RebelMouse Creates a Collage of Your Digital Life |  |
- RebelMouse Creates a Collage of Your Digital Life
- Should You Become a B Corp?
- Bootstrapping In The Age Of Automation And Outsourcing
- One Frightening Statistic on Small Business Health Insurance
- App.net Plans a Better Twitter
| RebelMouse Creates a Collage of Your Digital Life Posted: 13 Aug 2012 01:00 PM PDT With more and more social networks popping up daily, many Americans find themselves with so many different sites to check and manage and not enough time to do so. Enter RebelMouse, a self-dubbed "social front page" that lets users add content from other social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The site, which is part of Soho Tech Labs, an incubator funded by Lerer Ventures, serves as a sort of hub for users' social media content. All of the different updates come together and create a Pinterest-style collage of a user's digital life. Users can choose to have their tweets, Instagram photos, and other social content upload to RebelMouse automatically, but they can also add stories and move around the content on their page so they have more control over how it looks. The purpose of the site is to help you create a page where other users can get a glance at your overall social media presence. If you often share about politics, technology, and startups, for instance, someone can take a look at your RebelMouse page and see that you often talk about those topics and then decide if they'd like to subscribe to your updates on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. Says CEO, Paul Berry:
Currently, RebelMouse has more than 25,000 sites and is growing quickly, according to Berry, who got the idea for RebelMouse when he was CTO of the Huffington Post:
From Small Business Trends |
| Posted: 13 Aug 2012 11:00 AM PDT When most businesses think about incorporating, they consider S corps, C corps or LLCs. But there's an emerging alternative for business owners who want to tie their corporate goals to not just finances, but societal good.
The B Corp, officially called Benefit Corporation, is a legal structure that requires businesses to not only generate profits but also create social and environmental benefits. Starting with Maryland in 2010, eight U.S. states now offer the B Corp structure and several more are considering legislation to adopt it. (A nonprofit called B Lab, which advocates for B Corp laws, also allows any business to be voluntarily certified as a B Corp.) Some states have also adopted other similar types of corporate structures, including flexible purpose companies (FlexC) and low-profit LLCs (L3Cs). Check out this slideshow by Harvard adjunct professor Kyle Westaway to learn more about these different structures.) Under the state laws, B Corps must include social and environmental goals in their bylaws and put out an annual report that explains how well they've performed those goals. It's a way to ensure that the business is just as committed to generating social and environmental good as it is to generating profits. As the B Corp structure gets more acceptance, more businesses are using it to show their commitment to environmental and social strong practices. Outdoor apparel company Patagonia incorporated as a B Corp in California early this year. Read this Wall Street Journal piece about several other companies that have as well. Becoming a B Corp. offers several potential benefits to businesses that care about sustainable business practices. Here are a few to consider:
All said, however, not everyone is convinced that B Corps are worth it. Environmental and social goals can certainly be attained without the B Corp structure. Some critics also worry how B Corps will be viewed by potential investors who might be looking at the financial implications of being a B corp. What do you think about B Corps? Have you considered a B Corp structure for your business, or would you? B Corp Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| Bootstrapping In The Age Of Automation And Outsourcing Posted: 13 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT Bootstrapping stories always excite me, and what Sean Broihier has done with Fine Art America is nothing short of amazing. Let me start by saying that Broihier doesn't have an art background. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in mechanical engineering.
His first venture, Local Automation, a website designed for engineers, still exists today. Broihier followed that with the company he heads today, Fine Art America. One thing that sets Fine Art America apart from other online companies is how few people it takes for a company to generate $5M+ in revenue. Broihier's introduction to computers came early in his life. He taught himself, with the help of a book, how to program BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 computer that his parents owned. He continued to dabble in programming throughout high school and developed a fascination for the idea of programming for the Internet when Netscape came out in the late 1990s. Despite his fascination for programming, Broihier spent 10 years working as an engineer in New Jersey, the desire for entrepreneurship tugging at him the whole time. By 2005, Broihier decided to give in to his desire to be an entrepreneur and founded Local Automation, a marketplace for engineering firms that allowed them to advertise their products on the Internet. The idea for Fine Art America came to mind while he was helping out his brother, who owned an art gallery. Every time an artist put out a new piece, planned to do an in-store appearance, or changed a price on something, Broihier's brother would call him to update his website. It was then that Broihier realized there were artists and photographers all over the world who wanted an easy way to get their artwork online to sell. So, he re-purposed the code from the engineering website and launched Fine Art America in 2007. Fine Art America’s print-on-demand business model is ideal for artists and photographers from all over the world who get to name their own prices for the work they upload to Broihier's site. Buyers can select and customize the artwork and photographs that they want to purchase all through Fine Art America. The consumers pay for everything, artwork or photograph, mats and frames. FineArtAmerica makes its money by marking up the prices of the frames and mats, which the company gets at wholesale prices. The artists and photographers themselves generate the buzz that surrounds Fine Art America. When they promote the work that they've uploaded to the website, they're simultaneously promoting Fine Art America and all that it has to offer artists and photographers … and consumers. Broihier has set Fine Art America up in a way that it almost runs itself. The company is partnered with three different fulfillment companies, one in North Carolina, one in Atlanta and one in Los Angeles. Fine Art America's entire system is fully automated. The artists and photographers upload their work and set the prices for it themselves. Each photograph that is uploaded must be approved by a Fine Art America staff member before it appears on the site, but that's it. Photographs, of course, are easier to process than paintings. Some painters are not good photographers. The purchasing process is fully automated. Once an order is complete, the details go to one of Fine Art America's three fulfillment centers, depending what type of product the consumer purchased. The Atlanta processing center fills greeting card orders. Framed prints are filled by the North Carolina center. It's important to note that website is coded in such a way that customer orders go where they should automatically. No one on Fine Art America's staff has to do anything manually. What's really exciting about Fine Art America's story is that the company earned $1 million in revenue in 2009. By 2011, that number had grown to $5 million. Projected revenue for 2012 is $15 million. And Broihier only has two people on payroll besides himself. By March 2012, Fine Art America was processing 10,000 uploads per day from close to 100,000 artists – a number that grows by 150 to 300 daily – and hundreds of thousands of customers. Allowing contributing artists and photographers to set their own prices is the big differentiator between Fine Art America and competitors like Art.com, CaféPress and Australia's RedBubble. Contributors like National Geographic really appreciate having the freedom to choose how much they want people to pay for the photographs they upload. The extreme levels of automation and outsourcing have allowed Sean Broihier to bootstrap a fast growth company to substantial revenues with just three people, including himself. Of course, the business supports many jobs right here in America through the outsourced fulfillment centers, so the net job impact of the company is not insignificant. In this era of outsourcing and automation, we need to get used to this mode of ultra-lean startups, and in fact learn from them. Photographer Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| One Frightening Statistic on Small Business Health Insurance Posted: 13 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT The other day a reporter asked me what one statistic I thought best showed small business's problems with the U.S. health care system. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that it's this one: Since 1999 the average cost of employee health insurance premiums (for family coverage) has risen 84 percent in inflation adjusted terms (148 percent in nominal terms).
In the figure above, I chart the trend in the cost of premiums for family coverage at small businesses, using data from the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual survey on employer health benefits. Statistically, an upward sloping straight line (included in the chart) fits the data pretty well. To understand why this is a problem, consider what has happened to the average business's revenues since 1999. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) only provides data on business revenues through 2008. But between 1999 and 2008, the revenues at the average American company fell 5 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Over the same period, employee health care premiums went up 64 percent when measured similarly. The rapidly rising cost of employee health insurance means that the cost of health insurance has increased from 5.4 percent of total worker compensation in 1999 (PDF) to 7.7 percent in 2012 (PDF), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. You don't need an economics Ph.D. to see why for why these numbers are frightening to small business. From Small Business Trends |
| App.net Plans a Better Twitter Posted: 13 Aug 2012 02:30 AM PDT The days of Twitter and some other social networks may be numbered, if App.net founder Dalton Caldwell has his way. Caldwell’s new social network operates on a principle as revolutionary as cable TV might have seemed back in the days when broadcast television was the standard model. Caldwell wants an advertisement-free social media platform supported by payments from users. A New DirectionVoting with their money. If you think Caldwell is crazy, think again! The company has already raised more than $500,000 from 7,372 “backers” who have already signed up to be App.net’s first users. Membership starts at $50 for the basic service and goes up to $1000 annually for “Pro” service. The Verge No fuss, no muss. Take your first look at the App.net site, and it may seem a bit spartan when compared with its more lavishly funded and ad-driven competitor, Twitter, but Caldwell is quick to remind users his team built a functional Web application and API to demonstrate App.net in action and that there is much work to do now that funding goals are reached. App.net Global Feed Rallying the troops. Caldwell thanks his supporters as the App.net team reaches its ambitious funding goal, giving a bit more insight into the new business model the social site represents. If this is the social media community you wish to join, there’s no better introduction. Dalton Caldwell Twitter TroublesWelcome to the underground. Deep beneath the surface of the busy world of networking and 24/7 patter that is Twitter lies a thriving underground economy where followers are sold by the thousands over Ebay and other Websites, and many are fake. Barracuda Labs Blackout…again! Yikes! on July 26 Twitter again experienced a worldwide outage, this time from between 8:20 and 9:00 a.m. to10:25 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The outage is the second for Twitter in just over thirty days, and was caused this time not by a “cascading bug” but by two redundant parallel systems failing simultaneously. Twitter Blog Still the OneSocial Media U. But for all its shortcomings, Twitter has many qualities unparalleled for the online business owner or social media entrepreneur, qualities perhaps hard to replace with a pay-for-use system some will not think worth the cost. KissMetrics Twitter basics revisited. For those who will be staying with Twitter or who perhaps haven’t yet used the service for business, here is a collection of must-have resources to start making your Twitter efforts the best they can be. Idea Sprouts From Small Business Trends |
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