CoolBusinessIdeas Newsletter Issue 39

New Business Ideas/Opportunities Featured In This Issue:
SERVICES
Charmin Restroom
Procter and Gamble’s bathroom tissue brand operated a 20-stall restroom in the heart of Times Square, calling the service ‘Charmin’s holiday gift to New York’. The facilities offered clean, deluxe bathrooms, baby changing stations, stroller parking, seating areas, and of course lots of luxury toilet paper.
RETAIL
Supermarket Self-checkout
At Price Chopper’s Burlington store, eight of 19 checkout lanes are equipped with automated “Easy Scan Checkout” machines. The rest of the duties are left to customers: punching produce codes, weighing vegetables, scanning for prices and bagging food. To pay, shoppers feed cash into the machine or swipe a credit or debit card.
AGRICULTURE & ENVIRONMENTAL
EcoHangers
Hanger Network has developed an alternative: a dry cleaner’s hanger made entirely from recycled paper. EcoHangers are sturdy and cheap. And because they’re paper, they can be completely covered in full-colour advertising.
ADVERTISING
The Interactive Urinal Communicator
Discover Wizmark, the interactive urinal communicator, its advertising you can’t help but look at. An idea so original, it has everyone talking. Wizmark’s interactive capabilities will get results, providing the perfect guerrilla marketing medium for men of all ages.
Cellphone Billboard
V-Lodge is an online business-to-business marketplace for smarter, more civilized product placement and advertising weaved into video games. In-game advertising is the next frontier in entertainment marketing.
HOMES & LIVINGS
X-paste
Do you judge people by whether they squeeze the tube from the end or the middle? Do you think perhaps you should readjust your priorities in life? If the answer to the first two is yes, and no to the last, you should look into the X-paste dispenser.
MOBILE
Hidden Clue
Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera. The company believes the technology will have spin off implications for the publishing industry.
“I’ve lost my keys come home”New website TextMeOuttaHere.co.uk will, for a pound, send its users a text message at a prearranged time to help them lie and cheat their way out of an awkward situation. Sneak, your spouse or partner, your best friend and your vicar. That’s slander, surely.
DESIGN
Illuminate Fun
A Latino brother-sister design team generates nighttime cool with the quirky Havaleena, a sleek, versatile and customizable portable light. Providing illumination via a 1-Watt wide-angle LED, the portable Havaleena can be used indoors or outdoors, singly or as a bouquet of lights on an accompanying stand.
Build Your Bed
Called BuildTheBed, the product caters to DIY boudoir decorators who want to put their personal memories, fantasies or digital art in a place of honor, if not dreamy contemplation. In a choice of sizes and styles, from arched to rectangular, BuildTheBed’s colorful headboard gives a personality billboard-like prominence.
PETS
Dogs Beer
A nice young lady from Holland brewed up a nonalcoholic beer for her Weimaraners as a treat for a day’s hard work, and now she’s selling it as “Kwispelbier” after the Dutch word for a wagging tail. Technically, it isn’t a beer at all but more of a non-alcoholic malt liquor flavored with beef extracts. Either way, the dogs love it.
GADGETS
Driving Emotions
Using a certain finger to indicate feeling is so downgrading where as Drivemocion is a more geeky approach. It is a small electronic display that can be attached to the back window and allows any kind of message to be displayed. Its circular rear display can show smiley faces, frown faces, “Thanks,” and “Back Off.”
Digital Cookbook
You might have heard, but soon there will no longer be a need to risk your laptop in precarious situations in the kitchen. Modeled after a spatula, coo.boo is a digital cookbook that fits into the kitchen environment better than any laptop or printed cookbook.
FOOD & BEVERAGE
Halal Baby Friendly
Mumtaz Foods Industries offers ten varieties of baby food suitable for infants from 4 to 7+ months old, including Potato, Lamb & Spinach, and Spring Vegetables and Chicken. GEM Food’s Petit Gems comes in culture-spanning flavours, from Vegetable & Roast Beef to Middle-Eastern Lamb Tagine.
LIFESTYLE & LUXURY
Indoor Grill
If the drop in temperature has made the grilled delicacies a thing of the past, then this DeLonghi Healthy Indoor Grill will bring the grilling season again! The all-weather grill cooks with a combination of contact and radiant heat and it’s removable stainless steel drip tray allows excess fat to drip away, providing low-fat food and smoke-free indoor grilling.

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