For Art Koff, who had a successful career in advertising and communications for more than 40 years, just because he was beginning a retirement lifestyle lifestyle didn’t mean that he was ready to give up his passion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The entrepreneur knew that he needed something to do to occupy his time, so he started a website called RetiredBrains.com, a job posting site which aimed to attract other active living seniors who felt that they wanted a diversion or needed some extra cash.

“I got up at the crack of dawn,” Art Koff tells the news source of his days as an ad man. “I can’t imagine what would happen if I didn’t have someplace to go and something to do.”

Though many active living seniors look forward to a more leisurely pace of living after retirement, the recent economic crunch has led to a 31-year-high in unemployment for Americans over the age of 65, which suggests sites such as Koff’s might be particularly useful to mature individuals searching for a new career.

Several years ago Greg Whisenant unsuspectingly opened the door of his apartment building for a burglar, who then ripped off several of his neighbors. To make amends, Whisenant built an information-sharing web site for the local police, which is now one of the fast-growing crime data-mapping services in the United States.

“I’d never been a crime activist or particularly concerned about my personal safety,” said the founder of CrimeReports.com http://www.crimereports.com, who was working as a Washington lobbyist when he began attending community policing meetings in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. “But I raised my hand, everybody clapped, and I was off the races.”

The early CrimeReports web site, which allowed police departments to register for free, essentially served as an elaborate email system, creating a conduit for municipalities to send localized alerts to members of the general public who signed up.

Today CrimeReports provides comprehensive local crime-mapping data to some 750 police departments, including cities such as San Francisco and Boston, and the entire states of Maryland and Utah.

Depending on their size, clients pay between $100 to $200 a month for data on homicides, break-ins, auto thefts and other crimes occurring in their service areas. The company also has a handy iPhone application, and offers police internal analytics for an additional monthly fee of $300 to $1,000.

“President Obama has made it an issue to be more transparent,” said Whisenant, whose public-policy career included stints as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), and later as a law-firm lobbyist working on technology and telecoms issues for large corporations. “There’s a lot of appetite at the federal level for more visibility and transparency, so it’s helped us.”

CrimeReports received a second round of venture financing totaling $7.2 million in August of 2009, and it expects to be profitable later this year. In the last year Whisenant has expanded his full-time staff from 10 to 37, made up mostly of engineers, sale reps and support personnel.

Whisenant called this growth a “rollercoaster” ride, recalling how for years he operated the site out of his home as a sideline project that wouldn’t go away.

“If the site ever went down, I’d start getting calls from the police and the public,” he said, noting that he sometimes ignored CrimeReports for months at a time. “I knew there was something there.”

SELF-TAUGHT EXPERT

A former student of English literature with a graduate degree in public policy from Harvard, Whisenant taught himself HTML Internet programing and initially ran CrimeReports himself.

Whisenant began profiting from his newfound skills in 2000, when he moved back to his home state of Utah to run marketing for a startup called Talk2, which offered Internet-based language interpretation services. When Talk2 was sold, he went on to form his own networking services company in 2001, Wasatch Solutions.

Whisenant saw the chance to make CrimeReports a viable company shortly after Google’s new mapping technology began to revolutionize geographical information, using satellites to offer users a richer viewing experience. He sold Wasatch to some of its employees and went to work raising money for CrimeReports, which is now based in Draper, Utah.

“I thought, I can’t kill this thing, it’s got a life of its own so I’m just going to go for it,” said Whisenant, who received initial VC funding of $1.1 million in late 2007 from Salt Lake City’s vSpring Capital.

The company used the seed money to develop software that mines police departments’ records management systems for crime data originating from 911 emergency call systems. Then, using Google mapping, it plots crimes by region, allowing users to search on details such as type of offense, location and date. Whisenant opted for a subscription-based revenue model, avoiding online ads that might have compromised the official look and feel his clients preferred.

LOW-COST PROVIDER

What sets CrimeReports’ system apart from the competition is its ease of use and relatively low cost, said Michael Dodd, venture partner for Texas-based Austin Ventures, which teamed up with vSpring to offer the second round of financing. Alternative providers of crime mapping, he said, require police departments to purchase costly hardware and software.

“It’s cloud software,” said Austin, who estimates the market for offering public safety software to first responders, including police, fire departments and rescue squads, is between $4 million and $6 million.

“It’s $100 to $200 bucks a month, versus 50 grand with some other companies,” he said. “That’s why Greg is really successful.”

Police departments say they like CrimeReports because it lets officers spend community face time focusing on prevention, rather than bringing citizens up to speed on violations that have occurred in their area.

“It allows us to focus on the real issues,” said Rob Davis, chief of police in San Jose, California, which was an early adopter of technology. “People have the ability to become informed before they hit the (community) meetings.”

Meanwhile, CrimeReports is pushing ahead to stay on top of the latest trends. This year the company plans to roll out a new service that will give police departments the ability to create community-centered social networks, using popular aggregators such as Twitter and Facebook, so they can share information and invite neighbors to participate in the CrimeReports interface.

Whisenant, who is no stranger to Capitol Hill, said there will be a myriad of other possibilities for his data at a time when the public wants more control over the information affecting local communities.

“I think a lot more is going to be happening to move this information out to the networks in a meaningful way,” he said.

Almost by accident, Andrew Mason has figured out what others wish they could: how to make money from electronic content.

Mason’s Groupon marketing company has done this through “crowdsourcing,” which uses the power of the masses on the Internet. Groupon sends out daily e-mails with a deal that offers a product or service at a discounted price. The business relies on the collective purchasing power of a group of interested consumers, hence the name Groupon. Participating merchants pay a commission, making Groupon profitable at a time when so much Internet content lacks an income stream.

For the deal of the day to work, a minimum number of people have to buy it. That crowdsourcing encourages subscribers to tell their friends, family and co-workers. As word spreads, the selected business gains exposure.

“We kind of stumbled across a model that’s clearly a win for consumers, but even more so, it’s a win for businesses. It’s allowing them to get customers in the door at a time that can be difficult,” Mason said.

But it’s not just about the money. Groupon tries to make the experience for staffers and consumers alike enjoyable. The company’s copywriters often use a humorous tone to advertise a product or service.

“Part of what makes this fun for us is trying to expose people to things they wouldn’t have done otherwise,” like comedy, skydiving, cooking classes, architectural tours, salon services or even teeth whitening, Mason said.

The Annoyance Theatre & Bar sold out one recent performance and filled several other shows to near capacity after a promotion on Groupon offered four tickets for $15, a 75 percent discount off the usual weekend fee, plus half-price drinks, said Jennifer Estlin, executive producer and president.

The Annoyance deal sold 974 Groupons, with each good for four tickets, she said. And 80 percent of those using Groupon weren’t aware of the theater before, she said. “These are people who wouldn’t have come otherwise,” she said.

In just eight months, Groupon has amassed an e-mail list of more than 100,000 consumers in the Chicago area and 350,000 nationwide, as it has spread to seven cities with 60 markets planned by the end of 2010.

“The subscriber growth has been phenomenal,” said serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, a Groupon investor and director. “It kind of feeds on itself.”

Part of Groupon’s success is its ability to bring people together through a common connection, Lefkofsky said. That was Mason’s goal from the start, though his initial intention was not to sell coupons.

Mason, who had worked for Lefkofsky at InnerWorkings Inc. before attending graduate school at the University of Chicago, wanted to bring people together for social change.

He conceived ThePoint.com as a platform for organizing social action to “a tipping point” that would make an impact. He envisioned people starting a campaign to affect political or social change and using ThePoint.com to raise interest and funds for action.

But when ThePoint.com launched in late 2007, some people started using it for group purchases to save money. “I thought, ‘How can we take the collective-buying aspect and make it interesting?’ ” Mason said.

He decided to launch Groupon in November 2008, focusing on “cool things about Chicago every day at a price that was too good to refuse.” ThePoint.com continues with Groupon’s support, Mason said.

As subscribers beget more subscribers, participating businesses, such as BriteSmile Brite Skin Med Spa, take notice. After selling 220 Groupons in February for $189 teeth-whitening services, down from the usual $600, a similar promotion a few months later sold more than 700 deals due to the larger e-mail distribution.

“It was doing so well I had to call them and tell them to stop the promotion,” said Susan Strauser, executive sales consultant at BriteSmile, which has five Chicago locations.

Groupon works with merchants to come up with an appealing deal and writes all of the content. “We’re willing to work with business owners, but ultimately we have the final say,” Mason said.

With Groupon doing the creative work, there’s little overhead for the merchant. That makes it an ideal way to market to new customers, said Sandy Dinkel Karl, vice president of Dinkel’s Bakery, which Groupon recently featured in a deal offering $15 worth of bakery items for $5.

Dinkel’s paid Groupon a 50 percent commission on the nearly 4,000 deals sold, but the exposure generated additional traffic from people who didn’t buy but saw the e-mail, Karl said. Dinkel’s Web site had 10,000 hits that day, compared to fewer than 2,000 hits on a typical day, she said.

While Dinkel’s isn’t making money from purchases made through Groupon, that wasn’t the goal.

“It’s giving people a reason to come in,” Karl said. “If they taste a really good doughnut, it’s a hook.”

GREEN
Decades in the making, this $209 billion market has its roots in everything from water to energy to food. Look especially to organics, clean energy, alternative fuels, and water reuse and reclamation services.

ECONOMY
What goes upmust come down. Consumers are no longer trading up when making their purchase decisions, but rather trading down.

HEALTH
Thanks to the web and aging boomers, we know more than ever about our health, especially what may harm it. Sectors from exercise to plastic surgery are open for the entrepreneurially inclined.

MILLENNIALS
Want to bridge the generational gap? It may take a little research, but you’ll find opportunities in marketing, web apps, social networking, and anything that promotes culture and community.

BOOMERS
Representing the biggest wealth transfer in history, these individualists started the green movement and are ready to cash in on the environment, health, financial planning, travel and everything in between.

DIGITAL
The web holds endless opportunities for business pioneers, and almost everything you’ll ever do from here on out will somehow tie back to it.

ODDS & ENDS
The fact that cities are creating laws against trans fats and that companies are selling 100-calorie snack bags doesn’t take away from the popularity of bacon. Consider the Bacon of the Month Club and odd offerings like bacon mints.

When Adrian Portlock left his mobile phone on the tube in 2000, he was shocked at the kerfuffle involved in getting it back. “They asked me for the IMEI number of the handset,” says Portlock. “This was back in 2000, I didn’t even know what an IMEI number was.”

He finally tracked down the code and reclaimed his phone, but not before he’d found out that Transport for London recover some 10,000 mobile phones every month, which were only returned when people had their registration numbers.

“I decided to launch a service where people could register these details so that they were easily accessible if their phone was lost or stolen,” says Portlock, “But then I realised there was an even bigger potential for the idea.”

Portlock approached major mobile insurers like Carphone Warehouse, as well as the networks, global mobile databases and even the police. “It took lots of charm, persuasion and hard work to get them on board,” says Portlock. “But now we have the most comprehensive database in the world. We’ve got 30 million stolen handsets on our books.”

In 2000, the CheckMEND service was launched. The idea is simple: for £2.99 buyers and sellers of second-hand electronics can check anything from mobile phones to iPods and Satnavs against a global database to find out whether their gadgets are kosher, or whether they’ve fallen off the back of a lorry.

No other registration service can boast the kind of high level partnership wangled by Portlock. Recipero even provides the UK Police Service with a unique interface to check recovered phones and equipment. And the relationship is reciprocal: CheckMEND is informed when handsets are handed in.

Portlock is no untried businessman, he’s a serial entrepreneur. His chain of 15 restaurants, bars and leisure centres was sold in 2000. Recipero was founded after a brief attempt at retirement: “I was only 40,” he says. “I got bored.”

Takes me back to my Loseitback.com days ….

Here is a niche in the UK that I really think will be taking off over the next 18 months, especially in affluent areas and housing.

Security is an important feature for many homes. Bioaxxis offers a fingerprint bolt lock system which will do much more than the average locking system to protect people, their homes and their belongings.

Authorized dealers are given the chance to offer this higher level of security to customers in theor own area while getting the chance to work for themselves. Depending ont he size of the territory you’re given the business could be started for a minimum of $29,000.

Try and get UK rights!

Shane Chen was getting bored with his job. For 20 years, the founder of CID Inc. had focused on his Camas business, selling electronic instruments to plant scientists. He wanted a change.

“One day I saw an exercise equipment ad,” the Camas resident said. “I thought, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

And he got to work. The result, the Body Toner, went on sale six years ago through infomercials and QVC, the television shopping network.

Suddenly Chen, 52, was not just the president of CID Inc. He was heading a new venture, Inventist, and he was enjoying his work again.

Following the success of the Body Toner, Chen started seeing new ideas everywhere he went. The Orbitwheel, which he invented to create a smoother ride than roller skates and skateboards provide.

A willingness to fail is one secret to an inventor’s success, Chen said.

“People come up with ideas daily,” he said. “One out of 100 might work, but you have to try. You have to absorb failures and not get discouraged.”

That attitude has paid off. Born six years ago at the hands of a bored tinkerer, Inventist has grown into a business that does $1 million per year in sales and has four employees.

 

Paul Ramsey of private hospital operator Ramsay Health Care comes in at number 32 this year, with a  $1.1 billion fortune that started with a 16-bed psychiatric facility he created in the 1960s.

And in 2008 Primary Health managing director Dr Ed Bateman has again shown there’s money to be made in general practice – so long as you own it. His takeover of Symbion has pushed him to 86^th on the list with an increase in wealth from $358 million to $458 million – including a $17 million art collection. Not bad for a GP who started with a Warringah Mall clinic in

Other wealth creators come from the pharmaceutical and surgical supply industries, such as Michael Boyd, whose $360 million is based on his interests in Advance Healthcare Group and pathology provider Sonic Healthcare.

Nursing home tycoon and Circular Quay Toaster resident Doug Moran has $239 million in the bank thanks to his family firm the Moran Group. Aged care also made the Mussett family rich to the tune of $160 million with the sale of their Conform Health Group.

But let us not forget those impoverished entrepreneurs who have failed to make the list or dropped off it. These include father and son generic drug makers David and Paul Duchen  have fallen on hard times after selling their Arrow Pharmaceuticals interests to Sigma left them with less than $200 million.

Meanwhile Marcus Blackmore has found that alternative remedies are certainly effective when it comes to making money –strong growth has raised his fortune to close to $100 million.

A property entrepreneur in Yorkshire has said the credit crunch has produced an “exciting” environment in which many possibilities exist for those in the commercial sector.

In comments which may interest those with Commercial Mortgages, Andreas Evans, of Evans Property Group told the audience at the Yorkshire Property Industry Awards 2008 in Leeds: “Times like these have got opportunities in them but it”s about spotting them. We”re in a very sensitive place at the moment,” reports the Business Desk.

Evans Group won the award for the best property deal when it sold its portfolio for £425 million.

Another area that those dealing in the commercial property industry may want to consider is the growing emphasis on sustainable development, even though he himself was not so enthusiastic about green issues.

One place where business appears to be doing well is the Liverpool office rental sector.

A report by CB Richard Ellis has revealed that the city has had one of the world”s top 20 fastest growing office rents in the past year, Place North West reports.

Giving your product away to anyone who wants it is certainly an atypical business model, but for Roger and Margaret Wilson-Hinds, it was the pivotal decision that turned their screenreader idea into a commercial reality.

The Wilson-Hinds, both blind since birth, were busily running a disability training company having won a government contract to teach blind people to use computers. Then, in 1998, Roger was found to have cancer, forcing the couple to quit the business and give it to a close friend.

During the ensuing treatment the Wilson-Hinds realised that, although programmes that could scan text on a computer screen and read it back to the user were available, the typical £700-£800 software packages were beyond the pocket of the majority of the world’s blind community and they became determined to produce a low-cost alternative.

At 60 most people are contemplating a quieter life, but fuelled by the idea of “opening up information literacy to blind people anywhere”, in 2000 Roger enrolled himself and his wife on a course for social entrepreneurs instead.

Having self-funded the product’s development, the screenreader, called Thunder, was finally ready for market, but, after a few years of trying to sell it at low cost, the take-up was slow.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, but low-cost is often seen as inferior and it wasn’t until we studied the Google model and embraced the notion of ‘free to the end user’ that things really got moving,” Roger says.

Immediately the product became available free, a German company with links to the European Blind Union got in touch and, two months later, the Wilson-Hinds were in receipt of an EU grant of €240,000 (£190,000) to fund French, Italian, German, Slovak and Estonian versions of Thunder. Since then, more funding has been forthcoming, a version specifically for people with learning difficulties is in development and, with almost 100,000 users, the company now advises businesses on how to make their websites available to this untapped market.

www.screenreader.net