As a bloke I struggle to understand women’s obsession with shoes, and I struggle to understand their obsession with shoes they can’t actually walk in, even more. When Mike Horan was forced to carry his girlfriend because her stiletto’s were too uncomfortable for the walk home after a night out, he had a brain wave – rollup shoes which could be stored in a handbag and pulled out when function became more important than form.

Five years later Rollasole shoes are available in the likes of Debenhams, House of Fraser and Selfridges, and Horan has a successful business. It hasn’t all been plain sailing, but the rewards are now coming through…and all because he identified a personal problem and decided to do something about it.

The next time something annoys you, rather than complain, try to figure out if there’s a product which could solve the problem. For every unsolved problem there is a lucrative business opportunity waiting to be discovered.

So what are people likely to be eating more of when they go out in 2015. As always, the best place to look for clues is The United States. What grew in popularity there last year is likely to grow in popularity here this year.  Here are three top trends from the San Francisco Fancy Food Show:

1. Toast -Small cafes and restaurants nationally are embracing it as comfort food, featuring artesian bread, small dairy butter and toppings from almond butter to salted avocado. French toast in its many forms is also growing in popularity.

2. Dark Chocolate – Dark, darker, darkest is the trend when it comes to chocolate. Apparently people like it because its high in flavonoids, it has less sugar and it’s good for the brain.

3. Seaweed – Seaweed is  turning up in  multiple products. For example, Ocean’s Halo is selling seaweed chips in flavours such as Texas BBQ and Chili Lime. Seaweed also showed up in other snacks, such as almond seaweed crisps and onion seaweed crunch. It’s healthy,  sustainable, and has 30% of your vitamin B12 requirements and 30% of your vitamin A.

So if you’re looking to get into the food business, or want to give a boost to a café or restaurant, there could be some clues here.

Many consumers expect Amazon to offer the cheapest prices on products, but analysis suggests that isn’t always the case. The expectation is created by the perception that the company create and that’s done by way of a clever pricing strategy.

Amazon doesn’t have the lowest prices across the board, but instead focus’s on offering headline grabbing deals on the most popular and heavily searched items. Meanwhile, in the background, slightly less popular products and ancillary items are often more costly than those from the competition. This largely goes unnoticed by customers who are blinded by the halo effect created by the popular product prices, and so they don’t bother to check or compare.

I mention this for two reasons:

1. If you’re buying from Amazon, make sure you check all prices, and not just those of ‘headline’ items.

2. This may be a strategy you can use in your own business… offer rock-bottom prices on  the most popular items and then make up for the lost profits on items where prices aren’t checked so closely.

I’m not sure why it happens because we’re not a big household, but we always seem to fill our bin long before the fortnightly pick up time comes round. And that’s if the council bother to come at all. A combination of two inches of snow and some general incompetence meant we got no pick ups at all over the Christmas period. I was therefore interested to hear of a private wheelie bin service on radio this morning that’s been set up somewhere in Lancashire. For around £8 a week, the company will take your rubbish away, and you can bet that like all private services that don’t get paid if they don’t do the work, a bit of bad weather or the holiday period won’t be given as an excuse to leave your property a target for rats.

Not everyone will be willing to pay for a service they get fortnightly for ‘free’, but I can see a market for this in any upmarket area of the UK – and every town in the UK has at least one of those. People pay for private health and private education when they can have it for free, so why not waste collection?

If you decide to set one up in South Yorkshire, send me your card!

People have made bucket loads of cash from apps over the past few years, and although it’s getting harder, the opportunities are still there. Here are some step by step instructions on how to do it, courtesy of a 17 year old who made $100,000 by creating a series of apps:

Step 1. Download Gamesalad (iphone/ipad/android/amazon publishing tool)

Step 2. Go here –  https://help.gamesalad.com/hc/en-us/categories/200134158-Cookbook-Tutorials

Step 3. Do the tutorials.

Step 4. Now that you have a basic understanding of gamesalad, you can probably modify a template. Go here – http://www.deepblueapps.com and gshelper.com These will allow you to purchase templates to modify.

Step 5. Choose a template where all you have to do is change the graphics.

Step 6. Replace the graphics.

Step 7. Create icons and all the submission information.

Step 8. Charge $1 for your app. You can make it free if you want, but it won’t pay off.

Step 9. Publish to either Amazon or iOS platforms.

Step 10. Start all over.

The guy who wrote these instructions says he’s created apps in under 2 hours that have raked in $20,000. Sounds like an interesting no-risk opportunity to me, and now you know how to do it.