from Gizmodo - Here's the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED, and It has the same specs and price as Apple's other 4GB nanos, except $10 of its $199 purchase price will go toward fighting AIDS in Africa. That money will be contributed directly into the Global Fund, according to Apple. Click to view - this is hot!
The Advantage Valley ELS is seeking experienced entrepreneurs who have the ability and desire to coach other entrepreneurs. Join the Advantage Valley ELS which is an innovative coaching program in the Advantage Valley region and help develop the region’s pipeline of skilled entrepreneurs. Currently the program serves more than 70 entrepreneurs. Click below to learn more how you can help.
From Forbes - Their list of the 200 Best Small Companies ferrets out the most robust, fundamentally disciplined public outfits with sales between $5 million and $750 million. Candidates must carry profit margins of greater than 5% with positive sales and profit growth, on average, over both the last five years and last twelve months. The result? Small, but growing, businesses designed to survive the ups and downs of market volatility.
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Rank | Company | State
ROE | Sales Growth | Profit Growth | MarketValue
Many of you saw the cover story on Business Week a few days ago about Kevin Roses tremendous success with www.digg.com and having redefined the news industry. We wrote an article on him just a couple months ago. Well this cover story has stirred up alot of controversy about the hype associated with some of these web startups. Here are two more realistic views of what's happening in this Web 2.0 space. Still promising - but not as hyped as the lead article.
Starting in September, the Kauffman FastTrac® GrowthVenture™ Program is a ten-week, ten-module educational program created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs that is designed to help participants look at their entire business. Delivered locally by seasoned entrepreneurs in the community, it's hands-on program uses participants' businesses as case studies, giving them the opportunity to put proven business practices to work for them.
From WV Inc Online: Governor Joe Manchin III has announced that West Virginia will host the National Governors Association Seminar for New Governors for the second consecutive time. "It is such an honor for West Virginia to host this vital seminar for the second time," Manchin said. The Seminar for New Governors is held every two years; the last event was hosted by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise at The Greenbrier.
From Inc.com: Let's face it. Starting a business is tough. You have to build a client base, hire employees, find office space. There are plenty of challenges, but the one that many entrepreneurs find most daunting is raising start-up capital. Here is a site FULL of great resources for finding your funding.
The article provides links to over 40 in-depth resources in each of these areas:
Guy Kawasaki, author of 'The Art of the Start' is an experienced entrepreneur, venture capitalist and I think, a great resource to new entrepreneurs. In his weblog, he shares 11 fantastic tips that will provide some great guidance to anyone getting a business going by the bootstraps.
From the StartupJournal.com: What's the truth behind supposed studies that show about 80% or so of small businesses fail within their first five years? While there is no clear evidence to back up those numbers, the bad news is, they may be true. A close up look look at this 'statistic'.
The article reports that:
Let's start with what we do know. Roughly half of all new businesses with employees survive four years, and even those that shut down aren't necessarily failures. Amy Knaup, a researcher at the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 66% of the 212,182 employer businesses started in the second quarter of 1998 lasted two years, and 44% survived four years.
But there is a major shortcoming to these numbers: These studies track only businesses with employees — not nonemployers, such as the next-door neighbor running an eBay store from a computer in her basement. Nonemployers, which account for a whopping three-quarters of all U.S. businesses, are much harder to research because they don't file much information about their operations with the government.
From TechCrunch: Fox Interactive Media has entered into a nearly $1 billion, 3+ year deal with Google to exclusively power search across most Fox online sites, including Myspace. The partnership will begin in the fourth quarter of this year and extend though the second quarter of 2010.
This is big - not only for MySpace users, advertisers, Google, those who compete with Google, the Fox network, most everyone on the internet. Big. Specifically for businesses that have been working on a strategy to figure out how to monitize the tremendous traffic of MySpace - well Google is an expert at doing that with their search. And beginning this fall - its available to you..
From Hitwise: This July, MySpace has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. This is an incredible result in just a couple of years - the opportunity for business development and for advertisers is just tremendous.
Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.
From BusinessWeek Online: Cell phone users spend lots of time talking into their devices, but they generally communicate with very few people. Just how few? Would you believe four? Here is an excellent summary defining our new six communication channels.
The lone fixed-line telephone has given way to multiple fixed and mobile phones, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), text messaging, voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) free (or near-free) telephony and videoconferencing, and other interactive channels such as blogs and wikis.
Here is an excellent excerpt on how the study defined our new communication channels.
– The fixed phone is the collective channel: "a shared organizational tool for the whole household," with most calls done in "public," because they are relevant to other members of the household. Only 25% are done "privately," from one's bedroom or study.
– Mobile voice is "the micro coordination channel": It is "the preferred channel for last-minute adjustment of plans or updates on where people are and what they are doing." Surprisingly, "80 percent of all exchanges are with only four people."
– SMS, or short messaging, is "for intimacy, emotions, and efficiency. Only the most intimate sphere of friends and family are contacted by SMS, and the content of the messages is often related to 'grooming' and emotional exchanges."
– E-mail is "the administrative channel," used to support online activities such as travel reservations and shopping, for coordination with extended social groups (clubs, friends, acquaintances), or for exchanging pictures, music, and other content with close social networks.
– IM and VoIP are "the continuous channels": "users open an instant messaging channel for the day and then just keep it open in the background while they do other activities; they multitask — and step in and out of a conversation." This starts to apply to VoIP as well (think Skype).
– Blogging is the broader networking channel: "Personal pages are often primarily a center of communication with friends and people online in general."
From CNNMoney.com: Established franchises are booming, while over 500 new franchises were formed last year. A third of all franchises had more than 100 operating outlets and nearly half had more than 50.
The article also states:
Over the past three years, around 900 businesses started franchising. In 2005, there were over 500 new franchise businesses, that is up from 220 in 2004 and 207 in 2003.
A third of all franchises had more than 100 operating outlets and nearly half had more than 50. Significantly influenced by the growing number of new franchises in the past few years, 25 percent had 10 or less units.
There are 767,483 franchise businesses in the U.S., according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers based on data from 2001, the latest figures available.
The franchising sector's impact on the economy exceeds $1.5 trillion and provides more than 18 million jobs, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
From Information Week: E-commerce sales rose to $80.8 billion from $67.2 billion during the same period last year, ComScore Networks reported this week. Nontravel retail increased 24.6% from a year ago to $46.1 billion, and travel spending rose 14.7% to $34.7 billion.
The article also shares that:
For the full year, ComScore expects online spending overall to reach $170 billion, including $102 billion in non-travel e-commerce. This year could mark the first time such spending has topped $100 billion.
In the retail category in the first half of the year, office supplies accounted for 54 percent of spending, followed by computer software, 39 percent; sports and fitness, 38 percent; home and garden, 36 percent; and toy and hobbies, 33 percent.
As reported by TechCrunch - YouTube announced it's hit the 100m videos per day mark. It's estimated that 60% of the videos watched online are now served by YouTube. In June 2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube and with 30 employees, the company has over 65,000 videos updated daily.
From Forbes - Among the 793 billionaires Forbes found in 2006, only 11 of them, or 1%, were under the age of 35. Of those, five inherited their fortunes, the other six created their own wealth. Here's a short article and photo slide show of these 11 fortunate folks.
From Forbes - The world's biggest companies, combined, they show a 10% gain in sales, 32% in profits, 10% in assets and 17% in market capitalization over last year. This year's list has 173 new companies - Here they are sorted and listed in several ways.
Also view list sorted by:
Rank | Name | Country | Industry
Sales | Profits | Assets | Market Value
From Forbes - Chinese Internet users spend nearly two billion hours online each week, while the U.S. audience logs on for 129 million hours per week. China has an estimated 200 million active internet users vs the US's 154 million, and China users are increasing by 18% per year.
The article also notes that:
Even if we assume that China is still behind the U.S. in terms of users, China definitely wins in another critical area. One of the most valued metrics of Internet usage (especially for advertisers) is time spent online. Chinese users average 15.9 hours per week, while Yahoo! , the most popular Internet site in the U.S., can only get its users to stick around for less than one hour per week (216.5 minutes per month according to ComScore Media Metrix). That's 1.765 billion hours per week online in China, compared with 129 million hours per week online in the U.S.
Also - with regards to mobile internet use via cellular phone, the article says:
There are 400 million cell phone users in China, with over 6.1 million mobile users connecting online.** As cell phones increasingly become the connection of choice, you can expect China, which is a generation ahead of the U.S. in mobile technology, to lead the world in mobile Internet-access growth. And everything will hit hyperdrive over the next two years, as the country ramps up to host the summer Olympics, which are being held in Beijing in 2008.
They offer a free trial. It's the most affordable I've ever seen. And even though I'm a big fan of XDrive - this is worth checking out… I've seen it too many times - the sad sad look that comes from the 'digital data loss' Yes… it is gone.. forever… With services like this there is really no excuse anymore for losing data… Below are some pricing comparisons and the links to the site.
Business 2.0 reveals how Staples needed to simplify itself before it could reap the rewards of its new Easy Button ad campaign. The five-year branding odyssey that began in 2001 has helped make $16.1 billion Staples the runaway leader in office retail. In 2005 its profit was up 18 percent to $834 million. Second-place Office Depot (Research), meanwhile, booked 2005 earnings of just $274 million, an 18 percent slide, and OfficeMax (Research) posted a loss of $73.8 million. Staples now receives twice as many compliments as complaints. Here's a great article on what the retailer learned along the way.
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