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What Are the Latest Trends in Technology, Entertainment, and Design?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2009 Comment (1)TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design, and it is an annual conference with a mission to discuss "ideas worth spreading." It brings together a fascinating mix of technologists, politicians, academic researchers, business people, and celebrities.
The presentations, called TEDTalks, cover a range of topics that include science, art, design, culture, politics, and technology. The speakers are world-class leaders in their field. And because presenting at TED is the conference world's equivalent of performing at the Super Bowl, they bring their A game and do a great job.
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A Small-Business Stimulus? No Thanks
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2009 Comment (3)It's not politics, or at least I don't think so, but speaking as a small-business owner, I mistrust all the analysis of "what's in it for us" related to the badly needed economic stimulus, the bailouts, and all of that.
I don't think this is a time for looking at major legislation through a myopic, self-centered looking glass. Not by anybody. This is a deep dip in all economic indicators at once, and we should be pulling together to get out of it.
What I need as a small-business owner is a healthy economy. I don't need the government to help me specifically, but I need the economy to offer financing for those with good credit and good projects, and jobs for people who want to work, education for kids, and higher education for employees—in short, a healthy economy.
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Entrepreneurship Is on the Decline in the U.S.
Tweet Share on Facebook February 10, 2009 Comment (2)One of the most common misperceptions about America is that we are becoming more entrepreneurial over time. Growing entrepreneurship is a common theme in many newspaper and magazine articles about this country. But the statistics tell a different story.
In other places, I have discussed the myth of increasing entrepreneurship in greater detail than I can here. But I want to show some recent statistics to illustrate that this downward trend is persisting.
So I produced the table below from the most current information on entrepreneurship available—the Bureau of Labor Statistics data on self-employment in non agricultural industries.
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Clean Tech Cleaning Up in Venture Capital Investment
Tweet Share on Facebook February 6, 2009 Comment2008 was not a good year for most companies interested in raising venture capital. The recession made an already tough fundraising environment even more difficult.
But according to Ernst and Young, clean tech was the exception, and VC investments in this sector reached a record $4.7 billion, up 68 percent over 2007. This compares with just $234 million in VC clean tech investments in 2002.
The top four segments were electricity/electricity generation ($2.7 billion raised), alternative energy ($703 million raised), energy efficiency ($427 million raised) and energy storage ($320 million raised).
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Recession Means Back to Bootstrapping Basics
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2009 Comment (1)Hooray for bootstrapping.
While lots of would-be Neros fiddle, Rome burns. Economic stimulus gets stuck in partisan traffic—pork, or not—and, meanwhile, the job ticker goes steadily down and a credit crunch continues.
The New York Times reported the other day that angel investors are pulling back. And U.S. News's Matthew Bandyk posted yesterday on how venture capitalists are taking a beating. The Small Business Administration backed way fewer business loans last year than the year before. And commercial banks are tightening restrictions.
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Stimulus Plan Ignores Start-Ups at Nation's Peril
Tweet Share on Facebook February 4, 2009 Comment (5)If you were a private investor with a few hundred billion dollars at your disposal, would you pour your money into badly managed companies that were teetering on the brink of collapse?
No, I wouldn't either.
But we do. Our nation's leaders regularly use our tax dollars to bail out companies that no investor in his right mind would buy into without at least a wholesale changing of the management guard and a brand-new business plan.
And what kind of returns can you reasonably expect on those investments? When lawmakers fling money at floundering corporations, they demand nothing. No new management. No new business plan. No new product development. We essentially give them money so that they can continue to do all the things that got them into trouble in the first place, while expecting different results.
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3 Deadly Business Phrases to Avoid
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2009 Comment (2)Earlier today I caught the top 10 myths about small business by blogger Wealthy Bag Lady. She proves with examples that you don't necessarily need megabucks, a certain minimum or maximum age, or fancy offices, but you do need to know how to sell, and you have to keep learning, and you can't do it all on your own.
That reminded me of the myths I deal with way too often in the world of start-ups and small business. Several of them make me mad. For example:
Be your own boss ...
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Competition Good for Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2009 Comment (4)You need competition, and your business will do better if you have some competition. That was the point made by a successful entrepreneur from my hometown.
He told a local restaurant owner to quit worrying about the restaurant up the road. They aren't wasting time worrying about you, he told her, and you both benefit from putting people in the habit of eating out more often.
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Using Social Media and Crowd-Sourcing for Quick and Simple Market Research
Tweet Share on Facebook January 27, 2009 Comment (11)The Internet is fundamentally changing how market research and data collection are done. Low-cost, online survey tools like Survey Monkey make it easy for small businesses to afford, design, and conduct survey research.
Even cheaper and easier is using social media sites and tools to ask questions.
Bloggers have long used their blogs to ask questions of their audience. They simply post a question on their blog and ask readers to use comments to answer. The Small Business Trends blog does this quite often.
But even if you don't blog, you can still ask questions online.
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Job Loss in the Recession: If You Work for Yourself, Are You Worse Off?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (4)Lately, there has been a lot of discussion of job losses. Most of that discussion has focused on people who work for others because it's easier for people to grasp the meaning of job losses in terms of company layoffs than in terms of decisions by self-employed people to shutter their operations.
Perhaps because loss of jobs by the wage employed is easier to explain, the media have been pretty silent about how bad recession-induced job loss has been on the self-employed. So, I decided to take a look at this question.
Below is a chart that I created from data downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. It measures the change in the (seasonally adjusted) number of self-employed and nonagricultural private-sector wage-employed people between December 2007 and July 2008 and between July 2008 and December 2008. I set the baseline to 100 percent in December 2007 for both groups so that the different job-loss patterns for the wage- and self-employed are clear.
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