Retail
Do not be tempted to start a retail store just because you find a cute, affordable space. Location means everything in retail and a good location usually costs a lot of money. In fact, a super location, good signage, and an attractive store front may be all the marketing you need.
• Computers
• Office supplies
• Software
• Luggage
• Maps
• Rare books
• Flowers
• Candles
• Jewelry
• Pets
• Appliances
• Ice cream
• Wine
• Baked goods
• Auto parts
• Coffee and tea
• Children's clothes
• Paper goods
• Sporting goods
• Medical equipment
Secondhand stores
A secondhand store can provide a reasonable income with minimal investment and minimal risk. Buy used items cheap enough so you can mark them up at least 100 percent. If you are considering selling expensive items like cars, consider selling on consignment, never actually taking ownership of the items, but displaying and selling them for a hefty cut of the sales price.
• Cars
• Furniture
• Office equipment
• Computers
• Books
• Boats
• Antiques
• Industrial equipment
• Auto parts
• Formal Dress
• Baby Clothes
• medical equipment
• Televisions
• Musical instruments
• Electronic games
• Auto parts
• Phone systems
• Sports equipment
• CDs
• Lawn care equipment
Services
Service businesses offer a lot of advantages, especially for start-ups. They Tend to be local and you usually do not have to compete with as many heavily financed national or international corporations as you might in a retail, wholesale, or manufacturing business. So service businesses require less capital. You do not need to finance a large inventory or work-in-progress, and customers can usually be asked to pay immediately upon completion of the work.
• Blade sharpening
• Manicuring
• Athletic recruiting
• Funeral home
• Mobile disc jockey
• Hot-air balloon rides
• Tour pack aging
• portrait photography
• Temporary employment
• Resume Services
• Telemarketing
• Window washing
• Chimney sweeping
• Carpet cleaning
• Lawn care service
• Bungee jumping instruction
• Wake-up service
• Dance Instruction
• Trophy engraving
• Monogramming Service
Restaurants
Restaurants have a high failure rate. Steady, loyal patronage may take years to build up Owners of successful restaurants usually have extensive experience restaurants, endless work days, and either rely on their large, close-knit families for assistance or have a knack for attracting, retaining, and motivating good kitchen and service staff.
• Deli
• Food service
• espresso bar
• Seafood
• Gourmet
• ice cream
• Family style
• Steak house
• Sushi
• Mexican
• Sports bar
• Chinese
• Vegetarian
• Bagel
• Indian
• Thai
• Greek
• Italian
• Catering
• Pizza
• Pushcart
Consultancies
A consultancy is a great opportunity if you have many years of in-depth and specialized expertise that is in high demand. Those consultants who TEND to be more successful are those who are in the later stages of their careers, have developed a rich network of contacts and references in their industry, and do not mind working alone.
• Meteorological
• Engineering
• Customs
• Noise control
• Government controls
• Disability
• Child development
• Wellness
• Gerontology
• Forensics
• Medical management
• Nutrition
• Food manufacturing
• Gardening
• College
• Relocation
• Marketing
• Small Business
• Employee benefits
• Database
Rentals
Rentals are not as easy a way to make money as you might think. On the income side, the typically modest rental fees do not seem to amount to much. On the expense side, you've got marketing costs, repair and maintenance costs, expensive liability insurance, and theft costs. One positive note-periodic sales of rental items might net more than you paid for them new!
• Automobiles
• Televisions
• Furniture
• Office equipment
• Carpeting
• Lock boxes
• Storage facilities
• Party Equipment
• Vacation homes
• Bicycles
• Musical instruments
• AV equipment
• Computers
• Video Tapes
• Copy machines
• Outdoor furniture
• Tuxedos
• Limousines
• Carpet Cleaners
• Arcade games
Wholesale
If you're thinking about opening a wholesale business, think twice! While it's easy and quick to reach a high level of sales, you'll find it difficult to make money and keep afloat. Most wholesalers operate on very thin profit margins that are possible only because of highly sophisticated computer systems and extremely efficient warehouse and selling systems, tight credit control and collections, and most of all, a large volume of sales over which to spread overhead.
• Industrial supplies
• Textiles
• Retail equipment
• Food items
• Herbal products
• Restaurant Equipment
• Footwear
• Luggage
• Sports equipment
• Vending machines
• Computers
• Appliances
• Educational software
• Coffee
• Carpets
• Clothing
• Office supplies
• Books
• Tapes
• Flowers
Advertising
Publishing a magazine, newspaper, or other vehicle to sell advertising space is very tempting because the profit margins can be very high. But, no matter how good your product, advertising never sells itself. Save up a lot of energy, and a lot of money paying for good sales people.
• Classified ads
• Hand Bills
• Magazines
• Teletext
• Drive - by broadcasting
• Hotel information systems
• Mall kiosks
• Taxis
• Public transportation
• Subway systems
• Radio
• Broadcast television
• Cable television
• Yellow pages
• Card decks
• Giveaways
• Billboards
• Trade show handouts
• Pens
• Stickers
Sunday, May 30, 2010
4G phone will quickly change things .
BALTIMORE - I'm only here for the day. No time to dine on soft-shell, crab barely enough for a glance at Camden Yards, where the Orioles play baseball. I'ma tourist digital, screen here mainly to stare at a glowing LCD.
Related
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Year of the tablet?
Year of the tablet?
Apple's innovations
Apple's innovations
Still, I'm enjoying the tiny view, Web pages and Internet downloaded videos at amazing speed by a device that fits into a shirt pocket, lets me shoot high-definition videos, and can still be used to call the folks back home.
It's called the EVO 4G, and it's our first glimpse at the next big thing in smartphones. When cellular carrier Sprint Nextel Corp.. begins the bestselling EVO on June 4, it will be America's first 4G cellphone, capable of far greater speed than the 3G iPhones and BlackBerries we have come to love.
But why fly 360 miles to check it out? Because Boston does not have a working 4G network yet. Baltimore is one of about two dozen U.S. cities where you can find one. Sprint says it's building more 4G coverage as fast as it can, Boston is on the list for sometime this year.
Today's 3G services will let you download perhaps a million bits of data per second on a good day with a strong tailwind. In normal use, you're more likely to top out at 600 000 bits per second. But 4G promises speeds as high as 12 million bits per second, with 3 to 6 megabits being the likely norm
That means we're on the verge of having portable, pocket-size devices that can download data as fast as the broadband connections in our homes. Sprint already sells portable data hotspots and laptop cards that will deliver 4G speeds. The EVO 4G, made by the Taiwanese company HTC, packs 4G technology into a sleek, feature-packed smartphone.
You will still enjoy the phone, 4G or not. It's thinner than an iPhone, but longer, with a screen that's nearly an inch against when held sideways. That makes the EVO player an excellent video. The EVO uses Google Inc. 's Android operating system, a worthy rival to Apple's phone software.
You get two cameras for the price of one. There's an 8-megapixel autofocus camera that shoots video, as well as a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.
But it's the EVO's broadband firepower that really matters. I tested it with help from Ookla, a company with software for measuring speed data on mobile devices. I installed Ookla's Speed Test app on the EVO and on an Apple iPhone 3G running on AT & T Inc. 's 3G network.
It was not even close. The iPhone's 3G speeds were around 600 000 bits per second. Meanwhile, the EVO 4G was hauling down the data at more than 3 megabits, or five times faster.
That's enough bandwidth to share with friends and colleagues, and you can. The EVO 4G is also a Wi-Fi mobile hotspot. Up to eight other Wi-Fi-equipped devices can draw data from the phone's 4G connection. For some reason - envy? - My iphone would not speak to the EVO 4G, but my Blackberry Bold happily hooked up, as did the Netgear Wi-Fi card in my battered old Dell laptop.
But all this digital splendor comes at a steep price. The EVO Devours battery power. With its 4G modem switched on, I got just over three hours out of it.
The phone's $ 200 price tag is quite attractive - two-year contract, $ 100 mail-in rebate and ave But you must then pay $ 80 a month minimum for unlimited voice and data service, $ 10 a month more than Sprint charges for its 3G plans. You will have to pay this price even if you live in a city that has not gotten 4G coverage yet. And using the phone as a mobile hotspot additional costs to $ 30 a month.
Still, the future is rarely cheap, and the EVO 4G is the most advanced smartphone yet. There are rumors of a 4G iPhone, perhaps to be unveiled by Steve Jobs at Apple's software developers' conference on June 7, three days after the EVO goes on sale. But Apple's cellular partner, AT & T, can not even get its 3G network to function properly. Sun Apple breaks its exclusive deal with AT & T, the EVO will continue to outperform 4G unless the iPhone, especially in Baltimore.
RELATED STORIES. NEW MOBILE , NEW CAMERA , NEW TV , NEW WATCH , , NEW DEVICE , Cell phone , pc suit
Related
Compare cell plans
Compare cell plans
Year of the tablet?
Year of the tablet?
Apple's innovations
Apple's innovations
Still, I'm enjoying the tiny view, Web pages and Internet downloaded videos at amazing speed by a device that fits into a shirt pocket, lets me shoot high-definition videos, and can still be used to call the folks back home.
It's called the EVO 4G, and it's our first glimpse at the next big thing in smartphones. When cellular carrier Sprint Nextel Corp.. begins the bestselling EVO on June 4, it will be America's first 4G cellphone, capable of far greater speed than the 3G iPhones and BlackBerries we have come to love.
But why fly 360 miles to check it out? Because Boston does not have a working 4G network yet. Baltimore is one of about two dozen U.S. cities where you can find one. Sprint says it's building more 4G coverage as fast as it can, Boston is on the list for sometime this year.
Today's 3G services will let you download perhaps a million bits of data per second on a good day with a strong tailwind. In normal use, you're more likely to top out at 600 000 bits per second. But 4G promises speeds as high as 12 million bits per second, with 3 to 6 megabits being the likely norm
That means we're on the verge of having portable, pocket-size devices that can download data as fast as the broadband connections in our homes. Sprint already sells portable data hotspots and laptop cards that will deliver 4G speeds. The EVO 4G, made by the Taiwanese company HTC, packs 4G technology into a sleek, feature-packed smartphone.
You will still enjoy the phone, 4G or not. It's thinner than an iPhone, but longer, with a screen that's nearly an inch against when held sideways. That makes the EVO player an excellent video. The EVO uses Google Inc. 's Android operating system, a worthy rival to Apple's phone software.
You get two cameras for the price of one. There's an 8-megapixel autofocus camera that shoots video, as well as a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.
But it's the EVO's broadband firepower that really matters. I tested it with help from Ookla, a company with software for measuring speed data on mobile devices. I installed Ookla's Speed Test app on the EVO and on an Apple iPhone 3G running on AT & T Inc. 's 3G network.
It was not even close. The iPhone's 3G speeds were around 600 000 bits per second. Meanwhile, the EVO 4G was hauling down the data at more than 3 megabits, or five times faster.
That's enough bandwidth to share with friends and colleagues, and you can. The EVO 4G is also a Wi-Fi mobile hotspot. Up to eight other Wi-Fi-equipped devices can draw data from the phone's 4G connection. For some reason - envy? - My iphone would not speak to the EVO 4G, but my Blackberry Bold happily hooked up, as did the Netgear Wi-Fi card in my battered old Dell laptop.
But all this digital splendor comes at a steep price. The EVO Devours battery power. With its 4G modem switched on, I got just over three hours out of it.
The phone's $ 200 price tag is quite attractive - two-year contract, $ 100 mail-in rebate and ave But you must then pay $ 80 a month minimum for unlimited voice and data service, $ 10 a month more than Sprint charges for its 3G plans. You will have to pay this price even if you live in a city that has not gotten 4G coverage yet. And using the phone as a mobile hotspot additional costs to $ 30 a month.
Still, the future is rarely cheap, and the EVO 4G is the most advanced smartphone yet. There are rumors of a 4G iPhone, perhaps to be unveiled by Steve Jobs at Apple's software developers' conference on June 7, three days after the EVO goes on sale. But Apple's cellular partner, AT & T, can not even get its 3G network to function properly. Sun Apple breaks its exclusive deal with AT & T, the EVO will continue to outperform 4G unless the iPhone, especially in Baltimore.
RELATED STORIES. NEW MOBILE , NEW CAMERA , NEW TV , NEW WATCH , , NEW DEVICE , Cell phone , pc suit
Unemployment .
The main measure of employment in the United States is the Current Population Survey conducted monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a March 5, 2008 column in The New York Times, excerpted below, David Leonhardt described the birth of the survey, and its major shortcoming:
In 1878, Carroll D. Wright set out to do something that nobody in the United States had apparently ever done before. He tried to count the number of unemployed.
As is the case today, the 1870s were a time of economic anxiety, with a financial crisis - the panic of 1873 - having spread into the broader economy. But Wright, then the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, thought there were not nearly as many people as out of work commonly believed. He lamented the "industrial hypochondria" then making the rounds, and to combat it, he created the first survey of unemployment.
The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who "really want employment," according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they had been earning before.
Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22.000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his "intelligent canvas" had proven the "croakers" wrong. From Massachusetts, he went to Washington where, he served as The inaugural director of the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics and later as The head of the United States Census. His method for counting - and not counting - the unemployed became the basis for Census tallies of the jobless and, eventually, for the monthly employment report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Over the last few decades, there has been at enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man's land of the labor market that Carroll Wright created 130 years ago. These people are not employed, but they also do not fit the government's definition of the unemployed - those who "do not have a job, have Actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.
There are only two possible explanations for this bizarre combination of a falling rate employment rate and a falling unemployment. The first is that there has been a big increase in the number of people not working purely by their own choice. You can think of them as the self-unemployed. They include retirees, as well as stay-at-home parents, people caring for aging parents and others doing unpaid work.
The second possible explanation - a jump in the number of people who are not working, who are not Actively looking but who would, in fact, like to find a good job - is less comforting. It also appears to be the more accurate explanation.
There is no doubt that the unemployment rate is a less telling measure than it once was. It's simply no longer the best barometer of the country's economic health. A truer picture can be found elsewhere, by looking at compensation growth, for instance, or to changes in the percentage of the employed.
No less than Tom Nardone, the economist overseeing the unemployment survey, made a similar point. "Just saying the unemployment is 5 percent rate, without any other context, really doesn? T tell you much," Mr. Nardone said.
In 1878, Carroll D. Wright set out to do something that nobody in the United States had apparently ever done before. He tried to count the number of unemployed.
As is the case today, the 1870s were a time of economic anxiety, with a financial crisis - the panic of 1873 - having spread into the broader economy. But Wright, then the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, thought there were not nearly as many people as out of work commonly believed. He lamented the "industrial hypochondria" then making the rounds, and to combat it, he created the first survey of unemployment.
The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who "really want employment," according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they had been earning before.
Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22.000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his "intelligent canvas" had proven the "croakers" wrong. From Massachusetts, he went to Washington where, he served as The inaugural director of the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics and later as The head of the United States Census. His method for counting - and not counting - the unemployed became the basis for Census tallies of the jobless and, eventually, for the monthly employment report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Over the last few decades, there has been at enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man's land of the labor market that Carroll Wright created 130 years ago. These people are not employed, but they also do not fit the government's definition of the unemployed - those who "do not have a job, have Actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.
There are only two possible explanations for this bizarre combination of a falling rate employment rate and a falling unemployment. The first is that there has been a big increase in the number of people not working purely by their own choice. You can think of them as the self-unemployed. They include retirees, as well as stay-at-home parents, people caring for aging parents and others doing unpaid work.
The second possible explanation - a jump in the number of people who are not working, who are not Actively looking but who would, in fact, like to find a good job - is less comforting. It also appears to be the more accurate explanation.
There is no doubt that the unemployment rate is a less telling measure than it once was. It's simply no longer the best barometer of the country's economic health. A truer picture can be found elsewhere, by looking at compensation growth, for instance, or to changes in the percentage of the employed.
No less than Tom Nardone, the economist overseeing the unemployment survey, made a similar point. "Just saying the unemployment is 5 percent rate, without any other context, really doesn? T tell you much," Mr. Nardone said.
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