Google Map Business Idea

I think this is so cool (I realize that some people may not) !!! Sometime between last night and this morning Google maps (maps.google.com) put up the street view for my area. How crazy is it?!!! I love it!!! The picture doesn't go all the way down my cul-de-sac, but that's my house right in front of you. I checked out my old house and our next door neighbors kids are outside riding their bikes and another neighbor is sitting of their front porch. It looks like every day more areas across the U.S. are being done. You should check out your address! If you are not familiar with it:

• go to maps.google.com and scroll to U.S.A continent.
• be sure to click the street view button in the top right area of the map
  zoom into your city and any street that is outlined in blue is one that you can view in the street view format.
• an orange person will be present and you can drag and drop that person where ever you want to be (use the X below the person to make sure you drop down on the right street).
• then a window will pop up with the view of the street. You can look all around (complete 360 degrees)
• enjoy!!!

You can expand these ideas further with geological representation of information valuable to others...like the business I mention in my Gold Rush post, detailing locations of gold mine for possible harvesting and earning from it.

Tracking Diamonds Using RFID

One of the biggest challenges that diamond traders face with is in managing the hundreds if not thousands of loose gems. Imagine walking into the storehouse inventory with all these small envelopes of precious loose stones stacked in boxes and trying to figure out the exact gem type. If you are using a barcode scanner, life is probably prettier although still rather tedious. For some it is an entirely MANUAL task, an extremely difficult job. It will take ages just to make sure all the numbers tally. What if there is a better solution? Like sticking the box through a tunnel-like scanner, and everything about your inventory reads out to you on the screen ? The Answer :

Diamonds are placed in an individual envelope, and each envelope is small enough to be stack-fit into a namecard box. RFID tags are then stuck to the envelope (paper label) or inserted (non- adhesive plastic card), one tag for each envelope. When the user pushes the box through the scanner, it reads the information stored in the tag for each envelop and display the entire inventory for a single box on the screen. This is a HUGE man hours saver.

100 tags can be identified in 1-2 seconds. Take a scenario of 10,000 diamonds. In terms of equipment resources using this solution, it will require 2 x MTR units (the tunnel like scanner above), operated by 1 person. In terms of time, it will take approximate 5 hours to complete inventory check procedure. Contrast this to a manual system. For 10,000 diamonds, it will require 20 persons over 3 weeks thereabouts. That comes up to 15 minutes per diamond vs 5 minutes per 100 diamonds. It’s a great saving in man-hours, no doubt about it. Think about it !

Creating Niche YouTube Clones for Profit

Another simple home business idea is that I have seen several aspiring entrepreneurs create YouTube clones and scrape YouTube videos to be placed on their sites. Some of these sites were then subsequently listed in auctions within webmaster forums.

Surprisingly, these YouTube clones do derive a fairly decent amount of search traffic with some revenue coming from display of contextual ads.

Copyright issues may cause these YouTube clones to be shut down and displaying Adsense on them may be more of a risk then a profitable move. Instead of creating a clone, it might be better to create a niche video site that targets a specific audience.

For example, a social video sharing website specifically on the topic of Yoga. One could liaise with Yoga equipment manufacturers, schools and blogs and work out exclusive ad, video and traffic-sharing partnerships.

This will work as a competitive advantage because major video websites have content that are conceptually dispersed, with no exclusivity or emphasis on a niche topic, nor any strong sense of community.