You can bank on a proper business plan - News & Features, Farming - Independent.ie
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Startup America Partnership Announces All-Entrepreneur Board and Corporate Sponsors | Startup America Partnership
American Express OPEN, Dell, Intuit and Microsoft Sign on as Sponsors
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Aug. 23, 2011–The Startup America Partnership, an organization working to help young companies grow in order to create jobs in America, today announced the appointment of its founding board members, eleven of America’s most successful and highly-regarded entrepreneurs. At the first board meeting convened yesterday, members offered strategic guidance to the Partnership on bringing the private sector together to provide startups with the resources they need to start and scale their organizations.
The Partnership also announced that four iconic U.S. corporations have become the organization’s first sponsors: American Express OPEN, Dell Inc., Intuit Inc., and Microsoft Corp. These companies join the founding partners, the Case and Kauffman Foundations, to provide financial support and other strategic resources to help the Partnership maximize the success of America’s entrepreneurs, and ultimately strengthen America’s competitiveness in an increasingly global world.
In addition to Chairman Steve Case, founding board member Carl J. Schramm and CEO Scott Case, the founding board of the Startup America Partnership includes the following executives, each of whom was the founder of his or her company:
- Tory Burch, CEO and CCO, Tory Burch LLC
- Pamela Reilly Contag, CEO, Cygnet Biofuels
- Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell, Inc.
- Raul Fernandez, Chairman, ObjectVideo, Inc.
- Reed Hastings, Chairman, President, and CEO, Netflix, Inc.
- Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, LinkedIn
- Magic Johnson, Founder and CEO, Magic Johnson Enterprises
- Lynn Jurich, President and Co-Founder, SunRun, Inc.
- Kevin Plank, Chairman, President, and CEO, Under Armour, Inc.
- Fred Smith, Chairman, President, and CEO, FedEx Corporation
- Nina Vaca-Humrichouse, CEO, Pinnacle Technical Resources, Inc.
“This world-class group of entrepreneurs understands the critical role that new and young businesses play in getting the American economy back on track,” said Chairman Steve Case. “Their proven ability to conceptualize and scale companies, including the collective creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs, will be invaluable to the Startup America Partnership and the young firms we’re trying to help.”
“From 1980 to 2005, firms less than five years old were responsible for all net job creation in the U.S.,” said Carl J. Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation. “However, new Kauffman research indicates that in recent years, young companies are starting smaller and staying smaller. This underscores how important this board’s job is. These successful entrepreneurs and the Partnership’s new sponsors are getting behind what I believe is the most important cause of our time—reinvigorating the entrepreneurial energy that has grown our economy, expanded human welfare, and served as an example to economies around the world.”
The Partnership is focused on bringing together some of the country’s most successful organizations to provide valuable resources to young companies with high growth potential. Those resources fall into five key areas that entrepreneurs find critical to success: Talent, Services, Expertise, Customers and Capital. The Partnership is also working on a regional basis to identify and help accelerate entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country. Since launching at the White House in January of this year, the Partnership has announced more than $500 million in private-sector commitments to support startups.
“Our core concentration is to drive job growth in America by helping startups grow,” said CEO Scott Case. “By signing on American Express, Dell, Intuit and Microsoft as sponsors- four organizations that are world-renowned for their innovation and dedication to young companies- we can make sure that we are completely focused on getting entrepreneurs the tools and resources they need to succeed.
About Startup America Partnership
The Startup America Partnership was launched at the White House in response to President Obama’s call to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. The Partnership is bringing together an alliance of major corporations, funders, service providers, mentors and advisors working to dramatically increase the prevalence and success of high-growth enterprises in the U.S. AOL co-founder Steve Case chairs the Partnership and the Kauffman and Case Foundations are founding partners. American Express OPEN, Dell Inc., Intuit Inc., and Microsoft are sponsors. The Partnership will identify, measure and report on the effectiveness of cross-sector collaboration in support of entrepreneurial ventures and its affect on job creation and growth.For more information on the Partnership, visit www.startupamericapartnership.org and follow at www.twitter.com/startupamerica and www.facebook.com/startupamerica.
Jg
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
The Most Important Writing Skills for Business
Start your own small business, especially online, and you’ll quickly need to develop a range of brand new skills: a little bit of HTML; a touch of Web design; some knowledge of usability; a grounding in marketing channels. But the skill you’re likely to be drawing on most is a version of a technique you’ve known since you were a child: the ability to write. Whether you’re creating sales copy, writing a blog or even just sending an email, you’ll need to do more than just put one letter after another. You’ll need to craft copy that persuades.
That’s a very different kind of writing skill and it’s one that depends entirely on context. Writing headlines is different from writing email subject lines and crafting a newsletter demands a different approach from that used when keeping a blog up to date. Even if you’re planning to outsource the writing to a professional at some point, you should still have enough basic knowledge to know what to ask for and to judge the work you’re buying.
Headline Writing
Copywriting experts will tell you that the headline is the most important aspect of any piece of marketing copy. They’re not wrong. The headline is always the first thing that the reader sees and it determines whether he reads on or looks away. But the role of headlines has changed. Sales letters, ruined by hard-pushing, online, long-form versions are giving way to softer versions, free even of sub-headings, such as those promoted by Darren Rowse’s Third Tribe Marketing, and to video marketing. The most important use of an online headline is fading away while its traditional use, in billboards and ads, isn’t relevant on the Web.
Where headlines do remain important though is on Web copy. Even here though, the semi-pro business owner has one advantage over a professional copywriter: non-professional writers just want to get to the point; professional copywriters can be tempted to want to show how clever they can be, as though they’re writing as much for their portfolio as for their client’s bottom line. When Robert Bly reminds readers in The Copywriter’s Handbook that “The goal of advertising is not to be liked, to entertain, or to win advertising awards; it is to sell products,” he’s telling copywriters something that clients already need know.
That simple approach is always the best, especially on current website designs which use a large headline and an equally bold button to bring readers in.
Best approach: Don’t use Web copy headlines to persuade; use them to inform.
Email Subject lines
You can think of email subject lines as a kind of subset of headlines. They serve the same purpose, turning readers into curious leads. But unlike headlines, email subject lines reach readers unsolicited — they come to the user — so they have to work harder. And they do that by being simple, friendly and often non-salesy. According to email marketing expert Stephanie Miller, the best subject lines are deceptively simple. Like a good headline, they tell readers what to expect inside the message. That usually means keeping the text short but relevant, and avoiding spam words such as “free” and “buy now” while still keeping the value of the content clear. Numbers, like list posts, have been shown to improve read rates, she argues together with co-authors Matt Blumberg and Tami Forman in Sign Me Up!: A Marketer’s Guide to Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales.
One important difference between subject lines and headlines though is that email marketers can draw on knowledge of the subscriber gained at sign-up to send targeted messages to different readers. By segmenting lists, a business can send one subject line to a subscriber who provided an email address in return for a booklet of dessert recipes, for example, and another to someone who downloaded soup recipes.
Best approach: Send different subject lines to different subscribers. Keep the writing simple and personal, and avoid messages with subject lines that contain offer words such as “free” and “download now.”
Blog Content
Where your writing skills are going to be most in demand is in keeping your business blog up to date. That’s more crucial than it sounds. Google weighs dynamic sites, those with frequently refreshed content, more heavily than sites with static content, forcing serious business owners to keep adding new pages if they want to stay visible in search results.
According to Matt Cutts though, Google’s SEO expert best known for enforcing Webmaster guidelines, frequency of posts is less important than quality of posts. Frequent posting might bring in traffic by giving readers a reason to return each day but it’s the discussions and back links generated on high quality posts that attract the search engine’s interest. Cutts cites Mike Masnick of Techdirt, a technology blog, as an example of a blogger who maintains a high search engine ranking despite infrequent posting because his posts generate discussion, comments and links.
In terms of style and the content itself, blogs are flexible enough to provide room for a variety of different approaches, and the type of content they contain will depend on the kind of business they’re trying to promote. Photographers’ blogs can load up on images with just enough text to keep the search engines happy; blogs written to support software firms aimed at developers might contain plenty of jargon to keep its readership happy.
The length of posts can vary too. A quick update can be as short as a couple of hundred words. A long exploratory post can run into a few thousand. Which of those you use depends as much on your relationship with your audience, as your own writing preferences. The more valuable and usable your content, the more likely readers are to continue investing their time in reading it.
Best approach: Think before you write and blog when you have something valuable to say. Short posts might keep regular readers checking in but long posts that promote discussions will attract the search engines. Write naturally and clearly, but drop unnecessary colloquial interjections such as “okay” and sentences that start with “Well…” The key is to write as though you’re writing to a friend but not as though you’re talking to one.
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via geekpreneur.com
Jg
Angel investment program planned - Omaha.com
The Nebraska Department of Economic Development has outlined implementation steps for the new Angel Investment Tax Credit Program.
Investors can start applying for certification to be eligible for a 35 percent to 40 percent refundable state income tax credit for investment in certified Nebraska startups. The bill goes into effect Sept. 1.
The Angel Investment Tax Credit Program is part of the Talent and Innovation Initiative supported by Gov. Dave Heineman and approved by the Legislature this year. The package of bills aims to improve the state's economic climate for entrepreneurs, inventors and small businesses and as the governor has said, "put a laser-like focus on growing Nebraska's innovation economy,"
The tax credit program encourages high-risk investments in high-tech and other start-up enterprises by providing refundable state income tax credits. Up to $3 million a year in credits are offered for minimum investment of $25,000 for individuals and $50,000 for investment funds.
The program is intended to attract $7.5 to $8.5 million annually in new private equity investments to high-tech startups.
To qualify, certified individual investors must invest at least $25,000 per year. Certified investment funds must invest a minimum $50,000 per year and include at least three investors.
Qualified small businesses are those based in Nebraska with 25 or fewer employees at the time of investment (51 percent of employees must work in Nebraska).
Qualified high-technology fields include, but are not limited to: aerospace; agricultural processing; renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation; environmental engineering; food technology; cellulosic ethanol; information technology; materials science technology; nanotechnology; telecommunications; biosolutions; medical device products; pharmaceuticals; diagnostics; biological; chemistry; veterinary science; and similar fields.
To access the guidelines and application forms, visit here.
Contact the Omaha World-Herald newsroomCopyright ©2011 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
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Jg
In the Global Cyberwar, China Is a Dragon, America is a Nuclear Stealth Bomber | Motherboard
In the Global Cyberwar, China Is a Dragon, America is a Nuclear Stealth Bomber
Posted by Motherboard on Wednesday, Aug 17, 2011
Major Pwnage: Marine specialists receiving the 2006 NSACSS Director’s Trophy
Somewhere between the breathless reporting on China’s state-sponsored hacking offensive, the perceived threat of hackers from former Soviet republics, and the “hacktivist” activities of amorphous bodies like Anonymous and Wikileaks, we seem to have forgotten something about the U.S.: Washington has long been a leader, if not the undisputed master, in espionage and counter-intelligence. That prowess doesn’t end at the door of cyberspace.
Remember: the U.S. isn’t just the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the NSA and the movie Hackers. It’s the country with a nearly $60 billion black ops budget – a number that, even amidst a spending crisis, rose 3% from 2011 and will hold steady in 2012.
Of course, the accepted message that the U.S. isn’t prepared for cyber-attack despite regarding online attacks as acts of war, true and important though it may be, serves the interests of a wide American cyber offensive that stretches from public and diplomatic relations to highly secret infiltration missions. While the media and punditocracy have been fretting over the sad state of the U.S. cyber defenses, look closer and you can find signs that suggest its cyber offense has been quietly growing.
What do we actually know? That we can’t know just how much the government knows. But while U.S. cyber operations remain a closely guarded secret, a few recent indicators have offered a slightly crisper picture. Government-paid hackers – eagerly plucked from “the underground” by the military and the NSA – are currently breaking into, stealing information from, and even sabotaging foreign computer systems, much like legions of U.S. spies did in meatspace during the Cold War.
Outside of Chinese state media, it’s hard to find much mainstream concern about the threat of U.S. hack attacks. An early 2010 survey (pdf) of cybersecurity experts and information executives found the United States to be the biggest perceived threat. When 600 experts were asked which country causes “most concern” as a source of attacks on their country or business sector, the United States won out, with 36 percent. China followed closely at 33 percent, and Russia was the third bogeyman, with 12 percent.
But today, Russia and China are the major culprits, the domain of “hacker armies” that, at any given moment, are ransacking thousands of foreign computer systems, capable of perpetrating “our next Pearl Harbor” (if they haven’t already). A similar (but not perfectly comparable) survey (pdf) conducted in 2011 showed a shift. China led by far at 30 percent, compared to Russia at 16 and the United States at 12 percent.
Why the reversal in a year when many widely suspect the United States successfully used a piece of malicious code to severely, and potentially catastrophically, damage an Iranian nuclear facility? Speaking in Aspen, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the Iran attack, called Stuxnet after the name of the malware the did the deed, was a legion crossing the rubicon: “Someone just conducted a cyberattack [on] another nation’s critical infrastructure.” [video]
In Pentagon-speak, an attack creating physical damage in another state’s critical infrastructure is a big freaking deal. This is the stuff of “cyber war,” and it’s what keeps Cold War, counterterrorism, and national security veterans like Richard Clarke on high alert, sounding the alarm in private and in public for years.
Clarke’s flag-raising book — Cyber War — is designed to make us worried that the United States is desperately vulnerable to state- and industry-sponsored cyber intrusions designed to steal information, create damage, and prepare for a wider conflict. At a few moments, however, Clarke admits the United States is no innocent, offering rare frank insights into ongoing U.S. cyber offensives.
“The ways in which the U.S. and Russia now engage in cyber espionage are usually undetectable,” he writes (p. 235). Indeed, someone like Clarke who has been a national security official and enjoys high clearance can get interviewees to speak directly: “Hell, the U.S. government does [number withheld] penetrations of foreign networks every month,” an unidentified intelligence official says on page 123. “We never get caught. If we are not getting caught, what aren’t we catching when we’re guarding our own?”
The United States, this official suggests, is actively exploiting vulnerable computer networks and “critical infrastructure” in other countries. (In the United States itself, disturbingly perhaps, government systems are subject to preemptive intrusions by hackers from the NSA’s “Red Team”—in addition of course to distant intruders.) If Clarke is to be believed in raising the alarm in the United States, pretty much every computer network is vulnerable. “[number withheld]” is probably a large number.
The Air Force is online.
So why has the United States lost out to China and Russia in the perceived cyber threat? Is it that the experts and executives surveyed by the security firm McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are biased? Do they know something the rest of us don’t about a particular American sense of propriety and responsibility? Or are they simply influenced by the all-too-easy “China threat” narrative, one that revives a sense of Cold War vulnerability?
Some commentators have been hard on Clarke’s book. Wired writes that it should be “filed under fiction.” Claims of exaggeration are well taken, and the text can read a bit like a wonky version of Live Free or Die Hard, but the message that states are putting serious effort into messing with each other’s computers is inescapable. The trouble is that real scenarios (instead of Clarke’s thought experiments) are generally classified.
“You have to be very careful about what you say in this area,” a “top cyberwarrior” told Time in 2010. “But you can tell there’s something going on because the services are putting their money there and contractors are going after it in a big way.”
THE WAR THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
Now if only we could have an informed discussion about all of this hacker havoc outside the classified realm. It doesn’t help much that it’s particularly easy, and dangerous, to confuse cyber espionage and cyberwar, as Seymour Hersh pointed out last year. Meanwhile, “cyberwar” brings to mind the old military paradigms of secret warfare and territorial domination, which isn’t very helpful for clarifying a new kind of threat. Combat by computer isn’t simply a matter of destroying the other sides’ computers until they’ve got none left or they turn off their Internet. The stakes are different, and more complicated.
Plus, absent clear legal parameters or review, cyber fights could lead to physical casualties (Stuxnet threatened Iran’s nuclear infrastructure) and rapid, dangerous escalations, the sort of which are still creepily hard to imagine. That might explain why the Air Force recently instituted a legal review process for "any device or software payload intended to disrupt, deny, degrade, negate, impair or destroy adversarial computer systems, data, activities or capabilities.”
Then again, this is a form of “war” built on secrecy, and knowing too much could put us at risk. The prospect of losing their cover is so spooky to the spooks, their silence speaks volumes. In January, senators on the Armed Services Committee complained they been kept in the dark about the Pentagon’s black cyber ops. The Pentagon, for instance, only rarely even acknowledges the existence of offensive cyber capabilities. Check the Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace (pdf), released in unclassified form last month, for any mention of offensive cyber warfare. You won’t find one.
—Graham Webster and Alex Pasternack
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The Biggest Hack Ever, or How I Learned To Live With Asymmetric Cold War | Motherboard
The Biggest Hack Ever, or How I Learned To Live With Asymmetric Cold War
Posted by Graham_Webster on Thursday, Aug 04, 2011
Cybersecurity geeks without security clearance are spending today thinking about the biggest-ever cyber attacks. That we know of, that is.
Dubbed Operation Shady RAT, the series of victims include “the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.”
Meanwhile, in a breathless article in Vanity Fair that claims to have first revealed the attacks, Michael Joseph Gross hails the arrival of the “cyber-dragon,” also known as the People’s Republic of China. Though McAfee, the firm that publicized the attacks, refuses to point fingers, experts are keen to suspect China in the case of the Shady RAT (it stands for “remote access tool,” a piece of malware that lets the “Adversary” into your computer and its local network.)
If we assume this is a Chinese state-directed effort to exfiltrate enormous amounts of valuable intellectual property while gathering information about security vulnerabilities along the way, an assumption supported by experts like James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, then we have a classic cybersecurity puzzle. What can the United States and other governments do in return?
This brings us to what cybersecurity experts call the “attribution problem.” In the old Cold War, it was pretty clear who would have launched a missile. Even if a machine did the launching, as with Kubrick’s “doomsday device,” you knew which machines to obliterate. Destruction mutually assured was our insurance. Online, the true origin of an attack is very difficult to determine. Because signals are routed through third-, fourth-, and fifth-party servers, the attacker is obscured.
But let’s assume one step further, that we can attribute these attacks with confidence to an originating terminal in China. Maybe we even have old-fashioned intelligence—photographs, fingerprints, etc.—that shows a particular person in Shanghai or Hainan directing the attack. How do we know that these efforts are government-directed? In that old Cold War, your crazy uncle may have wanted to nuke the Russians, but he couldn’t do it on his own, or even with his crazy friends.
As likely as it is that China is behind at least a significant portion of these large-scale attacks, what portion and precisely who in China is simply unknown, at least outside of the classified world. Gross notes that at times the FBI has had trouble informing businesses that they were under attack, because the Bureau only knows about the attacks from classified sources. Unless someone in the office has clearance, your business might not find out until unclassified evidence is found.
So, Gross tells us a vivid story based on interviews with a ton of unnamed security figures. In addition to the Operation Shadow rat revelation, the most interesting story is probably an inside retelling of Google’s frantic efforts to fight an ongoing infiltration that Google later publicly attributed to China (and diplomatic cables attributed to a senior official who "didn’t like his Google results).
Three people who visited Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters while the attacks were in progress describe dramatic scenes of a company under siege. Google “built a physically separate area for the security team,” one of them says. Sergey Brin, one of the company’s co-founders, was deeply involved in the cyber-defense. “He moved his desk to go sit with the Aurora responders every day. Because he grew up in the Soviet Union, he personally has a real hard-on for the Chinese now. He is pissed.” Caught unawares and shorthanded, the company made a list of the world’s top security professionals, and Brin personally called to offer them jobs—with $100,000 signing bonuses for some, according to one person who received such an offer—and quickly built Google’s small, pre-Aurora security operation into a group of more than 200.
The Cold War parallel is never far below the surface, but the dilemma for targets of attacks is how to face the “Adversary.” As a practical matter, creating unbreakable security is impossible; you can only make things better. But practical concerns make it hard to levy direct, public pressure on governments in China, Russia, and other hacker-heavy states. The result is something like asymmetrical cold war, with no mutually assured destruction and with destruction defined in terms of potential attacks during a hot war, or loss of financially valuable intellectual property. And there’s a lot of it, experts fear. Says one Senate staffer: "But terrorism is not the best analogy here. Who could have imagined that people would have flown airplanes into buildings?The difference with cyber is there are people trying to fly planes into buildings every day now.”
In his book Cyber War, former U.S. terrorism official Richard Clarke raises the alarm about U.S. vulnerability to cyber attack. Despite a generally beltway-based worldview, Clarke points out the absurd language the Pentagon and other U.S. groups often use to talk about cyberspace. The online world, to these military planners, is a “domain” to be “dominated.” Only through “superiority” can the United States be safe.
Meanwhile, under their noses, information is stolen, intellectual property is siphoned away, systems are compromised, all to an end that we can’t see but should be worried about. Many are aware of this, but the political rhetoric is stuck in the old Cold War, and heads remain stuck in the sand. You know, the stuff that’s used to build the silicon computer chips that power the world’s newest, and maybe most powerful weapons.
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msherowski 14 days ago
Love the title and the Strangelove references. It is, by far, my very most favorite movie of all time. Ever.
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Jg
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Crowd Funding: The Greatest Success Story
Crowd funding should use the late great James Ling as its poster boy. Let me tell you about this great but little known American entrepreneur. His name comes to mind whenever someone mentions crowd funding. I first discovered James Ling (1922 - 2004) at about the age of ten when I came across
Jg
Startup Capital From Crowd Funding
How to Quickly Raise Seed Capital Entrepreneurship is like a 25-level computer game. If all that you can think of when it comes to startup financing is "write a business plan and shop it around to strangers," you're stuck at the bottom level. There are 24 more levels above you. Savvy entrepren
Jg
Monday, August 15, 2011
Seth's Blog
Given how much we talk about it, it's surprising that there's a lot of confusion about what quality is.
What's a higher quality car: a one-year old Honda Civic or a brand new top of the line Bentley?
It turns out that there are at least two useful ways to describe quality, and the conflict between them leads to the confusion...
Quality of design: Thoughtfulness and processes that lead to user delight, that make it likely that someone will seek out a product, pay extra for it or tell a friend.
Quality of manufacture: Removing any variation in tolerances that a user will notice or care about.
In the case of the Civic, the quality of manufacture is clearly higher by any measure. The manufacturing is more exact, the likelihood that the car will perform (or not perform) in a way you don't expect is tiny.
On the other hand, we can probably agree that the design of the Bentley is more bespoke, luxurious and worthy of comment.
Let's think about manufacturing variation for a second: Fedex promises overnight delivery. 10:20 vs 10:15 is not something the recipient cares about. Tomorrow vs. Thursday, they care about a lot. The goal of the manufacturing process isn't to reach the perfection of infinity. It's to drive tolerances so hard that the consumer doesn't care about the variation. Spending an extra million dollars to get five minutes faster isn't as important to the Fedex brand as spending a million dollars to make the website delightful.
Dropbox is a company that got both right. The design of the service is so useful it now seems obvious. At the same time, though, and most critically, the manufacture of the service is to a very high tolerance. Great design in a backup service would be useless if one in a thousand files were corrupted.
Microsoft struggles (when they struggle) because sometimes they get both wrong. Software that has a user interface that's a pain to use rarely leads to delight, and bugs represent significant manufacturing defects, because sometimes (usually just before a presentation), the software doesn't work as expected--a noticed variation.
The Shake Shack, many New York burger fans would argue, is a higher quality fast food experience than McDonald's, as evidenced by lines out the door and higher prices. Except from a production point of view. The factory that is McDonald's far outperforms the small chain in terms of efficient production of the designed goods within certain tolerances. It's faster and more reliable. And yet, many people choose to pay extra to eat at Shake Shack. Because it's "better." Faster doesn't matter as much to the Shake Shack customer.
The balance, then, is to understand that marketers want both. A short-sighted CFO might want neither.
Deming defined quality as: (result of work effort)/(total costs). Unless you understand both parts of that fraction, you'll have a hard time allocating your resources.
Consider what Philip Crosby realized a generation ago: Quality is free. (free essays are here).
It's cheaper to design marketing quality into the product than it is to advertise the product.
It's cheaper to design manufacturing quality into a factory than it is to inspect it in after the product has already been built.
These go hand in hand. Don't tell me about server uptime if your interface is lame or the attitude of the people answering the phone is obnoxious. Don't promise me a brilliant new service if you're unable to show up for the meeting. Don't show me a boring manuscript with no typos in it, and don't try to sell me a brilliant book so filled with errors that I'm too distracted to finish it.
There are two reasons that quality of manufacture is diminishing in importance as a competitive tool:
a. incremental advances in this sort of quality get increasingly more expensive. Going from one defect in a thousand to one in a million is relatively cheap. Going from one in a million to one in a billion, though, costs a fortune.
b. As manufacturing skills increase (and information about them is exchanged) it means that your competition has as much ability to manufacture with quality as you do.
On the other hand, quality of design remains a fast-moving, judgment-based process where supremacy is hard to reach and harder to maintain.
And yet organizations often focus obsessively on manufacturing quality. Easier to describe, easier to measure, easier to take on as a group. It's essential, it's just not as important as it used to be.
Jg
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Annual Investment Summit » ilab - Business Incubator and Accelerator in Brisbane, Australia
ilab Annual Investment Summit
Do you need an investor to help you grow your business?
ilab's Annual Investment Summit brings together investors from the local angel and venture capital communities to help demystify the process of raising capital. This half-day event will give entrepreneurs valuable insights into the investment strategies of angel and venture capital investors, as well as perspectives from successful entrepreneurs who have raised capital to grow their business.
Speakers include:
- Phil Hutchings - CEO, RedFlow Limited (keynote speaker)
- John Mactaggart - Angel investor and Chairman, Australian Association of Angel Investors
- John Hummelstad - Entrepreneur, advisor and investor
- Bob Waldie - Serial entrepreneur and angel investor
- Andy Jane - Partner, CM Capital
- Tom McKaskill - Entrepreneur, investor and author of Winning Ventures and Ultimate Exits
- Mark Bathie - Founder of successful startup company Codesion (acquired by CollabNet in 2010)
When: Thursday 25 August 2011
2.00 pm to 5.00 pm followed by networkingWhere: Hillstone St Lucia Golf Club - Grandview Room
RSVP: Click here to register
Cost: $95.00 inclusive of GST“I attended the ilab Investment Summit in August 2010 thinking I might pick up a few tips about raising capital from investors. I came away with a head full of useful information, presented by real investors.” Alan Whiteside, founder of Interaction360
ProgramArrive/Register 1.45 pm
Session One 2:00 pm to 3.20 pm
- Keynote address – Phil Hutchings, CEO, RedFlow Limited
Getting your business ready for investment
- Five things every startup can do to become investor-ready
- Why failure is OK (but success is better)
Angel investment
- What is angel investment and how do you find an angel?
- What are angels looking for? A checklist for entrepreneurs
- Entrepreneur case study – working with angel investors
Session Two 3:40 pm to 5:00 pm
Venture capital
- What is VC and how does it differ from angel investment?
- What investors look for in Silicon Valley – and why that matters in Australia
- Case study - Raising venture capital for Aussie startups
Exits
- Strategically planning an exit
- Case study – Codesion
Networking 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Drinks and canapes included.
via ilab.com.au
Jg
Early Stage Angel Investor Group in Philadelphia | Robin Hood Ventures - Home
March 2011 Fiserv Unveils New Prepaid Solutions
Fiserv has acquired prepaid card processing and other technologies developed by Maverick Network Solutions, a Delaware-based provider of advanced prepaid and reward and incentive card programs. The Delaware start-up and its employees became part of the Fiserv Card Services group on March 1, 2011.
Jg
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
LatinVision Business News: Family and Community are the Greatest Motivations ...
LatinVision Business News: Family and Community are the Greatest Motivations ...: "SPRINGFIELD, Mass., Aug. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the U.S. Census, Hispanic-owned businesses are growing at double the national ..."
SVForum
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Venture Startup and Financing SIG:
Venture Startup and Financing SIG: Back to School Nite…The How, What and to Whom of Pitching– Monday, August 15, 2011
Well yes, it is the end of summer and it is time to go back to school. But in this case we are talking about learning how to do a better job of pitching your idea-to investors, potential hires and prospect customers. Not only will you learn what to pitch (the secret slides that you should have for every presentation) but you will also learn how to be a better presenter and who you should target for your pitch.
• Secrets to maximizing the effectiveness of PowerPoint and Keynote slides
• Secrets about meetings with the right venture capitalists and angel investors
• The secret "right" number of slides to use in an investor meeting
• How to immediately win over your audience of 1 or 1,000
• What you can do to keep people on the edge of their seats
• How to use your voice and body when presenting
• How to make your presentations and demos personal
• How to leave a lasting positive impressionOur speaker for this evening will be Jon Baer, who is a co-chair of the Venture Startup and Financing SIG and a principal at Threshold Ventures. In addition to their discussion, they will be taking questions and offering feedback on audience two minute pitches. This is a great opportunity to get helpful feedback!
Speakers:
Nathan Gold, Founder, The Demo Coach. Nathan is the founder of The Demo Coach and co-author of Giving Memorable Product Demos. Nathan has given over 15,000 presentations and product demos in his career. Over the past 9 years, Nathan has been merited with two DEMOgod Awards from IDG Executive Forums for DEMOmobile 2000 and DEMOfall 2005. Nathan’s most recent achievement was granted at the DEMO Fall 2009, where he coached 4 out of 5 on stage DEMOgod Award winners and both $1M Media Prize People's Choice Award winners.
Jon Baer-Threshold Ventures
Jon is a senior executive who brings a unique perspective to the world of start-ups. In addition to being a venture capitalist, he was the founder and CEO of two venture backed companies, eBoomerang, an enterprise software company which was sold in 2006 and Artificial Muscle, Inc., a spinout from Stanford Research Institute (SRI) which was sold to Bayer AG in 2010.As a principal and founder of Threshold Ventures, Jon works with companies around the world, serving as an advisor/mentor, working on specific projects.
Location:
Silicon Valley Bank
2400 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304Agenda:
6:30 - 7:00 pm Registration and Networking
7:00 - 8:30 pm PresentationCost:
$35 for non-SVForum members
$20.00 for SVForum membersNote: There is an additional $10.00 charge at the door - if not pre-registered.
Seating is limited! It is very important to pre-register for this event. It does sell-out and we may need to turn people away. Please note: Because of Paypal's new policies, we can no longer accept American Express cards at the door.
via svforum.org
Jg
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Treasures of Small Business Research: Sample Business Plans | The New York Public Library
Starting a business? Take my word for it — you don't need a business plan. Oh, and while we're at it, I have a nice bridge I can let you have at a very good price...Well, you don't have to have a business plan — maybe — if you have plenty of cash and don't mind doing without a few things. But here's what the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) website suggests as why you might want one:
"Many factors critical to business success depend upon your plan: outside funding, credit from suppliers, management of your operation and finances, promotion and marketing of your business, and achievement of your goals and objectives." (More information is available here.)We'll Need to See Your Business Plan...
Of course sometimes there are other things you can do with your business plan. Like compete in our SIBL New York StartUP! Business Plan Competition (in 2011, the top prize on offer is $15,000). Right now we're in the final stages of the 2011 competition, and expect the winners to be selected soon. They should be announced around September 12th. And the whisper on the street is there will be another competition for 2012 (check our website after mid-September for important dates and other information).
So where do you start? Luckily there are lots of books which will explain how you can draft your business plan. In the NYPL collection, we have many circulating books on that topic. Just search our catalog to get a list and, if you feel like it, come on down to SIBL and browse these titles.
In addition, we have some series of "start-up" guides, their titles beginning with phrases such as: How to Start and Manage....; Start Your Own....; How to Open and Operate....; How to Start a Home-Based....; and Start and Run a..... Besides background information about a type of business, these books offer help creating a business plan, including in some a template or example business plan.
But the best business plan resource we have, the one we recommend most often, is the set of model plans from actual businesses found in the Business Plans Handbook, a multiple volume set of books here at SIBL. These business plans are also available online in the Small Business Resource Center database from Gale (available from home with an NYPL library card). This series provides an extensive selection of different types of businesses, many of them suitable for the budding entrepreneur. Whether or not they find an exact fit for their own business idea, most of our readers are able to use these to find a plan very close to the kind of business they are considering. So... give it a try.
Resource: Two pages from a model business plan for a pet sitting business. Visit Small Business Resource Center for a complete version of this plan.
via nypl.org
Jg
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Website plays matchmaker for start-ups and investors
Check out this website I found at articles.boston.com
Jg
Friday, August 5, 2011
Exclusive: Operation Shady RAT—Unprecedented Cyber-espionage Campaign and Intellectual-Property Bonanza | Culture | Vanity Fair
When the history of 2011 is written, it may well be remembered as the Year of the Hack.
Long before the saga of News of the World phone hacking began, stories of computer breaches were breaking almost every week. In recent months, Sony, Fox, the British National Health Service, and the Web sites of PBS, the U.S. Senate, and the C.I.A., among others, have all fallen victim to highly publicized cyber-attacks. Many of the breaches have been attributed to the groups Anonymous and LulzSec. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at the cyber-security firm McAfee, says that for him, “it’s been really hard to watch the news of this Anonymous and LulzSec stuff, because most of what they do, defacing Web sites and running denial-of-service attacks, is not serious. It’s really just nuisance.”
“Just nuisance,” that is, compared with a five-year campaign of hacks that Alperovitch discovered and named Operation Shady rat—a campaign that continues even now, and is being reported for the first time today, by vanityfair.com, and in a lengthier report on the larger problem of industrial cyber-espionage in the September issue of Vanity Fair. Operation Shady rat ranks with Operation Aurora (the attack on Google and many other companies in 2010) as among the most significant and potentially damaging acts of cyber-espionage yet made public. Operation Shady rat has been stealing valuable intellectual property (including government secrets, e-mail archives, legal contracts, negotiation plans for business activities, and design schematics) from more than 70 public- and private-sector organizations in 14 countries. The list of victims, which ranges from national governments to global corporations to tiny nonprofits, demonstrates with unprecedented clarity the universal scope of cyber-espionage and the vulnerability of organizations in almost every category imaginable. In Washington, where policymakers are struggling to chart a strategy for combating cyber-espionage, Operation Shady rat is already drawing attention at high levels. Last week, Alperovitch provided confidential briefings on Shady rat to senior White House officials, executive-branch agencies, and congressional-committee staff. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reviewed the McAfee report on Shady rat and wrote in an e-mail to Vanity Fair: “This is further evidence that we need a strong cyber-defense system in this country, and that we need to start applying pressure to other countries to make sure they do more to stop cyber hacking emanating from their borders.” McAfee says that victims include government agencies in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Canada, the Olympic committees in three countries, and the International Olympic Committee. Rounding out the list of countries where Shady rat hacked into computer networks: Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, and India. The vast majority of victims—49—were U.S.-based companies, government agencies, and nonprofits. The category most heavily targeted was defense contractors—13 in all.
In addition to the International Olympic Committee, the only other victims that McAfee has publicly named are the World Anti-doping Agency, the United Nations, and ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (whose members are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Burma [Myanmar], Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam).
In an e-mail to vanityfair.com, I.O.C. communications director Mark Adams wrote, “If proved true, such allegations would be disturbing. However, the IOC is transparent in its operations and has no secrets that would compromise either our operations or our reputation.” WADA spokesman Terence O’Rourke wrote in an e-mail that “WADA is constantly alert to the dangers of cyber hacking and maintains a vigilant security system on all of its computer programs.” He added that “WADA’s Anti-Doping Administration & Management System (ADAMS), which is on a completely different server to WADA’s emails, has never been compromised and remains a highly-secure system for the retention of athlete data.”
A prominent cyber-security expert who was briefed by McAfee on the intrusions says that the Associated Press was also a victim. McAfee declined to comment on that suggestion. Jack Stokes, A.P. media-relations manager, said, “We don’t comment on our network security,” when I asked if it was true that the A.P. was among Shady rat’s victims. Alperovitch believes the hacking was state-sponsored, pointing to Shady rat’s targeting of Olympic committees and political nonprofits as evidence, and contending that “[t]here’s no economic gain” to spying on them. Citing McAfee company policy, he refused to speculate on which country was behind Shady rat.
One leading cyber-espionage expert, however, thinks the likely culprit’s identity is clear. “All the signs point to China,” says James A. Lewis, director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding, “Who else spies on Taiwan?”
Alperovitch first picked up the trail of Shady rat in early 2009, when a McAfee client, a U.S. defense contractor, identified suspicious programs running on its network. Forensic investigation revealed that the defense contractor had been hit by a species of malware that had never been seen before: a spear-phishing e-mail containing a link to a Web page that, when clicked, automatically loaded a malicious program—a remote-access tool, or rat—onto the victim’s computer. The rat opened the door for a live intruder to get on the network, escalate user privileges, and begin exfiltrating data. After identifying the command-and-control server, located in a Western country, that operated this piece of malware, McAfee blocked its own clients from connecting to that server. Only this March, however, did Alperovitch finally discover the logs stored on the attackers’ servers. This allowed McAfee to identify the victims by name (using their Internet Protocol [I.P.] addresses) and to track the pattern of infections in detail.
The evolution of Shady rat’s activity provides more circumstantial evidence of Chinese involvement in the hacks. The operation targeted a broad range of public- and private-sector organizations in almost every country in Southeast Asia—but none in China. And most of Shady rat’s targets are known to be of interest to the People’s Republic. In 2006, or perhaps earlier, the intrusions began by targeting eight organizations, including South Korean steel and construction companies, a South Korean government agency, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, a U.S. real-estate company, international-trade organizations of Western and Asian nations, and the ASEAN Secretariat. (According to McAfee’s “Operation Shady rat” white paper, “[t]hat last intrusion began in October [2006], a month prior to the organization’s annual summit in Singapore, and continued for another 10 months.”) In 2007, the activity ramped up to hit 29 organizations. In addition to those previously targeted, new victims included a technology company owned by the Vietnamese government, four U.S. defense contractors, a U.S. federal-government agency, U.S. state and county government organizations, a computer-network-security company—and the national Olympic committees of two countries in Asia and one in the West, as well as the I.O.C. The Olympic organizations, strikingly, were targeted in the months leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Shady rat’s activity continued to build in 2008, when it infiltrated the networks of 36 organizations, including the United Nations—and reached a crest of 38 organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, in 2009. Since then, the victim numbers have been dropping, but the activity continues. Shady rat’s command-and-control server is still operating, and some organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, were still under attack as of last month. (As of Tuesday, according to a WADA spokesman, the group was unaware of any breach, but “WADA is investigating” McAfee’s discovery.) The longest compromise duration—“on and off for 28 months,” according to McAfee’s report—was one Asian country’s Olympic committee. Many others were compromised for two full years. Nine organizations were compromised for one month or less. All others were compromised for a minimum of one month, potentially allowing for complete access to all data on their servers.
via vanityfair.com
Jg
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