Top News: A Study Says 98 Percent of Mobile Malware Targets Android |  |
- Top News: A Study Says 98 Percent of Mobile Malware Targets Android
- Sage Launches Subscription Invoicing Aimed At Small Business Customers
- Government Contracting: How To Do Some Research Before Market Entry
- Steven Aldrich of GoDaddy: 50% of SMBs Still Working in the Stone Age
- Don’t be Late for a Waste of Time
- U.S. House Passes a Bill Allowing People to Unlock Their Phones, But….
| Top News: A Study Says 98 Percent of Mobile Malware Targets Android Posted: 28 Feb 2014 02:30 PM PST Small business owners need information to stay competitive. But following the latest updates even in your industry can be tough with everything else on your plate. The Small Business Trends editorial team wraps it all up and puts it in one place for your benefit. MobileYour Android phone could be a target. A report from Kaspersky Labs says 98 percent of mobile malware now targets the Android operating system. It’s not too surprising given Android’s popularity, but how safe is your mobile technology now? Huawei launches five new devices. The China-based company is now targeting the U.S. market. And with their low price, they might appeal to budget conscious small business owners. Here’s an overview of the five latest devices and a look at when U.S. business owners might be able to get a hold of some. Welcome to the future of business cards. TouchBase Technologies imagines a business card with conductive ink. Tap the card on a contact’s smartphone and your information is instantly transferred. WebIt’s crowdsourcing on your own domain. Sure, Indigogo and Kickstarter give you the ability to quickly and easily raise funds for your startup. But CrowdtiltOpen offers something more — a chance to add your own branding. Grand St. could be a new place for tech hardware startups. If your new small business isn’t a website but instead a “leather organizer that can charge your smartphone” or an “iOS enabled guitar,” you may want to try this. You can sell consumer ready, beta test a new product or take preorders. Microsoft OneDrive is finally here. And it turns out it’s much more than just a name change. The newly branded Microsoft cloud storage service has a few new surprises for users. Lets have a look at what you get with your OneDrive account. This Chrome feature will warn you of malware. Too bad some feel it may already look a bit like a malware trick. A box appears on your screen when Chrome detects a change in your settings. But some users say this is exactly the kind of thing Google tells people to look out for. Social MediaLinkedIn will soon open its publishing platform. Last week the social network for professionals announced a new publishing option had been opened to about 25,000 members. And many more will be given access soon, the company says. Posts you create will appear in your LinkedIn profile, but could eventually have much greater influence. Social media customer care. Businesses of all sizes are taking social media more seriously. Nowhere is this more clear than in the expansion of companies like Brand Embassy. Social media monitoring comes in all shapes and sizes. But this is one of the latest. This service is for social media management. Socialbakers has raised $26 million to further improve its offerings. But so far components include analytics, management of social channels, social media listening and more. There are also a number of resources and social media marketing reports for various countries. This Pinterest marketing tool listens to your brand. Discover, from Pinterest analytics and social marketing company Tailwind, has some features that could give insight. They include monitoring the number of followers, repins, likes and comments. This report says Facebook ads encourage “fake” clicks. The idea is that users paid to add “likes” to specific accounts with a fake profile also “like” other accounts too to disguise their activities. The easiest of these to find would be accounts that show up in Facebook ads. PolicyU.S. House passes important smartphone bill. The proposed legislation would allow you to “unlock” your smartphone once your contract expires. The bill must still be passed in the Senate and could face further amendment. But some say the ban on “bulk unlocking” remains business unfriendly. This program funds exporters. Members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship believe the State Trade and Export Promotion Program is a necessity. The pilot program gave grants to small businesses seeking global markets and some want it renewed. More funds for Score are possible. If U.S. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) has his way, SCORE could receive $10.5 million by 2015. The organization offers free mentoring to small businesses from an estimated 11,000 volunteers. Tech3D Printshow gives glimpse of business uses. There seems to be a lot of excitement over 3D printing these days and the implications for small business and entrepreneurship seem clear. This event gives an even broader perspective of possible business uses for the technology. Advice & ResourcesEntrepreneurs are optimistic people. Now there’s data to back that up. Despite all the complaints about the economy, a recent survey shows entrepreneurs remain pretty positive. Small Business Trends Publisher Anita Campbell reports. Plan for the worst. It could take you 1000 days to see your income rise again after starting a new business. It may not be the kind of uplifting talk you expect from entrepreneurs, but it is a realistic expectation. If you plan to quit your job to start a business, say goodbye to that steady paycheck for a while. ServicesHow to automate the hiring of new staff. This article gives you a walk-through of software designed to automate the hiring process. You can maintain a career portal where perspective employees can apply. You can also keep track of those applications once received. Reading Photo via Shutterstock The post Top News: A Study Says 98 Percent of Mobile Malware Targets Android appeared first on Small Business Trends.      |
| Sage Launches Subscription Invoicing Aimed At Small Business Customers Posted: 28 Feb 2014 12:30 PM PST One of the biggest challenges and frustrations of running a small business is getting paid. Now Sage has announced a new monthly subscription-based invoicing service. Called Sage One Invoicing and costing $9 a month, it is targeting small businesses as its core customers. The reasons for this seem to be pretty clear. According to the company, 57% of small businesses struggle to get paid quickly. About 71% of these businesses use Word or Excel to generate invoices. And 47% send their invoices in the mail. So a more organized, more productive system is required. The new invoicing service is being promoted as a simple alternative to other billing methods. What Makes Sage Simpler?Well, consider this scenario which is probably very common to many small business owners. You make your own invoices in Word or Excel. Then, you either email them or mail them. Afterwards it becomes extremely difficult to track the status of those invoices. Which ones have been paid? Which ones are still unpaid? Which ones are partially paid? Keeping on top of it all is a huge challenge. How do you remember to re-invoice late payers? With Sage, those challenges are eased considerably, the company says. Once you send out your invoices from Sage, the customer can pay directly from the invoice into Sage’s credit card service or Paypal. If the payment is late, Sage One will tell you so you can send the invoice out again. Partial payments are also tracked, the company says. Another plus is that, being online, Sage can be accessed from any computer with an online connection. Out of the office? No problem. Just sign into your account from another computer to see all of your invoices. An official announcement from the company has more. Sage One Product Manager Mike Savory said:
The post Sage Launches Subscription Invoicing Aimed At Small Business Customers appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| Government Contracting: How To Do Some Research Before Market Entry Posted: 28 Feb 2014 10:00 AM PST There is nothing worse than attending an event where a speaker will whet your appetite for a new market, then leave you hanging. At many small business conferences around the country, inevitably one of the speakers will bring up doing business with the government, and perhaps they will offer accurate advice, but not always. There are many myths about doing business with the government, some perpetuated by those seeking to take advantage of novices, others simply out-dated, others still kept alive by those unwilling to understand how the market is changing. Many of those who write or speak are not B2G (business to government) experts and inadvertently include inaccurate information. The federal government is the largest buyer of goods and services, buying virtually anything used in a business setting and more. They spend hundreds of billions annually. So on the surface, it is an attractive market. However, there are hundreds of nuances and thousands of regulations, so before you get too excited, let’s do a reality check. Before entering the government contracting arena, a little research is in order. But where to start? How To Do Government Contracting Research Before Market EntryThe first thing you need to ask yourself is, “Does the government buy what I sell?” While the answer is usually yes, it is best to get a definitive answer. One place to start is the General Services Administration (GSA) website. Once there, look at the “Most Requested Links” and click on the “GSA eLibrary.” This takes you into the eLibrary, where you can find not only whether or not the government buys what you sell, but who else is selling the same or similar products. Next, type your query into the search box and then select one of the three options:
As an example, let’s say you sell office furniture. Type in “office furniture” and select “exact phrase” and click the “enter” key. The page that comes up matches your phrase. For you, you are interested in the numbers of the left side of the page. These numbers are in red and they are under the word “Source.” Each number represents a GSA Schedule contract. The matches include:
You are looking for Schedule 71. So mouse over the red “71″ and you will find the full range of products and services the government purchases through Schedule 71, and it is extensive. After scrolling through, go back to the top of the page and look for the red arrow next to “Download Contractors (Excel).” Click on this and it will take you to the “Download” page where you are then prompted to click the “Download” button. This will download an Excel file that includes full company contact info, phone, email, company URL, DUNS, business status (various small business categories) and whether or not the company participates in a few state and local government programs. This file tells you that there are 2,739 companies currently participating on GSA Schedule 71, trying to leverage this contract to sell to Uncle Sam. (I don’t show you this to scare you off, but to let you know that every niche in the federal market is highly competed.) You’ve now done some government contracting research prior to market entry, and you now know what/who you’re up against. There are ways to enter this market and to win business – but as you can see, you cannot expect it to happen quickly. Research Photo via Shutterstock The post Government Contracting: How To Do Some Research Before Market Entry appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| Steven Aldrich of GoDaddy: 50% of SMBs Still Working in the Stone Age Posted: 28 Feb 2014 07:30 AM PST According to a newly released GoDaddy survey, even with all of the affordable and easy to use apps available today, there is a large number of small businesses out there that just haven't made the leap to the cloud. Steven Aldrich, SVP of Applications at GoDaddy, joins us to share and discuss some of the findings from the study, including what working in the Stone Age is costing small businesses that are slow to step away from the pad and pencil. * * * * *
Steven Aldrich: I’m an entrepreneur at heart; paper route, summer storage business in college, built lofts for folks with my roommate, started a business and have been CEO of a couple. I was fortunate enough to become part of GoDaddy as we were transforming the company to help really bring individuals through the process of successfully founding, running and growing their businesses. I’ve been involved in small business my whole life at this stage. Small Business Trends: Can you talk about the tax survey you just released? Steven Aldrich: GoDaddy has historically been known as a domain name registrar. Meaning, we help small businesses pick the right name for their business and then use that to build websites, host their website, send email. The last few years we started to broaden that set of services we’re bringing to small businesses. One of the services we added was online bookkeeping. We wanted to take a pulse of how small businesses today, are thinking about both, keeping records for their business, tax time, given that, that’s a timely topic right now and just hear how businesses are doing on those couple of topics and that’s what we’re going to talk about. Small Business Trends: Can you give us some of the high level key findings from the survey? Steven Aldrich: The one that is not surprising, but always surprises if that makes sense, is that small businesses, by and large, are still trying to maintain an understanding of their business by hand. We found that over 50% of small businesses still track how they’re doing on either a spreadsheet or pencil and paper. When we talked to small business owners and asked them why they said, 'I know it’s not perfect but I’m able to get by.' Then when we asked them if they were confident in knowing how they were doing. Almost half of them said, ‘No.’ Then we said, ‘Are you asking an accountant for help?’ Again, half of them said that they never talk to an accountant. Those that do, only half of those talk to their accountant more than once a year. What we found was that spreadsheets and paper are still the rule, rather than the exception. Small Business Trends: Wow, I’m seeing here more than half of SMB’s still use pen and paper or a spreadsheet to track expenses? Steven Aldrich: Yes, and what that means is two things. One, it’s extra work. When we talk to small business owners, they get so excited about finding customers, delighting those customers, having those customers come back and delivering excellent products and services to them. If you’re doing this work by hand, this is one of the least pleasant tasks that small business owners talk about – keeping the books and doing their taxes. So it gets pushed to the bottom of the stack, and at the end of the day, they collapse into bed. This is the stuff that doesn’t get entered in the spreadsheet or doesn’t get written down in the ledger or in the expense book. That means the small business owners not as up to date on what’s going on with their business – really come home to roost at tax time. That’s when you need to have your revenue and your expenses ready to roll so that you just pay your fair share of taxes, not too much and not too little. In the survey, this time a huge percentage of these small business owners, 40%, are taking 6 or more hours and many of them actually said it was taking days to just organize the information for their taxes. One of the things we know that means is the business owners are either not spending time with their customers, not spending time with their family, or not sleeping. None of those three things are good. Small Business Trends: What’s the difference between those who actually do use an online service versus the small businesses not using technology and still operating like they're in the Stone Age? Steven Aldrich: We asked folks that are using the GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping service, ‘How long did it take you and how confident were you in the outcome?’ We found it takes six or more hours, even days, using manual methods or spreadsheets. But folks using online bookkeeping from GoDaddy took two hours on average. That’s because the data is being collected everyday automatically, behind the scenes from your bank accounts, your credit card accounts, your PayPal or Etsy, your Amazon or Ebay accounts. Your invoices can be sent and payments tracked automatically. So, you’ve got an ongoing record of how you’re doing and you’ve got it on the desktop, you’ve got it on your mobile device. When it comes time to getting your schedule C ready, which is what small business owners almost all file with their 1040′s, they’re ready and literally they hit the button that says schedule C worksheet. They take a look, make sure any uncategorized stuff gets taken care of at that time, and then they can enter that data into a tax prep program like TurboTax. Or hand it off to their accountant, which we’ve heard now from lots of folks saves not only the business owner time, but it also saves the business owner money. Because they don’t have to go and pay an accountant to do all the data entry. Which the accountant doesn’t want to do anyway. Right? They want to do the value added stuff. Small Business Trends: There’s a lot of information coming out of this study. Can you give me one or two things that surprised you in the results? Steven Aldrich: When you ask the small business owner. ‘How confident are you that you know what your tax situation is going to be for the last year?’ Only 15% said that they knew how much they owed. That’s a wake up call to the community saying, ‘We’ve got to help small business owners break this Gordian Knot of fear around taxes and not knowing that there’s a better way to stay on top of the business.’ There is the ability now for that small business owner to not only have their cake and eat it too, but also know how they’re doing without having to become an accountant themselves. They can spend their time on their business and we’re delighted to be able to be a part of that at GoDaddy. Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about the survey and things that GoDaddy is doing specifically for small businesses? Steven Aldrich: I’d recommend they go to GoDaddy.com. It’s a really terrific place to find the breadth of things that we do for the small business owner. We’ve got the ability for people to get a domain, so they can choose a name for their business. Get a website. Get hosted. We’ve got some new services around finding new customers called GetFound. We’ve got the ability to run your business and be more productive with things like Office365 from GoDaddy and invoicing and bookkeeping tools as well. This interview on small businesses not using technology is part of the One on One interview series with thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This transcript has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click on the player above. The post Steven Aldrich of GoDaddy: 50% of SMBs Still Working in the Stone Age appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| Don’t be Late for a Waste of Time Posted: 28 Feb 2014 05:00 AM PST True story. I was finishing this cartoon up and spell-checking the caption in Photoshop. When the spell-checker got to “full-of-crap” it stopped and offered up the word “phallocrat” instead. When I looked “phallocrat” up I learned it meant “a male who assumes authority over females due to his maleness.” Who knew Photoshop had such a great sense of humor?! (I swear this is true. I even took a screenshot!) The post Don’t be Late for a Waste of Time appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| U.S. House Passes a Bill Allowing People to Unlock Their Phones, But…. Posted: 28 Feb 2014 02:30 AM PST A new bill that makes it legal to unlock your smartphone at the end of your service contract has narrowly passed the U.S. House. However, some language in the bill may stifle businesses that sell unlocked phones to consumers. This should be good news for any small business owner who’d like to continue using a smartphone they like but wants to switch to another mobile carrier. The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act passed the House of Representatives by more than two-thirds majority. The bill will now move to the Senate, The Hill reports. Once law, the bill would let smartphone owners who purchased their devices after Jan. 27, 2013, legally unlock their phones. Though those owners would have to wait until their current contracts expire. Smartphone owners could have unlocked their phones in the past legally. But that privilege expired when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was not renewed by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. The summary of the bill reads:
It’s the last portion of the legislation that has some groups irate with the House. As the bill stands, a smartphone owner can go to a business and have their phone unlocked. But that business cannot unlock phones and resell them in bulk. Sherwin Siy, the VP of Legal Affairs for the consumer watchdog group Public Knowledge said in response to the current bill:
Previously owned unlocked phones have risen in popularity for business owners who are looking to get a smartphone without a contract. Though the initial purchase price may be high, an unlocked phone offers benefits. One of these is being able to choose your carrier and potentially switch if necessary. The change in the current bill to add the ban on “bulk unlocking” was a last minute one. The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act could be amended further in the Senate before passage. Unlock Photo via Shutterstock The post U.S. House Passes a Bill Allowing People to Unlock Their Phones, But…. appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
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