experience. Those behind all the vending machines we've covered for pizza, postcards, sneakers, prescription drugs and bicycle parts (among others): this one's for you! ;-)

t-shirt for boys with 'fats ties' sewn on

2010-10-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

Dress-up clothes for small boys haven't changed much over the years, leaving us today with essentially the same shirts and ties our grandfathers wore. Enter Fat Tie, a Los Angeles-based company that aims to give young boys a fresh alternative with a comfortable feel and a hip sense of style.

Available in both short- and long-sleeved versions, Fat Tie shirts are prewashed and preshrunk soft cotton t-shirts with a bold, tie-like applique sewn on the front. No more struggling to squeeze junior into a multipiece ensemble; instead, he can go from playground to dinner with maybe just a hand-washing in between. Sizes range from 12 months to 5T; pricing is USD 37.

Who would have thought there was still room for innovation in the world of children's clothing? Then again, who wouldn't have? When it comes to t-shirts, there's no end to the possibilities

www.shop-fat-tie.com

Students pay by phone for bikes-sharing on campus

2010-10-06T02:35:00.000-07:00

College campuses are a natural fit for ride-sharing programs, as Zipcar and Zimride have already shown. So it makes perfect sense to see UK-based WhipBikes launch a bike-sharing program targeting a similar audience.
Inspired by the bike-sharing programs that are becoming common in many cities, WhipBikes is a self-service sharing system that's now available at Newcastle University. Faculty and students begin by paying a one-time GBP 14.95 registration fee to sign up with the service. From there on, they're eligible to use a WhipBike whenever they need one, choosing from the 150 or so bikes scattered all across campus. When they want to rent one, users simply pick a bike and text its bike number to WhipBikes, which will reply with the lock code for that bike. The user then has 30 minutes to ride wherever he or she needs to go and then relock the bike at the nearest WhipBikes rack. The cost of 50p per ride is simply added to the user's mobile phone bill. WhipBikes also accepts advertising for display on the rear wheel cover of its bikes; pricing is GBP 35 for two weeks.
With a solution that not only saves young transumers from having to purchase a bike of their own but also enables advertisers to reach tens of thousands of students throughout the course of the day, WhipBikes is ripe for partnership or emulation on college campuses around the globe.

Service for sports fans aims to rub in the team rivalry

2010-10-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

For the die-hard sports fan, half the fun of supporting a favourite team is explaining to unenlightened friends and relations why the teams they've chosen aren't the right ones. Toward that end, RivalGrams offer a new way to remind such ill-informed acquaintances of the fundamental superiority of one's own pick.

Using a predetermined combination of live or automated phone calls and emails, RivalGrams will make it plainly clear to stubbornly unaccepting friends why their team is not the right one. Recipients of RivalGram's USD 1.25 package No. 1, for instance, must endure one automated call with the sender's team's fight song or chant; a dollar extra will buy an additional live call. USD 2.99 buys two live calls plus an automated call, while for USD 9.99, fans can inflict upon their acquaintances the RivalGram-inator, including a live call and an e-mail each day for up to 20 days before the big game. Packages can be purchased in support of any team — including college, NFL, NBA, MLB even NASCAR — while calls can be customized or kept anonymous.

What's another name for consumers' collective itches? Opportunities to scratch, of course. What could *your* brand do to further a little good-hearted rivalry among friends.
www.rivalgrams.com

Pest controller by solar energy, using lamp to capture pest

2010-10-04T18:35:00.000-07:00

Pest control is a hotly contested topic, owing largely to the toxicity of the chemicals that are typically involved. So it's hard not to take notice when an alternative emerges that's not only chemical-free, but based on solar power as well.

Developed by South Korean Eco Solatec, the Solar Trap uses a BLB lamp to attract mosquitoes, moths, mayflies and other common pests, and then propel them by fan into an inescapable netting. Eminently suitable for agricultural settings as well as recreation areas such as parks and golf courses, the Solar Trap can be used 8 hours a day after just 5 hours of charging — which takes place on cloudy days as well as sunny ones. The device generates its own energy, creating no pollution in the process; it also automatically deactivates when it's raining, turning itself back on again after the rain stops. It turns off when temperatures fall below 12 C as well.

The Solar Trap is currently installed at the International Rice Research Institute, but its potential promises to extend globally. Agro-entrepreneurs: a sustainable and functionall innovation to explore for your part of the sustainability-focused world?

sergey brin, one of the google founder

2010-10-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

Childhood in the Soviet Union

In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to emigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,[10] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college". Although an official policy of anti-Semitism didn't exist in the Soviet Union, Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities; "Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular..." Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. However, he said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."[11] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 30 square meter (350 square foot) apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[11] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted", but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more", he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave..."[11]

Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[11]

At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."[12] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"[11

Prepaid cab card

2010-10-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Launched in eleven Minneapolis suburbs this month, Get Home Free is a flat rate, prepaid cab card that gets its holder home safely. Mainly targeted at teenagers and college students, the concept's initiators are aiming to help out kids who are stuck with car trouble, have been drinking, or whose ride home has fallen through. Cardholders place a call to the Get Home Free hotline, and a car is immediately dispatched to bring them home, no questions asked.

Teen drinking and driving is a serious issue. As reported in the Star Tribune: "According to the 2004 Minnesota Student Survey, 28 percent of high school seniors reported having driven after using alcohol or drugs at least once in the previous year. Also, almost 40 percent of seniors reported that they had ridden with someone who had been using substances." Having a Get Home Free card as an emergency back-up should help keep some of them off the road.

Cards can be purchased online for USD 64.99 and are valid throughout the Twin Cities metro area, with statewide expansion to all key cities in Minnesota planned for 2008, and to high school and college campuses in all 50 states by 2010. In order to offer the service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Get Home Free has partnered with Airport Taxi and Town Taxi, Minnesota's largest fleet of taxis with over 300 vehicles. To spread the word, Get Home Free will give away one card every month to a random MySpace friend. Useful and straightforward, this is one to start up locally.

Restaurant is on the rooftop of double decker bus.

2010-10-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Upscale food trucks have been popping up all over the place for some time now, selling everything from wood-fired pizzas to Korean tacos to gourmet desserts. Now, make way for the double-decker bus, which entered the picture last month complete with a rooftop restaurant.

Aiming to go well beyond the taco truck that's so ubiquitous on the streets of LA, local entrepreneurs Travis Schmidt and Jason Freeman began with a vintage double-decker, and then spent six months adding a full kitchen downstairs and open-air seating on top. Now, what might well be America's first “bustaurant” is officially called World Fare, a mobile restaurant that serves up a variety of high-end dishes from around the world. One favourite, for example, is the Bunny Chow, an originally South African street worker food that features a hollowed out loaf of bread filled with chicken curry, coconut milk, chick peas, cashews and cilantro. Also notable are World Fare's house-made “drinks in a bag,” including strawberry basil lemonade. Like several of the recent contenders we've seen, World Fare keeps its fans updated via Twitter; weekly schedules are also posted online.

As economic conditions declined in recent years, street vendors and low-cost curbside cuisine ascended; now, as prosperity begins to improve once again—albeit slowly—it makes perfect sense to see the mobile dining experience get upgraded once again. Foodie entrepreneurs around the world: time to hit the well-heeled streets with a double-decker bus of your very own?

Azim Uddin Ahmed, a Founder Life Member of the North South University (NSU)

2010-10-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Azim Uddin Ahmed, a Founder Life Member of the North South University (NSU) Foundation and an eminent industrialist of the country, has been unanimously elected as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Foundation and the Porichalona Porshod of the University for 2010-11 term at its 18th Annual General Meeting of the Foundation held on 24 June 2010.

The Foundation is the founder of NSU, the first and premier private university of Bangladesh that has been playing a pioneering role in providing quality higher education in the country. Mr. Ahmed has served the Foundation and the University previously for another term during 2001-02. Mr. Ahmed has expressed its expectation to make best possible efforts to enable NSU to continue as a center of excellence for higher education.

bangladesh's big online market place even first in bd

2010-10-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

www.ClickBD.com started its operations in April 14, 2005. ClickBD is Bangladesh's online marketplace where anyone can sell or buy almost anything. ClickBD has a strong and growing community users who trade in a wide range of item categories including Electronics, Cameras, Phones, Computers, CDs, Mobiles, Fashion Accessories, Music, and Travel. Through a world-class technology infrastructure ClickBD enables & simplifies e-commerce for Bangladesh's expending online community. People spend more time on ClickBD than any other Bangladeshi site, making it the most popular site of the country. ClickBD encouraged young generation to earn money from selling goods using the power of the Internet. ClickBD is proud to help many people established successful online businesses who make a living out of it.

The Founder

The founder and the Chief Software Engineer of ClickBD, Humayoun Alamgir, is a graduate from Arizona State University (USA) who worked for many top-notch companies in the US, UK and Bangladesh. His continued passion for software engineering and desire for contributing in Bangladesh's internet revolution had led him to build ClickBD.com from scratch. According to his vision, this truly dynamic e-commerce solution will change the way we buy and sell in Bangladesh. He hopes, success of ClickBD will inspire more ICT entrepreneurs to come up with new and innovative ideas to shape up our country's future in IT.

Green bricks, made from cow dung

2010-10-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

We’ve covered the value of worm poop, and now it’s time for the merits of cow dung to come to the fore. EcoFaeBrick turns cattle waste into bricks that are greener, stronger and 20% lighter than regular clay bricks.

The Indonesian organization was set up earlier this year to tackle the problem of excessive waste in farming areas. From this, the ecological and economical solution of the Cow Dung Brick was born. There's no visible difference between a traditional brick and the dung brick—and before you ask, there's no smell either. Instead of using wood fire the dung bricks are fired using biogas, helping to further reduce carbon emissions. The new product also lets land be retained for farming, rather than being excavated for clay for conventional bricks, or becoming a health risk due to ‘too much dung’.

A green product that boosts the wealth of rural Indonesians, it's not hard to see why EcoFaeBrick came first in the 2009 Global Social Venture competition. The company has identified 22 areas around Indonesia that they want to expand the project to, plus 22 more in other parts of the world. One to support, or otherwise get involved with!

Photo selling from directly your blog. Great opportunity for photographer.

2010-10-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

Just you have to make a blog at first. Then submit your photo in your blog.

Currently in invitation-only beta, Fotomoto enables anyone with photographic content to sell their photos directly from their website or blog. A single line of code is all it takes to add the customisable Fotomoto toolbar, which analyzes the site's web pages, adds a "Buy" button to each photo for sale and enables viewers to purchase and pay for photos on the spot or send them as free e-cards. Fotomoto handles all order processing and then prints, packages and ships the purchased photos to customers. Its control panel, meanwhile, allows users to set the pricing and availability of their photos, manage their orders and even track analytics data such as how many times a particular photo has been viewed or sent as an e-card. There is no subscription fee for using the service; Fotomoto simply deducts the cost of each print sold plus a 15 percent transaction charge from each order amount, sending the rest on to the user. Photographers in 25 different countries are already using San Francisco-based Fotomoto, which will soon be able to handle transactions in local currencies as well, it says. International shipping is also available. Greeting cards, postcards, calendars and signed prints are coming soon.

Creative consumers have long enjoyed being rewarded for their efforts, but the global recession has added a new level of urgency, spurring what our sister site calls sellsumers to hawk everything from their storage space to their online profiles in their quest to stay afloat. Those who help them do that, of course, will see their own ships rise as well! ;-)

The largest job site of bangladesh

2010-09-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

BdJobs.com Ltd.is the first and leading career management site in Bangladesh. Eight young business and IT professional backed by strong command over e-business and in-depth understanding of the needs of job seekers and employers in the country’s context started this venture on July 2000.

The vision of the company is to try bringing Internet technology in the mainstream business and economic life of the society.

Our web-site aims to explore maximum benefits of the Internet. We believe our service will help the job seekers manage their career more efficiently. This site will also help employers solve many of the problems associated with traditional recruiting methods and allow them to save time and money.

Right after its launching, the site has been able to attract the Internet users in the country. The site regularly updates Job Information (on average more than 1800 valid job news are placed at any point of time at the site), provides facility to the job seekers for posting resume and online application. The site has also been able to get good response from a large number of organizations in the country who use online job advertisement facility, online CV bank access and online application receiving and processing facility of www.bdjobs.com. Till now, more than 5500+ employers in the country have recruited more than 150,000 professionals at different levels for their organizations through Bdjobs.com service.

No. of Unique Daily Visitors: 35,000 (on average)
Monthly Pageviews: 40 million
No. of Resumes posted on the site: 2,80,000
No. of Corporate Accounts: 5500+

Company Management
A.K.M Fahim Mashroor CEO

Energy generated from soccer ball. It can be used in bangladesh, india

2010-09-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Over 1.5 billion people—one quarter of the world’s population—live in areas with no access to electricity, according to a recent UN report. Capitalizing on a sport's global appeal to address this problem, a group of Harvard University students developed sOccket, a soccer ball that turns energy from a kick into electricity.

The portable energy-harvesting device captures the impact energy normally dissipated when the ball is kicked, storing it to charge lights, cell phones and batteries. It works with inductive coil technology, similar to that found in flashlights that power up when shaken. For each 15 minutes of play, it can store enough energy to power a small LED light for three hours. sOccket could eventually help ease the reliance on toxic kerosene lamps in developing nations, thereby reducing the associated health risks.

Currently in the prototyping stages, sOccket has been successfully piloted in Durban, South Africa, and the development team has plans to market a commercial version of the sOccket in Western countries as a high-end tech toy, possibly using a "buy one-give one" model, to subsidize the cost of distributing sOccket in developing nations. Being an all-in-one soccer ball, portable generator, community builder and global health tool, sOccket is another shining example of the functionall trend covered in our sister site’s latest briefing. sOccket has attracted several development funding grants and is now in the process of developing production and distribution partnerships. One to partner with or otherwise get involved in?

Mobile CNG station

2010-09-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

A CNG-run vehicle has to wait for hours in line at a conventional CNG filling station for a refill. To improve the ongoing crisis of CNG, the portable filling stations could be placed at any convenient locations inside the city as well as at the entry or exit points of the city.The units do not require any permanent land and can supply the fuel during crisis situation when natural gas supply through the national grid is breached for any reason.The proposed unit has a control panel, a dispenser and 140 CNG storage cylinders to carry 6,000 cubic metres of compressed natural gas. A fully loaded unit can fill up 600 vehicles.