Business Opportunities Weblog

October 5, 2011 by Dane Carlson | News

Bloomberg:

Howard Schultz is giving new meaning to “start me up.” The increasingly activist Starbucks Corp. chief executive officer is taking donations online and through Starbucks cafes to create a small business lending fund. The company will donate $5 million in seed money to give the project, umm, a jolt.

That money can be leveraged seven times into $35 million worth of loans. And ultimately, Schultz said today in a meeting with Bloomberg View editors, he hopes to raise millions more for the project, “Create Jobs for USA.”

Beginning Nov. 1, donors who give at least $5 will get a red, white and blue bracelet bearing the message “Indivisible.” Mark Pinsky, the president and CEO of Opportunity Finance Network, a Philadelphia group that runs a network of 180 community-based lenders, will oversee the actual lending.

Photo by Ann Althouse.

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Tags: Coffee, Financing, Loans

October 5, 2011 by Dane Carlson | News

A farmer in Colorado tried hiring American workers in place of migrant labor. It didn’t go so well:

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.

Photo by erjkprunczyk.

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Tags: farm, hiring

October 5, 2011 by Angela Shupe | News

What was once said about television has made its way into social media: too much of it makes us lazy. At least, that is the theory Edward De Bono has, according to News.com.au.

“There’s a danger in the internet and social media,” says Mr De Bono.

“The notion that information is enough, that more-and-more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous.”

The author and philosopher says that people take the information they receive through social media at face value.

“That we can get information our computer and our communication systems are getting better and better, people say ‘I don’t have to think, information will make my decision for me’, and that completely rules out creativity using the information in a different way, or new way,” he says.

“(Social media causes) laziness – that we just feel we’ll just get more information and we don’t need to have ideas ourselves – we’ll get ideas from someone else, we don’t need to look at the data we’ll just see what someone else has said and so on.”

Do you agree?

Photo by Urs Steiner

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Tags: Social Media

October 5, 2011 by Angela Shupe | History, Humor

Names like Levi Strauss and Rube Goldberg are generally well known for many reasons, but the Quincy Herald Whig looks at what these people did before they reached fame.

Levi Strauss (1829-1902)

Twenty-four-year-old Levi Strauss left New York for San Francisco in 1853 to open a dry goods store with his sister and brother-in-law. They sold supplies to miners and other products to the people of San Francisco during the Gold Rush days. One of his customers had a method of making jeans with metal rivets and, unable to afford the cost of a patent, he asked Strauss to pay for the patent and go into business together. In May 1873, the first official blue jeans were made. I think you know how that turned out.

King Camp Gillette (1855-1932)

The work of Gillette’s parents laid the groundwork for him to become an inventor. For a while, his father worked as a patent agent and part-time tinkerer, and his mother created a cookbook in 1887 that remained in print for 100 years. Gillette became a traveling salesman at age 17, and he often made improvements to the products he sold. He learned the importance that disposable items had on sales, and he used this concept to improve the safety razor blade. Production began in 1903, and 100 years later, the company that bears his name rings up nearly $10 billion a year in sales in more than 200 countries. Ironically, despite his first name and the success that he had, King Gillette opposed capitalism, and he wrote books in which he declared competition to be the root of all evil.

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970)

The term “Rube Goldberg invention” has led millions of Americans to believe that Goldberg was an inventor. You won’t find his name on any patents or store shelves, though, because ol’ Rube never invented anything. After graduating with an engineering degree, he worked as an engineer for a short time but hated the job, so he began doing what he loved most, which was drawing. Goldberg won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his cartoons depicting elaborate schemes that took 10 or more steps to accomplish a simple task. Goldberg is probably the only “inventor” to be honored with both a postage stamp and an adjective named for him, as in “our Rube Goldberg tax system.”

Photo by Andres Rodriguez

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Tags: entrepreneurs, Inventors

October 5, 2011 by Angela Shupe | News

A lot of focus has been placed on the need to grow small business in the United States, but what about China? A recent article from AFP highlights a need for change in the way money is loaned to small businesses in their country.

China’s banks — which are not allowed to charge higher interest on riskier loans — mainly lend to other large state-controlled enterprises and shun small- and medium-sized enterprises.

So a growing number of independent business owners in China are resorting to the informal lending market where they pay as much as 70 percent interest on loans.

Tighter lending restrictions were also exacerbating the problem, Credit Suisse said this week, estimating that the informal lending market could be worth four trillion yuan and growing 50 percent year-on-year.

Credit Suisse said the surge in private lending over the past 12 months “threatened financial stability” in China.

Unless local authorities make it easier for private businesses to get loans and cut taxes, 40 percent will close by early next year, the Wenzhou Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Development Association was quoted as saying.

Photo by Jonathan Rees

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Tags: China, Money