Recent Posts
- Risks, Probability Revealed In Small Business Success Calculator
- Developers Rave About Google Wave
- Want To Hear About Your Business Complaints? There’s An App For That.
- Cloud Computing For Business– The Good and The Bad
- Open vs. Free : The Battle Over IT Semantics
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Risks, Probability Revealed In Small Business Success Calculator
June 11th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Small Business | 1 Comment »Leave it to the little folks to come up with some big, brilliant ideas.
There’s a new small business tool over at StartupNation - one that either budding entrepreneurs will love or hate.
It’s called the “Odds of Success Calculator For Business”. Designed in part by EquityNet, the ‘calculator’ is designed to help entrepreneurs identify and evaluate business risk. It also calculates the probability of whether a small business will succeed or fail.
Part tough love tool, part Magic 8 ball - the small business success calculator lets business owners get a snapshot of their own business risk profiles based on eight key risk factors:
- amount of capital investment
- difficulty in obtaining funds
- quality of financial management
- degree of business planning
- annual industry growth rate
- management experience
- industry experience and timeframe.
One click - free of charge - and the calculator spits out the odds for success within a given timeframe identified by the business ower.
EquityNet says this tool is best suited for companies that are younger than four years. The company also insists that the methodology used to generate the risk assessment is fair and accurate. The comprehensive version of EquityNet’s Risk Quantification System (RQS) analyzes 30 important business variables including industry sector and enterprise age. It then compares them against hundreds of thousands of data points of companies that have failed or succeeded, thereby computing the probability of success for the individual company.
And there you have it. A hard dose of reality all wrapped up into one tight little tool.
As they say in small business - boom or bust.
Why not let the ‘calculator’ break the news to you first?
Tags: odds of success calculator, small business success, startup nation
Developers Rave About Google Wave
June 4th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Developers, Technology | No Comments »At first I thought: Huh?
One look at the demo and I was completely and utterly confused. But here’s the concept in a nutshell:
Google Wave is a new service that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing, and software collaboration into one giant messaging center.
I lifted this screen shot from Google in an effort to provide a clearer picture of Wave. And in case you haven’t heard - and you probably have- Wave is Google’s answer to the question: “What would e-mail look like if we invented it from scratch today?”
It’s kind of cool in a chaotic sort of way. You can’t help but to sit and take it all in - and that’s precisely what developers and industry observers are doing.
When developers first caught a glimpse of Wave at Google I/O they were giddy. The big reveal was compared to the Apple iPhone unveiling - and it had developers there wondering what Google Wave would allow them to create. The potential apps are endless.
As for industry observers, well CNet’s Matt Asay bluntly indicated that Google Wave - with all of its promise - is a shining example of just how poor most enterprise software remains.
Google Wave - It is the wave of our Internet future.
What’s next? The Google Wave app store?
Poor Microsoft Bing. It doesn’t have a prayer.
Tags: enterprise software, google wave, microsoft bing, wave google I/O
Want To Hear About Your Business Complaints? There’s An App For That.
May 29th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Business, Small Business, Stature Projects, Twitter | No Comments »
We live in an app-crazed, social networking world folks.
I thought I had heard it all last week when the “drunk dial” app was unveiled for the Apple iPhone. Now comes word of a yet another new app - one that could really help small businesses.
Introducing “Salesforce CRM for Twitter.”
When people talk about you and your business - Salesforce let’s you know.
Here’s how is works:
Salesforce plugs into the Twitter API, and customer care reps can start Twitter searches from within Salesforce’s service, bypassing search.twitter.com. If a company discovers someone tweeting about them (good or bad), a button click can import the entire Twitter thread into Salesforce’s software. From there the Twitter user is notified via software, giving them the precious opportunity to respond to the original Tweet.
This is a brilliant idea, given that Twitter users can’t possibly monitor what is being said about them in real time and respond to people’s questions. Twitter is just too large now. Too powerful.
Thankfully, Salesforce can help business owners sleep at night by giving them the tool they need to track complaints - and compliments.
This is beyond better customer care. This is could very well be the life jacket that saves many of our small businesses.
Twitter.
What would businesses do without it?
Tags: business complaints, salesforce for twitter, Small Business, Twitter
Cloud Computing For Business– The Good and The Bad
May 19th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Business | No Comments »Everyone’s working in the clouds these days.
Having access to web-based business functions is, well, downright convenient.
But even though everyone’s using it – no one really knows what their using.
Case in point:
My colleague took an inner-office poll last week, asking everyone if they knew anything about “cloud computing.” Most everyone looked at my colleague, shrugged their shoulders, and said it was “some sort of IT thing.”
Cloud computing, when applied to business, is having computer applications – such as payroll, accounting, sales management, data backup, even word processing – hosted on a Web-based service rather than on a desktop or server computer.
If you use a web-based email program (like Yahoo Mail, Gmail), you are using a form of cloud-based computing. Your email data is stored on the Web.
Sounds simple enough, right?
Wrong.
As sweet as it sounds to be riding the Web-based clouds of cyberspace, there are advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing.
Tech columnist at Hartford Business, Rhonda Abrams, offers up this:
Cloud Computing Advantages:
- Always have the latest upgrade, without paying extra.
- Predictable costs, usually a low monthly subscription.
- More features than you could devise yourself.
- No internal tech staff required.
- Can access and use from any computer with a fast Internet connection.
- Information secure and backed up.
- Reduces need for an office computer network.
- Easy to learn and use.
Cloud Computing Disadvantages:
- Need fast, reliable Internet connection.
- Ongoing monthly cost, even when you don’t use it.
- Privacy concerns, especially if you’re not careful.
- If the company goes out of business, you may lose your data.
As you can see the advantages of cloud computing outweigh the disadvantages, even the all-important privacy issue.
Virtualization and web-based applications are our future. Embrace it – Be thankful for it.
In the end, once you go “cloud” you’ll never go back.
Tags: cloud computing, virtualization, web based applications, web based business
Open vs. Free : The Battle Over IT Semantics
May 15th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Technology | No Comments »I’ve seen this question a lot in IT chat rooms - Is free software the same as open source?
The responses are usually varied, yet none of them offer a definitive answer.
Curious myself, I Googled to find the answer which led me to one enlightening blog post on the matter at InformationWeek.
The title: You Say Open, I Say Free … Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off
Now c’mon… that’s funny.
The author, Serdar Yelgulalp, addresses this vocabulary war by sounding off on the context with which these labels are used.
Is a vendor that offers both an open source and a commercially-licensed edition of a product an “open source vendor?” Some would argue no. They would say OSD refers to the software itself - not the vendor or the business strategy.
On the other hand, some say that vendors with hybrid licensing models could be called “open source vendors” depending on their licensing terms and agreements.
So there you have it.
Still no definitive answer - yet a mighty entertaining dialogue.
In the end, I would have to agree with Yelgulalp.
Does all this even matter? Why should we care how the software was developed or licensed? The focus should be on whether the product is any good.
Still though, some of this petty semantic stuff is worthy of a good think - and a laugh.
Tags: business strategy, free software, open source development, open source vendor