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Take a close look at these amazing photos . . .

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/the-ghosts-of-world-war-iis

As soon as I saw them I thought this was such a great idea . . . and of course my entrepreneurial cogs started turning and I wondered if there was an income generating potential here.

Anyone familiar with iphone/smartphone apps will recognise this as a form of what's known as 'augmented reality' - where the real world is overlaid with additional imagery. There are already apps that allow you to find restaurants, bars and shops.

And yes, there's even an app which does something very similar to the photograph above. Created by the Museum of London, 'Street Museum' allows iPhone users who happen to be walking around London to see the world in real time with old photographs overlaid onto street corners and other locations.

But forgetting all the high tech phone apps for a moment, what if you could find old photographs of your local village/town/city and merge them with a modern shot, frame it and sell?

I've never seen anything like this offline, but it has huge potential . . .

People love local history and what better way to connect the present with the past than with this. I remember there used to be quite a demand for aerial shots of where people lived and framed prints used to go for £50+

So what would you need? A digital camera, scanner, printer and something like Adobe Photoshop software. OK, merging the 2 images might be a bit advanced for some, but how about partnering with someone from the local photography club or a friend or family member who is more technically minded?

If you're interested in this online business idea, let me know and I'll do some more research and come up with a full blueprint.

An online business idea with real income generating potential

Now, you already know that smartphones are one of the gadgets of the decade. Smartphones can do so much more than just make phone calls. They enable you to do everything from using the Internet from anywhere you want, to connecting with all your friends. In fact, some experts say that within a few years mobile phones not computers will be the biggest way of connecting to the Internet.

Well, I saw some research the other day that says the average restaurant website now gets between 5% and 20% of its traffic from a mobile device.

In other words, up to one in five people who are looking for a place to eat now use their mobile phone to find a new place for lunch or dinner. Old fashioned paper media like press ads, printed restaurant reviews and posters are losing favour fast.

There's a slight snag to all this however: If you've used your mobile phone to look for a restaurant you'll know what I mean. Restaurant owners haven't quite caught up with this technology yet. Not many restaurants currently have menus that are readable from mobile phones like the iPhone, iPod Touch and all the other smartphones and mobile devices. And menus are what potential restaurant-goers really want to see when choosing a place to eat.

That little snippet of information then led me to discover this very clever little smartphone-related tool. It's called Mobile Hunger.

http://mobilehunger.com/

Basically Mobile Hunger is an ingenious little tool which converts restaurant menus into a format which can be read by mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod, iPad and others.

It's only then that I had one of those eureka, light bulb moments!

I realised .... this could be a great little business opportunity sideline. Offering a service to your local restaurants putting their menus into smartphone readable format. So they can exploit this new and fast growing source of hungry customers.

It would be very easy to get this business started: Contact all your local restaurants. Put together a little sales pitch. Tell them you have a service which could bring up to 20% more customers through their door every month.

It's not just restaurants of course. Think of all your local takeaways, like pizza, Indian and Chinese. The number of menus they put through the door shows how desperate they are for more customers too. Then there are pubs and hotels that do food. And sandwich shops - this system would be absolutely perfect for making lunchtime sandwich menus accessible to busy workers.

(One thing here: You might ask why restaurants don't do this themselves. And of course they could if they wanted to. But most restaurant owners and managers are too busy doing the hundred and one other things that running a restaurant involves. Or maybe, like a lot of people, they're a bit scared by technology.)

Once a restaurant is signed up all they would need to do is send their menu through to you. Perhaps every month or so whenever they change their dishes or their prices. Or you could call round and see them if you prefer. You would then use the Mobile Hunger tool to publish their latest menu onto the Internet as a fully smartphone readable menu for customers to read it.

All you need for this business is a bog standard PC with an Internet connection. (Funnily enough you don't actually need a smartphone.)

Neither do you need any technical skills. You don't need to know about website design or HTML. None of that stuff. Mobile Hunger is very user-friendly. It's customisable too. So you can easily create a swish design for each restaurant. You can also add photos of the dishes or the restaurant and so on if you want to.

Mobile Hunger can be linked up to Google Maps, so people can easily find your customer's restaurant. It is also compatible with Open Table. (This is one of the most popular smartphone apps which allows iPhone and Blackberry users and so on to make online table reservations.)

Mobile Hunger has a couple of other neat features too: It offers basic analytics. So every month or so on you can send your customer a report to show them how much extra website traffic and customer leads your service is bringing them - to encourage them to keep on using you.

Mobile Hunger can also be linked up to Facebook and Twitter. So if you wanted to you could offer an extra service promoting your customer's restaurants on these very important social networking sites. Send out details of 'specials' and two-for-one dining offers and so on. (If you did this I think you could probably charge extra for it by the way.)

This is very useful and very powerful technology I think you'll agree.

But what's the catch? Is it going to be expensive? What will it cost you to start a successful small business based round this very clever technology?

The answer - absolutely nothing! The basic Mobile Hunger system is FREE to use on behalf of your customers. You can find out what it's all about and get more details from their website: http://mobilehunger.com

Because it's free that doesn't mean you couldn't make a nice sideline income from making menus smartphone accessible however.

What I would do with this business is charge restaurants a regular weekly subscription. Get them to pay you by regular monthly standing order - £10 or maybe £20 a week (for a more upmarket restaurant) is about right. It's very affordable and really nothing in terms of the extra business it could bring them.

But let's imagine you had, say, ten regular customers. You'd be turning over between £5k and £10k a year. And that would still be basically just a part time sideline that you could run in a couple of evenings a week.

Ultimately of course there's no reason why this has to be just a local business. You could offer your service to restaurants and other businesses all over the country, or even all over the world.

Once again, let me know if you're interested in discovering more about this opportunity - or whether or not you'd like to know about more businesses based around mobile digital technology - it will help me a lot in planning future WRMMs.

An interesting aside before I leave you, there's actually a similar and well-established business opportunity that uses fax instead of smartphones to distribute menus to local offices. It was called Easy Fax Profits (now renamed Easy JV Profits) and I gave it a thumbs up review a while back.

You can check out the latest version of the promo page here (http://www.easyjvprofits.com/uk.htm).

by Nick Laight Business Opportunities Expert Nick Laight is the editor of What Really Makes Money and helps ordinary people find simple, workable home business opportunities. You can sign up for his free weekly eletter here: Name Email

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