Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away . . . probably 1950’s America . . . marketing and promotions were easy. All marketing really took was a giant plateful of media advertising combined with a generous helping of sales and some dollops of direct response advertising and public relations. Nobody ever had [...]

FusionCharts is today a common name among web developers with over 16,000 organizations in 110 countries using it. It is used by names as big as LinkedIn, weather.com, Google, Cisco, GE and World bank. Howmuchever it sounds like a carefully crafted 12-point business plan by a left-brained Harvard-passout, it is so much the opposite. It [...]

As social networking — particularly Twitter and similar short-form messaging services — becomes more and more important to disseminating product and service information across a wide audience, we’ve seen an explosive growth of “URL shorteners,” services that are intended to take those long http-colon-slash-slash-tonsofgobbledeygookydogpilesfromyourcontentmanagementsystem and make them short-form friendly. Since we’re adding an entire section [...]

I love this story which landed in my email box from Michael Josephson over at CHARACTER COUNTS! this morning. He’ll probably sue me from here to Thursday (he is, after all, a lawyer), but it’s worth sharing in its entirety. I have a much different take on it than Mr. Josephson — I see it [...]

Two recent articles in The New York Times deserve every entrepreneur’s close attention, the first dealing with small businesses caught up in the fireworks when their lenders go under and the second dealing with the impending bankruptcy of General Growth Properties, the second-largest owner of shopping malls in the country and the first major commercial [...]

You see, the trick is in telling the difference.
In discussing the delicate line that regulators must walk, he said: “The challenge faced by regulators is to strike the right balance: to strive for the highest standards of consumer protection without eliminating the beneficial effects of responsible innovation on consumer choice and access to credit.”. . [...]

What happens when your bank fails? Your overextended small biz loan becomes toxic.
Clashes like this are increasingly taking place across the country, as banks struggle through their worst crisis in a generation. And Mr. Williamson is part of a niche industry that buys at bargain-basement prices the hard-to-collect commercial loans that the Federal Deposit Insurance [...]

Today is tax day! April 15! My wife and I received our refunds months ago, but people all over the country are celebrating tax day with Fox News-sponsored Tea Parties. Teabaggers from Beverly Hills to Greenwich Village are protesting tax hikes that have not in fact occurred, making Tea Parties the first protest in history [...]

This is officially the definition of “deflation,” but, thankfully, without the “spiral” part.
Consumer prices fell 0.4 per cent over the year to March, the labour department said yesterday, and dipped 0.1 per cent last month from February owing to weak energy and food prices. The drop in prices has lessened pressure on consumers who have [...]

How fast things move! Our book, Shoestring Venture is about to celebrate its fourth month and already our section on Web advertising is a bit out of date. The book helps you out with networks such as AdSense, Yahoo!, and Ask, but our section on Microsoft LiveOffice is now officially a dinosaur as the second [...]

I hadn’t really thought of lickable newspapers before, but will that save The Boston Globe?
Just as retailers stuff American newspapers with coupons and sales promotions, the idea is to get food and drink companies to attach a sealed pouch, containing a flavour sample, to front-page newspaper advertisements for their products. Consumers can then take them [...]

One great glaring fault of the mainstream business media and the business blogosphere is its knee-jerk focus on tech news. We’re so tuned to the tech world, that all this tech noise drowns out incredibly valuable start-up news and business success in transistor-challenged businesses. And in what is perhaps one of the most processor-free businesses [...]

In part three of our startup strategy primer, we discussed the crucial difference between industry analysis and business strategy. Substituting industry analysis for business strategy is the most common — and most fatal — mistake entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and online “strategy experts” make. The one and only purpose of industry analysis is to determine the “attractiveness” [...]

We shoulda said “so long” so long ago.
Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses. Others are leaving because of culture clashes at merging companies, [...]

As the U.S. contemplates bailing out the carmakers, Europe contemplates bailing out the banks, Japan has its eye on Pokemon.
Included in a giant stimulus package he unveiled on Friday was a target of raising exports from the “content” sector to about 18 percent of exports from less than 2 percent now. . . .
“Unfortunately, this [...]

In this, our third blog about business strategy, we try to unravel the easily confused difference between the attractiveness of an industry and what I believe to be the foundation of strategy, competitive advantage. You see, what typically passes for business strategy in the lion’s share of business proposals that come my way are industry [...]

The second edition of our foundation book, Shoestring Venture, is nearing completion and we have just added a section on getting paid through Twitter. While this market was dominated by TipIt, a decidedly problematic solution, TipJoy has just released an API for asynchronous payments through Twitter. Right now, the application is most suited to people [...]

Well, if you only need thirty-six billion dollars, I’m sure taxpayers would be glad to lend it to you!
Bank of America Corp., the largest U.S. bank, needs to raise $36.6 billion in equity to bring capital ratios in line with its peers, according to Oppenheimer & Co.
With investors reluctant to commit new funds to [...]

I get two or three broker calls per month trying to sell me stock. If you’re successful as an entrepreneur, your phone will be ringing off the hook two or three times a week from broker “chop shops.” So you might want to check out the new blog, They Madoff With Your Money, dedicated to [...]

Funny, that’s what the government is doing, in fact.
Reason has a must-read article on how our states mismanaged their budgets between recessions. The irrational growth of state spending, far outpacing inflation and population growth, did not produce any measurable increases in the quality of state services while putting the states in untenable positions for the [...]