Over the last few years there has been great buzz surrounding text messaging and how businesses can use it to market. Less emphasis has been put on how businesses can use it to actually carry out their business. However, Papa John’s, a popular national pizza chain, has found a way to use text messaging - to order your pizza.

Papa John’s already accepts online orders, and the neat thing about them and the text message orders is that they both appear on the same screen at the store - integrating methods of ordering. This integration technology is key, since the number one reason why most restaurants today don’t offer texting or online orders is because of the hassle to manage those orders, and the additional hardware that is generally needed.

Newspapers continued their slide in the third quarter of 2007, with 9% less advertising going to print.  While most newspapers added web properties to their portfolio in the last few years, that has not been enough to offset the losses in the print section.Newspaper classified ad sections suffered some of the worst losses, with that portion down 17%.  The three largest areas of the classifieds sections are:

Real Estate - The weak housing market has only added to the hurt of real estate companies shifting advertising to more interactive forms of advertising.

Market research has the power to make or break any business idea you have. You may be planning, for instance, a retail clothing store targeted at women ages 35-44. But, what if the location you chose has an abnormally low percentage of residents in that target market? The result most often would be a lack of business, potentially without your ever knowing why (and leaving you erroneously blaming your logo, for instance).

Luckily, the U.S. Census Bureau tracks just about every useful detail about our cities. Whereas it would normally be a major headache to sift through all of the data, I use a site that cuts down my research time to just a few minutes.