PC World:

After just over a year as a coveted, invitation-only beta, Google has officially launched Google Voice as a free service for all. Google Voice adds another component to the suite of tools available from Google providing small and medium businesses with cost-effective tools enabling them to conduct business like their much larger enterprise counterparts.

Large enterprises have the budget to invest in a robust networking, communication, and productivity infrastructure. Enterprise businesses also have the personnel resources to dedicate the expertise necessary to implement, maintain, and administer the tools. Small and medium businesses? Not so much.

Unfortunately for the small and medium businesses (SMB), though, they still have the same needs and similar business processes. They still need to communicate and collaborate in real-time with peers, partners, and customers.

Fortunately for SMBs, Google provides a diverse portfolio of tools that are free, or at least reasonably cost-effective, which allow them to appear much larger than they are, and compete on a level playing field with much larger competitors.

Read more.

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FastUpFront:

1. The number of small businesses is expected to grow. With the unemployment rate climbing and job security being challenged across the board, many will try their luck with small and personal businesses. A large percentage of this population will consist of Gen Y and Babyboomers.

2. Flexibility and innovation reign supreme. To survive the tough economic conditions, small businesses will need to increase their productivity, efficiency and customer value. This will compel many businesses to be creative in the way they operate and in the products and services they offer.

3. A year of bootstrapping and belt tightening. With consumer confidence at the lowest it has been in years, and many industries effected by sluggish consumer spending, small businesses will need to focus on improving their cash flow, reducing costs, and holding on to their customers.

4. Less legitimate funding for small businesses. 2009 promises to be a hard year for small businesses in need of financing. The banks as well as all sorts of commercial and private lenders are pulling in the reigns when it comes to offering money to entrepreneurs and small companies. Simultaneously, expect an increase in predatory lending schemes and their “barely legal” equivalents, such as payday cash loans.

5. Mobile technology provides necessary tools. Mobile technology will continue to offer small businesses the ability to boost productivity, efficiency, and market outreach in order to maintain a competitive edge and hold on to customers. Expect the continued growth and usage of navigation systems, location-based services, smart phones, netbooks (small notebooks primarily used for Internet access), and a whole slew of mobile applications.

More trends here.

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Small Business Labs:

1. The Recession Drives Small Business Innovation: With the economy mired in a deep recession, small businesses will focus on cash flow, cost containment, customer retention and survival. But economic stress will also lead to a wave of small business innovation. Driven by the need to improve productivity and increase customer value, small businesses will re-evaluate, re-design and refine their products, processes and business models. Despite the adverse economic climate, innovation will create new opportunities for many small businesses.

2. Government Plays an Increasing Role in the Economy: Economic turmoil, corporate malfeasance and regulatory failure are leading to much greater government intervention in the economy. While we believe that the long term, global trend towards market capitalism continues to be strong, governments around the world will take a more active role in managing and regulating their economies. Small businesses will need to be aware of federal, state and local government policy and program changes and their impacts.

3. Global Infrastructure Spend: President-elect Obama and his transition team are preparing a massive, $850 billion economic recovery package. China, Japan, the EU and other countries are also developing large infrastructure spending programs. In the US bridges and roads, alternative energy, transportation, clean tech and education will likely see substantial federal spending increases with the impacts likely being felt in the second half of 2009. Small businesses will benefit directly through government contracting programs targeted at them and indirectly through providing goods and services to larger firms.

4. The Number of Small Businesses Will Increase in 2009: With job losses high and traditional employment options limited, many will turn to self-employment and small business in 2009. The prior three recessions have seen small business formation rates increase. And with it easier and cheaper than ever to start small or personal businesses, we expect a strong year for small business formation – especially personal businesses. Failure rates will also increase, but not enough to offset the number of new small and personal businesses.

5. Small Business Globalization Will Temporarily Slow: While we believe the long- term trend towards small business globalization is still strong, we expect small business globalization to slow in 2009. The primary reasons are the global economic slump, turmoil in currency markets and small businesses focusing on local markets. We expect small business exports to pick up in late 2009 as the global economy starts to recover.

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Canadian Entrepreneur:

* Critical thinking: Learn to question everything, to look for alternative solutions. Find the weaknesses in other people’s ideas and plans. Learn to articulate what is wrong with them and why things should be different.

* Understand strategy: Strategy is a consistent process of analyzing your assets and liabilities, understanding your opportunities, setting objectives and making appropriate plans to meet them. Strategic planning is the key tool of business. Planning what we’ll do before we do it is what separates us from the apes.

* Understand a balance sheet: If you don’t know how much money you have, and how long it’s likely to last, you won’t be in business for long.

* Understand how to communicate: Your ability to tell explain your ideas, and convince other people to share in your enthusiasm, is essential to success in life and in business.

* Learn to tell stories: Stories are the way humans have always exchanged knowledge and information. Tell stories with beginnings, middles and end, heroes and villains and quests and obstacles. This is how people remember information; not through facts and names and statistics, but through stories.

* Embrace the Responsibility of Leadership: The world needs leaders. Leaders are simply people with ideas and visions, and the ability to convince other people to follow their lead. Confidence, passion and integrity are the leys to leadership.

* Give back: Virtually every successful entrepreneur I know is committed to giving back. No business succeeds alone: businesses win by engaging the support of whole communities of employees, investors, customers and supporters. In my experience, most business owners want to give back to the community that nourished their companies, and they are generous in doing so. They believe in kharma.

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Small Business Labs:

1. Technology is reducing production costs in a number of industries, allowing part-time and hobby businesses to compete in industries that used to be limited to bigger companies. Digital photography, for example, has substantially cut the costs of taking, developing and editing photographs and has led to a boom in the number of part-time photographers.

2. The reach of the Internet greatly expands the addressable market for part-time and hobbyist businesses and provides them new ways to find customers – and for customers to find them. In our case we found Silverman, which simply would not have happened prior to the broadband Internet.

3. Payment and back office systems allow the smallest of businesses to easily bill and collect. We used Paypal to buy Silverman’s photo, which was priced in British Pounds. Even 5 years ago it is unlikely we would have bothered to purchase this photo due to payment problems.

4. New middlemen are creating new small business opportunities. A wide range of intermediaries have emerged to make markets more efficient and help buyers and sellers find one another. Like iStock in photos, many of these intermediaries target part-time and hobbyist suppliers.

5. Baby boomers want to work in retirement, preferably doing things they enjoy and are different from their existing careers. Part-time and hobby businesses fit their needs. Silverman, for example, is a baby boomer with a regular job and career who plans to continue his photography business well into retirement.

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Marketing Web:

A special edition of Trendwatching.com‘s Trend Briefing lists 41 new business ideas, aimed to stimulate the imagination of entrepreneurial types.

We’ve picked some of those that caught our eye, and could be popular in South Africa.

Crowd Clout
One trend that Trendwatching.com has reported on is the rising power of crowds. It gives the example of a new, San Francisco-based site called Carrotmob which used the clout of crowds (thus the trend is known as crowd clout) to reward companies that do good. The group wants to create a broad network of consumers and form partnerships with larger advocacy groups.

Mobilising these consumers, Carrotmob will approach companies in a particular industry with suggestions, and invite them to make the changes they have identified. It will then choose one company in that industry to implement the suggestions. If it does so, Carrotmob’s members will reward the company with “an unprecedented kind of shopping spree” to boost short-term company profits, as well as proclaim the company the most responsible in its industry.

Carrotmob’s first campaign took place in March when Carrotmob members physically turned up at San Francisco’s K&D Market. All receipts were collected to keep track of the total gross revenue that the mob brought to the store. As agreed on prior to the event, K&D Market took 22% of that amount and spent it on upgrades to make their store more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. At least 300 people turned up, spending US$9,276.50 (including a Yahoo! donation of US$1,000).

It would be great to see South African consumers get involved in these kind of initiatives and take back the power from major retailers.

The Me-factor
Trendwatching.com has come up with the term MECONOMY to refer to popularity of all things “Me, myself and I”

One self-centred trend it focuses on is 5starbaby.com which offers personalised birth announcements fashioned after movie posters. Each movie poster is tailor-made for the new arrival, complete with the critical stats about the baby’s birth and the names of loved ones as “supporting cast.” Parents are listed as “producers,” the doctor is named as “director” and the hospital is listed as the “filmed in” setting, for example.

And another one for proud parents: Japanese Yosimiya sells bags of rice printed with a newborn’s photo, name and date of birth. The bags are shaped to resemble a swaddled baby. But the key feature is that the bags contain the baby’s exact weight in rice. Holding the bag will therefore feel like holding the baby. Read more.

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CNNMoney.com:

It was too weird to be true. In late 2006, a series of videos appeared on YouTube about a Willow Springs, Ill., resident named Kyle Bone who’d created a successful product called “the anti-shirt” – a shirt that exposed the area of one’s torso that a normal tee shirt would cover and revealed the area that would otherwise be exposed. In short, said Bone, it cured the age-old problem of “farmer’s tan.”

Viewers who investigated Bone’s site found a link to another site, www.ideawins.com, where they could enter an American Idol-like search for the best small business idea in America. And, oh, they would also download a free copy of Microsoft Office Accounting.

As you’ve probably guessed, Bone doesn’t actually exist. He was invented by StrawberryFrog, a ten-year-old ad agency based in New York City. StrawberryFrog is one of those small, self-styled renegade shops like Mother, Brooklyn Brothers, and Our Man in Havana that big companies call when they are having trouble moving products and don’t feel they are getting results from their large agencies.

Thanks to StrawberryFrog, more than two million people have downloaded the free version of the accounting software. (The company won’t disclose how many users have upgraded to the paid version, but it claims the number was substantial.) Meanwhile, the agency’s campaign was short-listed for a prestigious Lion award in June at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. “StrawberryFrog hasn’t been around that long,” says Jane Bedford, founder of The Bedford Group, a consulting firm that helps large corporations select ad agencies. “But they are very well known for their creative work and their digital skills.” Full article.

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East Valley Tribune:

“Going Green” is a hot topic and one of the most popular places in town to talk about how to do it is Green Drinks.
Green Drinks is a social gathering for “people interested in the planet,” according to event organizers at a.k.a. Green, a building and resource center in Scottsdale that focuses on environmentally friendly products and sustainability.

It actually began about three years ago, but attracted mostly people in the homebuilding industry who were interested in business networking.

“It grew a bit, but then interest seemed to wane,” said Mick Dalrymple, owner of a.k.a Green. “When it started taking off again, we were seeing people from all kinds of industries with all different backgrounds.”

The first Tuesday of every month the store coordinates this event to help “green” professionals network, share ideas and support each other in their businesses and organizations.

The event has been growing exponentially since it started, Dalrymple said, but seems to be gaining momentum as more businesses owners and individuals take an interest in eco-friendly practices. At the upcoming event they are expecting around 200 people, he said.

“We are actually running into the problem of finding locations to hold it that we don’t overwhelm,” he said. The event moves each month to make it convenient for people.

Beyond business networking, people are using Green Drinks for social networking, too. There have been some love connections, organizers said, and people make friends and meet people who live in their part of the Valley who share a common interest. Full article.

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Search Engine Land:

According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 11.5 billion online videos in March, 2008. The average viewer watched nearly three hours of video online. These statistics make video an attractive means for advertisers to reach their audience, and in turn, a potential windfall for online video hosts such as YouTube and Google. So far, however, online video sites are finding that users want to be entertained with online video and not necessarily watch commercials. So how do small business advertisers effectively tap into the online video craze and relay their messages to target audiences? Well, that opportunity is here but is not always easy to figure out.

Here are some things that advertisers will want to consider as they ponder their first – or next – online video advertising campaign.

Understand how consumers use commercially-oriented videos in their search and buy process. Consumers watch non-commercial videos on YouTube for entertainment. Unless your video is funny, informative, or entertaining in some way, it’s unlikely that people will simply want to watch it. However, when consumers need a product or service, they are active and more willing to view content like video to help in their buying process. Consumers typically will watch online videos when they are trying to finalize a vendor selection or purchase decision. That is why local search and IYP sites may offer the best opportunity to get in front of the right audience that has the “right” mindset.

Know who to target and where to reach them. Is the audience local or national? If national, advertisers will obviously want to take a broad-based approach and focus on some of the larger search sites. For many small businesses, however, local targeting is more important. If this is true, the advertiser will need to find ways of getting their video to display where the local audience will see it, including local media sites, newspapers, and local search sites, such as Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sites.

Decide on the appropriate type of video and determine the cost… Continued.

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Work.com:

Investing green with a piece of your retirement, business assets, or general investment portfolio not only sends an important message, but has a long term ability to profit as the world goes greener. Hardcore DIYers may want to take more risk by investing in individual stocks, but I would not recommend it. If you’re interested in it anyway, here’s a good place to start. I recommend spreading your risk amongst a combination of ETFs (exchange traded funds) and mutual funds, and it’s always best to understand your time horizon and not look at your investments every day. Green energy in particular can be volatile, so don’t be scared when the markets are choppy.

So the questions is: where to start? Well, shameless self promotion has never come so easy – you can start at my blog, Smugly Green, for some basic information. But here are some steps you can take to invest greener or more responsibly:

1. If you don’t do it yourself, get a financial adviser. Find someone local, someone you can trust, and always understand that there is a conflict of interest when someone is paid on commission. If you’re a DIYer, I recommend online brokerages like AmeriTrade, optionsXpress, or eTrade – they tend to be cheaper than any brokerage house, and if you’re comfortable managing your portfolio, they’re definitely worth it.

2. Allocate a % of your overall portfolio to green. This is a personal choice – it is always good to have your risk spread among many different industries, many different countries, and many different asset types. Green is just a part of the puzzle. For me, it’s the whole puzzle, but I’m willing to take that risk. How much makes sense to you? 20%? 10%? 5%? When you make the decision, understand that green has to be a long term investment, at least 5 year horizon, and probably longer. Green can also be risky and volatile, like any stock.

3. Start investing with the old guard of green. There are some green funds that have been around for a long time, it makes sense to start with them. They have long, proven track records, and more importantly, have shown a long term dedication to green investing. Read more.

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Forbes.com:

1. Tax credits make it easy to get started: Businesses with fewer than 100 employees, but at least one besides the owner, qualify for a $500 tax credit to offset the administrative costs of the plan for each of the first three years, providing a cumulative savings of more than $1,500 to each business.

2. A tax shelter of $15,500, plus any matching: This amount is three times greater than what can be expected from a traditional IRA and also allows for a catch-up of an additional $5,000 for individuals 50 and older. Businesses that choose to match their employee’s contributions also gain additional tax-deferred savings on those amounts and can deduct matching from their company’s taxes.

3. Self-employed workers can shelter up to $46,000 annually: The Solo 401(k) is a great option for one-person businesses as it allows participants to: contribute $15,500 to their plan, and make additional employer contributions that defer up to $46,000 based on the amount they earn.

4. Profit-sharing that provides flexibility: A 401(k) can make it easier for employers to share their success with employees when they have good years and to a lesser degree or not at all during the lean ones. As an added benefit, profit-sharing is typically tax deductible up to 25% of the amount each business contributes.

5. New Roth 401(k) feature allows for after-tax contributions: That’s right. New regulations now enable small businesses to make after-tax contributions with no income level restrictions–unlike the popular Roth IRAs that have income limits that restrict eligibility. This means that employees with a Roth 401(k) will have the advantage of tax-free withdrawals, earnings and all, when they use these funds in retirement. Employers can choose to put all, part or none of their personal contributions into their Roth. The caveat here is that any company match you do must be made on a tax-deferred basis and not into your Roth.

Don’t let 2008 deadlines sneak up on you. To ensure maximum tax benefits in the year ahead, it pays to get started sooner than later. With that in mind, there are a couple important 401(k) deadlines to be aware of.

If you have employees and are willing to provide matching contributions, the “Safe Harbor” deadline is Sept. 15. A safe harbor match provides the best of both worlds: the ability to contribute the maximum allowed to your individual account and to avoid the time and hassles of government plan testing. Businesses not interested in matching or those that are self employed have until December to get set up.

While worrying about money is a year-round experience for most small-business owners, this time of year provides the perfect opportunity to alleviate some of the stress associated with taxes. Before businesses close their books on another tax season, they should take a look at some proactive ways to be better prepared for next April 15. A 401(k) is one way they can put their money to work for them. It’s a small investment in time that can pay big dividends now and when they retire.

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New Business Hunter:

Every four years, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) polls small business owners to detect general problems and priorities. A quick review of the trends revealed in the 2008 survey, especially by industry, can lead an agency to new opportunities.

Here are a few of the top level items and the percentage of small business owners who consider these issues to be critical:

* Tax complexity 22.7%
* Locating qualified workers 20.7%
* Ability to advertise cost effectively 10.8%

Use this data to convince your tax or employment agency clients to market to small businesses. You could also use this information to convince small businesses that you can help them improve their advertising effectiveness.

Read the entire study to uncover challenges in specific industries such as manufacturing and construction and use the data to improve your pitch.

NFIB Small Business Problems and Priorities, June 2008

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BusinessWeek:

Bill Goldsmith has always been a maverick. As a radio disc jockey and program director in the 1970s and ’80s, he loved creating his own mixes of modern rock and introducing listeners to cutting-edge musicians. But in the ’90s, as large corporations bought up the stations he worked for, Goldsmith began to feel increasingly choked by the demands of commercial radio.

Programming was becoming too formulaic; he was given less leeway. Working in radio just wasn’t fun anymore.

In 2000, with the rise of the Internet and streaming media, Goldsmith had an idea: Why not start his own station, one that would buck the constraints of corporate radio with innovative programming and no ads? Today, Radioparadise.com, which broadcasts an eclectic mix of modern, classic, and alternative rock, is commercial-free. It’s supported entirely by donations from its listeners, 15,000 of whom are logged onto the site at any given time. Goldsmith’s company, based in Paradise, Calif., has three employees and about $1 million in annual revenues. Rebecca Goldsmith, Bill’s wife, is the CFO and new music reviewer. Says Bill: “I hate advertising. There is this kind of organic sense of community that develops here that could not happen if this radio station’s sole reason for existence was to increase shareholder value for a large corporation.”

Meet the antipreneurs. Goldsmith is one of perhaps a few thousand business owners who have won both notice and profits by being overtly or covertly anti-big business and anti-advertising. Antipreneurs frequently choose each other as suppliers because they share similar philosophies. Their marketing strategy is targeted toward consumers who have grown cynical about buying products and services from larger companies, whose methods they deem irresponsible. “Cynical consumers perceive that most of the marketplace is bad, lacking in integrity, or not trustworthy, except for a few [often small or local] companies,” says Amanda Helm, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. “But once they find a company they can trust, they are very motivated to stick with [it].”

Antipreneurs are quick to differentiate their efforts to reform capitalism from social entrepreneurs’ attempts to harness business for philanthropic ends…

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Entrepreneur Daily:

If you’re mechanically and environmentally inclined, a $10 million prize could soon be yours. The X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million for a super-efficient car. The competition is open to established automakers and unknown engineers, and it’s meant to result in cars available for purchase, not just concept cars.

So far, more than 60 teams have signed up for the competition. The winners will participate in a cross-country race in 2009, in which they’ll be judged on fuel efficiency, speed, distance and other factors. For more information, check out the website for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize.

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