Small Business Gold Mine in Water

Last year, the trio was planning a mid-November 2006 launch for Ice Rocks in luxury resorts and hotels in California, Chicago, Miami and New York. One test-marketing program in Europe distributed 300,000 four-packs of the cubes paired with bottles of Chivas Regal; that angle, marketed as Scotch Rocks, has a planned early '07 rollout. With a 48-cube pack of Ice Rocks selling for about $4.99, the company estimates first-year sales could top $10 million. According to Jean-Jean, "We're hearing from a lot of airlines and alcohol companies."

Another new water company targeting a more mainstream customer is Next-RO in Redondo Beach, California. The 2-year-old company offers a water-purifying device for home and office use that's smaller and more efficient than current models using similar reverse-osmosis technology. The unit will likely sell for about $500, roughly twice the price of many existing units, so the company faces the challenge of selling customers on the machine's merits.

But Next-RO founder and CEO Tim Beall, who helped create the device, says initial industry reaction has been strongly positive. The start-up has commitments for 600,000 machines from water-product companies located around the world, and last fall it planned to be producing its machine at a Torrance, Cali., factory in January.

Previous attempts by Beall's team to license a similar technology to other companies proved unfruitful. He went broke several years ago pursuing the technology and had to start again from scratch. Beall got back in the water game with $250,000 in funding provided by a neighbor who heard about his device. Now, Beall says, "This is ready to grow rapidly."