We wish you the greatest success and happiness for 2010.
Depending on how mathphilic or mathphobic you are, we have either entered the last decade of the naughties or the first decade of the twenty-teens. Either way, it seems we all have big plans to close out the decade (or start the new one) with [...]
It’s been a great recession for Wall Street and a truly sucky one for Main Street.
It sounds, I swear, like an Onion headline — in fact, when I read it, I scanned upwards to make sure the date didn’t read April 1.
Goldman Sachs’ president, Lloyd Blankenfein, announced today that it’s sorry for all the [...]
What recovery?
Making the rounds below the radar are the November 11 comments from the ever-wise Jan Hatzius, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, about how the current “recovery” statistics don’t include much of the small business picture, particularly small businesses shutting down.
Today’s comment attempts to gauge whether the recent official estimates might have overstated the economy’s [...]
In the SBA’s new 0-2(b) loan program, eligible small business owners are given a Big Gulp cup, a sheet of cardboard, and a magic marker.
Now that CIT has filed for bankruptcy, who’s filling the void that they leave in small business and supply chain financing, since they were the top dogs in both until very [...]
It is a well-established fact among statisticians, pollers, and market researchers that somewhere around 5% of all survey responders are, in fact, stupid. I kid you not. I learned that statistic in my first marketing research class, my second marketing research class, four more statistics classes, and a consumer behavior class. That’s seven different professors [...]
A Unique Publishing Brand
Shoestring Venture is a new type of brand in the publishing industry that unites several various strands into a unique configuration. A series of books, videos, and online resources dedicated to an audience of bootstrap entrepreneurs, the Shoestring Venture brand includes:
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For the real estate agent, it’s a “starter home.” For the seller, it’s a “fixer-upper.” For the buyer, it’s a “pile of crap.” If they can agree on a price, for the statistician, it’s an “outlier.” Here endeth the statistics lesson.
Housing prices have gone up for the third straight month! Unless, of course, housing prices [...]
It may not be Vegas, but it’s just as much a crap shoot. Or just plain crap.
Anyone who has read this blog for any time or listened to me on the radio can probably surmise that applying for contest money is not a viable funding plan. If you’re not a fan of grants (and I [...]
You don’t want to know who’s in charge at the iPhone Apps store.
Finally, the feds get interested in the black box we call the iPhone Apps store.
Federal regulators want to know if AT&T and Apple worked to together to reject mobile apps for Google’s innovative Voice service, sending letters to the companies asking them to [...]
I have always counseled every client I’ve dealt with that business planning, even from the start, needs to include how the business will close (this is equally true of business planning for individual products or brands). Perhaps because businesspeople are eternal optimists or because no-one wants to face mortality at birth, few have the good [...]
Where the CIT failure will be felt first . . .
In the grand guignol of faltering banks, CIT, which ranks 26th in size, seems little more than a sideshow in the wholesale slaughter of giants like Lehman, Bear Stearns, and WAMU. It’s imminent demise, despite its desperate, last minute loan of $3 billion, however, will [...]
In all our start-up travels — on the consulting side (me) or the entrepreneur side (Steve) — we’ve had front row seats to a million start-up crack-ups. And what we’ve learned from history is that nobody learns from history, to paraphrase a philosopher who year in and year out wins the “Best Moustache on a [...]
Venture capital funding is down 82% this quarter, but Marc Andreeson throws $300 million into the pot.
Andreeson, Marc: “The cash machine is now open.”
In one of the worst recessions ever, Andreeson and his long-time business buddy, Ben Horowitz, open up a new VC shop with over $300 million in funds. Turns out that they have [...]
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman of the corporate leadership consultancy,Zenger/Folkman, and authors of
In the latest issue of the New York Times, Kermit Pattison talks about global outsourcing as a resource for small businesses and solopreneurs. Money quote:
“This is one more step in the path to leveling the playing field between small and large businesses,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at [...]
Before you give away the store, you might want to check with the franchisees who own the store.
The sit-down casual segment of the restaurant industry has traditionally competed more on advertising and location than price, but these days, the chains appear to have little choice. Consumers hurt by the recession are eating out less. So [...]
Ever since Facebook released its API (this is why you should care), all us dedicated Facebookers have been deluged with oceans of the most trivial time-wasters (which species of fungus are you?). Despite the fact that the average Facebook app is productive only in killing time, quite a generous seasoning of business-oriented apps have moseyed [...]
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 [...]
