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Millions dream of starting their own businesses at home. StartupNation looks at 100 of the best — the most financially successful, the most innovative, the most adventurous and the downright wacky.

Entrepreneurs are known for turning dreams into reality, and we’re proud to recognize their accomplishments by publishing the first-ever StartupNation Home-Based 100.

The survey, which ranks and categorizes the nation’s top-performing home-based entrepreneurs, is the first of its kind. While larger companies have been tracked by Fortune and other publications for years, no one, until now, has focused the spotlight on the millions of Americans who call home “the office.”

At StartupNation, we decided to change that. We set about creating an annual ranking competition that focuses strictly on the first frontier — and, for many, the preferred frontier — for entrepreneurs.

According to a recent study by research firm Access Markets International Partners, some 16.5 million home-based businesses exist in the United States today — an all-time high. According to the Small Business Administration, home-based companies contribute more than $530 billion to the U.S. economy and represent 50% of all businesses registered in the United States. No matter how you slice the stats, it’s a huge chunk of the American economy, and growing fast.

And it’s no surprise. After all, recent FedEx and Yahoo studies reveal that more than two-thirds of Americans have considered starting their own businesses, and nearly half have taken initial steps in that direction.

Themes and variations
StartupNation organized the Home-Based 100 as a series of 10 Top Ten categories, each with a unique theme. To reflect the true nature of home-based businesses and the entrepreneurs behind them, we ranked companies on qualities that go beyond financial data. Playing to emerging trends, we created categories to highlight the “greenest” and worldliest businesses, as well as those run by baby boomers. For fun, we also share the wackiest and most slacker-friendly.

Above and beyond our categories, one theme dominated the submissions: passion.
We’re talking bleeding passion. The work of these entrepreneurs is literally and figuratively close to home. We learned that home-based entrepreneurs don’t separate who they are from what they do. Instead, they see their enterprise as part of their identity. They live for the triumphs and plug away at the challenges with incredible tenacity. At stake? Their name, their vision, their lifestyle.

Imagination, technology, outsourcing
The 2007 field of entrants had other, more tangible things in common.
Many were baby boomers who had worked for years, successfully, at large corporations and decided for whatever reason that it was time for a change. Some people had great ideas or goals that they were never able to implement because of their demanding work schedules. Others were interested in choosing a career that allows them to spend more time with their families. Some found they could make a lucrative, fulfilling living without leaving their homes.

Gone fishin’
Larry Murphy, operator of Murphy Outdoors of Gladstone, Mo., and the winner in our Boomers Back in Business category, took it one step further. He incorporated his love for fishing into a tour business after retiring from a software company at age 47.

In fact, some of the most financially successful home-based businesses in this year’s ranking actually made a conscious, strategic decision to transition from a traditional office environment to a home-based operation. They did this for efficiency. They traded in commutes and corporate cubicles for home-brewed coffee, bluejeans and high-bandwidth Internet connections.

Across the board, technology fueled the exodus from the office to the home. The Internet, where you can hang a shingle almost instantly, has combined with communications advances such as Internet-enabled cell phones featuring “Star Trek”-like capabilities to enable “home-preneurs” to operate more viably than ever before.

Franchising, technology make working from your home easier than ever, says Wall Street Journal small-business editor Gwendolyn Bounds.
Observations from the Home-Based 100 Best Financial Performers include the rise of “virtualization,” whereby entire teams of people are home-based, banded together by communications and data-sharing technologies. The winner of the Best Financial Performers category, nurse-staffing company Medical Solutions International of Tempe, Ariz., and the runner-up, Surefire Marketing of Potomac, Md., are both virtual operations that rely heavily, if not completely, on technology.

This trend redefines home-based businesses, really, by adding employees to what was once a largely go-it-alone business sector. And these companies are generating millions of dollars in revenue.

Outsourcing also looms large as a business practice used by the best financial performers in our ranking. It seems like almost anything can be contracted out these days, making a home-based enterprise a more sane and elegant operation that can be run effectively from an extra bedroom. Accounting services, manufacturing, telephone answering, Web site design and maintenance — even lunch, outsourced to the local pizza parlor and provided to you by express delivery, are all candidates.
Surprises, surprises

Besides these common threads, the 2007 submissions offered plenty share of surprises and exposed vast differences within the individual Top Ten categories.
If there were a word wackier than “wacky,” it very well might have described some of the outrageous contenders in this category, which proved the most difficult for our judges to pick a winner in.

At StartupNation, we labored over whether the world’s largest water bottle or a service that lets you enjoy happy hour with your dog should win. Of course, a “tech-gear” entrepreneur, with a whole new level of pocket-protector geek fashion, was also worthy, pitted against an accessories line inspired by an evil-eye talisman (don’t ask). And then there was the home-based entrepreneur who sells 10-foot-long drill bits made for routing wires from an attic to a crawl space, and the one who converted a disabled-student school bus into a mobile workout gym that pulls up in front of your house./Rich Sloan/

A number of the people profiled in “Millionaires tell how they did it” made their millions as entrepreneurs. But working for the Man doesn’t mean you have to be a wage slave or resort to buying lottery tickets to strike it rich. The trick is to maximize your income on the job (and know when to move on), make the most of your employee benefits and tax breaks and use that extra money to start investing.

1. Keep your eyes peeled for better ways to do your job. Streamline a procedure, shave costs, create a new profit center, become an expert on a specific topic, volunteer for a company committee — anything that will make you stand out as a prime candidate for a promotion or a pay boost.

2. Don’t be afraid to negotiate. In a study of master’s degree graduates from her university, Carnegie Mellon economics professor Linda Babcock found that those who negotiated their first salary boosted their pay by 7.4% compared with those who didn’t bargain.

3. Get your ducks in a row and your numbers on paper. If possible, quantify how much your efforts add to the company’s bottom line. If that’s not feasible, spotlight your value with comparable salaries for workers in your position from a Web site, such as Salary.com, or from a professional association.

4. Plot your strategy when it’s time to move on. Create a professional-looking page on MySpace that tells prospective employers why you’re an exceptional candidate, recommends John Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And don’t neglect more conventional networking: Join a professional association or show up at school reunions toting business cards.

Milk your benefits
5. Contribute as much as you can to your 401(k) and other tax-deferred retirement plans. You’ll not only build a bigger nest egg, but you’ll also cut your tax bill. In the 25% federal tax bracket, every $1,000 you contribute to a 401(k) trims your taxes by $250. And you’ll save on state income taxes, too.

6. Flex your tax-saving muscle. Contribute pretax dollars to a flexible spending account to pay for dependent care or out-of-pocket medical expenses. If you set aside $1,500 per year and you’re in the 25% bracket, avoiding federal income and Social

7. Review your tax withholding. If you’re expecting a refund this spring, you’re having too much tax withheld from your paycheck — and making an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam. That’s no way to become a millionaire. Put more money in your pocket by using Kiplinger’s withholding calculator and then filling out a new Form W-4.

8. Stash savings in a Roth IRA if you’re eligible. Withdrawals in retirement, including decades of compounded earnings, will be tax-free. This year, income-eligibility limits for a Roth increase to $114,000 for individuals and $166,000 for married couples.

Invest like crazy
9. Don’t delay. The quicker you get a jump on putting money aside, the easier it will be to stuff a seven-figure cushion. If you start at age 25, for example, investing $286 per month will get you $1 million by age 65, assuming you earn 8% annually.

10. Invest automatically, either through your employer’s retirement plan or by setting up a regular deposit to a mutual fund or broker. You’ll never miss the money, and you’ll avoid two big mistakes: buying too much when stock prices are high and not buying at all when prices fall.

11. Watch for fund fees. The more you pay, the tougher it is to earn an above-average return. The typical hedge fund, for example, takes 20% of any gains, a huge hurdle to overcome. A better bet: no-load mutual funds with expense ratios of 1% or less. If you trade individual stocks, watch those commissions.

12. Keep it simple. Be wary of get-rich-quick schemes or sales pitches for complex investments, such as oil-and-gas partnerships, that trade on the millionaire cachet to lure investors into buying high-fee products they don’t understand. Most millionaire households accumulate their wealth over the long term by sticking to a regular investing plan in a balanced portfolio. /Kiplinger/

Written by Alexis Madrigal

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all.
The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company’s acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded,TEDpresenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination andprobing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

Read more »

Written By Ben Kuchera

With the sudden and unexpected announcement from Warner that the studio would be abandoning HD DVD titles in favor of Blu-ray, it seemed to many observers that the high-def format war was all over, bar the shouting. With the upcoming 2.0 player profile requiring Blu-ray players to be networked, Sony finally gets to play its trump card: the PlayStation 3,which has clearly emerged as one of the best Blu-ray players on the market—and is likely to remain so for some time. Why? Because the first player now becomes the most versatile, sporting a future-proof Blu-ray setup.

Before we can understand why the PlayStation 3 is able to so easily deal with new profiles, we must first look at the difference between the 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 profiles to see why a simple firmware update isn’t enough to make a player compliant.

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Written By Those Aren’t Muskets

So Digg, eBay and Facebook walk into a room …

It’s the only house party of the season being described as a series of tubes! We promise no wait at the door–as long as you don’t have dial up.

For more of the funniest sketch comedy that no money can buy, head over to Those Aren’t Muskets!