"Lemonade has great business-to-business potential, as the 'stand' is completely customizable via look and feel. It can be displayed and added to any web environment, e.g., a company Web site, personal Web page or profile, blog, mobile device and others," says Thomas Zawacki, chief executive for Lemonade in an e-mail message.

What have you been doing with your old automation hardware?

If you've been disposing of it in a landfill, you're not accruing value from it. Lemonade Inc. gives you a way to refer (for a fee that goes to you) to the items you feel have proved valuable to you in your work. Thus, anyone can recommend an item and then sell it. Lemonade stand owners can select from among 2 million products carried by more than 200 top-tier retailers, including Apple, Macy's, Land's End, Liz Claiborne and The Sharper Image.

If, as part of a professional organization, you have made some acquaintances, you may even recognize a name. This new site enables individuals to meet online and help each other find and use technologies appropriate for their budget and application needs.

There is no Consumer Reports for the business-to-business world, and this is an automated way to check on other users' experiences. Those users are strangers, but if the stranger offers a convincing enough profile at a place such as MySpace or FaceBook, then "you've gotten to know me," Gartner analyst Gene Alvarez explains to The New York Times. "You don't think of me as a dark, evil corporation."

"Social networks have made fortunes setting up Web sites that allow people to post profiles and trade messages," notes the NYT. "Now the rank and file are getting the chance to make some cash from their contacts."

How It Works
Lemonade.com users register with the Web site, choose a name for their stand and select their font color of choice. Then they add a background image to their stand. You can create a custom color with our color selection tool or upload your own image

Users then create their kiosks by browsing product categories or searching among the roughly two million items on the site, choosing products to recommend in your "lemonade stand." After a user clicks and drags items into the stand, the stand quickly displays a slideshow of those goods, along with product headings and item descriptions. You can also delete items and reorder them whenever you want. Select an offer from your favorite retailer and add it to the bottom right hand corner of your stand. These offers may include free shipping, percentage off products, seasonal specials and offers to sign up for services.

Once you are done building your kiosk, or stand, "users can type in the Web addresses of their profile pages on MySpace or Facebook, and their Lemonade stands appear on those pages within minutes." The Lemonade stand can be displayed in any Web environment including a company Web site.

From there, make money. According to Lemonade Inc.'s "How it Works" page:

You can freshen up your stand with a new look or update your products and offers whenever you want. As visitors to your personal page, blog or Web site take advantage of products and offers featured in your stand you get a commission on the sales. As soon as your account reaches a minimum balance we will pay you via your PayPal account.

A Lemonade stand is not a replacement for other useful sites, such as Investment Recovery Association (IRA), which also helps companies extract maximum value from unused assets — equipment or ingredients/raw materials — that simply lose value in storage (a cost in itself) if not sold to the highest bidder soon after they cease to add value while creating products.

The IRA explains, "We help our member companies make the most of their past investments ... in everything from construction equipment to chemicals to real estate. By strategic use of recycling, redeployment, reselling and other innovative techniques, investment recovery professionals recover millions of dollars of value in often-forgotten assets."

One caveat, unlike Lemonade.com, is that there is a fee required to join the IRA. For businesses selling a sizable amount of equipment or commodities, this could amount to a small amount of money for the value gained, though.

Sites such as Lemonade.com can help purchasers and small-businesses rely on testimonials for the details that aid during the selection process, especially when you want to rank various brands to develop a short list or determine the one that will provide maximum value. While this helps both the buyer and seller, there are also other beneficiaries: Items used by a second party delay the time until disposal, another costly expense, thus society gains an advantage. And for Lemonade users who may not be in a position to accept a payment for a referral because of corporate policies, Lemonade.com allows users to donate to local charities.

"Upon their request, we do not promote or publish the names of nonprofits we work with until the first quarter of 2008. I can tell you we primarily donate to charities that allocate 90 percent or more of their funds to program costs versus internal expenses and cover children's hunger, education and clean water provision," explained Zawacki.

"For many of us, setting up a neighborhood lemonade stand was our introduction to entrepreneurship," Zawacki said in a statement. "In a similar way, Lemonade allows people to combine commerce and community in the digital neighborhood of their personal online space."

Cost-free and easy to use, this is the next generation of the old-fashioned lemonade stand concept.

Resources

Lemonade.com

Updating the Lemonade Stand Strategy
by Bob Tedeschi
The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2007

Promoting Professional Management of Surplus Assets
Investment Recovery Association