By Rich Whittle
In June, Missouri doctor Stuart Hoover needed to create a Web video to market his new wellness center in Springfield. He had farmed out similar video projects in the past, at a cost of thousands of dollars and weeks of waiting. This time he took a chance on a $300 product called Instant Video Presenter, from St. Louis company ej4, reports CNNMoney.

He was sent a green screen to stand in front of and software that let him key in professional-looking images over that green screen. The recommended camera and lighting cost him an additional $200.

In just 30 minutes his first video appeared on his new Web site, HealthyLifeTube.com. It featured Hoover in front of a (simulated) bank of monitors in a television newsroom. “I couldn’t believe how simple and precise it was,” he recalls.

Ted Finch, president of Video Backstage in Austin, recommends IVP to his clients who need quick turnarounds. “Instead of spending nine grand with me, they just turn on their camcorder and press a button,” he says. “Projects that would have taken weeks now take minutes.”

Instant Video Presenter

Photo by ej4.

by Rich Whittle
For many consultants, real-time collaboration with clients is extremely important. Setting up one-on-one phone calls is easy, but if you need to have three or more parties on the line, things get tricky — and expensive, says Small Business Computing.

FreeConferenceCall.com offers free private conference lines. Just enter your name and an e-mail address on their site to receive an instant account.

FreeConferenceCall will provide you with a dedicated dial-in number and an access code, which are ready for immediate use 24/7 — no need to make a reservation. Long distance charges may apply, but there are no additional charges from the company.

Calls can be up to six hours in length, and the company offers free recording and downloading of the calls. Recordings are accessible by phone or computer, and you can distribute, archive or even send recordings to your listeners via RSS and podcast.

Photo by FreeConferenceCall.

by Rich Whittle | Videomaker tutorial, How to Start a Wedding Video Business.

If you’re thinking about going into the videography business, you’ll want to check out another

This video covers a little about equipment, developing a contract, and how to cover a wedding. It really just scratches the service, but it’s a start.

Wedding Videographer Style and The Best Videographer—IOV Award Winners are also a couple of five-minute introductions that will wet your appetite.

In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama outlined proposals intended to promote job creation.

They included incentives for small businesses to hire more workers, additional money to build roads and other construction projects and rebates for homeowners who invest in energy-saving weatherizing improvements, reports The New York Times.

Obama did not put a price on the proposals, which would add to the $787 billion that Congress allocated last winter to revive the economy. But he said the cost could be offset by some of the $200 billion in lower-than-expected spending on the bailout of financial institutions.

More than half of the original stimulus package remains in the pipeline, with many road building and construction projects beginning in 2010. But Obama, in his address at the Brookings Institution, a policy research organization, said further stimulus is needed to spur employers to hire and bring down a jobless rate that stands at 10 percent.

“Our work is far from done,” he said. “For even though we’ve reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who’ve been swept up in the flood.”

Photo by Reuters.

Deidre Booker works hard during the planting season tending her mums, pansies and marigolds in the front yard and a garden of herbs, tomatoes, cabbage and peppers in her backyard, writes The Sun Times

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So when Booker heard about the “Glam Can” — a black, 3-gallon, mount-anywhere garbage and recycling can — she snapped one up to put on the fence next to her home in the Pill Hill neighborhood.

“It looks decorative, and it’s a convenient place to put the candy wrappers and debris that are forever drifting into the yard,” Booker said.

Twanda Mobley, CEO of Mobley’s Gate Garbage Inc., dreamed up the Glam Can while she worked as a bank compliance officer.

“I’m a homeowner, and it really bothered me to see litter all over people’s lawns,” said Mobley, who lives in Chicago Lawn.

After Mobley got laid off in a bank consolidation in March 2008, she started her own business to make her dream happen.

Photo by Mobley’s Gate Garbage, Inc..