So if you’re a lansdscaper, in the construction business or make deliveries –even if you use only one vehicle — this could be right for you. Here’s how it works, whether you use gasoline or diesel: You give Pricelock the number of gallons you expect to use over a certain period, pick a target price per gallon and Pricelock quotes you a fee; an example on Pricelock’s site shows an 11% fee on a 3,000-gallon coverage plan at a target of $3 a gallon. If the national average price on gas or diesel (as determined by the U.S. Department of Energy) exceeds your target in a month, Pricelock pays you the difference. If the price lands at or below your target, then you’ve paid the fee with no return. Either way, you don’t actually have to buy any fuel or show any receipts. A similar plan covers shippers against fuel surcharges by shipping companies.

Pricelock’s site has a nice set of tools to try out scenarios for rising gas prices. Salespeople are available to help you pick a fuel price protection plan. Just remember that Pricelock isn’t an oil company, it’s a financial company that uses the commodities markets to cover its bets – and it’s going to be savvier about energy prices than you over time. Still, as a way to smooth out your annual spend at the pump, Pricelock’s fee may be worth the cost of having some certainty when managing fuel for your fleet.

Ask Your Target Market.com recruits survey respondents through another site, InstantCashSweepstakes.com, where users register by giving their demographic information, then answer survey questions to compete to win a $50 daily prize or $2 prizes every four hours. Users can also profit by referring new members through their blogs or Twitter pages.

The sweepstakes site claims to rank participants by their truthfulness, based on the consistency of their answers, and tries to weed out people so they don’t claim all sorts of things to qualify for as many surveys as possible.  Still, we’ve got to suspect that the survey panel is skewed toward — well, people who are motivated by a shot at winning a $2 prize. You may not want to test out that new app for hedge fund managers with this crowd.

Ask Your Target Market.com’s survey building tools are very easy to use. A nice feature is that you can see the price of your survey going up as you refine your requirements or increase your audience size (up to 400). The site will tell you upfront if they can’t fill out your target group and offers a partial credit if they don’t get you all the data in 72 hours.

How useful is the data likely to be? Professional market surveyors scoff at the validity of results from a sample of 50 people and many even find 100 to be borderline. But if you’re looking for clues, not science, Ask Your Target Market.com may be worth the low price. And that’s from a survey of one person … me.

The idea behind this free social media platform is pretty simple: You sign up with your flight details and Planely lets you know who else has registered a similar itinerary. You can contact your fellow travelers through the site and agree to carpool to the airport, meet at an airport cafe or possibly sit together on the plane. Planely could really be useful for convention-goers, who could arrange to share a cab or start the business networking early. Or business travelers could find someone of similar interests to while away the hours of coach class and take their minds off the leg cramps.

Of course, we’re not suggesting people use Planely to search for date-able travelers — but this could be the beginning of the end for all those “missed connections” ads on Craigslist.

With Twittens (Twitter + mittens, get it?), pull up the hoodies, fingers warm. Pull down the hoodies, fingers free to contact the touch screen. Non-skid grips on the palms allow a firm hold on a phone no matter how hard you shake. Another glove seller, Freehands, offers pretty much the design.  Yes, these gloves are compatible with both iPhone and Android. And Marlboro and Camel.

Or check out some competing cell phone glove technologies. The fingertips of FIVEPOINT gloves are made from a conductive thread that the company claims reacts with a touch screen just as well as your skin. Same principle for the DOTS gloves, but with just dots of conductive material, so the company says they are more precise.

Freehands also makes the Power Stretch 5 Finger Liner with “conductive polyamide tips with silver plating to conduct electric energy from your fingers.” The North Face ETIP glove similarly comes with fingertips of “X-STATIC” silver-fiber, which according to the manufacturer, also inhibits bacteria growth. Another side benefit: Put these on, hold out your hands and you can do a pretty fair imitation of Halle Berry as “Storm” in “X-Men.”

Surely, there’s a business plan competition out there just for you. Several states, such as Wisconsin and Rhode Island,  fund competitions for residents or contestants who say they’ll move there. Competitions can also get very local, such as the North of Boston event just for Essex County and the Merrimack Valley. The Global Security Challenge funds startups in any kind of security business; the Breakthrough Innovation Grant is for new products that can be sold through “sari-sari” stores, the mom and pop shops of the Philippines.

The prizes can be quite lucrative, such as the $100,000 first prize for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Entrepreneurship Challenge. But here’s one big catch: Many of these competitions are run by universities and may require you to have at least one student or alum on your team. You typically send in your business plan and if you make the cut, you will have to show up in person to pitch it — that itself can be a valuable experience. Some of the finalist pitch sessions are public events, but for sheer terror nothing matched the pitch during the Ball State University Entrepreneurship Center’s competition, held in the back seat of a limo while racing around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. And the pitch had to be made in 500 seconds. For 2011, they’re moving the competition indoors.

There’s nothing’s to stop you from entering multiple competitions with the same plan; Forbes wrote about one enterprising fellow who won the MIT prize, then went on to win five others. Hey, that’s a business plan right there.

If you own a bar or a dress shop and are out buying  supplies, what do you use for your second pair of eyes? Hauling around a laptop won’t cut it. That’s why Mobiscope is offering an app so you can keep an eye on the store from your phone.

Shape Services, which also makes a business card reader, is the company behind the mobile eye. You download the program on your computer, then sync up your mobile phone. The program supports all the popular types of cameras. You can also get motion alerts via email too, or record videos to watch later.

One of the cooler features is being able to view four cameras on one screen of your iPhone. (Four is the limit on the number of cameras you can use in each group.) They also have apps for the Android phones and Blackberrys.  And everything you’d need to safeguard your data is there.

Or if you just want to watch the store or restaurant from home, you can still use your laptop.

On a standard power strip or surge suppressor the outlets are all created equal; the smart models give different outlets different ranks. Plug your computer into the “control outlet” on the SMART STRIP Surge Protector from BITS Limited and, when you turn off the computer, the devices plugged into the “automatically switched outlets” shut down. But devices plugged into the “constant hot outlets” stay on, handy for wireless routers or clocks. Even better, the SMART STRIP senses when your computer goes into sleep mode and then powers down the other devices. You may have to tweak the setting with a knob on the side so the SMART STRIP recognizes your computer’s sleep mode.

The Belkin Conserve Switch surge suppressor also gives you control outlets and always-on outlets but doesn’t offer sleep-mode shutoff. However, it does have one big personal energy-saver: A switch that you can stick on the wall will wirelessly control up to six power strips within 60 feet. One click and all those energy vampires go back into their coffins.

The problem with annual performance reviews is that they’re annual; the employee is likely to get an earful about last week’s problem, not last spring’s success. Rypple aims to fix that with social media tools that make giving and getting performance feedback part of the daily workflow.

Rypple has a simple, web-based interface with three main parts: post a thank you or other update, coach a team member and set goals and deliverables. The update posts to a Facebook-style wall, where other team members can see the comment and add their own. Kudos can be tagged with Foursquare-style badges, colorful icons that say “Awesome,” “Quick Learner” or other superlatives.

The coaching interface is a worksheet that makes it easy to add comments about an employee’s job performance while still fresh in the manager’s memory. The sheet can be shared with the employee or other managers if you want their feedback too. The goal is to make the sit-down performance review a no-surprises event. And Rypple is geared to frequent reviews, with the worksheets turning into to-do lists.

The personal goals section also leverages the social media approach. A manager can solicit anonymous answers to questions such as “How can I improve meetings?” A scheduler is able to send the questions out on a periodic basis.

Rypple is a hosted web solution and the company promises no configuration is needed. Given the sensitive nature of the messages that pass through Rypple, the company also promises a high level of security against hacking and spoofing. Pricing starts at $19 a month for up to 8 users.

And the flexible printing creates new uses for business cards; read this case study of a company that tracked contacts by putting unique codes on the cards.

MOO cards are pretty expensive, as far as online business card printers go: 1,000 cards for $332.45. Compare that to $62.98 for 1,000 glossy standard-look cards from VistaPrint. On the other hand, they throw in infinite variations for free. And when you compare that to the costs of publishing catalogs, it makes more sense.

——————

Find business card printers on Business.com

People counters are as varied as people and come in many different varieties: mats that count when stepped on, light beams or infrared beams that trip when a leg breaks the beam, heat sensors that trigger when a body comes near, and sophisticated thermal imaging cameras that mount on the ceiling and track movement around the store. They typically send wireless signals to a central receiver that may serve as a standalone counter or dump the data into a computer for analysis.

An entry-level model, the Amseco Wireless Door Chime With Counter sounds when a customer passes through one of two infrared beams and sends a wireless signal to a simple counter. The system can distinguish between entrances and exits.

SenSource sells a wide range of people counter solutions, including thermal imaging cameras that count by registering body heat and can distinguish multiple customers walking in the door at the same time.

Traf-Sys is another full-line vendor of people counters, including proximity counters that cover the small area around a counter or kiosk. The device wirelessly send reports about how effectively displays are attracting shoppers.

For a stylish solution to retail flow counting, check out the Shopguard model, which sits in polished aluminum pillars by the store entrance.

People counter software automates comparisons of foot traffic to sales and other metrics. Vendors such as Sensource and Trafsys will sell you complete packages, including hardware and software, or you can directly buy software like Wincounter. At the high end of the scale, Flownomics analyzes video of customer movements for insights into not just where they go but what motivates them to pick up a product and put it in their basket.