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Many times micro-businesses have been neglected when it comes to the national development of this country, reports Ben Ssebuguz at The Observer.
Most of the government programmes put their focus on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). All banks are looking at working with SMEs too, neglecting the Micro-businesses. The civil society organizations have also put their emphasis on SMEs, effectively shutting out the ‘micros’.
Because Micro-enterprises typically have no access to the commercial banking sector, they often rely on ‘Micro-Loans’ or ‘Micro- credit’ in order to be financed”.
According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, SMEs differentiate from country to country but by Ugandan standards, Small Enterprises employ more than 4-19 people, Medium Enterprises employ 19-100 people and Large Enterprises employ more than 100 people.
When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi, courtesy of Google, at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight.
Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.
The list includes the international airports in Miami and Orlando, which are among the world’s 30 busiest airports, as well as five others in Florida.
Travelers through smaller airports, such as Montana’s Billings and Bozeman, will also benefit.
Brian Spaly’s quest for the perfect pair of pants led him and former roommate Andy Dunn to start a Web-only clothing company that wants to sell men’s trousers that fit — without the need for fitting rooms writes The Associated Press.
Mass-market pants, the kind you find at chain stores, are often baggy and frumpy, with lots of extra fabric around the thigh, Spaly says. High-end designer pants, meanwhile, are expensive and too tight.
Bonobos aims for the comfy middle ground. Its pants, most of which cost $118, have a curved waistband, less fabric in the thighs than the frumpy pants its founders frown on, and a slight boot cut. They come in classic men’s colors, but also in orange, pale lavender and jungle green with bright flowers.
The company is so confident in its designs it accepts pants for return, free of postage for the buyer, no matter when they were bought and even if they’ve been washed, worn and hemmed.
Bonobos pants were born when Spaly used his girlfriend’s sewing machine to rip apart and hem his store-bought pants. As a business student at Stanford University in 2005, he focused on pants even as his classmates turned their eye toward technology. He was soon selling the pants to classmates.
TechCrunch reports on Chris Anderson’s presentation to the Y Combinator’s Startup School about Freemium Business Models.
Anderson likened freemium to handing out muffins on the street to entice people to start eating your muffins. But with muffins there’s a significant cost to giving away each muffin. With digital goods, you can give away 90% of your product for free, without any cost for those goods.
Anderson outlined some of the models he’s seen for Freemium models.
Feature limited
Gives users real utility initially, then they convert if they want it even better. But this also means that you have to build more features (things people would want to pay for). And you have to maintain multiple products.
Time Limited
Easy to do. But there’s less commitment and engagement.
Capacity limited
Easy to do (e.g. limit the number of megabytes in a Email box), but it doesn’t always work for a product.
Seat limited
Easy to do. But it doesn’t work for every product, and people can ‘cheat’ by only purchasing a few seats, or segmenting company into lots of 5 person teams so they’re free.
Customer Class Limited
Bizspark is free to businesses if you’re under 3 years old, less than a million in revenue. Once you graduate you pay. This is easy to implement, but harder to enforce. Anderson says that Chinese Pirates had a similar model with Microsoft — Bill Gates said that China was developing, if they were going to steal software, they’d rather they steal Microsoft’s software, so they develop for Microsoft.
Despite all the talk of venture capital, angel investors, business loans and the like, the fact is about one-third of startup funding comes from credit cards.
Plastic is the most popular source of outside financing to get businesses off the ground reports Entrepreneur.
So it’s important for startups to consider the effects of the federal Credit Card Act of 2009, even though the bill did not apply to small-business credit cards. The new regulations on consumer credit will have profound effects on how entrepreneurs finance their startups.
As a result of the Credit Card Act, credit companies are mailing bills earlier (21 days before the due date rather than 14 days, as required before). In addition, notifications of changes to fees, penalties and terms must be sent in advance, rather than retroactively (giving consumers the ability to opt out before the change takes effect).
The rest of the new rules are set to go into effect in February, including regulations on interest-rate increases and disclosure rules that more clearly spell out the cost of financing using credit cards.
Stephanie Rolle’s mother, Betty, started baking her special oatmeal cookies with raisins last fall.
“People just fell in love with them,” said Rolle, who recently opened Savannah’s Gourmet Cookies, Treats and Gifts in the Crowne Plaza hotel.
Then people asked, “Can you be the concession at our high school play?” A bride called and said, “Can you do cookies at my wedding reception?”
Before they knew it, the mother and daughter were shipping cookies as Christmas gifts to customers who wanted them in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey.
“We had to cut off the orders on Christmas Eve,” Rolle said.
“I told my family, ‘If you want Christmas dinner, it will be cookies.’”
In July their cottage business got a brick-and-mortar home. Rolle and her mother, Bernadine “Betty” Lazier, set up shop in a former Starbucks.
Rolle, who also owns a consulting firm, decided to call the shop Savannah’s “for the daughter I would have had if I would have had a daughter.”
The wedding day is a special moment in any couples life and it is one that can be quite costly. Put that together with the millions of people that are getting married each year and that makes this a very profitable industry to be in.
This is something Patricia Ottoni, the owner of The Goodie Bar, knows a lot about. Besides the profit value of an industry like this, Patricia also realizes how specific—and sometimes quite unique—the demands can be for wedding accessories. That is why Patricia offers “countless products” on her website, each selectively chosen from a variety of vendors. If the bride and groom cannot find what they are looking for or they want something different, it only takes a quick look through her catalog where it will most likely be found.
Tell us a little about The Goodie Bar.
The Goodie Bar is an on-line retail store specializing in wedding favors, accessories and invitations. We have something for every style and every budget, and cater to a clientele that wants to be original, fun, and hip…although we do offer more traditional items as well. We also recently opened our door to the local market in our area, servicing brides in Montreal, QC.
If you have a million dollar idea and need some advice on how to get started, a new book and an inventor’s conference may be your ticket to booming business says 9News.com.
The Hoola Hoop, Crocs, Post-it Notes, The Snuggie – all simple ideas that turned into millions of dollars for independent inventors and stimulated the economy in depressions and recessions.
So just how do you turn that little idea, like blankets with sleeves, into cold hard cash?
Louis Foreman, author of the new book “The Independent Inventor’s Handbook” and Executive Producer of the PBS show “Everyday Edisons” says it is all about profitability.
“The first thing you want to do if you have a great idea and we all have great ideas is to figure out whether or not you can actually make money from your idea. I’ve seen too many inventors go down a path of pursuing an invention only to find out later that there’s not an economic return to be justified from that investment,” Foreman said.
Foreman says even though the economy is sluggish, the recession is the best time for innovation.
His business is called, appropriately, IWearYourShirt.com. And that $85,000 per year has a nice ring to it. Think you could do something like this?
When you look at his pricing (no more than $365 per day) it’s not so bad for the potential exposure if he does a good job. One big newspaper ad could cost that much.
He promotes his “T-Shirt” using Social Media Tools like online video. My first thought was he must spend all his time walking around New York City!
Trendspotter Springwise is reporting that of the 140 million cell phones sold in the US in 2007, only 10% were recycled, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
That leaves a mounting pile of e-waste to deal with. Offering a solution is EcoATM, an automated reuse-and-recycle machine that makes it easy and financially rewarding for consumers to offload their abandoned electronics.
The process is simple: a customer feeds the machine an old mobile phone and it analyses the device and assigns it a value. If the phone has a resale value, the customer receives store credit, or can donate the amount to charity. If there’s no resale value, customers can choose to have the handset recycled.
The first EcoATM was installed in Omaha, Nebraska, and has already proved successful, with 23 phones collected on the first day.
It’s likely to hold appeal for retailers and manufacturers too, as the system is designed to facilitate compliance with new federal ‘takeback’ laws. Although it currently only takes mobile phones, EcoATM will soon be able to accept a range of consumer electronics including MP3 players, digital cameras and even computers and printers.
The incentive for EcoATM is clear: an estimated 12 billion dollars is currently sitting in drawers across America in the form of old phones.
A mom who is using her life savings to set herself up as an inventor is ready to release her first product – the Snooze Shade writes The Surrey Herald.
Cara Sayer, 37, says the product aimed to make mum’s lives easier, by providing a removable shade to attach to prams (strollers).
The idea came to her when she was struggling to protect her daughter Holly, now two, when she was a baby in her pram in 2008.
Cara, said: “I was sitting at Cafe Rouge in Weybridge and I was spending a lot of time trying to cover the babies, with coats and various other items, while trying to keep them asleep for as long as possible. It seemed like such a simple idea, that I thought about it quite a few times after that. It wasn’t until some of my girlfriends said that I should do it that I bought some fabric.”
The shade is a blackout blind designed to be pulled over the front of buggies, to either shade children or to encourage them to sleep.
Cara is now putting the finishing touches on her website and preparing for the official launch of Snooze Shade in February when it will be sold by children’s clothes and products store, Jojo Maman Bebe as well as by herself on her website.
PR.com is reporting that Atek, Inc. is making a timely flu season introduction of the Touch-Stick, a key-size implement used for hygienically pushing, tapping, and signing store keypads, ATM machines, elevator buttons, gas pump buttons, and other publicly touched electronic devices.
The patent-pending Touch-Stick features a flat round tip for pushing mechanical buttons, a cleverly integrated stylus tip for tapping and signing electronic screens, and key ring compatibility for convenience and high availability.
The product, which is made of a durable polycarbonate ABS plastic blend and is initially available in black, grey, blue, red, and white colors, was invented by Dan Rothman, president of Atek.
“In the most extreme cases, store clerks told us that some customers refuse to even touch the terminals and ask the clerks to do it for them. Supermarkets have wipes for shopping cart handles but germ protection is not available for point-of-sale machines and other publicly used devices.”
In my experience, learning as much as possible how other people do things lets you find the “model” that most directly fits your own needs and personality.
Finding models, examples, case studies about ideas and procedures that worked are worth seeking out. In articles like this one you may have those vague ideas in your mind “gel” and give you the plan you’ve been looking for all your life.
You know you want to start a business—but you’re not sure exactly what that business should be. Fear not. While some lucky entrepreneurs do get a flash of inspiration that sets them on the path to success, others need to hunt for the right idea. In fact, talk to serial entrepreneurs about how they come up with new business concepts, and you’ll find they often have a well-structured methodology for coming up with great ideas. In this slide show, 20 entrepreneurs tell BusinessWeek how they struck gold, whether it was a bolt from the blue or the result of a disciplined search process. (Notes: A handful of the featured entrepreneurs are running early-stage ventures that are not yet generating significant revenue; comments are edited.)
With the current economic situation, many business owners are taking it upon themselves to publicly complain about how the stimulus money is being spent, complaining about how some companies are getting stimulus money when they don’t deserve it. All this is doing is wasting their time when they should be out there trying to stimulate the economy themselves. No one is going to do it for them.
When you stimulate the economy using your brain power rather than your constant complaining it shows everyone around you that you are above all of the pettiness, you are a strong willed business leader. So how do you stimulate the economy using your brain? Well Escape From Cubicle Nation suggests several different avenues to take such as mentoring another business that is in your same niche. Provide them with support, ideas, helpful suggestions and maybe a little investment to help them get back on their feet.
Think about others rather than just yourself. Try sending out emails to fellow business colleges talking up some businesses that you think are worth talking about and sending business their way. Maybe attend a meeting in your community, something along the lines of your Chamber of Commerce meetings to provide some input on how things can be better in the community.
Reuters is reporting that General Mills is extending an invitation to scientists, researchers, engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs around the globe to visit the company`s new innovation portal.
Visitors to the site can find opportunities to partner with General Mills on initiatives across the company`s extensive portfolio of leading consumer brands.
The new G-WIN innovation portal provides visitors with details on nearly 50 technical challenges that the company is looking to solve. Those who join the G-WIN community by registering online will receive ongoing updates about specific technical challenges that match their unique abilities and expertise.
“We are absolutely committed to changing the way we invent through connected innovation,” said Peter Erickson, senior vice president of Innovation, Technology and Quality at General Mills. “Connected innovation is very much a part of our culture. The new innovation portal, powered by inno360`s software, provides us with a wonderful tool to make the process more efficient.”
Inventors with two or more patent applications pending at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can have one of their patents fast-tracked – “jumped to the head of the line,” in the words of USPTO director David Kappos – provided inventors abandon one of their less pressing applications, reports Inventors Digest.
The move is part of a sweeping and – in some circles – controversial set of reforms he intends to implement to help reduce the backlog of 770,000 pending applications – a backlog that is hamstringing innovation and job creation, Kappos said. (One USPTO staffer says the backlog is closer to 800,000.)
The program, he said, “is specifically designed to accelerate the patent process for independent inventors. This backlog reduction pilot project will be made available only to small and medium-sized entities and will give you the opportunity to receive special, accelerated status for a new application if you abandon a pending, unexamined application.
They fix lunch, shepherd the kids to swim lessons, do the laundry and somehow find the time to create businesses. They’re Mompreneurs, entrepreneurial moms who walk the tightrope between family and business, looking after the kids and the bottom line at the same time.
Maybe it’s the economy, but moms on a mission to make money seem to be everywhere. Nationally, 10.1 million firms are owned by women, accounting for $1.9 trillion in sales, says the National Association of Women Business Owners. These 10.1 million firms employ 13 million people, a sign that Mom is often on her own, working from home around the kids’ schedules.
Michelle Spelman, a Newport mother of three young boys, and her husband just launched a card game called Jukem Football, and she spends a lot of time on the road pitching it to toy stores around the country. In August, she took her 10-year-old on a sales trip up the New England coast from Boston to Maine, stopping to cold call every toy store on the way. Business can benefit from a mother’s intuition, says Elizabeth Edwards, whose downtown firm, Neyer Holdings, helped finance the card game venture. “Those instincts paired with business instincts make them a force to be reckoned with,” she says.
Dissatisfaction with the sacrifices required to climb the corporate ladder is driving the Mompreneur trend, says Kim Lavine, Michigan-based author of “Mommy Millionaire.” “Women are dropping out of the workforce in record numbers,” she said. “They refuse to sacrifice their family anymore for their careers.”
How many of us can truly say we found our life’s calling? Sewing found Johnny Wimberly as a teenager, long before he found this work as a small business owner, running Jed’s Custom Services in Sheridan, reports 9News.com.
In 1992, Wimberly was convicted of aggravated armed robbery and spent six years in prison.
“I went to prison basically with no skills,” Wimberly said.
Then he discovered sewing in an inmate training program which led to several jobs in prison and work after his release.
“I didn’t go try to get a job that had anything to do with banking or money, because most people, their first thought of talking to a felon is that they can’t be trusted,” Wimberly said.
Since 1992, he has much more: a loving wife who eventually helped him start his own business, and a daughter who helps run it.
Even during a credit squeeze when getting a loan is unheard of, Wimberly is no longer alone in this new struggle.
“Everything I have is in this company. I can’t imagine doing something without it. So what do you do? You quit and take a loss? Or do you just keep going and depend on your customers to come and bring you work?”
Like many big organizations, Comcast Corp. is taking precautions to halt the spread of H1N1 flu. For one, it has distributed bottles of hand sanitizer to employees reports The Chicago Tribune.
But Comcast, the nation’s largest residential Internet provider, with 14 million high-speed subscribers, may have a bigger problem if the flu leads to rampant absenteeism by students and workers. All those people may be online at home simultaneously, a recent government report warned, causing an Internet meltdown.
Homebound workers and ailing children could overload the Internet with video game downloads, Web surfing, online shopping and Webcast viewing. Neighborhood telecommunication nodes that act as traffic cops for the Internet could be overwhelmed with data.
A Government Accountability Office report released late last month said the Internet could slow dramatically if worker absenteeism reached 40 percent — a reasonable speculation for a severe flu outbreak.
Trendspotter Springwise has an interesting holiday story about renting….Christmas trees.
For all the traditional merriment they embody, Christmas trees are a) awkward to transport and b) terribly depressing when they’re discarded in January.
No longer if Los Angeles landscape architect Scott Martin has his way; he founded The Living Christmas Company, which gives Los Angeles residents the chance to temporarily rent a living Christmas tree and have it delivered right to their door.
Unlike regular Christmas trees, around 20 million of which are felled each year in the US, living trees are transplanted, roots and all, into pots to be enjoyed over the festive period.
After the holidays, Scott and his team pick up the trees, replant them and nuture them until next year.
Customers can order a living tree from the company’s website; sizes range from 3–8 feet and prices—including delivery and collection by bio-diesel truck—are comparable to those of felled trees.
While the company isn’t the first to offer tree rentals for Christmas, it is the first we’ve seen that lets customers adopt a pine, allowing them to share Christmas with the same tree year after year, watching it grow along with their family. Adopted trees are tracked by barcode.
The Business Pundit has put together a list of the unique origins of 25 popular products.
In 1928, accountant Walter Diemer worked at Fleer, but experimented with gum recipes on the side. One of his ingredient combinations was less sticky and stretchier than other gums. He discovered that it he could blow bubbles with it.
Excited by the new gum’s potential, Diemer brought two kilograms of it to a grocery store. It sold out in one afternoon. It didn’t take long for bubble gum to catch on with kids.
In 1951, the Topps Company added a stick of it to their baseball card packages, replacing the old gift of a cigarette. It became an instant tradition.
The reason bubblegum is traditionally pink is that it was the original color used by Diemer, as it was the only color he had when he made it.
World-wide bubble gum sales in 2006 is estimated to be around $3 billion.
Entrepreneur has an interview with Sean Spector, who, in 2002, co-founded Gamefly, an online company that is to gamers what Netflix is to movie lovers.
What inspired you to start Gamefly?
I had a voracious appetite for video games, and I couldn’t afford to buy all the games I wanted to play. I think that’s the conundrum for most gamers: They want way more than they can afford. I looked at the traditional rental model–which is the brick-and-mortar model–and realized that it was pretty good for movies, but it was broken for games.
What were some of the hurdles you faced during startup?
When we started this company, it was post-bubble burst. Nobody was really looking at funding dot-coms. They had sort of gone out of fashion–especially dot-coms that held inventory. So it was definitely a contrarian play, for us as well as for the investors. It was a really good time to start a company, not that dissimilar from the way things are today. Really good companies are going to emerge from this shakeout, and I think the same thing happened back in 2002. Real business models need to be created to sustain growth and become profitable. I knew from Day One that we would have a real business model that generates real revenue, and not the reliance upon “If we build it, the profitable model will come.”
Owen Voorhees may seem like an unlikely tech entrepreneur because he’s just 11-years old.
But according to an Inc.com story, for the last nine months Voorhees has climbed a mountain of doubt, overcame unfamiliar programming languages and pored over college level computer science textbooks–all to develop his very own iPhone application.
His app, MathTime, debuted in the App Store and quickly rose to No. 13 in the paid, educational apps section.
The premise of MathTime is simple; it takes the old-fashioned flashcard “mad minute” drill idea and adds a new media twist. Participants can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone, one to show the problem, one to display the answer.
“I thought it would be cool,” said the Hinsdale, Ill.-native, adding, “It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up” on the App Store.
After he established the basic premise of the game, Owen’s 9-year-old brother Finn designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple.
“Nothing’s impossible if you don’t know it’s impossible,” said John Voorhees, Owen and Finn’s father, who created an app account and provided a bank number for the boys. “He dug into it all by himself, I didn’t touch a line of code.”
