Image via Wikipedia

A great article from Forbes on the emerging freelance economy:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1116/careers-lisa-steinberg-labor-statistics-freelance-economy.html

This is nothing new to freelancers and companies that use their services and have been taking advantage of the Internet to come together to create a new type of labor market for years. Thomas Friedman described just such a phenomenon emerging in 2005 in his book The World Is Flat.

This article helps break the news to the mainstream.

Related articles by Zemanta

• No Wonder Many Americans’ Economic Outlook Is Pessimistic (seekingalpha.com)
• Pro-Freelance.com – Where Freelance Projects Are Listed (domainmacher.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Great Forbes article on MetroPCS strategy. Briefly,  Roger Linquist (MetroPCS CEO) is positioning his company to be a cost leader in the area of digital voice transmission. He wants to commoditize cellular phone service squeezing the margins of his competitors and positioning his company to take advantage of increased consumer demand for cheaper cell phone service.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1116/technology-mobile-4G-telephony-metropcs.html

Businessweek ran a great article on some of Steve Jobs‘ presentation tactics. While presenting like Steve Jobs will not turn your company into Apple, these tips will definitely help any entrepreneur or sales person make more effective presentations.

Uncovering Steve Jobs’ Presentation Secrets – BusinessWeek.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple tablet? Just say no. (lockergnome.com)

How Your Business Can Become The Target Of A Scam

Phishing and E-Mail Scams are a lucrative criminal endeavor. The US Secret Service estimates that more than $100 million every year are stolen through these scams. While these scams are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with the increased media exposure of these scams it is difficult to believe that so many people fall suspect to these scams each year. I think part of the reason for so many people getting caught in these scams is human nature but a large part is a lack of understanding of how easy technology makes it for the criminals to operate these scams.

On of the businesses we operate is an Internation used car sales service. The service has a large online presence and advertises heavily using online classified services. This business was recently the target of an attempted scam. The scam consisted of an individual claiming to be a representative of the Ghanese government  sending us an inquire about purchasing a number of vehicles. While we have never received an inquirey directly from a government we frequently receive legitimate request for proposals from individuals and businesses looking to purchase cars from overseas, as this is a large portion of our business. We may have even entertained this attempted scam instead of immediatley reporting it to the authorities if not for the spelling mistakes and general amateur look and feel of the e-mailed request that we received. Even though we did not become victims, this still begs the question of how our business was targeted by some crooks half-way around the world.

I find it very difficult to believe that the process of identifying targets for scams is manual. I believe this is a numbers game. The more e-mails that the scammer sends out the more likely are his chances of success, similar to how e-mail marketing works in general. So, how did we receive such a seemingly targeted e-mail? Two words: e-mail harvesting.

Using an e-mail extraction software, scammers can build gigantic keyword specific lists of e-mail addresses collected from websites on the Internet. In our situation, the scammer may have been building a list using the keywords “internationl used car sales.” These are keywords that some of our advertising is optimized for. As the extraction software locates these keywords on a website, it then searches for any e-mail addresses on the website. Our sales inquiry e-mail address is an example of an e-mail address that this program found on our website. Once the scammer has built a huge list of targeted e-mail addresses, he or she could use mail-merge software or other types of e-mail automation to send the same targeted message to everyone the list that was built. I believe that possibly thousands of individuals and businesses involved in international vehicle sales received the same e-mail that we did.

One of the reasons that we did not fall to the scammers ploy was because we spend most of our day using the Internet and are well aware of scammers and the tools that they could use.  I would think that a scam like this would be much more likely to work on someone not as familiar with the Internet that is barely comfortable with e-mail and basic browsing. Unfortunantely, a recent article on crunchgear.com shows that even young professionals comfortable with the Internet can fall for the schemes of a scammer.

Ways To Protect Yourself and Your Business

1. Do not display e-mail addresses as text on your website. Use contact forms or display them as graphics. You can use this tool to obfuscate your address to prevent a harvester from being able to use your e-mail: http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php
2. Report scam mail to spam@uce.gov and 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov
3. If you receive an e-mail that seems to be legitimate and you decide to move forward with a transaction, verify identities through third parties. In our case, we discussed our matter with the Consulate General Of Ghana in New York and a client of an unrelated business that has operations in Ghana.

Related articles by Zemanta

• When computer illiterates become spammers (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• Hide your email address on your website from spam harvesters (igeek.co.za)
• Chris Kenton Uncovers Spam Mafia (stoweboyd.com)
• Catching Spammers in the Act (technologyreview.com)
• Facebook Phishers Target Notification Messages [ALERT] (mashable.com)
• US hacker pleads guilty to huge ID theft (guardian.co.uk)
• Hackers target Guardian jobs site (guardian.co.uk)

The trend in large businesses over the past few years has been a greater push for better business analytics.  One needs to look no further than at the growth of SAS and at IBM’s latest advertising push. Businesses want solid data upon which to make decisions!

Business analytics is the practice of collecting and analyzing all sorts of business metrics to determine how well a business is doing and to help make  better forecasts. I believe this is a scary development for small businesses.

There is an idea propounded by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema that for a company to become a market leader it must excel at one specific dimension of value and maint threshold standards on the other dimensions of value. The authors grouped value into three categories they called value disciplines: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. Operational excellence is defined by superb operations and execution. Product leadership is defined by market leading product innovation and marketing. Customer intimacy is defined by excellent customer attention and service.

The authors’ thinking is that to become a market leader in any of these value disciplines is a Herculean task and often each value discipline requires a focus placed on different process, systems, and personnel. Often you would find the largest companies become leaders in operational excellence because of the economies of scale and expertise developed over their long histories. Startups or newer companies tend to be leaders of product innovation and customer intimacy because by their nature startups tend to focus on solving problems of a particular niche and hence tend to be intimately familiar with the needs of the particular niche.

Business analytics changes all of this and gives the upper hand to larger companies that could afford well developed customer insight teams that use millions of dollars worth of automation and analytics technology. Darden Restaurants is an excellent example of how even a gigantic company can develop both operational excellence and customer intimacy through the use of business analytics-enabling processes and technology.

Darden Restaurants is multi-billion dollar parent company of Bahama Breeze, Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Seasons 52, and The Capital Grille. Together the company owns and operates over 1,770 restaurants and serves more than 400 million meals a year. Restaurant businesses tend to have the highest rates of failure. Yet, Darden has been thriving even despite the down-economy and changing consumer preferences (the average American has 79 sit-down meals in restaurants per year, 16% fewer than 15 years ago).

Darden’s secret is business analytics. Their IT group builds custom software that is rolled out through all of the restaurants. The use of this technology helps Darden become ultra-efficient in producing meals and surprisingly knowledgeable of their customers’ preferences. Each restaurant is operated as a just-in-time manufacturing plant that creates a wide range of products selected, produced, consumed, and judged by customers announced in minutes. The technology used allows Darden to track inventory (food) usage in each restaurant, real time sales, forecast staffing and food preparation needs, provide a workflow for optimizing the preparation of a table’s meals, and ensuring delivery of food within one-minute of being ready. At the same time, this software allows Darden Restaurants to track trends in their customers eating habits. They could answer questions such as: Are diners buying more appertizers? Are they choosing healthier meals? Are fewer diners purchasing dessert?

Having this knowledge allows Darden Restaurants to be able to react to changes in consumers habits as they are happening instead of after patrons stopped visiting their restaurants. Prior to the emergence and maturation of business analytics technology, such information could only be acquired through customer surveys and interviews which subjects business operators to the risk of acting on more anecdotal evidence in lieu of having better evidence to go by.

Finally, I believe business anlaytics presents a challenge to small businesses as it eliminates of the advantages that small businesses often have over their larger counterparts, knowledge of the customer. Statistically speaking, the larger restaurant will always have better information to go by because they are pooling a larger and more complete sample of data (every single order placed in their restaurants). The costs of such advanced analytics systems may be an obstacle for small businesses at least in the short-term until mainstream adoption reduces costs further. But, large businesses tend to pay attention to things that they could measure. This may lead to small businesses uncovering and developing innovations that do not appear on the radar yet for larger businesses. One such example is an observation of the type of people that are coming to a particular restaurant. Analytics systems could tell you what your clients are ordering but only a restaurant operator intimately familiar with his business and clientele could identify a certain demographic frequenting a restaurant more and tailor programs to increase business from that demographic (senior citizens may be one such example).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Putting the Art of Leadership into Practice (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• What You Need To Know About Online Business Success: Part 2 (smallbusinessbranding.com)
• Why Entrepreneurs Sabotage the Succession Process (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• IBM to buy analytic software firm for US$1.2B in cash (financialpost.com)

A business plan is essentially a formal cost-benefit analysis.  The process of writing a business plan forces an entrepreneur to try to look at his or her idea from another person’s point of view. When writing a business plan, an entrepreneur should be thinking about what do investors/stakeholders want to know about my business. This train of thought and process leads to what basically amounts to a value proposition and the how much time, effort, or money is necessary to deliver that value proposition.

A thorough and well put together business plan requires a significant time investment. In the days of brick and mortar businesses, a business plan was a necessity for most entrepreneurs to secure the funding necessary to begin operations. But in today’s web-enabled world, some business ideas take less effort to implement and get to market than the process of writing a business plan. I propose a rule of thumb that if you estimate that a business idea will take less time to get to market than it takes to gather all of the necessary details of your idea and synthesize it into a coherent plan, then do it. Moreover, the process of trying to bring an idea to market and adopting the viewpoint of the customer can prove very beneficial in crafting a more accurate business plan.

I recently came across a story about Tamir Goodman that I thought could serve as a lesson in entrepreneurship. Tamir Goodman is an Orthodox Jewish basketball player who was dubbed  the “Jewish Jordan” throughout his early career.  His basketball career never lived up to the hype surrounding him. He is now a 27 years old and coming to grips with the end of his basketball-player career due to injuries. His plan now is to run a foundation for improving the lives of underprivileged youth in Haifa, Israel by raising funds to send them to basketballs games and events that they would otherwise not be able to afford.

I think Haifa Hoops For Kids is an excellent social entrepreneurial initiative. It shows the entrepreneur, Tamir Goodman, following what I call the “Scientific Method of Entrepreneurship.” He identified a problem: underprivileged youth in Haifa have little opportunity of escape from their challenging daily lives. He determined what  unique capabilities he has that would allow him to solve this problem: Tamir was a professional basketball player in Israel and has very strong connections with fund raising organizations in the United States. Finally, he developed a solution to the problem using his unique capabilities: start a charitable foundation that helps underprivileged youth attend professional basketball games in Israel through funds raised in America.

Haifa Hoops For Kids sounds like an idea that only Tamir Goodman would be able to execute effectively. That is exactly what makes it a great entrepreneurial venture for Tamir Goodman. And this is what I believe, venture capital firms are looking for when they are evaluating the uniqueness of a startup’s product or service. The idea should be able to uniquely and adequately present a solution to a large enough problem in a way in which only this particular team is able to do. VCs are looking for an idea developed with “The Scientific Method of Entrepreneurship” in mind.

The results of the experiment have definite implications for the business world. One needs to look no further then the recent economic slow down we are facing due to risky financial behavior. Bankers were issuing hundred-thousand dollar mortgage loans to individuals who did not have the assets or income to be able to afford such a loan. Even though bankers understood the problem with their actions, they were able to rationalize their actions by the profit that they were making. Such a system also encouraged loan applicants to apply as they understood and saw from the people around them that their loan application would not be turned down. And they were able to rationalize this through the larger house or apartment that they could acquire.

If these individuals, would have listened to their instincts telling them that something feels wrong about the whole process, we may have had a much more stable mortgage lending system.

This lesson has special applications for individuals working at and founding new companies. Trusting your instincts may be a better decision then you think.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Does America Need 8,000 Mortgage Lenders? (blogs.wsj.com)

The highlight for the article for me was the following quote:

“More and more of biology is becoming an information science, which is very much a business for I.B.M.”

This article reinforces the increasingly technologically advanced nature of medicine.

John Markoff, the author of the article, also highlighted the fact that there are at least 17 companies working on developing a dominant method of genome sequencing.

Bio-technology could become the American economy’s growth engine and a major export in the next decade.

It is such innovation that should encourage an even stronger emphasis on math and science education at all levels in American schools.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Beyond the Genome (wired.com)
• DNA sequencing in a holey new way (news.bbc.co.uk)