A checklist for starting a small business by Jamie Downey

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

• Research the product or service you want to sell. Determine who your customers will be and how you will make a profit.

• Create a business plan. For many this is a difficult task. However, it is probably not as difficult as you think. You can search around the web for examples or shoot me an email and I can help you get a sample business plan to work from.

• Create a budget (this may be included in the business plan).

• Determine your capital needs (see your budget) and find the necessary financing to get the business up and running. For many start-up businesses, friends, family, home equity and your own checking account are often a significant source of their financing needs.

• Choose your business name and register it. Consider a trademark if you want to protect the name of your business.

• Open a company checking account. Contact the bank and make sure their requirements simple and their fees are low. I recommend contacting a local bank as they seem to work more closely with small businesses.

• Choose what type of legal entity you want to use; corporation, limited liability company, partnership or sole proprietorship.

• Determine if you need any federal, state or local licenses / permits.

• Obtain an Employer Identification Number. This may not be necessary if you are going to operate as a sole proprietorship and you have no employees.

• Obtain a sales tax number, if needed. This obviously depends on the product or service you plan on selling.

• Set up your record-keeping system. Your business will need to maintain adequate financial books and records. Small businesses often fail to devote the necessary time to this process and it comes back to haunt them in many ways; including on your taxes, payroll tax filings, obtaining credit from banks, etc.

• Choose a location for your business. A home office is very inexpensive to start and you will likely receive some tax benefits.

• Talk to your insurance agent and obtain adequate business coverage. Also consider your health insurance requirements.

• Create a marketing plan.

• Set up professional relationships. May be not at first, but over time you will need an attorney, a Certified Public Accountant, insurance agent and a banker.

• Obtain a business email address.

• Obtain your web domain and set up the website. If you have never set up a website, you might consider WYSIWYG software. It makes creating websites much easier and it only cost $40. Furthermore, you can try for free for 30 days.

• Find a mentor. SCORE is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to educating and assisting entrepreneurs on the growth of small businesses. They will team you up with a mentor to help you facilitate your business.

Hacker jailbreaks the Iphone 3GS by Nick Farrell

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

THE TEEN HACKER who unlocked the original Iphone claims to have created an app that can 'jailbreak' Apple's recently released Iphone 3GS.

George Hotz, 19, wrote a program called "purplera1n" which he says can install third-party software on an Iphone 3GS, even if that software is not approved by Apple.

It didn't take him very long to hack the device, which has only been available since June 19.

This shows that it isn't impossible to bypass Apple's wonderful built-in security features for the Iphone and it makes a mockery of the outfit's autocractic control of users.

It also means that users can run whatever they like on the gizmo rather than only what Steve Jobs says they are allowed.

Hotz released software that works with Windows-based computers and the latest version of Itunes, as well as the Iphone 3GS running Apple's latest Iphone 3.0 software. Over the weekend he released a Mac version, too.

Hotz got his first 15 minutes of fame two years ago when, at the age of 17, he became the first hacker to crack the Iphone's security so it could run unauthorised apps.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1432758/hacker-jailbreaks-iphone-3gs

Companies recall products linked to milk processor

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Food distributors across the country announced on Thursday they are recalling nonfat dry milk, cocoa and other products that are linked to a possible salmonella contamination at a Plainview, Minn., milk processor.

The Food and Drug Administration said late last month that Plainview Milk Products Cooperative was recalling instant nonfat dried milk, whey protein, fruit stabilizers and food thickening agents that it made over the past two years because they might be contaminated with salmonella.

Salmonella can cause serious infections, especially in children, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek said on Thursday "there are no illnesses that we are aware of" and the agency is tracking distribution of the products.

The FDA has said none of Plainview's products were sold directly to the public. But the company sold their products to other distributors, who distributed them further, and also to manufacturers, who may have used them in their products, Kwisnek said.

Retailer Meijer Inc. announced on Thursday it was recalling one type of its Meijer Brand Instant Nonfat Dry Milk. The product was sold in Meijer stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.

CPI Foods Inc., of Dallas, recalled about 15,000 packets of nonfat dry milk. The company said the packets are parts of CPI Foods shelf-stable meal kits distributed to community service companies in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, West Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada and Kentucky.

Precision Foods Inc., of St. Louis, said it was recalling certain Madagascar Vanilla cocoa. The recalled cocoa product is labeled as Land O Lakes International Drinking Cocoa "Madagascar Vanilla." It was distributed nationally in retail stores and through mail orders, the company said.

Also announced Thursday was a recall by NOW Foods for products containing whey protein concentrate. McClancy Seasoning Co. recalled Alba instant nonfat dry milk products and various Alba snack shake mixes.

On Wednesday, East Coast grocery chains Giant Food and Stop & Shop also issued recalls of some of their dried milk products.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iQJ6l3Y38myc2dnLRiOOWWGOPWYQD996ML202

Be an Expert, and Customers Will Find You by Zack Stern

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Your medium- or small-business can live or die by its marketing. One of the greatest angles costs you no capital. Establish yourself as an expert in your field by offering advice through websites and magazine trade articles. Readers will migrate to your business, and you can point potential customers back to the articles for an extra marketing push.

To get the best results, find publications and topics that fit. I know a therapist who has written about meditation for spirituality and yoga websites. He uses mindfulness in his practice and has built up a stream of clients who have found him through those articles. Consider these tactics for nearly any other service-based business.

You can get similar results--but it can take more work--building up your own audience. Many, local real-estate blogs, for example, give details about market conditions in a specific area. If the content is good, offering home-buying tips and tutorials, readers will associate that help with the author. If that author leaves a blurb about their day job, readers will seek them out.

In either case, be an expert about your industry, but don't shill for your business. Readers see through any overt selling. The real marketing comes after you help the readers and they seek you out. Make the connection then, and they'll see you as an expert, not a pitch-man.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR2009061703346.html

Hey, Just a Minute (or Why Google Isn’t Twitter) By Randall Stross

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Google moves faster than some of its critics think. But even if didn’t, the more important question is this: Do we really want Google’s search engine to swallow Twitter’s output as fast as it comes, without filtering, analyzing and ranking by authority?

“Real-time search begets real-time spam,” writes Danny Sullivan, the editor in chief of the Web site Search Engine Land.

Anyone who signs up to follow a particular Twitterer receives tweets instantaneously, as they are dispatched (when the system is functioning). Filtering is not an issue in such cases: The 1.77 million followers of Britney Spears presumably look forward to receiving every morsel of information broadcast from her account.

But if one wants to search Twitter for tweets about a topic — say, about Ms. Spears, but encompassing anyone’s tweet that happens to mention her — Twitter’s data fill an ocean in which it’s hard to find specific fish.

Twitter’s search page says, “See what’s happening — right now.” But Twitter’s database was not originally designed to be searched like Google’s was. Last year, in fact, Twitter bought another start-up, Summize, to provide it with search functionality.

Even so, search performance on Twitter is sluggish compared with the live tweet stream. Mr. Sullivan notes that Twitter’s search service does not consistently deliver real-time results: 20 or more minutes often pass before a given tweet appears in search results. At Google only hundredths of a second are needed to check its index when a search phrase is submitted. But to prepare, the company re-surveys the wide Web to update that index on a schedule that the company does not divulge. Some Web sites, like those of news organizations, are checked very often. Others await their turn in a rotating schedule of visits by Google’s crawler, the software that collects copies of Web pages.

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, says that Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, has consistently pushed the company’s engineers to index the most active Web pages faster. When the frequency was increased to hourly, Mr. Page insisted that the interval be referred to as “3,600 seconds” to emphasize that it would be reduced further, which it was.

Google checks news feeds constantly but does not so easily pull in tweets. At a press event in London last month, Mr. Page was asked to comment on any plans that Google had to search Twitter in real time. After praising Twitter for doing a “great job” in showing information to users in real time, Mr. Page said he had long been pushing his search teams to index every second. “They sort of laugh at me and go, ‘It’s O.K. if it’s a few minutes’ old,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, no, it needs to be every second.’”

A number of search start-ups have appeared recently that differentiate their offerings from older search engines’ by playing up their specialized focus on the real-time Web. For example, OneRiot, based in Boulder, Colo., covers Twitter among other social media, but it has an intriguing means of reducing Twitter spam: it does not index the text in tweets — it plucks only the links, reasoning that the videos, news stories and blog posts that are being shared are what others will be most interested in.

OneRiot follows the link, checks for spam by comparing the content of the page with the content of the tweet, and then uses its own algorithms to figure out where the link should go in its always-changing index of “hot” items.

Strictly speaking, this is not real-time processing. But checking links before adding them to the index seems to be time well spent.

Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, said his company could process, check and index a link within 37 seconds. When asked why he bothered to measure the seconds if it took 20 or more minutes just to receive searchable tweets from Twitter, he explained that the delays at Twitter’s search site did not affect his company’s search service, which receives the data stream at the same time Twitter’s own search engine does. Because one venture capital firm, Spark Capital, has invested in both OneRiot and Twitter, OneRiot has “access to Twitter data that other third parties don’t,” Mr. Peggs said.

GOOGLE crawls Twitter’s Web site — the frequency is not disclosed — to collect the same links included in tweets that OneRiot collects, and these may show up in Google’s search results. If Google were to negotiate direct access to the tweet stream that OneRiot enjoys, it presumably could move just as fast and match OneRiot’s lists, like “most shared today” or “today’s hottest videos.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/business/14digi.html

Smart Social Networking For Your Small Business by Frederic Paul

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Next to mobility and cloud computing,
social networking was the talk of
Interop this year--especially at a
conference session devoted to social
software tools and a portion of the
Unconference, where real SMB users
talked about how to make the most of it.

But perhaps the best thing I learned
about social media came in a meeting
with security vendor ESET. Just as at
a recent Intuit ( INTU - news - people )
town hall where I discovered Social
NOT-working, at Interop, ESET director
of marketing Liz Fraumann shared the
abbreviation for Social Media as "So
Me." Perfect, isn't it?

Anyway, Social Software Tools: A
Critical Evaluation offered useful
insight into the choices SMBs need
to make when moving into social
networking. Tony Byrne, founder of
CMS Watch, started with a useful
breakdown of the complex world of
social networking, beginning with
separating external and internal
applications, depending on whether
the connections occur inside or
outside your company:

External

--Branded community

--Tech support

--Reader interaction

--Partner collaboration

--Professional networking

--Hosted user blogs and blog
comments (you host, but don't
control, user postings)

Internal

--Project collaboration

--Enterprise collaboration

--Enterprise discussion
(especially useful after
a merger or acquisition)

--Information organization/
filtering

--Knowledgebase management
(collaboration)

--Communities of practice

--Enterprise networking (intranets
and/or Facebook groups for
employees); vendors include
Ning and Lithium

Of course, where social networking
takes place is only the first part of
the puzzle. The networking itself
can take many forms:

Social Networking Functions

--Blogs; vendors include Six Apart,
Google's ( GOOG - news - people )
Blogger and Automattic's WordPress

--Microblogs (Twitter)

--Wikis; vendors include MediaWiki
(the foundation of Wikipedia), Atlassian,
MindTouch and Socialtext)

--Project tracking/participation software

--Multimedia (video/audio, internal or
external, including YouTube)

--Information ranking/filtering--voting

--Discussion forums

--Presence/instant messaging (IM)

--Public social networks, including
Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and MySpace

Each of these functional applications
has its own uses, strengths and
weaknesses.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/social-networking-interop-entrepreneurs-technology-bmighty.html

What's The Best Advice In An Economic Downturn?

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

In an economic downturn,
customer satisfaction is
crucial. Actually, it's
important three-hundred-
sixty-five days a year.


People, in general, are
short on time and money.
They are concerned about
how their money is spent,
and on what.

There are numerous ads on
posters, television, at
the market, store fronts,
libraries, and cars are
sporting messages to buy.

Customers have access to
information via the
Internet. They are informed.

They will buy your product
or service if you've answered
the following.

Will your product or service
save me money? Why should I
buy your product or service?
How can your product or service
help me? Will it make me money?
Will my life be improved?

Answer one or more of those
questions before presenting the
sales campaign. The answer(s)
must be stirred in the
advertisement.

"There isn't one thing, but several
to help in an economic downturn."
You stabbed your eyes at the title.

You're right. There are other means
to get customers to return, but one
action on your part is essential.

Yes, new ideas, cutting-edge products
or services, better technology,
and easy payment plans help repeat
business. Also, answering
questions when it's not a good time,
and resolving issues that arise with
customer purchases. These simple
actions bring customers
back.

"What brings 'em back?" You tapped
three fingers on your desk.

The secret to keeping a customer is
consistent behavior. It pulls customers
back faster than anything else. The
principles that landed you their trust
is the glue securing additional
business from them.

Consistency, no matter where, is
relaxing. It's easier, better,
to deal with.

Happy customers advertise for you.
They tell friends, associates, which
means new customers.

Clients, customers, mouth-to-mouth
advertising is more productive than
an ad placed by you. Mouth-to-mouth
ads spread faster. You're likely to see
results with it, first. A big advantage
to you is that it's free.

Let's look at an example.

A customer buys fresh fruits and
vegetables from your place of business.
A play-area sits in front of the store.
The customer leaves her baby there while
shopping. Of course, there's an attendant,
maybe three.

The lady, when finished shopping, takes
her baby home.

The baby is tired from the trip, playing,
and takes a nap.

The mother unpacks groceries, undisturbed.
She does other duties around the house
before the baby wakes up. Perhaps, she
naps too.

The customer is happy with the consistency,
order, and the flow of her day.

What would happen if the play-area
was removed?

It forces the lady to get-up earlier, or
run late for the day.

"Why?" You questioned.

She'll need time to adjust her plans,
routine, before shopping.

She dislikes the time spent to find a
sitter. A sitter for her child is
expensive. Maybe, she can find a
relative to take care of the child.

She has to slice time away to
arrive at the relative's house. Allow
the child to get comfortable before
leaving.

The customer is rushing by the time
she gets to your store, and cranky.
Consistency is removed.

The baby cried on the way to the
relative's house. The baby felt the
mother's frustration.

The customer will look for a store
closer to where the baby-sitter lives.

At your store, she's stressed.

The ripple effect happened because
one factor was removed, and that was
consistency.

Customers will return to consistent
behavior from you, your product, or
service. The secret is using the same
principles that closed the deal on day
one. Customers will word-of-mouth
advertise for you, which brings new
customers. Customers purchase
products or services if they see benefits
in doing so.