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Ready to start your own business? We’ve crunched the data and compiled statistics to find the most promising industries for start-ups in 2010. Industry Profiles Environmental Consulting Translation and Interpretation Services Home Health Care Mobile App Design Ferryboats Tea and Healthy Beverages Fun, Games, and Hobbies Test Preparation and Tutoring Bakeries and Baked Goods Self-Storage Leasing Selling Handmade and Vintage Goods Online Medicinal Marijuana Retailing Self-Publishing Video Games Blood, Plasma, and Sperm Banks Water Supply and Irrigation Systems Safety and Quality Testing The Best Industries for Starting a Business in 2010 This year’s burgeoning industries include interactive technology (from mobile app design to tech-savvy translation), wellness (healthy beverages), and little luxuries, such as games and baked goods. Is Your Industry Hot or Not? How bright are your business prospects? Conduct research online to find out but don’t forget to consult trade associations, industry experts, and consumers. Building a Cupcake Empire As consumers warm to splurging on little luxuries, bakeries are booming. Here’s how one law student spotted the trend and found the sweet smell of success. Ferryboat Industry Gaining Speed Sure, water transit is a growth industry, but how can an average entrepreneur finance a ferryboat and start a water transit company? The Year of the Venture Capital Bounceback? A slight resurgence in the IPO market and an upswing in M&A activity means venture capitalists have some hopes of exiting investments. How We Created This Year’s List The criteria and ranking method behind the 2010 Best Industries to Start and Grow a Business. Best Industries of 2009 Top 10 Industries of 2005 Businesses You Can Start From Home 2010 Six Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting a Business Business – Venture capital – Initial public offering – Technology – Small Business

If you consider a tool for editing images good only when it is both dead easy to use and free, then Pic Ghost will certainly pass the test. It is a mass image editor that will empower you to take any image you want and have it edited. All the usual effects can be applied, and these include cropping, rotating and resizing the actual pictures, and up to 20 images can be uploaded at once. Read more Learn more about PicGhost.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much PicGhost.com is worth with Stimator.com

When will the iPad deliver in the enterprise? We first asked this question on Feb 11th when we interviewed the Citrix team . At the time, we gave it a thumbs-up as the Citrix team had good answers for all of our questions. Today, with the launch of the iPad, Citrix has delivered on its promise of making Citrix Receiver (powered by XENApps) for iPad available as a day one app in the iPad app store. Seeing is believing, so today we took a look at the new application on the new device. Sponsor Citrix isn’t shy about the opportunity for iPad. The demonstration they shared focused on one of the toughest IT nuts to crack, health care applications in the hospital. From what we see, with some reasonable configuration, the iPad, with Citrix Receiver installed, is ready to read and write health care records today. Citrix Reciever uses software virtualization to bring backoffice applications all sorts of smart clients, including Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone, and iPad. Here is a demonstration offered by Citrix on the Citrix Receiver on iPad. Today, the ReadWriteWeb team installed the Citrix Reciever for iPad app, here’s first impressions. Real-time setup . The app installed perfectly, but setting up the Citrix account takes 15 minutes. In our real-time world, we found ourselves downloading other apps and almost forgot to check back. A minor issue, but perhaps something to consider for enterprise deployments. Gestures . In the world of iPad, point and click converts to pinch and slide. As noted in our earlier post, Apple has done a lot of the heavy lifting to get parity with mouse and finger controls. Still, we asked the question of whether gestures mapped, our first impression is that all the basics are there. Custom icons for each application session . We reported that this might be an important feature. Citrix acknowledged it being part of the implementation. Today, we see that this part of the framework enabled by Apple and supported by Citrix. Each enterprise application can be dropped onto the iPad home screen and it will have a custom icon per your setup. Streaming . One of the considerations for all software virtualization is the ability to stream real-time changes from screen to screen. In the demonstration above, we see examples of real-time application heart visualization. This capability seems to be a key for leveraging existing investments and to avoid having to re-build these applications for iPad. More About the iPad Launch Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch . Come back throughout the day for more of our coverage of the iPad launch. Citrix has done some heavy lifting to prepare iPad for the enterprise by focusing on its strength in preparing back office enterprise applications to be available to smart clients like iPad. Now, the big question. Are you preparing your enterprise for iPad? Do you have questions or wish-list items for the team at Citrix? Credit: Frederic Lardinois RWW’s brave iPad owner who wrestled control of his new day-one device from his family to do this evaluation. Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it. Register now

The Moby Affiliates website offers mobile developers a ready chance for monetizing their apps, as well as enabling publishers to make money from mobile sites and services on the whole. It features a directory in which mobile internet and iPhone affiliate programs are exhaustively listed, along with the mobile affiliate networks available today And in addition to listing programs and networks, there is a “Tools” section that has a wide range of mobile analytics resources and mobile website builders among other applications and links to Indie appstores on the Web. On the other hand, the site acts as a true point of reference for merchants and networks, since they can resort to it in order to recruit mobile affiliates and give their products greater exposure. Read more Learn more about MobyAffiliates.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much MobyAffiliates.com is worth with Stimator.com

Nearly 15 years ago, libraries were still primarily a place to go check out the printed, bound word. Only 28 percent offered Internet access, whereas today, almost all public libraries offer access and are helping to bridge the digital divide, according to a report by the University of Washington on Internet use in libraries across the country. According to the report, “the wiring of public libraries has transformed one of the nation’s most established community resources into a critical digital hub”. Sponsor Every year, 169 million people visit their local public library and 45 percent of them access the Internet, according to the report. The report, which focuses its numbers of people 14-years old and older, is based on nearly 50,000 surveys from patrons of more than 400 public libraries across the country. As Seth Godin pointed out last January, libraries “can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own” and that the “number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals.” Now, we can add “Internet access” to the top of the list, as “Internet access is now one of the most sought after public library services”, according to the report. The report notes that patrons use the Internet for a variety of tasks – from job searches to civic participation to finance to school kids doing their homework – but offers an interesting stat right off the bat. Of those people using the Internet at the library, “more than three-quarters of these people had Internet access at home, work, or elsewhere.” The library, it would seem, offers a respite from the coffee shop, a refuge from familial fights over the single home computer and an alternative to the dizzyingly slow dial-up Internet that so many still have to deal with. But what are they doing with this new found Internet provider? Another telling number, though, was that 60 percent of respondents said they use library computers to maintain “social connections” and we can’t help but wonder if libraries are giving people a safe place to Facebook-lurk. That is, many places of employment and schools ban social networks – are libraries a way around that for workers and teens? Overall though, the report does seem to show that libraries are a “technological lifeline to children and families in need”, with 44 percent of people in households below the federal poverty line using public libraries for Internet access. And while we may make fun of Facebook occasionally, social networking can be a key tool in finding employment and networking. But beyond that, we can see that employment, education and health information are among the top use cases. In the end, the report calls for continued support for a public system that seems to be the biggest bridge for the digital divide . It is certainly a shift in focus, but we hope that any hard feelings over digital taking away from the printed word don’t get in the way of keeping public libraries funded. As the report reads, “The findings signal this is a moment when federal, state, and local governments should invest more, not less, in the computing capacity of the nation’s libraries to help advance a wide range of policy goals.” Discuss