The FlowBreeze Flow Chart Software site is now live. It currently lists the standard flowcharting software information. In the future it will be used to showcase special deals for free flow chart downloads, flow chart templates, and How To articles. Article topics will include on how to create a basic flowchart, what the symbols mean, and best practices for using flow charts in process analysis and process documentation. There will also be material on style guides and some basic quality improvement articles.

Piracy is a major problem for software vendors. I make a product called FlowBreeze, a flowcharting automation add-in for Excel. Let's say someone wants to find a keygen, serial number, or cracked version of FlowBreeze from some torrent or warez site. If they search Google, they're probably going to find pages and pages of legitimate software download sites - because all the download sites optimize for those terms.

Next, they're going to find a bunch of subscription warez sites. Many of these will claim to have thousands of software titles listed, but you need to pay a nominal fee to gain access to them. These are spotty at best since many don't actually contain the file. You can search for a software title you make up on the spot and they'll generate a page for it, claiming to have it. I've seen others claim to list FlowBreeze, but the file size is typically much bigger or much smaller than the real FlowBreeze setup file, so I know they're not legit.

But even with all these hurdles, people still do find cracked versions of various software titles, so software vendors pay big bucks for anti-piracy protection and licensing software. That's where the money making comes into play - by creating a large number of "mis-direction" sites.

Here's the setup:
1. An enterprising web entrepreneur creates a large network of interlinked fake warez and torrent sites (low rent .info domains would suffice).
2. Software vendors pay a small subscription fee to get listed on the network.
3. All the subscribers link to at least one site in the network.
4. Each software title has its own page like the one linked to above. It will state the users IP address and a scary (but ultimately fake) warning.
5. The warning page will link back to a real purchase page of the software.

Here's where the money comes in:
1. The subscription fees mentioned above.
2. Each page can have an affiliate link back to the software vendor's site to make a percentage off the sale.
3. The network of sites can all sell advertising.

The beauty is that the SEO is built-in, since back links to the network are part of the subscription agreement. The more sites that are in the network, the more a potential crack, serial, or keygen seeker has to wade through false leads. It's basically protection through a massive inundation of the search results.

I have been searching lately for some web icons, and they're tough to find. Don't get me wrong, if you Google common terms like web icons, webmaster icons, and so forth, you'll get plenty of results. But most of them are crap. You would think with all the icon makers out there that it would be easy to find Buy Now buttons, Satisfaction Guaranteed badges, and the like. But most web based business owners I know had custom ones designed. The neighbor's kid is attending some little art school, and when she gets home for the summer this is an idea I'll hit her up with. But in the meantime, it would great if someone had the common sense to design a set of Web 2.0 looking buttons and icons in a variety of colors. It simply amazes me that everything I find is trashy or has limited applicability.

Here is a minimal list of buttons and icons I would include:

• Limited Time Offer
• New
• Sale
• One Day Only
• Today Only
• Secure (100%, Shopping)
• No Hacker
• Safe
• Risk Free
• 20%, 25, 30, 1/3, 40, 50, 60, 75 Off
• Free
• Popular
• Hot!
• Wow!
• Download
• Screen shots
• Preview
• Demo
• More Info...
• Buy Now
• Buy Now!
• 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• 15-Day Free Trial
• Free Trial
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
• 60-Day Money Back Guarantee
• 90-Day Money Back Guarantee
• Shop On-Line
• Email
• Products
• Services
• Support
• Contact
• About
• About Us
• RSS
• Blog
• Feed

One of the annoyances of starting a business is that your junk mail swells to fill your mail box (we're talking snail mail here, folks). Sorting through this junk is a non-value added chore for anyone. You could simply toss them in the trash, but if you want to be safe, it's a good idea to shred all these pre-approved offers.

Wouldn't it be great to rid your self of these? You can, and here's how.

The FTC has instructions for opting out permanently via mail, or you can just go on-line to OptOutPrescreen and do it on-line. The online version lets you opt out of pre-approved credit card and insurance offers for 5 years. It works for both mail and phone offers. All you need to do is enter your name, address, telephone number and social security number (they encrypt it for security).

[You can also choose to opt-in. This was probably a concession made to the finance industry, but it's laughable that anyone would want to opt-in.]

Note: If you have existing credit card accounts (who doesn't?), odds are that somewhere in their agreement, they and their affiliates can solicit you for offers via mail and telephone. But, they also need to provide an option for you to opt-out of those offers. It may take a little work to track them down, but you can free up wasted time in the long run with a little effort today.

From time to time I come up with these software ideas that I just assume that someone has already invented and blow them off. This is one of them. But since I don't have the time or inclination to develop such as product, I'll go ahead and log it here for posterity.

The idea is simple - an plug-in for IE (because it would probably have to be ActiveX) that allows you to precisely control the printer output for a web document. You can use CSS to layout out a page for printing, but that isn't always enough. Case in point: barcodes.

In my career in manufacturing, I've dealt with barcodes on every job. In my first job, it was simple. I had to coordinate the  acquisition and inventory management of barcode security labels to be placed on circuit boards for our UK operation. (I still remember the company!) Simple enough. Later, my first "coding" experience with barcodes was creating a macro to generate them on the fly in an Excel spreadsheet. Again, pretty easy. Later still, we had a barcode printer developed in VB6 that output barcodes to a thermal printer. Piece of cake.

Finally, though, I was working on a project that really should have been an enterprise web app. At the time, pre-.Net ASP was the in-house web dev language, and the show stopper was barcode printing. The typical PC needing barcodes printed was also used for day-to-day work, with multiple printers available, including the thermal barcode printer. The web app had no way of knowing which printers were installed, and we couldn't figure out a way not to waste a bunch of labels because the operator forgot to switch the default printer before the printing job was run. So we had the joy of distributing and maintaining a desktop application that otherwise would have been a perfect web app.

Maybe in the years since, someone has developed a better way to do this, but if not, my business idea of the day is an IE plug-in that will enumerate the installed printers and allow for the selection of both the printer and the print stock/paper size.

If you do a lot of writing on-line, especially in web forms, then you're bound to make a few mistakes. And, inevitably, you'll want to cut, copy, and paste text frequently. Moving around a web page can often mean switching back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse, which gets to be a pain. If you're a mouse oriented user, then here are 10 quick keyboard shortcuts that can save you a lot of time...

1. Ctrl+Z: Undo. It will undo your last typing. Most web forms don't have a buil;t-in undo feature, so knowing this keyboard shortcut is really handy.
2. Ctrl+Y: Redo. In case your Undo went a bit too far, Redo will roll back your last Undo.
3. Ctrl+A: select All. selects all the content in a region. If your cursor is within a form element, it will select only the content within the form.
4. Ctrl+X: Cut. It beats using the mouse every time.
5. Ctrl+C: Copy. Do I need to elaborate?
6. Ctrl+V: Paste. The logical compliment to Ctrl+X and Ctrl+C.
7. Ctrl+Shift+Arrow/End/Page Up/Page Down: Select text from the cursor to the next letter, end of line, one letter, bottom or top of page respectively.
8. Ctrl+B: Applies bold formatting to selected text.
9. Ctrl+I: Applies Italic formatting to selected text.
10. Ctrl+U: Underlines selected text. (Use with caution since underlines typically mean links.)

If you're like me, you never fully learned all the features of your company's voicemail system. Two of the features I never learned were (1) how to send one voice message to multiple people and (2) voice message forwarding.

The telephone is a lousy user interface. I have no patience for "press 1 to do this, press 2 for that, press 3 for whatever". And why is it always "press 9 to exit the system". Why not just hang-up?

What I thought would be cool is a software package that connected the voicemail system to the email system. So if I received a voicemail that I wanted to forward to my team, I could just open up Outlook (or some other email program), create a quick email and attach the voicemail to the email.

The person receiving the voice message via email would double-click the attachment and choose to listen to it on their PC or have it sent to their phone. Better yet, the software would let you send it to their phones automatically.

Likewise, I could originate a message either in email or voicemail and send the voice message to a group of people. The system would require a text to speech (TTS) component for the email-to-voicemail capability, but those are readily available (AT&T's Natural Voices actually sounds pretty good.)

Some may ask why not just send an email? For one, a lot of us can talk faster than we can type. Secondly, not all companies are willing to buy their field personnel Blackberries, so is usually easier for them to call in and check their voice messages than their emails.

Many of us no longer have a dial-up ISP account, so when we travel we have to resort to using the the hotel's ISP service. The problem with this is that it's expensive. Plus, it's probably intrusive.

When visiting Las Vegas last year, I used the hotel's high speed internet access. It ran $10 / day, I think, and it was a pain to setup. I had to download a connection program from the hotel's server, install it, play with the configuration, and finally after about 20 minutes could get on-line.

So I start browsing, and my software firewall pops up a notice that the connection program is trying to send outbound data. The people who run Vegas hotels aren't exactly the kind of people I trust sending data out from my PC. What kind of data are they (collecting and) sending anyway?

So, finally, here's my first business idea. Start a low cost pay-per-use dial-up service targeted toward travelers.

Here's how it would work:

1. Get an easy to remember 1-800 number, like 1-800-TEMP-ISP.
2. The customer would call the 1-800 number and the service would automatically identify the city of the caller.
3. The customer would provide the credit card info.
4. The customer would then be forwarded to an recorded instruction guide on how to connect (i.e., via a local number).
5. Customer is then billed per minute at a low rate.

The hotel would only bill the customer at their local calling rate.

I'm not in the ISP business, so I don't know how well it would work. But then again, it is a Crazy Business Idea.

Originally this was a blog I started for fun called Crazy Business Ideas. Most of my ideas revolved around software, and I decided to remove them. What I am doing instead is to create a list of software ideas for startups elsewhere and turn this into a venue for any fun or worthwhile  post regarding business startups, entrepreneurship, and small business in general.