(FORTUNE Magazine) – Want Your Business to Stand Out? Move away from the crowd. That's what Andrew Roth and Glenn Horowitz did when they opened their gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a part of town known for its wealthy residents and conservative atmosphere, not its edgy art scene. "We would have been just part of the scene downtown," says Roth, referring to the "artsy" Chelsea and SoHo neighborhoods. Specializing in rare books and photos, the year-old Roth Horowitz gallery has attracted huge crowds with recent shows like "Witness," a moving and sometimes horrifying exhibit of 60 postcards, books, and artifacts chronicling lynchings from 1883 to 1960. Another show, "Provoke," showcasing rare Japanese photo books of Hiroshima, sold out, says Horowitz. Their successful strategy: Add controversy to location.

Summer Reading: If you're looking for a good read and a more realistic portrayal of the Wild Wild Web, check out Tom Ashbrook's new book, The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush (Houghton Mifflin, $26). It's a modern-day odyssey about an old guy (40) who left his cushy job and fat salary to make it in cyberspace.

We Would Have Named It Apathy.com: But we like the concept. Take the typical American voter's lack of interest in politics and make some money on it. BetterVote.com scours voting records and speeches of candidates and even reminds you to vote. The best part: It chooses your candidate based on a ten-minute online survey asking your political stance on such issues as health care, the environment, and gun control. More than 30,000 people have taken the survey. The founders, self-proclaimed political junkie Charlie Rentschler, 25, and his tech-guru brother Adam, 27, say they have no partisan agenda. The brothers, who grew up on a hog farm in southern Indiana, say they just want to get rich and do good. They launched the site in February with $500,000 in angel money from family and friends. Revenues come from ads, licensing the technology, and selling the data they collect to politicians and special-interest groups. The site will eventually expand to include state and local politics.

New Lessons for an Old Practice: Imagine people with a product, talking face to face and displaying 3-D objects. You have to wonder if the old trade show has a place in this virtual world. But when we joined buyers from Noodle Kidoodle at a recent toy fair, we figured out what the old and new venues have in common: Speed wins. Rushing by hundreds of booths, the buyers barely glanced at a Santa's Workshop guy who pleaded for an audience. But the Power Pumper 2000 bike rep scored with the correct answer to the question, "Can you ship right away?" (Yes.) "You bore 'em to death if you tell too much," says the CEO of Schylling Toys. His 25-word pitch seemed to work. Or maybe it was just the right item: a Thomas the Tank Engine stopwatch.

Prohibition, Take Two: When Congress repealed Prohibition in 1933, the Foppianos of Sonoma County, Calif., joyfully stopped growing prunes and returned to their true love, winemaking. Yet strangely enough, the federal and state laws that restored prosperity to the Foppianos are now hindering their ability to use the Internet to sell their wines. How? Thirty states, including New York and Texas, have laws stemming from the repeal of Prohibition that require out-of-state winemakers to sell products only through a wholesaler--no easy task when it comes to low-volume specialty types like Foppiano's spicy Petite Sirah. A couple of clicks on a Website, of course, would be the solution. So small winemakers are pleading for changes to the laws to permit direct shipping to customers. No way, say big wholesalers, who are urging Congress to toughen direct-shipping bans. So far, the vintners are winning: In February a federal judge in Houston called Texas' direct-shipping ban "economic protectionism" and ruled it unconstitutional; a judge in Indiana issued a similar decision this year. But don't raise your glasses yet. This one will be tied up in the courts for years to come.

WITH REPORTING BY Arlyn Tobias Gajilan, Julia Lawlor, Rathe Miller, and Edward Robinson