This contest is tied in with an iPhone app called BizBreak, which is a boss-punching game aimed at helping you get some much-needed stress relief. All in the spirit of entrepreneurship, the winner of the Limitless VC contest will receive 50% of the profit made from the BizBreak app, which is already up to $3,000. In addition, the winner will receive mentoring from a few very successful entrepreneurs.

You have until April 16th to submit a video. The 8 most viewed videos along with 2 more wildcard videos will be selected as finalists, and there will be a 7-day public voting period to determine the winner. Get to it! Sounds like a great prize for a quick and fun video submission. Check out the promo video for all the other details.

Since this is a new project, we’re looking for feedback and we welcome comments on what you like or how we can make a fun contest even better!

Dave Buechel, a member of the HOP, was sent in to do some undercover work and see if Amazon Mechanical Turk is the real deal! See what Dave has concluded! If you aren’t familiar with our previous article on Mechanical Turk, check it out here.

If you have the time and devotion, Mechanical Turk is a great way to earn fast, easy money. The tasks, or HIT’s you accomplish in order to make money are simple. Most HIT’s take only a few seconds to complete, however you are given at least an hour to complete them depending on their difficulty and the amount of money they are worth. I have completed HIT’s that are worth anywhere from $.01 to $2.15. When I first started out I wasn’t very careful with my submitted work, which resulted in rejected HIT’s. These rejected HIT’s led to a lower approval rating. Your approval rating is the ratio of approved and rejected HIT’s. Most HIT’s require you to have an approval rate of 80% or higher, and if you have a lower rating than that you will not be allowed to even attempt the HIT. Without being able to attempt most HIT’s, it was extremely hard to complete tasks and  make money. After a month of increasing my rating back to a reasonable ratio, I could then do most tasks and start earning money.

Since starting in September, I have completed 1275 HIT’s and made $40. If I spent the time and gave as much effort as I did for my schoolwork, and didn’t have the approval rating setback, I could have easily made a Benjamin by now.

#1. Rent Out Parking Space At Work

This idea is for adults who have assigned parking spaces at work and are looking to make some extra spending cash. Let your co-workers know that you would be willing to rent out your superb parking spot right next to the office, and see if anyone takes you up on your offer!

#2. Return Past Purchases

Have you ever bought something and for one reason or another you never opened it? If you don’t think you will ever need it, why don’t you try to return the item from where you bought it, either for cash or store credit.

#3. Rent Out Room In Your House

My roommate Matt will be transferring next year, and I will need to find someone new to move in and help pay the bills! If you have a spare room in your house, you could make some serious cash if you rented out the room. Depending on where you live, you could bring in an extra $300-700 a month.

#4. Tap Your Life Insurance

Yeah it might not be the smartest thing to do, but tapping into your life insurance is still a way to get some cash. Talk to a life settlement broker and see what kind of deal you can stir up.

#5. Rainy Day Sales

Find a crowded outdoor area, such as a high school sporting event, and sell plastic ponchos when it starts to rain. You can see our previous post for more information.

#6. Legal Ticket Scalping

First off, check to see if the state you live in even allows such a thing. Click here for information. Ticket scalpers make very good money, which is why there are always so many of them outside of big event venues. If your state allows, this could be a great way to make some extra cash.

#7. Xbox 360 Repair

If you didn’t already know, Xbox 360’s are known for breaking. I am a first hand victim of the “red ring of death”. For the Xbox’s that fall under warranty, Microsoft offers a deal to fix your Xbox for $100 dollars. Oh yeah, it takes a month for them to send it back to you too. Many people realized that this was relatively pricey and inconvenient, so they actually researched how to fix Xbox’s online and did the repair themselves. I gave my Xbox to a friend who said he could fix it for $20, and I had it back in less than a week working like brand new. The moral of the story? Learn how to fix Xbox’s and you can make some serious cash!

#8. Gift Wrapping Service

With the holiday season right around the corner, a gift wrapping service could be very profitable! I can’t wrap presents for my life, so I would definitely use a service like this if I could find one. If you have the wrapping skills, advertise around your area and see what kind of response you get!

#9. Holiday Decorating Service

My mom asked me to string some lights up outside the other day. While she was explaining to me exactly what she wanted me to do, I was thinking to myself that this could be a great business idea for somebody. Offer to put up lights and decorations for people who don’t have the time or don’t want to be out in the cold! In conclusion, I managed to talk my way out of helping my mom put decorations up. Bring on the coal, Santa.

#10. Snow Removal

A classic, but it still puts that cash in your pocket. Advertise around your neighbor for a price less than the local snowplow guys, and you will be sure to have some business. Consider writing up a contract and then pray for lots of snow!

I also tested online sports betting sites. I must admit that I have not been very active on these sites. However, with that being said, my total balance is just over $12 after only placing a measly 15 bets. If I could commit myself to these sites like I do with my fantasy football team, I feel like I would have at least $50 right now. There is no work required for placing bets, unlike creating a quiz. Placing bets is fun, and you risk NOTHING! Here are some good sites that I recommend.

Cent Sports

Free Sports Bet

Many houses near these big venues do not participate in parking services for a variety of reasons. Maybe the home owner does not have the time, maybe they are going to the actual event, or maybe they will be out of town. Go around to these homes a few weeks before the event and find out if they will be selling parking spaces on their property. If not, offer to set up and run the whole operation on their property and then split the profits half and half. If your prices compete with surrounding parking areas, it is bound to profitable. There are almost no start up costs! All you have to do is collect people’s money and direct them to logical parking spaces. You may want to throw together a little contract for you and the home owner to sign just to be safe and so that you get all the money you deserve.

Photo credit: Thienzieyung

For all you college students – note taking is a part of being in school. Aside from the few who are blessed with photographic memory, most of you will agree that taking good lecture and study notes is a big part of what earns A’s and B’s instead of D’s and F’s. Taking notes can be a huge pain, but a well-done set of notes is valuable, and now may be even more so, thanks to the internet. Websites are now popping up that offer a resource for students to go to and download class notes that others have added, and reward students who upload high-quality, helpful notes cash or other prizes. As if you didn’t have enough reasons to pay attention in class, money adds a whole new incentive to jotting down some notes.

GradeGuru.com is one such note-sharing service that lets students download notes for free if they have a university-affiliated e-mail address. Students who submit notes (which can be in a variety of forms, such as outlines or textbook and lecture summaries) then get rewarded depending on the quality of the notes and on the number of hits and downloads their notes receive. GradeGuru operates on a point system, where users earn a certain number points for every set of notes they upload, as well as whenever their notes are downloaded by others.

You might think there could be many loopholes to a website like this, but GradeGuru has a very strict anti-plagiarism and “no cheating” policy. All notes are submitted to TurnItIn, which is a database that notes and other written items are checked against to ensure the content is original. Any questionable material can also be flagged by the users themselves with a “report disrespect” button, which helps to prevent any unethical activity.

Bottom line, make sure any notes you choose to submit are truly your own. More and more professors are copywriting their own lecture notes, so don’t think you can make a quick buck just by throwing whatever outlines you received in class on the site – it could get you in some messy legal trouble.

While there are concerns that websites such as GradeGuru actually take away from learning because they allow students to get notes without having to master the note-taking process, I think that students can still benefit greatly from a service like this. It allows students to actually listen to a lecture and absorb it without having to keep up with scribbling down messy notes, and then go back and access them later.

The biggest issue right now with a site like GradeGuru is that not all schools are involved, so it can be difficult to find (and draw hits from) notes for a very specific class. If your school doesn’t have much activity on the website, don’t fear – you can still post and use notes in more general subject areas, on anything from business to earth science.

As with many of our ideas, GradeGuru isn’t a way to get rich, but if you already take high-quality notes, publishing them for others to download could get you some extra spending cash – the top earner on GradeGuru has made over $400, not too shabby. There are other similar note-sharing sites out there as well, such as StudyBlue, which doesn’t pay you to post notes, but does pay you for any referrals you get to sign up for the site. Check it out!

Photo Credit: HometownSolutions

I was at a high school football game this past Friday night when I came across a great money-making idea. It was an overcast day with no rain, but when the game started it began to downpour. Nobody was prepared for this. A man began walking around the stands selling disposable ponchos. Many people were buying them in an attempt to stay dry. What a simple and great way to make some cash! Does this sound appealing to you? If so, consider buying some disposable ponchos and try this idea for yourself. If you buy them in bulk, they go for less than two bucks a pop. Go to free sporting events in your area on days when the weather is not so hot and test your luck! Bring on the rain!

Seems like everyone (including parents and grandparents!) is on Facebook now. And based on personal experience, its astoundingly easy to spend large chunks of time surfing around on the social networking site and not accomplishing much else! But with the help of a new website, it may be possible to change that, and actually make some money while having fun on Facebook.

AppBank, which just recently launched in beta mode, is a platform that lets any registered Facebook user create different applications to be used on Facebook itself and make money off of them. The best part is that you don’t even have to have any developing experience to create the app! Appbank’s straight-forward forms allow you to create a quiz, a gift, or a poll, among other games. You can then receive a portion of the revenue made from ads placed on the facebook page where your app will be found. 

The higher the quality of your app, the more people will see it, which increases the potential for scoring ad revenue. While this is not a way to make millions, if you create enough good applications that people visit often, you could make a significant amount of cash – right now the top monthly user has made just over $1000, and the top application (a quiz) has brought in almost $800. We’ve got some guinea pigs currently creating applications to test out, so we’ll let you know how it turns out for us!