Blackberry's parent company, Research in Motion, will reportedly launch a tablet to go up against the iPad in November. The story comes from Bloomberg quoting "two anonymous sources familiar with the company's plans".

Although RIM has not blessed the story, we do know this; it has registerd the web address "blackpad.com". Those same sources say that this is what the tablet will indeed be called.

I hope this isn't true. Memo to tech industry from a woman; anything ending in "pad" is a bad idea. If you need any evidence that these companies are still largely male-dominated look no further than this tone-deaf marketing to women.

Okay, my estrogen levels are lowering now. Back to the story.

So this "Blackpad" will presumably have the same size screen as the iPad (9.7 inches). It will have cameras front and back for videoconferencing and be tricked out for Bluetooth and WiFi. Users will be able to tether with their Blackberry phones for Internet access, as well. Pricing will start at $499 (just like another device that starts with a little "i" and ends in "Pad").

So does RIM actually have a shot with this thing?

Short answer: yes.

RIM does have its work cut out for itself. Apple has over 200,000 apps in its store. RIM has about six thousand to date.

However, it would make sense for the iPad to rule the "tablet as a toy" space, while the Blackpad positions itself as "tablet as a tool" device.

CNN checks in with Trevor Blackwell, the founder of Anybots, a company that is attempting to help CEOs micromanage, even when they're nowhere near the office. With robots!

I test drove Blackwell's robot, QB, during Inc.'s work from home month, and I must say I found it totally awesome. You control the robot using a Web browser that runs a simple Firefox plug in and move it by using the arrows on your keyboard. The robot has sensors that automatically activate a brake if, for instance, you accidentally run it into a wall--or intentionally try to assault an employee.

Blackwell, who is also a partner in Y Combinator (the two companies share office space), tells CNN that telepresence robots like QB will be common in Silicon Valley offices within a year.

Toni Bowers at TechRepublic has written about a new syndrome that afflicts many of us. Symptoms include posting something compromising or embarrassing about ourselves online and then regretting it later. Sound familiar?

Since the advent of social media, there have been many horror stories of people losing relationships, jobs or even just face over inappropriate posts. A new study has shown that 54% of people under the age of 25 have posted something online that they later regretted. Over the age of 25, the number goes down to 27%. It is interesting to see the generation gap – are older social media users more cautious?

It reminds me of when I first discovered email in the late 80's. Sometimes my fingers went faster than my brain and I hit the send button a little faster than wisdom would have warranted. Almost lost a friend over one of those indiscretions. How about you?

Read more of Curt's musings on entrepreneurship, management and technology

Publicity stunts are on my mind this week. This past Sunday night on the premiere of Mad Men, Peggy suggests paying women to fight over a ham, and scores press coverage for her client. I arrived in Manhattan on Monday morning to find Herald Square turned into a park with an artificial hill, trees and a new Ford Explorer 2011 (which had been revealed on Facebook only two hours prior.)

Launching your business should be a deliberate, calculated event. You should prepare, have press materials ready, generate online materials as well, to make sure that people who want to find out more about you can do so easily. But you might consider the value of a stunt to generate attention and sales.

Jim Kukral, author of the book, "Attention! This Book Will Make You Money", as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant has worked with large brands like Fedex and Sherwin Williams. He told me about this small biz example from his book. “Grasshopper.com provides a virtual phone solution for entrepreneurs who want to sound professional and stay connected…Grasshopper knew that in order to stand out and get some buzz going, and new customers, that they had to do something different. Their solution? Package up 5,000 packs of real chocolate covered grasshoppers and send them out to 5,000 influencers on the Web. People like bloggers and technology pundits and in general people who could, and would, talk about them…This got them a 4,911% traffic increase from April to May, 144,843 video views with 162 comments, 1,500 tweets, 120 blog posts in one month and 7 national TV mentions.”

You might not generate as much excitement as Grasshopper.com. But something as simple as “Free Ice Cream to the first 10 people who prove they’re our Fans on Facebook or show us this Tweet” can be just as much fun on a small scale.

Peter Shankman, founder of HARO and Author of “Can We Do that?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – And Why Your Company Needs Them” told me “A stunt for the sake a stunt is pointless. Tie it into something in the news, tie it into what's going on in the world. Make cupcakes? Send some to Lindsay. Offer career coaching? Give it to Mel Gibson, he'll need it. But don't just put something out into the universe without a bigger plan. PR is an ongoing process. One good piece should lead to another. It should foster growth inside and outside the organization. The blessing of a good media piece is a powerful growth tool, both to clients and to employees as well.” A timely example: Beach Bum tanning salon did a “Free Lindsay Lohan” rally the other day.

Once you’ve pulled off your ‘stunt’ you need to be able to capitalize on the publicity you’ve generated. Can people find your store, business or site online? Do you have a special offer for people who have shown up for the first time because of your stunt? Do you have a way for them to sign up for a permission-based email list so you can keep in touch with them in the future?

Doing something people will talk about around the water cooler (real or virtual) is an accomplishment. But being able to capture the attention and turn it into leads and sales is the real trick.

What can your startup learn from the value of pulling a simple stunt?

Publicity stunts are on my mind this week. This past Sunday night on the premiere of Mad Men, Peggy suggests paying women to fight over a ham, and scores press coverage for her client. I arrived in Manhattan on Monday morning to find Herald Square turned into a park with an artificial hill, trees and a new Ford Explorer 2011 (which had been revealed on Facebook only two hours prior.)

Launching your business should be a deliberate, calculated event. You should prepare, have press materials ready, generate online materials as well, to make sure that people who want to find out more about you can do so easily. But you might consider the value of a stunt to generate attention and sales.

Jim Kukral, author of the book, "Attention! This Book Will Make You Money",(http://attentionthebook.com) as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant has worked with large brands like Fedex and Sherwin Williams. He told me about this small biz example from his book. “Grasshopper.com provides a virtual phone solution for entrepreneurs who want to sound professional and stay connected…Grasshopper knew that in order to stand out and get some buzz going, and new customers, that they had to do something different. Their solution? Package up 5,000 packs of real chocolate covered grasshoppers and send them out to 5,000 influencers on the Web. People like bloggers and technology pundits and in general people who could, and would, talk about them…This got them a 4,911% traffic increase from April to May, 144,843 video views with 162 comments, 1,500 tweets, 120 blog posts in one month and 7 national TV mentions.”

You might not generate as much excitement as Grasshopper.com. But something as simple as “Free Ice Cream to the first 10 people who prove they’re our Fans on Facebook or show us this Tweet” can be just as much fun on a small scale.

Peter Shankman, founder of HARO http://helpareporter.com/ and Author of “Can We Do that?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – And Why Your Company Needs Them” http://www.amazon.com/Outrageous-Stunts-Work-Company-Needs/dp/047004392X told me “A stunt for the sake a stunt is pointless. Tie it into something in the news, tie it into what's going on in the world. Make cupcakes? Send some to Lindsay. Offer career coaching? Give it to Mel Gibson, he'll need it. But don't just put something out into the universe without a bigger plan. PR is an ongoing process. One good piece should lead to another. It should foster growth inside and outside the organization. The blessing of a good media piece is a powerful growth tool, both to clients and to employees as well.” A timely example: Beach Bum tanning salon did a “Free Lindsay Lohan” rally yesterday http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/27/beach-bum-tanning-salons-free-lindsay-rally-only-a-publicity-stunt/ .

Once you’ve pulled off your ‘stunt’ you need to be able to capitalize on the publicity you’ve generated. Can people find your store, business or site online? Do you have a special offer for people who have shown up for the first time because of your stunt? Do you have a way for them to sign up for a permission-based email list so you can keep in touch with them in the future?

Doing something people will talk about around the water cooler (real or virtual) is an accomplishment. But being able to capture the attention and turn it into leads and sales is the real trick.

What can your startup learn from the value of pulling a simple stunt?

In sifting through small-business bankruptcy data, it wasn’t surprising to see that the hardest hit areas in terms of sheer numbers are in California. After all, not only is it our most populous state, but it was also ground zero of the subprime meltdown.

According to recent data from Equifax, the three metropolitan areas with the most bankruptcies among businesses with fewer than 100 employees in the first quarter of 2010 were Los Angeles (1,035 bankruptcies), Riverside (736) and Sacramento (522) – all of which are located in the Golden State. And things are still getting worse: all three of those areas experienced a double-digit percent increase in bankruptcies compared to a year earlier.

But what was really striking in the data was the surge in bankruptcies experienced in some smaller markets.

In the first quarter of 2009, Springfield, Mass. saw just one small business bankruptcy. The first quarter of 2010? Seventeen. The number of bankruptcies in the Manchester, New Hampshire area leapt from 22 to 130, an almost 500 percent increase. Other areas with major increasess: Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss., Fort Wayne, Ind., Green Bay, Wisc., Wilmington, N.C., and Anchorage, AK.

In total, small-business bankruptcies at least doubled in 14 metropolitan areas.

What this tells me is that no area has been insulated from the recession and the economy clearly isn’t rebounding quickly enough. Just last week, we saw data that showed sales at small businesses eroded at an even faster pace in the first half of this year than in 2009. Businesses can only hang on for so long.

With nowhere left to cut costs and sales still spiraling downward, we should expect to see plenty more small-business owners making Chapter 7, 11 and 13 filings. And we can expect to find them pretty much anywhere and everywhere.

Have you been considering hiring some new employees? Has it been awhile since you added staff? If so, then let us offer you a refresher course on how to manage the process. The following guide brings together tools you can use to manage the process including deciding what positions to hire, structuring job interviews, and effectively onboarding new employees.

Tools You Need For Hiring: Job Posting and Pre-Screening

Your time is extremely valuable, so when deciding to hire additional staff you want the process to be as quick, efficient, and effective as possible. Start by determining what positions you need to fill. The Position Request Form will walk you through the parameters you shoul take into account when hiring a new employee. Its purpose is to help you define the need for a new employee and what alternatives might exist for your company. You may not need to make a new hire, for example, but to reorganize responsibilities among your current staff. This document helps you to avoid wasting time and money on a hire you may not need.

If you have determined that you do need to increase your staff, it's time to write the job description. You can use this generic Job Description Template that can be customized to your needs or use one of the many job descriptions available on Inc.com.

Once the job has been posted on your website and on job sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and SimplyHired you will get resumes from interested candidates. Be sure to immediately sort resumes as you get them in piles that include interested, not interested, and save for future position folders.

One way to save time on your search is to send a Pre-Interview Questionnaire to the candidates whose resumes immediately grab your attention. Based on a resume and the answers to the questionnaire, you can determine whether an applicant should be contacted for an in-person interview.

As a courtesy to those that submitted a resume and answered the questionnaire but didn't quite meet your expectations for the position, you can send them a Pre-Interview Rejection Letter. This might seem like an unnecessary step but it is polite, and has the added benefit of saving you from having to respond to follow-up e-mails and phone calls.

Dig Deeper: How to Write a Job Description

Tools You Need For Hiring: The Interview

Now that you have selected the job candidates you are interested in meeting, it's a good idea to set up the interviews. Most companies handle interviews in a casual way, but some take a more formal approach. If you would like to add structure to your interview process, either because you are hiring so many new employees that it is hard to keep track of them, you should incorporate an Interview Letter for Employment into your process. This form simply should give the details of the interview location and time, who the candidate will be meeting with as well as outlines the job description. It can be paired with an Employment Application and Job Applicant Reference Request. The interview letter Having the candidates bring a completed employment application and reference request to the interview will save you time on processing. It will also give you some insight into how meticulous a candidate is when it comes to completing a task.

It's now time for the interview and there are questions you should ask and questions you should avoid asking because they put you at risk for violating Equal Employment Opportunity Commission laws. Be sure to ask questions relevant to the position, and also to look for a good cultural fit. The person not only has to be able to do the job but they have to work well with others on the staff. Another way to safeguard against hiring someone who isn't a good fit with the staff is to include several colleagues in the interview process. Allow a few people that will work with the new hire to interview and complete a Co-Employee Applicant Appraisal Form. It also let's your employees know that their opinion matters and that each person is a highly valued part of your company.

As a courtesy to the job candidates that came in for an interview, but you know you are not interested in them for the position, send them a Post Interview Rejection Letter. Like the pre-interview rejection letter, this correspondence politely lets candidates know that although they are no longer being considered for the position, but that you will keep their resume on file for future positions.

Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Employment Application


Tools You Need For Hiring: The Job Offer

After you have vetted several job candidates, it's time to decide who your new hire will be. If you are debating between several candidates this Pre-Employment Checklist may help you to make your final decision. The first thing you should do is a Pre-Hiring Reference Check. Use this form to make sure you know who you're hiring before you ask them to sign on.

When the references have checked out, it is time to send the Offer Letter. Here are several examples of Job Offer Letters that you can customize to your needs. Be sure to include an Employee Information Sheet, I-9 form, W-4 form, Background Check Authorization, Consent to Physical Exam Form, Reference Release Form, Employee Confidentiality Agreement and other documentation that may be necessary for employment. You can reference this Personnel File Checklist if you are not sure of what forms you need to keep your employee records straight.

It is highly recommended that you hold off on sending Rejection Letters to the other job finalists until your top choice has accepted the offer. You also want to make sure that person clears all background checks and testing before letting the other finalists know that they were not selected.

Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Hiring Practices

Tools You Need For Hiring: Orientation and Beyond

You have gone through the hiring process and it is the first day for your new employee. Reference the New Employee Orientation Checklist to make sure your new employee learns everything they need to know about their new job and workplace.

You should make the new employee aware of any company policies such as Compensation, Pension, Vacation, Voice Mail/Email/Internet Policy and any other important policies. These should also be included in the Employee Handbook. If all company policies are included in the Employee Handbook then it is in your best interest to have your new employee sign an Employee Handbook Receipt to acknowledge that they received the Employee Handbook and that it is their responsibility to be familiar with all company policies. If there are any other documents that your new employee needs to complete like an Employment Agreement, Non-Compete Agreement or Information Release Form have them do that during orientation.

To show your new employee that you want them to succeed in the position you can include a tip sheet on How To Be an Excellent Employee in their orientation materials. Setting forth a list of desired behaviors helps you maintain communication and positive relations with your employees. The first 60 to 90 days for a new hire are extremely important. To track progress during this period, and to gain valuable insight about your company from the new hire, ask them to complete this 60-Day New Employee Survey. This form allows new hires to add immediate value to a company by sharing what remains of their outside perspective. It can also serve as a review of a new hire.

Dig Deeper: How to Build an Onboarding Plan for a New Hire

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today:

Cashing in on clutter. Today's Wall Street Journal tells the story of Matt Paxton, founder of Clutter Cleaner, and how he used reality TV to gain exposure for his brand. When the company first started and Paxton was cash-strapped, he posted a message on Facebook, asking friends if they had any connections in the television industry. That initial request led him to a contact at Screaming Flea Productions, the company behind the reality show "Hoarders." Now, Clutter Cleaner has been featured in more than 12 episodes, hauling and sorting through the trash collected by compulsive hoarders. Though the company is still bringing in a modest $500,000 in revenue each year, Paxton tells the Journal, "The television exposure means that we don't have to advertise anymore...And we don't have to explain what we do. We can sell our service in a five-second sound bite."

Facebook delaying IPO...again. Well, probably. Bloomberg reports that Facebook will "probably" push back its initial public offering another year, until 2012. It cited three unnamed sources "familiar with the matter" who said the company would benefit from another year of growth before adding the scrutiny of a public listing. But with CEO Mark Zuckerberg still holding board control, he could push for a sale at any time - and it could be the largest IPO since Google's in 2004. Last year, experts seemed to think Zuckerberg would push for a 2010 IPO, and more recently, it's been expected to happen in 2011. But 40 companies have delayed or withdrawn IPOs this year in the United States, Bloomberg reports, so maybe the $24.9 billion-valued company is just going with the flow. After all, Zuckerberg's last public statement on when he'd take the company public was "when it makes sense."

Fred Wilson gets defensive. In a wide-ranging blog post, the venture capitalist chimes in on Twitter and Foursquare haters, the angel-investment explosion, and why entrepreneurs need lead investors.

Survival tips for the long haul flight. A business trip to Asia or Europe can be an exciting cultural experience. What's less exciting (and a little more exhausting) is the thought of the 12-hour flight to get there. Business Insider has put together a slideshow with some practical tips for making long haul flights a little more bearable, starting with a suggestion to try not to dress like Pamela Anderson. "If you're going to be stuck on a cramped plane for hours, it's a good idea to wear loose, comfortable clothing that won't restrict your movements." The slideshow also include tips on packing, portable electronics, and fighting jet lag. For a list of the top picks for hotels, airlines, and travel gadgets and accessories, don't miss the Inc. Business Travel 50.

Getting in on the boom in virtual goods. It seems that behemoths of the video game industry are looking for a new way to squeeze cash from nerdy pockets. The Wall Street Journal (via AllThingsD) reports that, not only did the virtual goods market exploded from $278 million in 2008 to a projected $1.7 billion this year in the U.S. alone, but big names like Sony and Time Warner are eschewing subscription models in favor of selling virtual goods to their audiences. Here's how you can set up your own virtual goods market, as well as the story of two indie game developers who made major bank by letting customers pay whatever they wanted.

Earlier this summer, I endorsed the prediction that we'd see sub $100 eReaders from the likes of Amazon, etc. by the end of the year. Maybe. Welll, you can now forget that "maybe" as far as I'm concerned. Amazon announced this week that it's Kindle line will now be starting at $139, by next month. There's a no-name eReader brand (Copia) that will soon be out for $99 (here we are!).

eReader prices are sinking like a stone. I believe they are destined to be just software apps on other all-in-one devices like the iPad, other near-future tablets coming out, and smartphones. There's no need for them to have their own hardware. It's happening faster that I even expected.

eReaders are not alone. With the advent of powerful smartphones and now touch tablets coming into play, the trend is clear: all-in-one devices are in and multiple devices are just stupid.

Here's my top five list of gadgets destined to go the way of the 8 Track player.

1. eReaders (as mentioned)

2. DVD Players (including Blu-Ray): This will take a little longer because so many have so much invested in their collections. But the younger generation coming up has less of an issue with that.

3. Point and Shoot Cameras (including video): Who wants to carry around a mobile device AND a digital camera? Meanwhile, the quality of cameras on smartphones just get better and better.

4. GPS Devices: again, this is a piece of software that can house just as easily on a smartphone. Why do I need mutliple devices for this?

5. iPods/MP3 Players: see above.

Other gadgets I would also say are suspect for the same reasons; portable gaming devices and even lower end video cameras (like the Flip Camera).

The only caveat I would add to portable gaming devices is that for younger kids who wouldn't likely have their own smartphone, it makes sense to still have a stand-alone gaming device.

At Y Combinator's AngelConf yesterday, Michael Arrington bemoaned the proliferation of, as he called them, "dipshit companies." I suppose by this he meant companies that offer unassuming products and services--and entrepreneurs whose chief ambition is to sell out to a larger enterprise for a relatively small amount of money.

There's something undeniably seductive about this line of thinking, especially as it applies to so-called Web 2.0 start-ups, which often offer dead simple services built on top of existing ones. After all, it's hard to get excited about a company like Voyurl, which, TechCrunch tells us is, "Blippy for web browsing," which in turn was billed as "Twitter for credit cards." How could a company that lets me share my web browsing history or my credit card purchases with my Facebook friends create lasting value or make the world a better place? Why would a serious entrepreneur start with such a trivial premise?

The trouble is that these start-ups seem only trivial until they change the world. Back when I was writing about Twitter two and a half years ago, most serious business people thought that the service was a joke. Then this happened. And this. And this. Today, one can argue about the Twitter's long-term prospects as a business, but it would be crazy to call the company trivial. Twitter has had a marked influence on world events, has become a legitimate source of news, and has made businesses millions of dollars.

In fact, the "dipshit company" formulation sounds eerily similar to Clayton Christensen's definition of disruptive innovation:

Fred Wilson makes this point especially well:

More than one in six marriages over the past three years were the result of relationships begun online, a recent study on social media and dating behavior found. When so many people are turning to the Internet to find soul mates, you can rest assured they are looking online for everything else – from their next pair of Oakleys to a new optometrist – and if you are a business seeking customers, you are well-advised to look online, too. You've heard it before: Social media is no longer an option; it's a necessity.

Nielsen recently published a study stating that 79 percent of large corporations are leveraging social media to engage their audience, and they are using innovative ways to build buzz, establish relationships, foster communication, improve products, and cultivate long-term brand awareness and consumer trust.

It doesen't matter whether you're a seasoned producer of award-winning viral campaigns or are just learning how to create a Facebook profile. The beauty of social media is that you don't need experience; you only need to learn a few basic rules. Social media is not so much a new idea as it is a way to communicate ideas, and the nature of a good idea hasn't changed. The same marketing principles from 50 years ago apply today; they are simply communicated in a different way.

Dig Deeper: The Truth About Who's Using Twitter

Creating a Social Media Strategy: How to Approach a Building an Online Campaign

Social media is ultimately about relationships. It should be viewed as a two-way street. As a brand, you aren't there to promote a product, you are there to communicate and relate. If you approach social media with sales as your end goal, your audience will notice and, most likely, you will be ignored.

On the other hand, if you offer your audience something of value, and your message is genuine, aka you aren't faking it, consumers are inclined to listen. Offer users engaging content, helpful information, streamlined customer service, or incentives like discounts and free gifts consistently, and you have the makings of a healthy long-term relationship with a brand ambassador willing to sing your praises to the world.

From that point on, as long as you pull your weight by keeping your message consistent, authentic and meaningful, consumers tend to stay loyal and express that in revenue generated over time and positive word-of-mouth expressed among their peers. That's the real return on social media.

Dig Deeper: How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing


Creating a Social Media Strategy: The Companies Behind Four Great Social-Media Promotions

The basic principles behind a successful social-media campaign – engaging content and authenticity – apply whether you are launching a celebrity-driven viral campaign or a simple online contest to drive website traffic. Designing the campaign, from concept to content to delivery, is where you can be creative; to design a good one requires careful analysis of your goals and your target audience's behavior in order to deliver a message that engages in the most effective and interesting way possible.

Still, even with so many variables, most successful social media campaigns are modeled after prototypes that employ proven promotional tactics and conventional marketing psychology. The challenge is not so much in the concept, but rather in its execution.

Seem complicated? In the following real-world examples, we will explore how you can win in the social media marketing game - no matter what you are selling and to whom.

1. Raise brand awareness by hosting an online game or contest.

When trendy women's shoe designer Naughty Monkey approached my consulting company Wpromote, there was already a positive buzz surrounding the brand. Their shoes peppered fashion magazines. However, Naughty Monkey had only a limited reach, so capitalizing on the existing buzz by building a social media presence made perfect sense.

The concept was simple. In a "Where have your Naughty Monkey's Been?" contest, users were asked to submit pictures of themselves in interesting locations wearing their Naughty Monkey shoes. Users voted for their favorite pictures and the winners received a year's supply of Naughty Monkey shoes.

The result? Thousands of new Facebook fans, tens of thousands of engaged users, an established social-media presence, and the creation of many valuable brand evangelists for the up-and-coming fashion footwear label.

2. Drive valuable traffic to your social network with a free giveaway.

If designing and executing an online game or contest seems daunting, you can always go back to basics and appeal to a universal human truth: People love free stuff.

When ScanDigital, my online photo scanning and video digitization service, wanted to build a fan base and drive user engagement via Facebook, we used its monthly newsletter to promote a simple game akin to the bar classic Photo Hunt. In the newsletter, two subtly different pictures were featured, and the first groups of users who identified and posted the differences on Facebook received a $25 ScanDigital gift card.

ScanDigital acquired more Facebook fans than ever before - or since.

In a similar promotion, VeeV Vodka, an acaí berry-infused spirit, found a creative way to make use of extra canvas tote bags sitting around their office. Rather than stuff the bags in a storage closet, VeeV used the bags as prizes in a contest designed to drive user engagement on Facebook.

To win a tote bag, users were asked to post pictures of themselves drinking VeeV on the brand's Facebook page, a relatively easy request considering the number of drinking photos on Facebook. Needless to say, the canvas tote bags went like hotcakes, and brand awareness increased exponentially. The cost? A less cluttered office for the folks at VeeV.

3. Grow consumer loyalty by giving consumers a stake in your brand.

When Vitamin Water decided to launch a new flavor, it ditched the focus groups and branding experts and turned to social networks. Throughout the summer of 2009, Vitamin Water engaged and grew its Facebook fan base by soliciting ideas from users regarding the name and packaging for the new flavor.

More than one million fans participated in the contest, and celebrities were engaged via video clips to spur interest. In the end, when "Connect," the new Vitamin Water flavor, hit the shelves, there were a million potential buyers on the market far more likely to pick up a bottle than they had been before interacting with the contest.

4. Build brand equity by aligning with a higher purpose.

It feels good to do good, and if you can inspire others to follow suit, even better. Toms Shoes has made it its mission to give a pair of shoes to a child in a developing nation for every pair sold. To maximize its contribution, Toms.com prompts users who buy shoes online to share news of their purchase on Facebook when the sale is complete.

It's not surprising that Toms's messaging strategy works as well as it does. When I buy a book from Amazon or add a movie to my Netflix queue, I have little interest in alerting the people in my life. If you ask me to alert them about something charitable I've done, my interest peaks.

When I purchase a pair of Toms online, not only do I want to brag about my good deed, I also want to encourage friends to follow suit. Toms wins by making it easy for me, and anyone else, to do just that.

Dig Deeper: How to Write a Social Media Policy

Creating a Social Media Strategy: Tying It All Together

When we sit down with executives of large companies and the topic of social media comes up, a collective groan ensues. What if they don't like our product? What about damage control? We need to control our message! And so on.
What's the bottom line for brands worried about getting social media wrong? The train is leaving the station with or without you. Conversations about your brand are going to happen, regardless of whether you choose to take part. Don't sit on the sidelines. Embrace the conversation and engage.

Even if you take nothing else from this article, allow me to leave you with this: when it comes to social media, remember the golden rule. If you would be put off by a promotional tactic, your audience probably wouldn't like it, and if you find something so exciting you want to share it with all your friends, there's a good chance your audience will, too. Use common sense, and remember that social media networks mirror how we interact in the real world.

Similar social rules apply. In other words, don't be a jerk.

Dig Deeper: Playing Marketing Games on Twitter

Creating a Social Media Strategy: Additional Resources

1. Social media campaigns that failed.

2. How to run an effective social media cause marketing campaign.

3. 10 tips for a successful media campaign.

4. More general tactics and ideas on social media marketing.

5. How to use Foursquare to promote your business.

Michael Mothner is the founder and CEO of Wpromote, a search-engine optimization and pay-per-click management consulting firm based in Los Angeles.

Finding financing in any economic climate can be challenging, whether you’re looking for start-up funds, capital to expand or money to hold on through the tough times. But given our current state of affairs, securing funds is as tough as ever. To help you find the money you need, we’ve compiled a guide on 10 financing techniques and what you should know when pursuing them.

1. Get a Bank Loan

Lending standards have gotten much stricter, but banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America have earmarked additional funds for small business lending. So why not apply?

Read more on what you need to know about filling out a loan application.

2. Use a Credit Card

Using a credit card to fund your business is some serious risky business. Fall behind on your payment and your credit score gets whacked. Pay just the minimum each month and you could create a hole you’ll never get out of. However, used responsibly, a credit card can get you out of the occasional jam and even extend your accounts payable period to shore up your cash flow.

Read more on financing your business with a credit card.

3. Tap into Your 401(k)

If you’re unemployed and thinking about starting your own business, those funds you’ve accumulated in your 401(k) over the years can look pretty tempting. And thanks to provisions in the tax code, you actually can tap into them without penalty if you follow the right steps. The steps are simple enough, but legally complex, so you’ll need someone with experience setting up a C corporation and the appropriate retirement plan to roll your retirement assets into. Remember that you’re investing your retirement funds, which means if things don’t pan out, not only do you lose your business, but your nest egg, too.

Read more on financing a business with your 401(k).

4. Try Crowdfunding

A crowdfunding site like Kickstarter.com can be a fun and effective way to raise money for a relatively low cost, creative project. You’ll set a goal for how money you’d like to raise over a period of time, say, $1,500 over 40 days. Your friends, family, and strangers then use the site to pledge money. Kickstarter has funded roughly 1,000 projects, from rock albums to documentary films since its launch last year. But keep in mind, this isn’t about long-term funding. Rather, it's supposed to facilitate the asking for and giving of support for single, one-off ideas. Usually, project-creators offer incentives for pledging, such as if you give a writer $15, you’ll get a book in return. There’s no long-term return on investment for supporters and not even the ability to write off donations for tax purposes. Still, that hasn't stopped close to 100,000 people from pledging to Kickstarter projects.

Read more on using Kickstarter for business.

5. Pledge Some of Your Future Earnings

Young, ambitious and willing to make a bet on your future earnings? Consider how Kjerstin Erickson, Saul Garlick and Jon Gosier are trying to raise money. Through an online marketplace called the Thrust Fund, the three have offered up a percentage of their future lifetime earnings in exchange for upfront, undesignated venture funding. Erickson is willing to swap 6 percent of her future lifetime earnings for $600,000. The other two entrepreneurs are each offering 3 percent of future earnings for $300,000. Beware: the legality and enforceability of these "personal investment contracts" have yet to be established.

Read more on trading future earnings for funding now.

6. Attract an Angel Investor

When pitching an angel investor, all the old rules still apply: be succinct, avoid jargon, have an exit strategy. But the economic turmoil of the last few years has made a complicated game even trickier. Here are some tips to win over angel interest:

Read more on finding an angel investor.

7. Secure an SBA Loan

With banks reluctant to take any chances with their own money in the wake of the credit crisis, loans guaranteed by the U.S. Small Business Administration have become a hot commodity. Indeed, funds to support special breaks on fees and guarantees on SBA-backed loans have run out a number of times. And while SBA-backed loans are open to any small business, there are a number of qualifications, including:

Read more on getting an SBA loan.

8. Raise Money from Your Family and Friends

Hitting up family and friends is the most common way to finance a start-up. But when you turn loved ones into creditors, you’re risking their financial future and jeopardizing important personal relationships. A classic mistake is approaching friends and family before a formal business plan is even in place. To avoid it, you should supply formal financial projections, as well as an evidence-based assessment of when your loved ones will see their money again. This should reduce the likelihood of unpleasant surprises. It also lets your investors know you take their money seriously. You also need to seriously consider how the arrangement will be structured. Are you offering equity? Or will this be a loan? Perhaps most importantly, you need to emphasize the risk involved. Offer up a strong business plan, but remind them there is a good chance their money will be lost. It’s better to mention that upfront to Aunt Gladys rather than over Thanksgiving dinner.

Read more on raising money from family and friends.

9. Get a Microloan

The lack of a credit history, collateral or the inability to secure a loan through a bank doesn’t mean no one will lend to you. One option would be to apply for a microloan, a small business loan ranging from $500 to $35,000. Microloans are often so small that commercial banks can't be bothered lending the funds. Instead of a bank, you need to turn to a microlender. a non-profit organization that works differently than banks. Microlenders offer smaller loan sizes, usually require less documentation than banks, and often apply more flexible underwriting criteria. There are a few hundred microlenders throughout the U.S. and they often charge slightly higher interest rates for loans than banks. "Microloans are really for that startup entrepreneur or an entrepreneur in an existing business facing a capital gap who needs to secure capital for new equipment or to service a contract," says Connie Evans, president and CEO of AEO, which represents 400 mostly non-profit microlenders and microenterprise organizations.

Read more on getting a microloan.

10. Consider Factoring

Factoring is a finance method where a company sells its receivables at a discount to get cash up-front. It’s often used by companies with poor credit or by businesses such as apparel manufacturers, which have to fill orders long before they get paid. However, it's an expensive way to raise funds. Companies selling receivables generally pay a fee that’s a percentage of the total amount. If you pay a 2 percent fee to get funds 30 days in advance, it's equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 24 percent. For that reason, the business has gotten a bad reputation over the years. That said, the economic downturn has forced companies to look to alternative financing methods and companies like The Receivables Exchange are trying to make factoring more competitive. The exchange allows companies to offer their receivables to dozens of factoring companies at once, along with hedge funds, banks, and other finance companies. These lenders will bid on the invoices, which can be sold in a bundle or one at a time.

Read more on financing your business with factoring.

E-newsletters allow a business to stay in touch with its customers on a regular basis. They give you the opportunity to establish yourself as a "thought leader" in your area of expertise, be that in designing toys for rare parrots or providing software to keep your personal finances straight. They are also a great way to create viral marketing, because if your customers find the information useful they may forward your e-newsletter to others, thereby helping you grow your customer base.

"Done right, they will give you a return far better than any other marketing strategy," says Tamara Gielen, an independent e-mail marketing consultant who has worked for such companies as Cognos, eBay, and OgilvyOne. "But success largely depends on two things: relevance and permission. Sending irrelevant messages to recipients who didn't give you permission to e-mail them will not only hurt your brand, it is also the fastest way to get blacklisted with the major ISPs. The last thing you want is to be perceived as a spammer."

So, how do you get permission, and how do you create relevant e-newsletters?

The following guide will cover how to get permission by building an opt-in e-mail list, how to create compelling content and attract readers, and how to choose an e-mail newsletter provider.

Dig Deeper: E-Mail Marketing Solutions

The first order of business is to build a quality list of customers -- customers who have given you permission to send them e-mail newsletters. "Collect this information wherever and whenever you are making a connection with a prospective customer," advises Eric Groves, senior vice president of global market development for Constant Contact, an e-mail and online marketing tool provider. If you have a store front, for example, have a sign-up book by the register and ask people to fill it out and include their e-mail address so that you can send them your e-newsletter. "There's been research done that if a local business asks a customer for their contact information, over 60 percent of the time they will give it to you," Groves says.

Collect e-mail addresses from your prospects and customers at a variety occasions, such as the following.

Use all offline channels you currently have to drive e-newsletter subscriptions, whether they be direct mail, advertising, catalogs, flyers, or feedback forms, Gielen says.

Be careful with rented lists. "Make sure the list owner sends the e-mail on your behalf. If the list provider promises to give you a list of email addresses, walk away. It's not worth the risk of getting blacklisted because the list is old, contains spam traps and lots of bad addresses," Gielen warns. Most email service providers, such as Constant Contact, won't even allow companies to import rented lists into e-mail newsletter products because it would violate terms of service, Groves says.

Remember that permission is important, so don't add an e-mail address to your list unless you have the owner's explicit permission to do so.

Gielen advises to use a double opt-in process when you're collecting email addresses in places other than your own website or when the email capture is part of a contest or sweepstakes. "Double opt-in means that you ask people to confirm their subscription before you add them to your list. That way, you can be sure that all the e-mail addresses that end up on your list are correct and the people on your list are truly engaged." she says. "On your own website, your Facebook page and your blog there's usually no need for a double opt-in process." Gielen says. However, she does recommend sending an email that welcomes the news subscribers, tells them what they can expect and how they can unsubscribe."

Dig Deeper: Finding and Using E-Mail Newsletter Templates

A successful e-newsletter consistently provides value to the recipient by offering relevant content to the readers. "It's not about you, but sharing what you know," Groves says. "If you do it well, recipients will forward it on to others."

Keep in mind that your customers may be solicited via e-mail with scores of offers every day. They eventually tune out the "buy from me" pitch. But they're more likely to read something that helps them become more knowledgeable about a subject that interests them. "Different content offering might include how-to guides that help readers get better at what they do, tips on how to get the most out of the product or service that you sell, background articles on topics that your readers find interesting, surveys, contests and sweepstakes, and promotions such as discounts or free shipping," Gielen says.

A restaurateur might have the chef send out tips on cooking, such as "What to do if you put too much salt in a recipe," Groves suggests. During the holidays, they might send out a newsletter item on what great wine goes with turkey for Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, a landscaper might write an article about plants that deer won't eat. "That's something people can use," Groves says. "They're going to take that and forward it to their friends and say, 'Check this out.' You're sharing knowledge and getting engagement. They already know what you sell."

How can you figure out what your target audience considers to be relevant content? "One way is by asking them on the sign-up form or via surveys and polls," Gielen says. "Another way is by analyzing their behavior. Which links do they typically click on? What kind of subject lines typically trigger them to open your e-mails?"

The articles in the e-newsletter should be brief, Groves advises. And there shouldn't be 42 different items. "A simple one-article newsletter is a fantastic tool," he says. In addition to articles, you might add a calendar of events that might interest readers and, perhaps a link to a promotional offer at the bottom. "If you're writing about California Chardonnays, you might say, 'Here is a real special Chardonnay that we just got in.' That's fine if it's all tied together."

Design for the Preview Pane
Once you have built your list and determined what kind of content your readers value, it's time to develop an effective template for your e-newsletter. The first thing to keep in mind is that most e-mail clients do not display images by default, Gielen says. "The top right two to three inches of your template is what people see in their preview panes, so if your template has mainly images in that area, most readers will not see anything in their preview pane," she says. "Make sure you design your template with this in mind." Think of the preview pane area as a teaser area, and use this area to grab the reader's attention. The information in this area should be compelling enough to make the reader open the e-mail, download the images, and scroll down for more information.

Keep Design Professional
Pick a layout that is going to look professional and render well. Groves says that Constant Contact has 400 different e-newsletter templates alone. You don't have to worry about how to create HTML, but you do need to look at the colors, create images, and think about layout so that it renders well. Most e-mail clients have images turned off as a default, so it's not necessarily a good idea to put a big company logo on the top of the image in the preview pane because it won't load, Groves says. Instead, have that logo lower on the page and just write the company name in regular text at the top of the screen. Choose colors that look weak and reflect your brand. Groves recommends two online tools, Color Cop and Color Schemer, which can help you choose colors. "You don't have to be a graphic artist," Groves says. Lastly, leave some white space for your readers so the e-newsletter doesn't look too dense and is easy on the eye.

Write a Compelling Subject Line
The subject line (and your sender name) is what convinces someone to open your e-mail, Gielen says. You can ask a question, state a benefit, or add urgency, as long as you don't try to deceive your readers. "You should keep your subject line short," she says. "Most readers see only five to seven words, or 50 to 60 characters, of your subject line, so your most important words should be right in the beginning." Also, make your subject line dynamic. Don't use the same subject line over and over again. Finally, tell, don't sell, what's inside. A subject line that tries to sell something is often perceived by readers as spam, and the chance they will delete your e-mail without opening it is much higher.

Choose an E-Mail Service Provider
Don't use Outlook to send out your e-newsletter. Apart from some very nasty deliverability problems you risk running into, you will not have any reporting for your e-newsletter whatsoever, Gielen says. Without the necessary reporting, how will you know how your e-newsletter performs?

There are a number of very good and affordable e-mail service providers out there, like Aweber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, MailChimp, eROI, iContact and others. "By using an e-mail service provider, you won't have to worry about any of the logistics, you'll know exactly who opened and clicked and even creating a professional looking template will be a piece of cake," Gielen says.

Manage Your List
Each time you send out your e-newsletter, you'll find e-mail addresses that no longer exist or people that have unsubscribed from your list. It is of the utmost importance that you remove these e-mail addresses from your list before you send out your next e-newsletter, Gielen says. "If you don't, you risk running into legal problems, as well as being blacklisted." Remember the two rules of sending e-mail newsletters: relevance and permission. If a customer revokes their permission, you need to respect that. But, Groves says, next time the customer comes in to your store or makes a purchase, follow up and ask to make sure they didn't unsubscribe from the e-newsletter by accident.

Additional Resources

How to Write Effective E-Mail Newsletters
Tips from Web Market Central, a portal for interactive marketing professionals.

E-mail Marketer's Club
Discuss e-mail marketing trends, issues and tactics with other e-mail marketers.

In the Internet age, customer feedback is only a click away. Online surveys are one of the best ways to solicit it. Done right, online surveys can help you more effectively listen to customers and make informed business decisions.

But before you design and launch a survey, think about this: are you, or is your company, willing to act on the insight a survey generates? In short: Can your company handle the truth?

"Collecting data is one thing. Acting on it is another thing altogether," says David Ambler, a partner in the Phelon Group, a consultancy based in Palo Alto, California, which focuses on helping companies better relations with customers. "If you are unwilling or unable to act on survey data, then the survey is a waste of your customers' time and an unnecessary distraction for your organization."

Online survey tools are widely available today from such companies as Zoomerang, Survey Monkey, and SurveyGizmo – and some are free. But it's important to remember that an online survey is not just a form – it is a customer touch point, and an opportunity to build better customer relationships. To your customers, an online survey, a survey invitation, and the actions you take in following up the survey in response to issues consumers point out show that you value their feedback and opinions.

Keep in mind that online surveys are merely one of many tools to gather customer insights, Ambler says. It's important to balance these surveys out with other market research, such as face-to-face interviews, focus groups, and online viral marketing to gather intelligence on which to base business decisions.

Here's how to pinpoint the goal of an online survey, who to include in your online survey population, and how to craft informative questions.

Using Online Tools for Customer Surveys: Craft a Survey Research Objective

Before you start sending out electronic questionnaires or posting a survey on your business website, do some homework. Gather input from others in your company to figure out what they already know about customers and what new information they really need in order to improve a department, product, or service. These are the individuals who will ultimately be charged with acting on the results of your survey, so it's best to involve them early in the process.

"One objective might be figuring out overall customer satisfaction," says Alex Terry, executive vice president and general manager for Zoomerang, the online survey arm of Market Tools, which provides software and services for market research. "A different goal would be to get input on a new product or a new feature of an existing product. You might also want to generate new ideas for your product team."

Depending upon your different objective, you may want to use a different slate of questions and survey a different population, Terry says. Another tactic is to conduct a broad survey over a few weeks and, judging on the feedback you get, develop a new, more focused online survey that pinpoints certain objectives.

Keep in mind that by defining a specific research objective, that ensures your survey is short enough to be completed because your customers are busy people. At the same time, you want to generate answers comprehensive enought that they can translate into actionable insight.

According to Ambler, an example of a weak research objective would be the following: "Determine the current state of customer satisfaction." He says: "Such a broad, vague statement cannot guide the design of specific questions, and often leads to long, unfocused surveys and, ultimately, poor survey results."

A solid research objective should be specific enough to help determine whether each question really belongs in the survey and clarifies the action intended, Ambler adds. For example, a strong research objective would be the following: "To improve customer service, identify the drivers of customer retention and repurchase, as they relate to widgets."

Dig Deeper: Tools Provide Online Reviews and Drive Business

Using Online Tools for Customer Surveys: Identify Your Online Survey Population

A few key issues may impact your choice of whom to survey:

"The key question is this: From whom must I hear to be able to act with confidence?" Ambler says. "With a large base of individual consumers, you might focus on obtaining a statistically significant sample for analysis by customer segments. If your base is mostly businesses, with significant revenue coming from key clients, then you'll be better with a business-relevant sample that includes decision makers in top accounts."

Another issue that may come into play is how you intend to deliver the survey. If you want to know how satisfied your existing customers are, you may already have their e-mail addresses on file from previous interactions so you may want to send them an e-mail with a link to an online survey. To reach this population, you may also decide to have a survey on your website for existing customers to access.

Another growing option, Terry says, is to use your business' Facebook fans or Twitter subscribers as a potential survey population by using online survey tools that integrate with social media. "A lot of businesses have realized that it's cheap and efficient to interact with customers online using social media," he says. "Increasingly a lot of customers spending time online and specifically in social media channels. There are good survey opportunities with people who have been following your business online. You want to ask questions where your customers are, meaning you can post a survey to Facebook or send it via Twitter."

If you want to determine how to grow your customer base, you may want to broaden your survey horizons. "What about the other 90 percent of the world? That's your potential customer. That's how you grow," Terry says. Companies such as MarketTools and other market research firms can develop random sample populations and help compile lists for specialized market segments, such as women between the ages of 25 and 40 who live in the San Francisco Bay area, or people who have children or pets.

Dig Deeper: The Pulse of the Customer

Using Online Tools for Customer Surveys: Define Online Survey Questions

Fortunately for many small businesses and entrepreneurs, online survey companies have invested in labor and time in developing survey questions that you can customize. Several survey companies have templates that you can use to assess customer satisfaction, performance of customer-facing employees, or new products. You can also choose whether you want multiple choice questions, drop down menus, or rating scales.

If you want to customize your own survey questions, you should begin with demographics. "Determine what you need to know about each respondent to analyze results," Ambler says. "Your approach will largely be driven by whether your survey is anonymous. If so, you'll only be able to analyze survey data based on survey answers. If not, you'll be able to supplement your survey data with other customer data you already have."

Before writing key survey questions and their answer options, define the purpose of each question. "You won't use these purpose statements in the final online survey, but you will find that they help test if each question is really meaningful," Ambler says. "Purpose statements also enable productive conversations with stakeholders as you vet the survey with them."

Watch survey wording. As a company insider, you're familiar with company jargon, but customers probably are not. "Like any good marketer, you need to understand your audience," Terry says. "Don't talk over their heads. Don't use technical jargon. Keep it simple with something that's measurable. You're a small business owner and you want actionable intelligence. Ask questions in a way that provides enough specifics that you can act on them."

Before sending out surveys to customers or potential customers, validate your questions with key stakeholders in your business. Stakeholder feedback helps you 1) ask actionable questions, 2) provide complete answer options, and 3) not overlook potentially critical questions.

"To get the most meaningful input from stakeholders, keep the conversation focused on each question's purpose statement and how it achieves the research objective," Ambler says. "People like to wordsmith and introduce new questions, which are fine if they fit within your existing research objective. Just keep in mind that every new question makes your online survey that much longer, which ultimately reduces the response rate."

A survey is only as good as the replies you get. You want to woo potential respondents by writing a clever survey invitation. "Your goal is to get above the noise and convince people to participate," Ambler says.

Think about your survey sample: What moves and motivates them? "For some B2B audiences, a summary of findings is a strong enough motivator; others might need a more tangible incentive," he says. "In either case, make your case succinctly and avoid spam-like language and subject lines. Personalize the invitation wherever possible."

Before you go live with the final survey, launch a pilot version to a small population subset. A pilot allows you to test the effectiveness of your survey invitation, determine if there is a particular point in the survey where people drop out, and see if you'll be able to take action based on the results, Ambler says. Ask stakeholders to review the data; see if they think they'll be able to act based on what they see. Adjust accordingly.

After someone takes your online survey, it's important to follow up. "At the very least, you need to say 'thank you,'" Terry says. "You asked someone for a little bit of their day. If you captured their e-mail address, follow up by showing that you care. People like being listened to."

Survey tools can be used to generate automatic responses to participants. But there's nothing like a personal e-mail, especially if you took the person's suggestions to heart and made some changes in your business.

Dig Deeper: How to Make the Most of Customer Feedback

Using Online Tools for Customer Surveys: Additional Resources

A white paper on understanding how customer feedback interacts with other insight to create a compelling go-to-market strategy.

Use a single question to track promoters and detractors and produce a clear measure of your organization's performance through customers' eyes.

Using online surveys to rebrand or reposition your company.

Ten reasons for using online surveys to market products and services.

If you are a procrastinator when it comes to putting money aside for your retirement or if your nest egg was hit hard by the economic turmoil of the past few years, you might consider establishing a cash-balance pension plan at your company. When done properly, these plans can be a great way for small-business owners to substantially accelerate their retirement savings, while also lowering their year-end tax bill and offering a nice little perk to employees.

How to Start a Cash Balance Pension Plan: The Appeal

A cash balance pension is a qualified retirement plan under IRS guidelines known as a "hybrid" plan that’s funded by an annual employer contribution.

Such plans have steadily become more popular since the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which clarified what it would take for a plan to get the IRS’s blessing.

Depending on how close to retirement you are, a cash balance plan could allow you to contribute well in excess of $100,000 annually to your own retirement. That compares to a maximum of roughly $50,000 under a 401(k) plan.

"Cash balance is a great way to accelerate savings," says Daniel Kravitz, president of Kravitz, a firm in Los Angeles that designs and administers retirement plans. "We like to say you can squeeze 20 years of savings into 10."

Another major appeal of a cash balance plan is that it helps you reduce your year-end tax liability. Given the expectation that taxes will rise in the coming years, that’s clearing a huge plus.

Kravitz says a rule of thumb is that if 70 percent of the money going into the plan is for the owners and executives, the tax savings for those beneficiaries far outweighs the cost of funding the accounts of rank-and-file employees and administering the plan. At 50 percent, it’s typically a wash, but you still have the added plus of giving a nice perk to your employees rather than paying the money in taxes.

Dig Deeper: How to Reduce Your Small Business Tax Bill

How to Start a Cash Balance Pension Plan: How It Works

A cash balance plan has the look of a defined contribution plan, but is actually a defined benefit plan. Under a cash balance plan, as mentioned before, the employer makes an annual contribution to an employee’s account. But here’s a special attribute in the design of the plan: the return on the participants’ assets is guaranteed. Known as the annual interest credit, the annual return is usually tied to the 30-year Treasury rate, which has been around 5 percent in recent years.

This concept is where people most commonly get confused, says Kravitz. As with other pension plans, the assets are pooled and invested by a trustee or investment manager. If the assets perform better than the benchmark return, your contribution the following year will be smaller. For example, if the annual contribution is $100,000 and the plan returns 10 percent rather than the guaranteed 5 percent, the contribution the following year will only be $95,000. Conversely, if the plan’s investments fall short of the promised return, the employer has to make up the difference. That shortfall can be made up over seven years.

For this reason, the plan is usually invested rather conservatively, though Kravitz says he’s seen some business owners get aggressive during bull markets only to have to make up some serious shortfalls once markets reversed.

Dig Deeper: Inc.’s 401(k) Retirement Calculator

How to Start a Cash Balance Pension Plan: Setting Up the Plan

Kravitz says that clients typically come to services like his through tax or financial advisers. The adviser will first collect an employee census that outlines the demographics of the company, such as employee ages and salaries. With that information, a plan designer calculates how much can go into the plan for executives and owners and how much will have to go in for the employees to pass IRS testing that ensures the plan’s benefits don’t discriminate in favor of officers, shareholders or any employees.

Step two is putting together a legal document laying out all the plan's details, including the contributions for the participants and the annual interest credit. This document must be signed no later than the end of the fiscal year for which the company wants to take the deduction.

Contributions to the plan must be funded by the due date of your tax return including extensions and no later than eight and a half months after the year ends. That means you have until September 15, 2011 to fund the plan to get the deduction for 2010, assuming you’ve filed for a tax extension.

A rule of thumb on fees, says Kravitz, is that it will cost twice as much to administer a cash balance plan as a 401(k) plan. Tax returns, participant account statements, and discrimination testing will be required each year. For its part, Kravitz charges a flat fee of $5,500 to set up a plan and $5,500 each year to administer it plus $115 for each participant.

Dig Deeper: Inc.’s free Employee Pension Plan Outline

How to Start a Cash Balance Pension Plan: Running the Plan

A few things you should know once the plan is up and running:

Dig Deeper: How to Create a Personal Financial Statement

How to Start a Cash Balance Pension Plan: Other Considerations

Sure, accelerated retirement savings and reduced tax liabilities sound good, but cash balance plans aren’t for everyone. Any company offering a cash balance plan should be confident it can make its annual contribution, so a history of dependable profits is a must. While you can make changes from time to time, frequent amendments to the plan might prompt the IRS to deem it a cash-deferred arrangement and not a pension plan. In which case, regular 401(k) limits would apply.

The plan should be used in addition to a 401(k) plan, not as a substitute, Kravitz recommends. Given the cost and complexity – it does require the assistance of an actuary, after all – a cash balance plan should only be considered if a 401(k) isn’t meeting your company's retirement needs. Plus, the conservative returns promised by a cash balance plan means you’ll probably want the flexibility of another retirement plan you can invest more aggressively.

“This is just if you want to do more for your retirement,” says Kravitz. “This is forced savings for many small business owners.”

A new bill in Congress would allow sales tax to be charged on Internet transactions – a move backers say would eliminate the edge online retailers have over brick-and-mortar small businesses.

Proposed by Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) and known as The Main Street Fairness Act 2010, the bill would end one of the biggest perks of online shopping – no sales tax – by allowing states to require tax payments for online transactions, provided they have a uniform set of rules to streamline collection. Nearly half of all states (24) already have such rules, and experts predict others swiftly would follow if the bill passed. Delahunt's bill includes a get-out clause for small businesses, but it doesn't define "small" – at least not yet.

The proposed legislation is not without controversy. On Thursday, Rep. Paul W. Hodes (D-N.H.) introduced a resolution opposing it, asking House members not to approve a "burdensome" tax requirement on small online businesses.
"The internet has opened a fast lane to further job creation and innovation, and allows our small business to compete in the worldwide marketplace," Hodes said in a statement.

States desperate for revenue – and protective of local business – are behind Delahunt's bill. Collectively, states claim they lose as much as $23 billion because they can't force online retailers to pay state sales taxes unless those businesses have a physical presence in the state, such as an office, store or warehouse. This stems from 1992's Quill v. North Dakota, where the Supreme Court held that it was difficult and expensive for businesses to determine what should be collected because of byzantine tax rules with huge variation from one state to another. (At the time, there were 45 state and 7,600 local tax systems across the country). Instead, shoppers were supposed to figure out how much they owed and pay up, but of course few people did – and it was too expensive and time-consuming for states to chase the money. This ruling dates from the early days of the Internet, of course, and only catalogs and TV home shopping channels really were affected, but since then Internet shopping has mushroomed into a $130 billion business.

"A consumer walking in [to a store] looks at the product you have to offer and includes in their mind the cost of tax when they buy the product. But they go on the Internet and they purchase the same product, and that Main Street businessman starts out at a disadvantage because he's collecting tax on the product," South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds, a Republican, said in a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday. "That's what this is all about: making it fair for brick-and-mortar businesses."

Rounds said his home state could pull in an extra $35 million per year in revenue from the proposal – or about 3 percent of the state's $1.2 billion budget.

About a dozen states this year have considered bills containing various attempts to collect tax, including broadening the definition of the Supreme Court's "physical presence" rule to catch certain types of advertisers. Online retailers with brick-and-mortar stores must collect sales tax, but online-only retailers (among them Amazon and eBay) do not. Industry trade group NetChoice said the legislation would be expensive for small businesses.

"Don't believe it when tax collectors say their software makes it trivial for tiny sellers to collect everyone's sales tax," said Steve DelBianco, NetChoice's executive director. "Small sellers will spend thousands of dollars making changes to their website software, plus endless time and accounting fees to handle exceptions, customer questions, and state tax audits."

Movement on the proposed legislation is unlikely to happen quickly. It's been referred to the House judiciary committee, but Congress's summer recess begins at the end of next week.

In crowdsourcing, companies leverage the work of many distributed individuals with whom they have loose, ad-hoc relationships. Doing so can offer competitive advantages. So say Lucas Biewald, founder and CEO of crowdsourcing lab Crowdflower, and Leila Janah, founder of Samasource, a nonprofit that provides poor women, youth, and refugees throughout the world with computer-based work.

It's been four years since Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing." Since, Facebook has engaged thousands of members to translate the site into more than 65 languages. Pizza Hut uses virtual order-takers through the cloud, and if you need a new logo, you can tap the design pool through 99Designs. Biewald and Janah have compiled six of their favorite tools for crowdsourcing in small business.

MyGenGo offers crowdsourced human translators that anyone can connect with through an API. That means you can upload articles, blog posts, or really any content and have it worked on by a scattered cloud of amateur translators while you sleep.

On-demand transcription service CastingWords posts tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where it pays people small amounts of money to transcribe short segments of audio. Long or short, upload your audio and CastingWords will have it done within 24 hours.

Kickstartser offers "crowdfunding" for game designers, artists, musicians, journalists, and other creative types. Users post projects of public interest and ask the crowd for funding; the crowd pays only if you attain your funding goal. Diaspora, an open-source social network with extra privacy features, recently raised more than $200,000 from nearly 6,500 donors on Kickstarter.

There's no substitute for human insight in finding what search terms will be most relevant for your customers – not even Google. The experts that optimize keywords at Trada are rewarded based on the amount of money they save the advertiser.

Here's a way to tap the crowd for customer support. Instead of answering every customer’s question, companies can set up a GetSatistfaction page where their users answer each others' questions. This reduces support costs and provides insight into new ways that customers might be using your product.

Two companies, Gerson Lehrman Group and Maven Research, have collected networks of hundreds of thousands of professionals and offer a way to hire an expert for an hour at a time. The rates can be steep – on average, experts are paid hundreds of dollars an hour – but the ability to find someone quickly with an exact answer to an esoteric question can be incredibly valuable.

In 2002, on the executive education campus of MIT, I learned that I had been selling the wrong product.

I, along with 61 other entrepreneurs, had been going to MIT for three years to learn how to be better company-builders. The program was called “The Birthing of Giants,” and we had been selected from a pool of applicants who all met the same criteria: own a company with at least $1 million in annual sales and be under the age of 40.

The curriculum was designed by Verne Harnish, the program founder and adviser to many of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. Harnish seemed to have a sixth sense about when best to bring in speakers to provide a real-life perspective.

In the beginning, we heard from Jack Stack on the benefits of employee ownership. The next year, we heard from Pat Lencioni, who taught us how to avoid the temptations of leadership. In the final year of the program, Stephen Watkins, an entrepreneur who had recently sold his business, spoke to us.

To be honest, I was going to skip the session. I’d never heard of Watkins and had tired of the trite, rags-to-riches success story of the cashed-out entrepreneur.

In the end, I decided to attend his session, and I’m glad I did because he said something that forever changed the way I think about entrepreneurship. He began by canvassing the room to see how many of us were involved in selling our product or service to our customers. I, along with virtually every other entrepreneur in the room, raised my hand.

With that, he proceeded to scold us all for spending too much time selling our products and virtually no time selling our company. He went further, and I’ll try to paraphrase his message for you: “Your job as an entrepreneur is to hire salespeople to sell your products and services so you can spend your time selling your company. You make a few hundred or thousand dollars when you sell your product, but if you turned those same skills to selling your company, you can make exponentially more. You have the right skills, but you’re selling the wrong product.”

He paused, took a long pull from a bottle of water and let his message sink in.

He then explained that entrepreneurs add the most value when they design and start their business; the return on their time invested starts to go down rapidly as the business gets going. The entrepreneurs who earn the best return on their investment of money, time and energy are the ones who get in and out quickly.

His message landed on me with blunt force. I felt like an amateur who had gotten a glimpse at a professional game and realized the pros were playing with an entirely different set of rules. Here I was spinning my wheels selling our services when I should have been marketing my company.

From that day forward, the way I thought about my role changed. I started hiring salespeople to call on customers. At first I missed the adrenaline rush of personally making a big sale, but in time, I came to enjoy seeing other people make sales even more.

I still went out on sales calls, but they were to people I thought might one day buy my company, not my product.

John Warrillow is a writer, speaker and angel investor in a number of start-up companies. He writes a blog about building a sellable company at http://www.BuiltToSell.com/blog

Democrats and Republicans battle for the small-biz vote. Speaking from a sandwich shop yesterday in Edison, New Jersey, President Obama declared that, "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They are central to our identity as a nation. They are going to lead this recovery." Republicans, however, argue that the democrats' agenda, especially the health-care act and the possible repeal of the Bush tax cuts, will only serve to hurt small businesses. As quoted in the Washington Post, Republican Senator Judd Gregg said that the Democrats have "hit small business with a sledgehammer and now they're going to go around and say they're picking up some of the pieces." At issue right now is Obama's plan to expand tax breaks for small businesses and make it easier for them to borrow money, to which Republicans have raised objections. With both sides aching to be known as the champion of small businesses, it raises the question of whether any effective legislation will actually be passed. Perhaps Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it best when he said,"Both parties claim to be friends of small business. This is the proverbial stall we've had all year."

Pining for an exit? Think less traditional. While the small business M&A field has been gradually picking up steam, if you're in the market to sell your company, the offers you're getting probably still feel a bit paltry. BusinessWeek suggests that you take a non-traditional approach. "Unconventional deal structuring can maximize a company's long-term value and do wonders to bridge the gap between a buyer's limitations and a seller's expectations," the post counsels. Some examples of strategies include offsetting a low upfront price with a long-term consulting contract, selling to your employees through an employee stock option plan (ESOP), or preparing the company for your departure to give yourself time to tackle other ventures. Before you sign anything, however, be mindful of these four traps to avoid when selling your company.

Put down that phone. Popular belief has long held that good customer service means having a conversation with a real person, but new research published in the Harvard Business Review finds that companies are overestimating just how much their customers prefer live customer service over automated self service, like ATMs and check-in kiosks at airports. In their research, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff found that those companies estimated customers valued live service twice as much as self service, but that customers are actually pretty much indifferent. While the efficiency and the element of self control offered by self-service machines are possible explanations for the trend, the researchers further hypothesize that "maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don't want a relationship with companies. For managers hell-bent on deepening relationships with their customers, that's a sobering thought.

So your Facebook got hacked? Big deal. According to Fast Company, the so-called "hacker," who posted info from 100 million Facebook profiles online, only took public data from the site that you could easily find just by Googling someone's name. The man behind the scam says he was trying to alert users of the still-existing privacy issues, despite Facebook's revamped settings. Fast Company concludes: "For those worried about a hacker stealing their data--don't be. There was no hack, there is no security risk. If you want your information to be private, make it private. But if it's public, people can and will find it. That's not a flaw. That's a choice."

Omniture founder leaving company. His successful growth strategies included organizing a giant 'rock-paper-scissors' game at a trade show and making mistakes "faster than anybody." But now, Josh James, co-founder and longtime CEO of the web analytics giant Omniture, is leaving the company he sold to Adobe for $1.8 billion last year. In an e-mail, James said, "It was a fantastic ride, and it's time to move on to the next gig."

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You have got a few employees managing your social media accounts, and you've amassed some followers, friends and contacts. You've posted a few tweets and blogs marketing your product or service to consumers, but you're still stumped at how to reach out to other businesses.

Using social media for business-to-business marketing can be integral to promoting your company and forging industry contacts, especially when you're involved in areas of retail and trade. The truth is, using social media for your B2B efforts isn't much different from marketing to consumers. It's just a matter of shifting your focus and keeping your ear closer to the ground.

How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Defining Your Target Audience

When developing your B2B strategy for social media, the place to start out is to find out where other businesses are going. Who are you trying to market to, and which social media platform are they using? Are there business owners or certain employees that you are looking for? Where are they getting their information?

Derek Edmond, a managing partner at Waltham, Mass.-based B2B marketing firm KoMarketing Associates, suggests using the search function that most social media sites have, such as those of Facebook or LinkedIn. "Most of these sites even have an advanced search option, so that you can scour through regions and titles," Edmond says.

You're likely to find correspondence from individual employees of companies rather than the company itself, says Edmond, and you should keep this in mind as you refine your contact list. One way to do this, with Twitter, for example, is to look through the Twitter lists of other users and follow people with the titles you're looking for.

Dig Deeper: How to Define Your Target Market


How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Monitoring Before You Act

Once you have defined your target audience and started developing your B2B contacts, don't immediately start spamming your latest press releases, says Edmond. The key is to contribute to the conversation before you jump in trying to market services. "If there's a Twitter chat going on, join the chat before trying to promote your agenda," he says. "Anyone can post a link to Twitter, but the question is, how do you make them pay attention to it?" One effective way of searching for topics and active conversations on Twitter is to click on or search for certain hashtags relevant to your industry.

Before you start aggressively pursuing your strategy, you should also be monitoring what people are saying about your company by setting up an account with Google Alerts and searching social media sites with tools like Radian6, Salesforce.com or Social Mention. You can also read or subscribe to the blogs of the companies you want to market to, so that you can respond and comment whenever a post grabs your attention.

Dig Deeper: Survey Says Social Media Generates Business


How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Communicating Your Message

One of your primary goals in your marketing strategy should be to offer resources and knowledge to your followers, says David Armano, senior vice president of digital marketing firm Edelman Digital. "The key is provide value through thought leadership," he says.

Posting Reports and Presentations
If your company has recently completed an industry-related report or presentation, for example, publish it on SlideShare and post a link to it on Twitter. "I think SlideShare is really well-designed for how people are looking for information these days," Armano says. "You can digest it quickly as opposed to doing a really long white paper."

Initiating Interaction on LinkedIn
Another great way to provide knowledge while marketing your company is to join groups on LinkedIn and start relevant conversations. "Groups are the biggest opportunities for businesses," Armano says. "Start a topic around what your niche is, so that you can build an audience that is comprised of other businesses and business owners."

LinkedIn also has a Q&A section where employees of different companies seek advice on different topics. Providing helpful answers to these questions can help cement your role as a leader and reliable source of information in your field. Armano also advises creating a company profile on LinkedIn. This way, whenever an employee of your company posts a link in their status, it becomes aggregated within the company profile.

Organizing Events
According to Armano, one of the most helpful tools social media offers in terms of B2B marketing is the ability to effectively organize events. Armano says that SOBcon, a convention that brings together leaders in social media, is a great example of how to leverage social media to build a following around an upcoming event.

"They put a lot of effort into online community building before and after the event," he says." Reaching out to businesses before an event not only helps boost your attendance, but also helps you to build your customer base afterward.

Dig Deeper: 12 Tips for Stepping Up Your Social Media Presence


How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Being Cautious Throughout Your Marketing

Throughout your marketing efforts, says Edmond of KoMarketing Associates, keep in mind that social media shouldn't be thought of as a direct sales tool with B2B clients, or you'll end up disappointed. "If you're dealing with enterprise-level software or a business advertising contract, for example, it's less likely that you're going to see a Twitter update about that," he says. Think of social media as more a generator of quality leads, he says, since "often it can take months, if not quarters, for a client to actually close business."

Edmond also advises marketers to be careful when directly soliciting social media users as you respond to their posts, because you could end up getting overlooked as a spammer. Instead, try to relate your message to an existing conversation that is happening. "If you know your case study is going to address a particular problem in the industry," Edmond says, "Wait for it to come up, then interrelate that issue into your post."

Dig Deeper: Lessons from the Most Successful Marketing Campaign Ever


How to use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Using Analytics to Measure Your Marketing Efforts

With any online marketing strategy, it's imperative to have some type of analytics tool is in place that will help you set goals and measure the success of your actions. "Where are people leaving, and where are they coming in?" says Edmond. "What are the search terms or key words they are using to get to your site? These are the questions analytics tools help you to answer."

Edmond advises using tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, or Marketo to measure the quality of your traffic and put conversion methods in place. HootSuite, a Twitter application, also has an analytics tool that allows you to track and measure the effectiveness of your tweets.

As you develop and refine your B2B marketing strategy, Edmond says, don't forget that providing answers to peers and potential customers is arguably the most effective social media marketing tactic. "You might be ignored, but you're trying to foster the problem-solving aspect of social media."

Dig Deeper: Using Predictive Analytics on Web Data

Starting your own business can be as exciting as it is nerve-wracking. Your road to future success starts with your first customer. Landing your first customer will require a mix of old school face-to-face networking and plenty of time behind the computer building your brand online. If you're ready to make the leap to entrepreneurship this guide on finding your first customer will prepare you for that first sale and future sales.

How to Find Your First Customer: Develop a Business Model

Mapping out a clear plan on how your new product or service will benefit your potential customers, should be the first thing you do before picking up a phone to begin selling your wares, says Michael Song, Ph.D., executive director, of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Song says it's important to be able to explain on paper what your product can do for your customer.

"Make sure you are thinking about what you can do for them. Can you offer a product that gives the client something that others can't deliver, but in a measureable way?" says Song. Without a plan, says Song, you likely will not be able to demonstrate the value your product or service can offer.

For example, Song, who also teaches a course at UMKC on creating a company points out this scenario: Take a person who has developed software that for $19.99 will shut down all of the computers in a company at the end of the day and turn them back on at a certain time in the morning. The software developer first approaches the potential client saying this will help save on their electricity costs. This sounds like a good idea, but they fail to make the sale. "That's because they didn't quantify exactly how much electricity the company would save," says Song.

He says the easiest thing to do here is to look at where the company is based and determine the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour. Then your plan would look at all the computers owned by the potential client and the average kilowatt each computer uses per hour. Then, Song says, you will see how much the potential company will save if they shut down the computers for seven hours at night.

"So let's say we could conclude that the computer software would save the average amount of electricity by 1 ½ years. The electricity costs alone would be more than the price of the software which is $19.99. So you have to demonstrate the economic value of your product," says Song.

Song says a detailed plan is also important since as a new company you don't have the reputation, the history, or following to back up your claims so the inherent value of your product or service must be clearly outlined.

Dig Deeper: How to Plan a Product Launch Event


How to Find Your First Customer: Think Local

Once you are set on how to proceed, it's time to actually go out and do some of the legwork, whether that's calling on friends and family, old bosses or even clients from your last job. Dharmesh Shah, chief technology officer and founder of Hubspot, an internet marketing company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests looking at the circle of friends and family closest to you for help in launching your product. "They can be a great a first customer," says Shah, who is also a founder and blogger for OnStartups.com, an online community for entrepreneurs. However, he adds a word of advice: ensure that they provide pointed, objective feedback. "The big value of early customers is not the revenue generated -- but the insights they provide," says Shah.

Another thing about friends and family—they too, should be paying customers. "Don't give the product away for free to these early customers -- even if they're friends and family. The reason is that if they're not paying customers, they [would] be reluctant to voice complaints. For example, with my startup, when we started the company my wife was one of the early customers. She paid full price and is still a customer today," explains Shah.

Alternately, other experts on finding your first customer, say there are exceptions to the rule about not giving your product away for free. "David Letterman would have no studio audience," contends certified professional coach Mitchell York. Through his company E2E Coaching Inc. in Sayerville, NY, York has advised executives on the ins and outs of entrepreneurship. "Give stuff away, and if it's good people will buy it. If it was never right to give away your product for free, the folks who make those little ice cream sample spoons would be out of business. As would all the young people in the streets of New York, giving away promotional size candy bars, cosmetics and everything under the sun."

According to York, your first customer might be someone you're already doing business with. If you've developed a rapport with your boss, you may be able to secure your current employer as a client. "Just make sure you aren't doing work on your new business while at your current job."

York also says migrating clients from your current job may or may not work out for you. Be sure to check the fine print on the contract you signed when you were hired or let go. "If you're going to 'migrate' clients from your employer to your new business, make sure you are not under any restrictions. Lots of companies have non-compete agreements and policies, and even if you never signed one, that doesn't mean your employer can't make your life as an entrepreneur very difficult if it wants to," says York.

Dig Deeper: How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales


How to Find Your First Customer: Branching Out

After you've tapped all of your relatives and Facebook friends, it's time to widen your audience reach. A great way to do that is to find what Song calls "The Innovators," using paid market research panels if you can afford it. "There is always about 2% of the population that are innovators. Meaning those are the people most willing to adopt new products or the opinion leaders. You need to identify who are your innovators," says Song. Once you have identified those innovators, Song advises giving them a free trial with a satisfaction guarantee offer or risk free trial so if they don't find benefit in [the product], you will take it back.

Another way to expand your circle is to get out and shake hands. Mitchell says try in-person networking events often hosted by your local Chamber of Commerce. "Any venue that brings people face to face is great. The trick is to use networking events the right way to develop relationships that will last. If you talk more than you listen at a networking event, you're not doing it right," says Mitchell.

When it comes to cold-calling, Shah says, the art form hasn't completely died, but "increasingly less effective" these days. "As a society, we've become better and better at blocking out these unwanted marketing interruptions. As such, it's very difficult to reach potential customers through cold-calling," explains Shah.

Dig Deeper: The Happiest Cold Caller You'll Ever Meet


How to Find Your First Customer: Social/New Media

Perhaps one of the newest methods of finding your first customer is by using social/new media. Experts recommend social /new media tools over traditional advertising. Matt Myers, chief marketing officer of Shooger, a mobile marketing company based in Coral Gables, Florida, suggests forming strategic partnerships with media companies to help spread the word about your product or service. "We're just starting to create greater outreach and awareness of Shooger by working in partnership with traditional media outlets and public relations agencies who very clearly understand how we can help them move forward," says Myers.

And, says Myers, "Testing out a mobile marketing option like Shooger and offering special or introductory deals is a great way to entice new customers and develop a loyal following."

Social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube offer a great return on investment for little to no upfront costs, says Shah and York. "I've seen many businesses (of all kinds) get a great return on their investment in social media -- particularly blogging," says Shah. "Creating useful, remarkable content and sharing it online (via blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc.) is an exceptionally effective way to "pull" potential customers into a business." York agrees, adding YouTube to the list. "It costs nothing except time to create a brand using social media. Facebook is a necessity. A YouTube channel is a good idea too, as is a blog."

Whether you've sourced a client from an old job, set up a Facebook account, or asked your parents to buy-in to your service, there are a number of ways to find your first and likely most loyal customer you will ever have.

Dig Deeper: Launch a New Product on Twitter

The four largest banks in the U.S. are making good on their promises to increase lending to small businesses.

Bank of America pledged to increase lending to small business by $5 billion this year, and this week reached the halfway point, with $45.4 billion loaned in the first half of 2010. That is nearly $9 billion more than during the same period last year.

Wells Fargo, which owns Wachovia, increased small-business lending by 30 percent last quarter. The bank also said it is taking a "second look" at previously declined applicants.

Meanwhile, Citigroup said small-business lending had doubled at the bank over the last six months, and JP Morgan Chase said its lending (which includes credit cards) was up 37 percent. JP Morgan's goal is to make $10 billion in new loans to companies with under $20 million in revenue – an increase from $6 billion in 2009. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Chase has hired 235 new small-business bankers and made $110 million in "second-look loans" – loans to small-business borrowers whose applications were turned down at first, but got a second review.

The news comes as Senate Democrats worked to pass a bill that would increase lending to small businesses (and President Barack Obama highlighted his small-business agenda with a visit to the Tastee Sub Shop in Edison, New Jersey). But the surge in lending comes as confidence among small-business owners has sunk to its lowest level in seven years, according to a new Wells Fargo/Gallup survey released this week.

The bank's small business index – which peaked at 114 in 2006 – tumbled to -28 this month, down 17 points from April. A score of zero would mean small-business owners are neutral about market business prospects.

Wells Fargo calculates the index each quarter using two factors: a company's present financial health and its forecast for the next year.

The decline was fueled mostly by weakening optimism among small-business owners, said Doug Case, the small-business segment manager for Wells Fargo, which is based in San Francisco.

"Small-business owners are usually a very optimistic bunch," he said in a statement. "But this July we're seeing a real change in future expectations."

The report includes a survey of more than 600 small business owners from all 50 states. There were two "lowest-ever" figures in the 29-quarter history of the survey: 43 percent expect their companies' cash flow to increase, down from 53 percent in the previous quarter. And just 13 percent expect their companies to add jobs, down from 18 percent.

The survey found also found that 38 percent of respondents expect their companies' revenues to increase "a lot or a little" over the next year, down from 48 percent in the previous quarter. Just over a third expect capital spending to fall "a lot or a little" over the next year, up from 29 percent in the previous quarter.

Wells Fargo was surprised at the survey results, since small business optimism had improved slightly over the last few quarters.

"We thought we had hit the low point in the survey," Case said. "That said, things like consumer confidence and other key economic measures are wavering right now. I think the decline is a reflection of the economy overall."

I really enjoyed thisprofile of Nathan Myhrvold, the incredibly prolific inventor and amateur paleontologist, which appeared in the New Yorker last year. The article painted an impressive (and totally uncritical) portrait of the man:

But not everyone sees Myhrvold's business as a benevolent idea factory; in fact, many in Silicon Valley apply another term: Patent troll. Here's one take on Intellectual Ventures's business, from Techdirt:

Now, documents published by PEHub and flagged by Chris Dixon, suggest that the business model, whatever it is, may be foundering. Two Intellectual Ventures funds have posted negative returns, according to a filing by the University of Texas, including one fund with returns of negative 73 percent. Dixon says this suggests that, "patent trolling might not pay." But the documents also reveal that the fund in question was formed in May of 2007, meaning that it's probably too early to assess its success or failure.

Whether or not Intellectual Ventures is succeeding, I'm curious what people make of this strange, secretive business. Are patent licensing shops inherently evil, or can they produce value?

Happy graduation! I got you a business. Hiring a kid to work in the family business after graduation is one thing. Buying them a business for graduation is quite another. According to the Wall Street Journal, more and more parents are buying businesses, especially franchises, for their kids to take over when they graduate. According to the story, "many parents see business ownership as a better bet for their kids' future than a graduate degree," and they believe franchises have a built-in marketing system and brand recognition. Though there are obvious risks involved, one parent who bought his son an internet-consulting franchise told the Journal, "As a parent, the best gift you can ever receive is to see your children happy and successful."

Study shows dismal outlook for small-businesses. The National Small Business Association released its 2010 Mid-Year Economic Report yesterday, and the picture it paints isn't pretty. According to the report, small businesses are facing the most difficult business climate they've seen in the last three years. In a survey of 400 small-business owners, 59 percent said they expect the U.S. economy to remain flat in the coming year, while 29 percent expect a recession. Only 11 percent of small businesses hired new employees in the last 12 months, while 25 percent were forced to cut jobs. To put it plainly: "Despite a slight increase in optimism just six months ago, small businesses today report decreases in nearly every indicator including business confidence, revenues, job growth, and growth projections."

In social-media news... The location-based service boom isn't such a blowout. In fact, only 4 percent of online adults in the United States use any kind of location-aware service, according a Forester study, Mashable reports. Who is really wired? Residents of the U.K., a PR firm finds. Nearly 65 percent have social network profiles; 60 percent read blogs. And what does it mean that a hedge fund acquired a 1 percent stake in LinkedIn for $20 million? That the site could be worth more than $2 billion, Bloomberg reports. And if you're looking to boost your social-media presence, check out advice from entrepreneurial blogger Maisha Walker, who was featured on an Inc.com live chat this morning.

Honest Tea staying honest. Two years ago, we pondered whether Honest Tea CEO Seth Goldman had gone to the dark side after selling a 40-percent stake in his organic teamaker to Coca-Cola. But in this interview with The Wall Street Journal, Goldman challenges critics to find ways in which his product has changed for the worse. "[L]ook at where we are now: none of our drinks have gotten sweeter; none of our [ingredients] have gotten cheaper." And as a winner of our top workplaces contest, it seems Honest Tea is still a great place to work. Next year, though, Coca-Cola has the opportunity to buy the rest of the company. Goldman says he expects that to happen. The true test could start then.

10 Chinese brands invading U.S. shelves. Watch out, inventors and manufacturers. Business Insider has a slideshow of 10 Chinese brands shouldering their way into the U.S. market, and they're based on innovation rather than competitive pricing. These companies sell everything from household appliances and cars to commercial airline flights - and if they're in your industry, you should steel yourself for some stiff competition in the coming decade.

Apple charges up. Amid an array of product releases yesterday, including faster iMacs and Mac Pro computers and a "Magic Trackpad" that some bloggers are calling a "mouse killer," there was a tiny new iProduct. It's a battery charger. Not for computer or iPhone batteries - just for regular AAs. Well. The Unofficial Apple Weblog called them "deceptively cool" and MacRumors called it one of the most interesting product announcements du jour. The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian was underwhelmed, though, writing: "We're just hoping to see a commercial with some colorful, dancing silhouettes replacing batteries in their TV remotes."

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On the heels of a brutal recession, a sudden rebound in sales can feel like 20 inches of rain after a draught. New business is cause for celebration—but caution, too. A big increase in sales brings with it a set of management conundrums. Should customers who stood by you during slow times continue to get special treatment? Can your production floor ramp up fast enough? Will everyone need to work overtime?

The very tactics that helped many companies ride out the recession—hoarding cash and shedding inventory, reducing the workforce, and eliminating overtime—can impede a sales rally. At the same time, sales spikes can be sporadic or short-lived, making it hard to justify new investments in staff and equipment. But with some planning, you can not only survive the spike but thrive. Here are 9 steps to take in order to wisely manage a spike in sales.

1. Staff up prudently.

"When a sales surge occurs, it's always a balancing act," says Warren H. Hausman, professor of operations management at Stanford University. Companies must decide whether to add new staff or build up their inventories in anticipation of a longer rally, or whether to play it safe.

Direct labor is a typical bottleneck in today's service-oriented economy. According to CareerBuilder's 2010 Job Forecast, 20 percent of employers plan to add headcount in 2010, up from 14 percent in 2009, but the research firm found that hiring managers are still jittery.

Holding back on hiring makes some sense since a sales spike can be temporary. But hold back too long and you might find that you've blown an opportunity. John McQuillan recently experienced that quandary. McQuillan is CEO of Triumvirate, a $60-million waste disposal and clean-up company in Somerville, Massachusetts. The company experienced a sales spike in April, "our largest month in 22 years," says McQuillan. When the spike continued in May, the Triumvirate chief knew it was more than a spring fling. "It's the best backlog I can ever remember," gushes McQuillan. "Having said that, I'm a little gun shy."

Prior to the spring sales increase, Triumvirate endured 16 grueling months of "one client after another asking for concessions," McQuillan says. In that slow period, his sales and operations managers spent most of their time trying to hold onto customers by helping them reduce costs. Then, all of a sudden, those same clients came back and were eager to return to pre-recession service levels. At the same time, Triumverate's sales force landed brand new customers. McQuillan didn't want to lose any new business. "You never want to tell salespeople to slow down," he says. Yet his field work force of about 160 people was operating flat out.

Rather than add oodles of operations people, McQuillan struck a compromise. He hired a few new full-time staffers to help manage current clients. But then he hired a group of seasoned temporary workers to step in and handle the new accounts. McQuillan loves these workers, now numbering 20, whom he calls "plug and play" staffers. Some of them may eventually be hired on a permanent basis but, in the meantime, the afford Triumverate some much-needed flexibility.

"There's lots of talent to be had," McQuillan says. "Our HR team is working closer than ever with operations." In addition, McQuillan has hired about 18 more permanent employees, most straight out of college, but says they won't be ready for primetime for about 15 months. "Given the sales pipeline, we're under-hiring, but I'd rather strengthen relations with our current employees." (In April, the company lifted its moratorium on pay raises.)

Dig Deeper: 7 Tips for Managing Part-Time Workers

2. Cross-train rather than add overhead.

TaxBreak is a Gadsden, Alabama firm that processes state and federal work-opportunity tax credits. The company's sales dropped along with new hiring. By the end of 2009, employer applications were down 30 percent. However, in May the company landed 73 new clients, close to its all-time record – and marked the beginning of a sales surge. (Some of the uptick in sales is due to the new federal HIRE law.)

Rather than hire more people to process those new-employer applications, CEO Shannon Scott relied on increased automation and a cross-training program put in place in early 2009 to handle sales spikes and backlogs. "Every employee is cross-trained to work in every other department," Scott explains. That means even salespeople and billing staff can work overtime in the processing department. "Heck, even I'll go in from time to time to pump out applications," laughs Scott.

A yearly team bonus for which all workers are eligible smooths over any reluctance to pitch in, plus all new employees start off in processing for their first 6 to 8 weeks. "Everyone helps each other and why would you grumble about that?" Scott says. The system has paid off. In the last year, the company has hired only two additional operations people even as its sales staff has increased to 43, and a national reseller program has been put in place. The company is now on track to gross $7.2 million this year.

Dig Deeper: 3 Reasons Why Cross-Training Pays Off

3. Manage sales-operations conflicts.

Every company, whether a manufacturer or a service business, has lead times and backlogs. The effect of these lags on morale and team play can be very dangerous during sales spikes. As formerly parched salespeople revel in their role as rainmakers, they might promise too much too soon in their zeal to impress new customers and score commissions.

That zeal can end up putting them at cross-purposes with operations. During a crunch, says Stanford professor Hausman, sales and marketing people need to know the physical limits of the operations team. The easiest thing for operations to do is push back required lead times. But therein lies the conflict. "If the customer doesn't want to wait," says Hausman, "the salesperson is saying 'Geez my commission is going to be gone if I don't twist some arms.'"

In manufacturing, for example, typically one order on the floor can be pushed up and given first priority, he adds. "You can do it for one order, but not 10 at this special rate," Hausman adds. It's not necessarily a sales rep over-promising, either, he notes. Timing changes when the economy picks up and you need to make sure your sales team understands the changes in lead times that naturally occur. When salespeople are up to date on lead times, many conflicts can be avoided.

Dig Deeper: How to Manage Conflict

4. Give joint incentives to sales and operations.

At Triumvirate, CEO McQuillan acknowledges the tensions. "An abrupt restarting of the machine carries with it some friction," he says. His answer? Salespeople are compensated in part on customer satisfaction scores. Operational decisions are also based on those scores. That bond helps to eliminate tensions. In addition, the company holds twice-a-year retreats for operations and sales managers. The most recent conclave in May took on renewed importance as the company hustled to meet the new demand.

Shannon Scott of TaxBreak has been known to resort to some more extreme measures to get sales and operations working together. Last summer, with a major deadline looming, the CEO challenged the whole company to a series of goals for new-client revenue, applications processed, and customer-service rankings. Scott told the tk# employees that if they could hit the targets, he and the other executives would roast a pig and do a hula dance in grass skirts at the company picnic. He gave them 30 days. Not only did the staff win but the executives ended up with pie on their faces, literally.

Dig Deeper: Finding the Right Incentives

5. Prioritize your new orders.

Customers are not all equal. A sales surge might be brief, so you can't ignore your long-term, big-volume clients. In fact, they should be your first priority. Be willing to quote longer-than-normal response times to lower-priority customers, recognizing that some of those orders may be one-offs or go away over time. A more appealing option, though, is to offer some customers a "split lot" when they don't need the whole order at once. "They might like it all at once but maybe just one-tenth of the order is needed right away," says Hausman.

Dig Deeper: How to Find New Customers

6. Improve your sales forecasting model.

"Sales spikes aren't easy to handle," says Diane Parente, an operations expert and management professor at Pennsylvania State University. "But they are not as unpredictable as we think," she adds. "You can forecast sales, and even sales spikes can be historical." She urges entrepreneurs to make use of statistical models for sales forecasting, available on the Internet and through local university courses on operations management.

There are even forecasting models good for products with no history—such as the Bass Model of Innovation that takes into account factors such as innovation and imitation to project demand for a new product.

The key is to be able to "What is the cost of holding inventory – just in case? What is the cost of lost orders? It is this type of analysis that will help us answer the questions before the situation becomes an emergency," says Parente.

Dig Deeper: A Passion for Forecasting

7. Take a stress test.

Many companies have survived brutal declines in revenue through aggressive cost cutting and generating cash via reducing receivables and inventory and stretching payables. Unfortunately, such survival tactics can backfire when sales finally pick up. That's the thinking behind the Plante & Moran Liquidity Stress Test. Plante & Moran is a certified public accounting and business advisory firm based in Southfield, Michigan. The liquidity test, which is a free online tool, helps growing companies project their longer-term cash flow needs.

"A lot of people have their own strategy for predicting short-term capital," notes David Priestley, a consulting manager in restructuring and operations management at Plante & Moran. "They might say, `I have this in the bank, I know I have this receivable coming in next week and these payables for the next two weeks.'" But Plante's liquidity test looks months down the road. A typical scenario: You have to buy a bunch of inventory and you've got customers who might not pay for 60 days. Do you have enough working capital or the ability to borrow to meet those needs? The test can help you see just how unhealthy your cash situation might become. Priestly likens the cash-forecasting tool to "a home medical test that tells you if you really need to go see the doctor."

Dig Deeper: Understanding the Pressures on Your Business

8. Plan for special cases.

A sales spike should not be a total surprise if the communication between customers, salespeople, and production is good. In her research, Parente found the relationship between sales and operations to be most critical in the case of "make-to-order" or "assemble-to-order" products. That's because salespeople transmit customer specifications directly to production. A strained relationship between the two departments can lead to miscommunication and ultimately lower customer satisfaction.

Dig Deeper: The Benefits of Sales Coaching

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. It's a wonderful day for start-up Playdom. The two-and-a-half-year-old company has been acquired by Walt Disney for $563.2 million, making it the richest deal ever in the social gaming market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Playdom makes games for social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. It's the third-largest player in the social gaming space, attracting a user base of 42 million active players each month -- compared to market leader Zynga's 235 million. (Zynga is the maker of "FarmVille.") Playdom's "Mobsters," where players try to rise through the crime ranks, is the No. 1 game on MySpace. Other popular games include the city-building game "Social City," and the vampire game "Bloodlines."

Playdom's website brags: "We may be the fastest growing social gaming company on the planet."

Besides the $563.2 million in mostly cash, Playdom's shareholders could pick up another $200 million if the company meets performance goals, making the deal the biggest one yet in the fledgling yet fast-growing social gaming market. Millions of people play Playdom's games for free, but the company makes money through the sale of ads and virtual goods.

Disney – which earlier this month strengthened its burgeoning games business by acquiring iPhone and iPad app-maker Tapulous -- already is an investor in Playdom through its Steamboat Ventures fund. Privately-held Playdom has raised a total of $76 million, and its most recent valuation was about $345 million.

“We believed we could accomplish more with Disney than on our own," Playdom’s chief financial officer Christa Quarles told the Financial Times. “We’re already looking at the Disney catalogue and how we can bring those characters into our games.”

Steve Wadsworth, president of the Disney Interactive Media Group, said: "There's a huge growth opportunity happening in the marketplace that we weren't really playing in in any significant way. We believe strongly that social gaming is a critical component of interactive entertainment and we feel it is critical for us to have a presence there."

Playdom, formerly known as YouPlus, came out of stealth mode in March 2009 to reveal itself as the developer of the No. 1 game on MySpace. Then just 18 months old, the company already claimed to be profitable, had 37 employees, and had raised no money. It was founded by Daniel Yue (a semi-pro poker player who previously worked at ad-tech firm Adify), Rick Thompson (a co-founder of Adify) and former Google employees Chris Wang and Ling Xiao.

The company's sale of virtual goods took off partially thanks to user feedback. "We used to have nothing but cars in our racing game," Yue said in 2009. "Then one day a user e-mailed us offering to pay us $100 if we put a picture of his truck in the game. So we put a truck in the game and a lot of people bought it."

Playdom rival Zynga in November raised an additional $15.1 million, bringing its total funding to more than $54 million. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts swallowed Playfish in a deal worth $400 million in October.

It's not just Foursquare, really, but all of these location based services that seem to be hogging all the press these days. This week, the press is not so good thanks to a new study put out by the highly regarded Forrester Research.

Forrester published the results of a new survey showing that only a pathetic 4% of U.S. adults online have ever actually used a location based mobile app. 84% of adult Americans have never even heard of them. If you are one of them, I'm talking about apps that use geographical positioning in mobile devices to target hyperlocal information to the user.

A typical location based service can be a map showing you where you are in relation to all the nearby traffic slowdowns around you on the roads. Waze is a good example of this.

It can be a targeted advertisement based on the user's exact location, like an ad for a nearby sample sale on handbags.

I use one called Locavore that allows me to opt-in my current location and I get a map showing me all the nearby farm stands where I can buy locally grown food that is in season, for example. I also get a list of what's in season in my area of the country and what will be coming to harvest soon.

It's cool stuff. Creepy if you consider the possible intrusions to privacy. But, I have to admit the possibilities make me dizzy. Many believe location based services will be the next big thing in technology. I don't disagree.

I also don't disagree with Forrester. It's still very, very early days. Only a small percentage of people are actually dabbling with these new services out there. It sounds like most people are blissfully unaware. I'm guessing there are also more than a few that actually are aware and feeling anything but blissful about it. This crowd would be more interested in protecting their privacy than finding a good place to buy a few ears of sweet corn.

Unless you are a company that has the extra cash to play with bleeding edge technology and a need to market specifically to young men (the group most likely to try a location based service), Forrester recommends businesses should hold off on LBS marketing opportunities until more people are using them.

Before I introduce our final six-figure soloist, I'd like to invite you to a free web event to help you learn more about taking your business to six figure profits. Join me and my peers at the International Association of Solopreneurs for a FREE FREEDOM Conference. Learn what true Freedom really is--business ownership. Learn what pitfalls to avoid and how to get profits soaring! And yes, you heard me right – this virtual conference is FREE!

And now, wrapping up our “How to Make Six Figures” series with our final 6-figure soloist. Please know that these six weeks have featured only a handful of the responses I received when I set out to find the common links amongst the amazing men and women who single-handedly grew their businesses to six-figure profits, meaningful ventures and were willing to share the how and why of it all. I’d like to thank everyone who contacted me. Your stories were all wonderful, making my job all the more difficult!

Make sure to stay tuned for next week’s post where we’ll sum up our list of common links and see how we all measure up! Now I’d like to introduce you to our final 6-figure soloist.

International speaker, standup comedian and Professional Certified Coach David Wood is the author of Get Paid for Who You Are™ and a coauthor of the bestselling book Guerilla Marketing on the Front Lines. His tried and true methods for freeing oneself from the shackles of the timecard have been the inspiration for many people to gain a lifestyle of freedom and contribution. You can learn more at www.GetPaidForWhoYouAre.com.

Q. David, when you started your company did you have a plan in place, or did you just “wing it?”

A. Initially I was pretty much winging it. I printed a business card and started handing them out put up a website. It was much later while journaling that I created the master plan for the online business.

Q. Looking back, what would you say are the two important personal qualities or characteristics that are most responsible for your success?

A. 1) I’m willing to try things – unusual things, small things, big things. I try 100 things that don’t work, and then there’s one that takes off.
2) I’m willing to be uncomfortable. Whether it’s going on radio or speaking on a stage or sharing something raw and vulnerable about my life with 100,000 subscribers – I push that edge of my comfort zone.

Q. What mentoring or coaching experiences have you benefitted from?

A. I hired one of the top coaches in Australia – Christine McDougall, past Vice President of the International Coaching Federation, and then Marcia Reynolds, Past President of the International Coach Federation. Both coaches helped me with my vision and motivated me to keep stepping forward through uncertainty.

Q. David, what was the key motivating factor in your drive and determination to become your own boss?

A. When I left Towers Perrin, a top management consulting company, my boss said, “I hope in 10 years we’ll be ready for someone like you.” I was a wave-maker and tired of needing 10 people to approve any new idea I had. I wanted to implement my ideas NOW, and to have time freedom (to work when I like), and location freedom (to work from home or Hawaii.)

Q. Was funding ever an issue for you? If so, how did you solve the problem?

A. Initially I had about $30,000 in savings so I knew I had 6-12 months before I ran into trouble. I earned a little money with my first business, which was as a professional entertainer singing in Australian pubs, and then more money on the side as a consulting actuary (my former profession) at an hourly rate.

Q. What was your most challenging moment to date and how did you overcome it?

A. Stepping out on stage in front of 1200 people was one of the scariest. But higher on the list was going on national television in Australia on Hey Hey It’s Saturday (our equivalent of The Gong Show) and singing in a kilt. I was absolutely terrified and literally thought I might pee my pants. I overcame it by putting one foot in front of the other – ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. It always works.

Q. What is the greatest reward in running your own business?

A. When I want a week or a month off, I can take it. Also I get to create websites, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and teleclasses as quickly as I like. I can impact lives. I had a thought this morning about financial worry and how it impacts all of us, so I posted on Facebook: “Would you attend a free teleclass on financial worry and how to improve your finances?” If the response is good I can have 50-300 people on a teleclass next week and begin impacting lives that quickly. I might even make some sales at the end of it.

Q. Do you have a “top strategy” for success that you’d like to share?

A. Nothing mind-blowing, but rather simple: Have a simple plan for what you’re going to accomplish, and each day spend the first two hours of your day doing the most important thing on your list.

Q. David, entrepreneurs are idea machines, and that’s great. But sometimes too many good ideas can clutter the picture and stop progress. How did you harness your best ideas and bring them to fruition?

A. Ha – I have a million ideas, and many are incomplete. I pick my favorite ones – the ones that will have the most impact on people’s lives or the most revenue potential, or both – and focus on those. The others I write down on another piece of paper and save them – knowing I can come to them when the time is right. So prioritize, and just keep going down the list.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our solopreneurs?

A. It’s a challenging and rewarding life. The most important thing is a simple plan. I put everything I know about setting up an online business into five simple steps – and published them in Get Paid For Who You Are. I’m happy to give readers a free copy of the book at www.getpaidforwhoyouare.com.

In Summary: Wow, David's book for free! I'm on my way...
These “common links” are really adding up! Our final 6-figure soloist is most certainly a creative, flexible, out of the box thinker. David serves an important value of helping others through his work and he certainly values his freedom. Our soloists have all seemed pretty flexible in terms of their willingness to change the plan as circumstances change and David is no exception. Once again, a self funded startup whose creator is not risk adverse. David acts quickly and efficiently on his ideas and has a great system in place for “testing” them and determining whether they get shelved or acted upon. He seems systematic, yet doesn’t allow systems to stifle his creativity. One of the things that struck me most was the speed and efficiency in which David brings his wonderful ideas to fruition – or not. David is also very willing to push the limits of his “comfort zone” and do it with a wonderful sense of humor in place. Personally, I think this is such an important quality; taking one’s self too seriously can really get in the way!

I thought e-mail was supposed to do that! Or was it .pdf files? Word docs? Then along came Google Docs & Spreadseets. Ah ha! That's it; getting much warmer, because they're web-based and therefore accessible from any computing device with an Internet connection.

Well, they all have (and there are many, many other digital solutions that I could name. So please don't flame me in comments because I didn't mention your favorite) eroded the need for paper.

SanDisk CEO, Eli Harari, said a little something in his company's earnings call last week that got my attention. Harari says its the flash drive that is really replacing paper.

Of course, that is something he would say given SanDisk makes flash drives. But, is he right or is that just conference call smoke-blowing?

I believe he makes a point and here's the difference. Paper (aside from the chiseled or painted rock) has got to be the world's oldest data storage device. It takes one storage format to replace another.

E-mail is not a storage tool (although most of us use it as one anyway). E-mail is a tool to create data. So are software applications.

Servers, despite being the mules of data storage, are removed and out of the hands of the user.

Portable data storage, like flash drives, are really the natural descendent of paper (and before that it's great-grandaddy papyrus).

I'm not sure if this is what Harari was considering when he made his remark.

I'm guessing the flash drive will not last nearly as long as paper has, either.

Angel investors will get a federal tax cut for investing in government-funded technology start-ups under proposed legislation.

Five members of Congress – including Jared Polis, the founder of Proflowers.com and Bluemountain.com and a first-term Democrat from Colorado – are proposing a new tax break that would provide a 25 percent credit for an equity investment in a company that has already qualified for a federal research and development grant program for small businesses.

Under the legislation, introduced July 15 by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, the credit's value would be limited to half the size of the Small Business Innovation Research award. (The nearly 30-year-old SBIR spreads federal research largess to small businesses, requiring federal departments and agencies that spend more than $100 million in grants for outside research to set aside 2.5 percent of that for small businesses. Initial grants usually equal about $100,000 to assess the feasibility of an idea and then, at the next stage, grants of $750,000 are provided for research and development.)

The bill, called the Innovation Technologies Investment Incentive Act, is the latest in a string of local, state, and federal incentives to funnel private money toward technology ventures. It's modeled partly on Van Hollen's home state of Maryland's biotech tax credit, which offers investors a tax break valued at 50 percent of the eligible investment. (The state says the credit has helped it leverage $50 million in investment for biotech companies that are less than 12 years old and have fewer than 50 employees.) The proposed program will be capped at $500 million nationally.

The other 3 members of Congress who joined Hollen and Polis in introducing the bill: Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, Pennsylvania Rep. Allyson Schwartz, and Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, all Democrats. The bill is pending in the House Ways & Means Committee.

How would the legislation help start-ups? "If I get an immediate tax credit, I get an immediate return. I know I would increase my investing if there was a tax credit," angel investor Stephen Spinelli, co-founder of Jiffy Lube, told Inc. earlier this year.

Don Rainey, a general partner with Grotech Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Vienna, Virginia, told the Washington Business Journal that linking the tax break to the SBIR award is a shrewd move.

"It takes all those federal dollars that will be spent anyway, and causes more private dollars to complement that investment," he said.

He added: "Start-ups tend to create more start-ups, particularly successful ones. People go into a start-up, see its success, learn what you need to do and they start companies."

Free tips from an SEO expert. Tech entrepreneur Neil Patel has spent a large portion of his career helping big corporations like Viacom and HP make more money off the web through SEO techniques. Now you can gain the value of his expertise without having to pay the big-corporation price-tag. On his blog Quick Sprout, Patel has some tips to help your business rank on Page 1 of Google without buying a single paid link. As Patel explains, Google frowns on paid links and is constantly on the lookout for link spam. "The problem with buying paid links is, you'll rank really well in the short run, but sooner or later you will get caught," he says. The trick to great results is to build legitimate links. To that end, Patel has a handful of relatively simple techniques to help you boost your business's Google search results. According to Patel, his tips "aren't fun and sexy, but they work."

The right way to deal with employee ideas. Our Leigh Buchanan spoke with the nation's most employee-centric companies and this is what she found.

The "Hello, Ladies" effect. It might not exist. Despite 94 million views on YouTube of Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa's ads, sales of Red Zone body wash have declined 7 percent, according to a study by SymphonyIRI. Fast Company ponders why the immense online popularity seems to have failed to translate into influence, citing another - successful - spokesman. Remember Dos Equis The Most Interesting Man in the World? Since he signed on in 2007, sales have jumped every year. Why? According to Jonathan Goldsmith, the man who plays the Most Interesting Man, it's all about "life experience" that gives his character intrigue. He tells Fast Company: "If you don't experience life, you won't be a participant - you'll just be a voyeur. You'll watch it go by like a parade you're not involved in." We'll buy that.

Forgetting sunk costs is harder than it sounds. When you've invested valuable time and money into a new project at your company, say a product line or a marketing campaign, it's natural to want to keep wrestling with the endeavor until it at least breaks even (if not turns a profit). But Fred Wilson says that even if you've dug hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project, you shouldn't let that impact future investments. "Even though I was taught about sunk costs in business school twenty-five years ago, I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Most of the time that we make a follow-on investment defensively, to protect the capital we have already invested, that follow-on investment is marginal or outright bad," he writes.

Go ahead, take that vacation. Any entrepreneur can tell you how difficult it is to set their business aside to take a vacation, and Paul Downs is no exception. In a blog post for The New York Times, the founder of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers explains that he hasn't been away from an entire workweek since 2003. Downs just returned from a vacation, however, and it turned out that "the sky did not fall," he writes. "The bookkeeper paid the bills, and we didn't run out of money." While that's not altogether unexpected, he leaves us with a few insights on the underlying conflict many business owners feel when considering vacation time: "There are many times I fantasize about a life without daily obligations. That's supposed to be one of the prime motivators for entrepreneurs--the day you cash out and retire to a life of complete freedom. On the other hand, it's nice to be needed...I think it would be hard for me to start an existence separate from the shop." Perhaps the record-setting heat on the East Coast this summer convinced him a few days away wouldn't hurt.

The Facebook prejudice? First Facebook prohibited a rep from the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet from creating a fan page with the word "Palestinian" in it. Now that the "error" is fixed, Valleywag reports that the last name Arab also gets automatically rejected during sign-up. The tipster who discovered the problem says Facebook allowed her husband to sign up using his last name, Arab, back in 2007, but now, neither she nor other members of her family are able to do so. Facebook responded to the initial glitch with page registration saying, "We have an automated system that checks for obviously inaccurate profile registration names. For a short time, this was inadvertently applied to Page creation names." According to Valleywag, this is likely the result of the same issue, but they write, "this shouldn't have been a problem in the first place—especially if CEO Mark Zuckerberg really believes that his site can be a tool for building bridges across cultural divides."

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While working on a recent report about great corporate cultures, we heard from many companies that aggressively promote employee participation. "We are proud of our distinctive Open Door Policy," wrote virtually every applicant to a best workplaces competition, implying that most executives not only lock themselves away in their offices but also pile large pieces of furniture before the entranceways. Many also touted their suggestion boxes, which ranged from "Add your comments" sections on an intranet to the kinds of low-tech repositories in which schoolchildren leave valentine cards for classmates. The general theme: no one here gets slapped down for speaking up.

Which is, of course, all to the good. Cultures that encourage input and ideas get more of both. The contest applications overflowed with examples of suggestions (often from fresh hires, interns, and receptionists) that had saved or earned the businesses millions of dollars. The typical anecdote went something like this: "Loretta, who vacuums the floors, pointed out that the lint from our rugs could be collected and used to make sound-muffling filters for our machinery, which could cut down on damage to employees' eardrums and significantly reduce our health-care costs." None of us is as smart as all of us, as the motivational posters affirm.

In addition to open doors and slotted boxes, contest applicants reported using meetings, committees, and off-sites to solicit ideas. But two or three cited a practice that I believe, if applied widely, could double or triple staff input and significantly improve employee satisfaction into the bargain. These companies guarantee employees a yea or nay on their suggestions within 48 hours. And if the response is yea, then the companies expeditiously put the ideas into action.

Companies, in general, are not efficient about soliciting ideas. They schedule brainstorming sessions or big-think retreats, setting off panics in which employees pound their foreheads and squeeze the sides of their skulls in an effort to produce something—ideally, a lot of somethings—that makes them look smart. Managers often return from these fishing expeditions with hauls more notable for quantity than for quality. The sheer volume of ideas becomes paralyzing. Leaders slog through long lists of suggestions typed into their laptops or captured on the pages of a flipchart, weighing one against the other, trying to recall the context and the arguments for and against. One or two may see the light of day. A few are swiftly buried, their graves sprinkled with salt to prevent them from coming back. The majority get pushed down the road and pushed down the road and pushed down the road until they wear away to nothingness.

Sometimes employees will independently approach a leader with ideas. The leader pronounces them promising and then, amidst the constant demands of running the business, promptly forgets them. Or, unwilling to discourage initiative, she promises to consider them and then shoves them to the back of her mental filing cabinet. Employees, uncomfortable nagging even the most benevolent of bosses, rarely follow up. They grow frustrated. The suggestion box sits empty save for a gum wrapper and a receipt for Handi Wipes from Staples.

Then there's XPlane, a design consultancy in Portland, Oregon. Like many other companies, XPlane solicits employee suggestions through a forum on its intranet. But XPlane guarantees a response within 48 hours. "Action is taken immediately to determine best solutions to inquiries and suggestions," according to the company.

Lauren Dixon, CEO of Dixon-Schwabl, an advertising firm in Victor, New York, describes her company's process this way: "A person comes in my office and says, 'I really want to do this.' I say, 'Let's figure out a business model and see if it makes dollars and cents.' We evaluate it on the spot and agree if there is any other information that needs to be in the mix before we make the decision. Within 48 hours we make the decision whether to move forward or abort the plan."

"Employees will come to you more often with big ideas if they get instant gratification and results," Dixon continues. "Forty-eight hours I think is the appropriate amount of time."

Of course such a policy requires the CEO and members of her executive team to put aside time two or three days a week to consider suggestions. The need for additional information may make a 48-hour turnaround impossible, in which case the employee should be informed and told when to expect a final answer. But 48 hours means 48 hours. Delivering on that promise strengthens employee trust, and expedites the introduction of great new products and processes to your business.

Many types of companies compete for customers by offering time-specific guarantees. They can compete for employees by doing the same.

Early in my career, I owned a small marketing services business. Beyond a few computers and desks, we didn’t have any assets to speak of.

I feared I wasn’t building any equity in my business but, rather, just piddling away hours. I decided to look into buying a piece of commercial property to operate from as a hedge in case my business turned out to be worthless. I reasoned that at least I could sell the property when it was time to move on.

I had an advisory board of seasoned entrepreneurs, so I convened a meeting to discuss the purchase of a commercial property.

The meeting began well enough, with my outlining the merits of owning the space we operated from. Instead of paying thousands of dollars a month to a landlord, I argued, I could be paying the funds to myself. In 15 years, I calculated, I could own the property outright.

Finally, one of my advisers interrupted: “What makes you think your marketing business isn’t sellable?”

“It’s just a collection of people. I have no hard assets,” I responded.

My adviser dug in. “The only thing acquirers buy—the only thing—is the promise of a reliable stream of future profits. Focus on making your existing business more reliable and predictable, and you’ll have a sellable company.”

The room went quiet; my advisers sensed I needed time to absorb this insight. After a minute or so, another adviser weighed in: “Commercial real estate is a different business. The fastest way to jeopardize your existing business is to get distracted by starting a second business.”

By the end of the meeting, all of my directors had panned the idea of buying a space for our company.

I quickly decided against buying the property and focused instead on growing my business from leased space.

Recently, I ran into a friend of mine who is a partner in a successful venture capital firm. He had just decided to move his office from downtown Toronto to Yorkville, Toronto’s most exclusive real estate market.

I decided to test the advice I had been given years earlier and asked my VC friend why he had chosen to rent instead of buy, which was clearly an option given the success of his firm. “We’re in the business of finding the next big technology business,” he said. “We don’t know the first thing about commercial real estate. Why would I pretend to understand that business?”

In the end, I built a business that was worth more than the real estate I was considering buying. I’ll never know if I would have still been able to pull that off while simultaneously getting into the commercial real estate business. Maybe . . . but then again, maybe not.

John Warrillow is the author of Built to Sell: Turn Your Business into One You Can Sell. He has started and exited four companies. Most recently John transformed Warrillow & Co. from a boutique consultancy into a recurring revenue model subscription business, which was acquired by The Corporate Executive Board. In 2008 he was recognized by BtoB Magazine’s “Who’s Who” list as one of America’s most influential business-to-business marketers.

With the release of Apple's iPhone, mobile gaming has clearly become a major moneymaking industry (just as social gaming on Facebook has turned the industry on its head—see Farmville and its 100 million users). The next hot thing on the mobile gaming market seems to be the Android, but it's all about designing games that capitalize on the original addictive nature of gaming, to keep users coming back.

"Thanks to the rapid evolution of mobile technology, smartphones have transformed the real world into a giant game board, allowing users to interact and compete in ways that were science fiction a decade ago," says David Griner, a social media strategist for marketing agency Luckie & Company in Birmingham, Alabama. "Whether you're fighting to be Foursquare mayor of your favorite coffee shop or searching posters for hidden QR codes to reveal hints about a new movie, it's clear that businesses have more ways than ever to engage their fans and make day-to-day life more fun."

If you're looking to start your own mobile gaming company, your best bet is to leverage existing games and platforms, to figure out what people are already consuming, and then to try to beat the market there. Regardless of the platform or game idea, here are the steps you can follow as you put together your business plan.


Business Planning for a Mobile Gaming Company: Why You Should Start a Mobile Gaming Business

When Mark Zuckerberg set out to design Facebook, he certainly never envisioned it would be the No. 1 gaming platform on the web. And Apple surely didn't plan on games being the main driver of their app store revenue. Games have become mainstream entertainment, and are certainly no longer a basement-only activity.

Whether it be executives playing BrickBreaker while they travel, a senior citizens Wii tournament, New Yorkers playing solitaire on their subway ride, or a family night built around "Rock Band," everyone is playing games in some capacity.

"There are games now for pretty much every age, every demographic," says Jesse Schell, instructor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University. "More and more women are going online. It comes down to everybody is playing games. Games are just evolving like species in order to fit into every little niche of our lives."

In fact, about 40 percent of gamers today are women, and 68 percent of homes in America either own a console or PC used for interactive entertainment, according to the Entertainment Software Association's 2010 Essential Facts report. Additionally, the report notes, 42 percent of heads of households say they play games on wireless devices such as cell phones or PDAs, up from 20 percent in 2002.

"We're in a place where consumers are constantly consuming content over platforms all in the course of a day," says Matt Story, the Los Angeles-based director of Denuo (and former head of their gaming division, Play). "We've been playing games for 20 years with the sole purpose of getting a higher score than our opponent, and now that's just become a part of our everyday lives."

Dig Deeper: Should You Create an iPhone App?


Business Planning for a Mobile Gaming Company: Find Your Niche

As noted above, it's all about finding a blank space in the industry and filling that hole. Try to focus on a single platform early on and then if and when you grow, you can look to expand and broaden your product. Finding your niche is not specific to planning a business based around mobile gaming, but it is perhaps one of the most important factors you can consider. Just as nobody expected the iPhone and Android to become gaming hubs, there are likely devices that are being overlooked as future gaming devices. Is that the Kindle? Or is it just as simple as designing something new for smartphones?

Dig Deeper: How to Make Money on iPhone Apps


Business Planning for a Mobile Gaming Company: Test Your Product

"Perhaps better than any other industry, the gaming industry is really good at getting a product out there for consumers to use, get feedback on and see what they think," Story says. "If you think about some of the biggest products like a Halo, there are playable beta versions before the final product. The traditional model of holding back a product doesn't work in gaming, so feedback is key in helping you to avoid mistakes early on."

The beauty of mobile and social gaming's rise in popularity is that is has made it considerably easier to enter the gaming market as a small company, with limited capital. While the big studios like Electronic Arts, Rockstar Games and Activision may spend $50-100 million and employ an army of engineers, technicians, artists and more on their biggest titles (think Madden, Halo, Grand Theft Auto etc.), they are all based upon realism. With the success of games like Farmville and other Zynga offerings, the groundwork has been laid for the success of smaller, cheaper games.

"Perhaps due to the economic situation, we've learned that gamers are willing to sacrifice quality for cost," says Story. "It's gotten to the point where a few guys can sit in a room and bang out a game in three weeks for a relatively low cost, and then it's all about making that game social."

In the early days of gaming, the developer was involved in almost all of the testing. And as a small startup, that may still be your best bet as well. Rely on your instincts that you've developed as a gamer for guidance on what is working and what is not. Achieving broad appeal requires that some aspects of the game are engaging to the hardcore gamers, while other features appeal to the casual gamer. Once a playable prototype has been created, play it every day internally and make adjustments based on testing, thereby creating new versions quickly, evolving the game in the process.

Larger test groups provide valuable testing feedback and create games of wider mass and social appeal. But the reality is also that unless your game is addictive and easy to share via existing mobile social networks, your success may be muted. As games become more complex, a larger pool of quality assessment resources are often required, but as a start-up you don't have to focus on this early on. Use your network of friends, colleagues, and potential marketing partners to explore more opportunities on the testing level. With no proper or required reference to a complete and reusable test strategy, game testing follows a game-specific test approach. This ranges from completely ad-hoc and exploratory testing to a semi-structured approach based on testers experience, scale, complexity and production delivery date of the game. It's really up to you and what you want to get out of it.

Dig Deeper: Industry Profile – Self-Published Video Games


Business Planning for a Mobile Gaming Company: Find Marketing & Distribution Partners

Creating a game and then approaching potential advertising partners can be the wrong process, particularly in this industry. Gamers are some of the smartest consumers, so if you give them a product early on that is free and doesn't have any branding or advertising tie-in, when you try to retroactively add that in, gamers will typically balk.

A better way to approach your company is to find a marketing partner to help alleviate cost and raise awareness of the games. Not only will you not have to pour as much of your own money into the product, but you'll reap the benefits of having a marketing agency and access to larger brands at your disposal from an early stage. It's often difficult to get advertisers behind a product early on, particularly if you don't have something for them to see (this is again why testing your product is so vital), but if there is a great opportunity in an untapped arena, marketers would be more likely to partner up to help both parties.

Additionally, finding a distribution partner with reach and access from an early stage can bring about the social awareness that you'll really want with a new mobile startup.

Dig Deeper: Google's Play on Gaming

Business Planning for a Mobile Gaming Company: Make Your Game a Seamless Part of Daily Life

"I believe gaming technology will evolve to integrate into a player's daily life so that even their most mundane routines become meta-games in a grander scheme," Dan Greenwalt, the Game Director at Turn 10 Studios, told IGN when asked about the future of gaming. "Imagine an RPG where going to work and sitting at your office actually gains you experience points in-game, or going on a date in real life actually accomplishes a quest or a mission. By 2020, players will go from an always-connected lifestyle of today to an always-gaming lifestyle of tomorrow."

Greenwalt puts it very succinctly, as what it comes down to if you're looking to enter the mobile gaming market is finding a way to relate your game to everyday habits and lifestyle of your consumers. You can expect that if you succeed, your game will be successful for 6-12 months at best (even the top big studio games rarely remain relevant more than a year), so it's all about garnering social relevancy, conversation and keeping users coming back with new features and add-ins.

Dig Deeper: Industry Profile – Mobile Application Design

The U.S. Copyright Office says that jailbreaking one's iPhone--that is, hacking into the operating system to add software applications not authorized by Apple--is totally cool with them.

This means that the four million iPhone users who have jailbroken their phones (this reporter included) no longer have to live in fear of being shipped off to the clinker (where, despite this Lady Gaga video, iPhones are generally prohibited).

More importantly, the copyright ruling would seem to make it a little easier for entrepreneurs who have been denied access to Apple's app store to get their products to consumers. A vibrant grey market in unofficial iPhone apps has existed as long as the iPhone has been on sale, and the ruling means it will likely grow.

But it's not all good news for entrepreneurs. As Alexis Madrigal notes, Apple is under no obligation to be nice to jailbreakers. It could design its software to be incompatible with hacked phones, rendering them unusable, or it could refuse to provide technical support to users who have jailbroken their phones.

In other words the tension between Apple's desire to sell a perfect product and its desire to own a platform for entrepreneurs remains. As Paul Graham warns:

"When you're in business, there are two doors you can walk through," says Bob Moore, of Bob's Red Mill, a natural-foods chain based in Milwaukee, Oregon. "You can walk through the door where you treat the customer like your guest, operating by the rule that the customer is always right. Or you can be cutthroat. The first door is the door of kindness. That's the one I decided to walk through."

"Early on, a management consultant told me to get a great board of directors," says Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, a publishing company based in Sebastopol, California. "It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody—even if you're the sole owner."

"I like coding," says Justin Kan, the co-founder of Justin.tv, a San Francisco-based website that streams live video. "It helps keep me sharp. Plus, I find it hard to manage somebody's work unless I have an intimate knowledge of how to do it myself. Otherwise, how can you differentiate a good idea from a bad one or know how long something is going to take?"

"Our food prices fluctuate," says Jerry Murrell, founder of Five Guys Burgers and Fries, a franchise based in Washington, D.C. "We do not base our price on anything but margins. We raise our prices to reflect whatever our food costs are. So if the mayonnaise guy triples his price, we pay triple for the mayonnaise! And then we'll increase the price of our product."

"I carry a little notebook with the names of 35 or 40 people in the company, and I every week I look at it to make sure I'm in touch with everyone," says Kevin P. Ryan, founder of AlleyCorp, a New York City holding company that owns several Internet start-ups. "There are always 20 or 30 people who are up-and-comers or one or two levels down [in the organization], and I want them to know I'm paying attention. So I'll run down the list and notice I haven't talked to Mary in a long time and send her an e-mail, even if it's just to say, Great work."

"I make mistakes faster than anybody," says Josh James, founder of Omniture, a web analytics company based in Orem, Utah. "I think, go, do," he continues. "That's the Omniture mantra. While you're figuring out what to do, we've tried two different things and have figured out the right one."

Once upon a time as students at Cambridge University in the early '90s, Adam Balon, Richard Reed and Jon Wright ran a business organizing club nights. Now the three run Innocent Drinks, the U.K.'s favorite smoothie company (they also sell in more than a dozen European countries), with revenue of more than $150 million a year. The company's mission is as simple as its all-natural ingredients: To make it easy for people to do themselves some good and that doing so should taste good, too.

Besides its pure-fruit smoothies, the company is nearly as well-known for its cheekiness (one label reads: "separation occurs, but mummy still loves daddy") and its ethical business practices (the partners insist that fruit growers look after workers' rights, and 10 percent of annual profits go to the Innocent Foundation, which funds projects in countries where suppliers are based). But in 2009, the company sold a 20 percent stake to Coca-Cola, raising the equivilant of more than $45 million to fund a global expansion. "We want to be the Earth's favorite healthy food and drink company," says Reed, now 37.

Innocent has also expanded its product line, by offering "veg pots" (three servings of vegetables, plus whole grains and sauce), thickies (yogurt-based drinks), and more. Despite the 12-year-old company's success, Reed says it wasn't until about three years ago that he stopped questioning whether their initial idea would work. "Every time something good happened I still didn't believe it was just temporary respite from the paranoia that it was destined to fail," he says with a laugh. He told his story to Inc.com's Courtney Rubin. What follows is an edited transcript.

In February 1998 we were three 26-year-old friends living together and working in London, and we'd always wanted to set up a business together and we'd try to think up ideas. We were drinking too much beer and eating too much pizza and we thought we'd solve the riddle of healthy eating everyone knows the benefits of it, but modern life conspires against it. So we thought totally natural fruit smoothies would be a great little healthy habit and would make it easy for people to do themselves some good.

After about six months we had this orange, banana, and pineapple recipe, and we needed to test it on people other than our friends and family, who of course all said it was good. So we bought 500 of fruit and set up a stall at the Jazz on the Green festival in Parsons Green, which we thought would be full of the type of people who'd buy our product. Originally we had a three-page market research form for people to fill out, but when it's a lovely sunny day you don't want to fill out a form. And it felt too corporate. And so someone said: "Don't you just want to know if people will buy them or not?" So we had a sign that said: "Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies? and we had a "yes" bin and a "no" bin, and we committed to each other that if the yes bin was full we'd quit our jobs the next day. And the yes bin was full, but still we weren't sure. So we went back to our house in Barons Court and flipped a coin, and it came up three times in a row tails. So we all went in Monday morning and resigned.

We were innocent in name and innocent in nature because we'd only left with our last paychecks. We had no brand or packaging, we'd only ever made the smoothies in our kitchen, not on a grand scale, and we thought we'd be out to market in three to four weeks!

It turned into nine months, as we applied to 20 different banks and got turned down 20 times. We applied to every venture capital firm, and they all turned us down. One investor told us we scored a zero out of five in the investors' handbook: that we were friends, we'd never set up a business, we had no experience in food and drink, and we were going up against huge companies. And that was representative feedback. We went to one of these events that puts entrepreneurs in front of business angels and we gave it the pitch of our lives, and at the end I said: "If anyone's interested to find out more, could you put your hand up?" And no one did. It was a soul destroying experience.

And we sat on our sofa this blue Ikea sofa and it was "Well, that's it, we've got to call it a day because everyone's said no." And a mate of our said: "You will know someone who knows someone who knows someone who's rich it's like the Kevin Bacon game." So we sent out an email to literally everyone we knew. I nicked a load of addresses from my old workplace and we spammed half of London asking: "Do you know anyone rich?" And we got two e-mails back, one of which was from a friend of Jon's from school who'd done work experience with an American guy called Maurice Pinto who he'd heard sometimes made investments. So we had a meeting with him and he said it was a dumb idea but that he sort of believed in the team. We were trying to raise 250,000, and he said he'd put in 50,000 and committed to raise the rest for us. But the other six investors he usually worked with all said no, so he put in the extra 200 grand himself, entirely out of obligation. It's the single best investment he's ever made, and he loves telling that story.

Equally as hard as trying to raise funds was finding a manufacturing partner, and again, we got our break from meeting someone very senior near the end of his career. We always knew we couldn't build our own factories that we'd develop the recipes and find someone else to make them. Everyone in manufacturing also said our idea wouldn't work, but they're not as brutal as investors they'd say no but in a helpful way, suggesting someone who might say yes. So we finally met Mike Lord, who had started by importing fresh oranges to make fresh-squeezed orange juice. It's not a huge leap from there to smoothies, and we told him we'd put in the extra kit required. He said, "I don't think it's going to work, but there's something in your eyes that reminds me of myself when I was your age, so I'll do it."

The minimum run Mike would do was 400 cases, eight bottles in a case. The drinks are natural and without any preservatives, they have to be kept chilled, and we had to make them every day. On the first day, a Thursday, we sold three cases of the 400 to our local sandwich shop. On the second day we sold zero. So we went back to the shop that bought the original three cases and there's only four bottles left of the original 24. Our original business plan was based on the shops selling six bottles a day, but this one had sold 10 a day. That weekend we loaded up the 797 cases we hadn't sold and went into every shop in West London and said, "Hi, we're your new local neighborhood juice company. We'd love to give you some smoothies for free. If you sell them, please give us a call and order some more. If not, you and your staff can have them." And after that weekend literally about 45 of the 50 shops we gave them to called and said, "They sold really well. Can I have some more?" So then we could go to a wholesaler and say, "Here's 45 of your existing customers that want these. Here's a big pallet of 400 cases you buy the pallet and sell them on." And that's essentially how we've grown the business.

We also looked for ways to communicate and create an impression that didn't cost us anything for the first five years, we couldn't afford advertising. We did really simple things that were disproportionately effective. On the back of our labels there was space, and we knew that anyone reading it was one of our customers. So we'd write silly things, sometimes delivering a subtle message about how natural the products were but sometimes just delivering a load of nonsense. We worked really hard to get good PR coverage. I remember in the summer of 1999 we got a meeting with a journalist. We went in and dropped off the samples and realized: This whole building is stuffed with journalists, and we've got security passes already and a van outside. So Dan and I just went in and out getting bag after bag, and we started at the top floor and worked our way down, leaving smoothies on every floor. You probably couldn't do that now in the post-September 11 world, but we got a ton of phone calls.

Ten years in, we never expected to sell a stake to Coke. We thought we'd end up with another Maurice, but the money we were looking for was massive: 30 million pounds to grow our international business. The market was hotting up and we didn't have time to do it slowly but surely the way we did in the U.K. we needed to get there fast, and we needed money. We officially launched our fundraising on the 14th of September, the day Lehman went under. Our adviser said: There has never been a worse time in the history of finance to raise funds. So he said we had to go wide and speak to everyone. To cut a long story short, we had eight different offers. We came out of the Coke meeting and said, 'Blimey, that wasn't how we thought it would be.' They were smart, they were honest. They were clear that they wanted to invest and they didn't want to control. That was quite a cool thing to have, especially because all the others had weird clauses. It was "We'll put the money in but you'll have to stop 10 percent going to charity." Definitely no way. Or "We'll put the money in but you have to give us the majority of seats on the board." No way. Coke was willing to sign that they'd have no operational control. That was two years ago, and they've been absolutely true to their word. When we've asked them for help they'll drop anything and help us. But they're really nervous just coming in the building they tell us they don't want to fiddle with what we've got.

All three founders make a rolling three-year commitment. We can't see how anyone can commit for longer than that. Once a year we look each other in the eye and say, "Are you in?" We've got our 2012 goals at the moment, and we've got a 30-year-vision. We're really keen to get the brand recognized internationally as the one that helps people live well and die old. One could say we're doing OK in the U.K. and just starting to get somewhere in Europe. But we've registered the trademark in the U.S., China and India and we want to get there, too.

I never would have had the confidence to do all this by myself. I think we survived because we were a team of three. Chances are if one of us was having a bad day then somebody else was having a good day. Can I just tell you, though, that the smaller the issue the bigger the argument? We know when to defer to each other on business matters, but the three hugest rows we've ever had were about the color of the walls, the color of the floors, and the one where people thought we were going to thump each other: where we were going to put the bookcase. I think we're all really frustrated interior designers, and it's pure subjectivity: why should someone's view matter more than anyone else's?

I still maintain that choosing cranberry over orange for the walls was the right choice.

Inc. 500 alum 2Wire was snapped up over the weekend by Pace for nearly a half billion dollars in cash. Not bad for a company started in 1998.

Pace, a British firm and the largest set-top box maker in the world, will pay $475 million for the broadband technology company. The acquisition is expected to give Pace greater access to the U.S. market.

2Wire, headquartered in San Jose, California, reached #26 on the Inc. 500 list in 2004, posting revenue growth of more than 3,000 percent. The company remained on the list the following two years and was an Inc. 5000 company in 2007, when revenue exceeded $225 million.

2Wire is currently owned by a consortium of investors including Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Telmex, Oak Investment Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures.

The close relationship with AT&T appears to have been particularly attractive to Pace. Neil Gaydon, chief executive of Pace said in a press release: "2Wire, with its expertise in the broadband residential gateway market, will enable us to address a full range of US operator requirements..The transaction introduces deep client relationships with important customers including AT&T and further develops our platform to deliver ongoing sustainable growth."

AT&T president of supply chain and fleet operations Tim Harden even made an appearance in the press release announcing the deal: "AT&T looks forward to continuing our working relationship with 2Wire under Pace’s ownership."

Who needs sleep when there are start-ups to launch? Between endless e-mail conversations and talkative co-workers, getting actual work done during the day isn't always an easy proposition. The New York Times has an interesting article about a group of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and software developers who have come up with a nocturnal solution to that problem. Calling themselves the New York Nightowls, this group of roughly 30 techies meets every Tuesday night from 10 p.m. until about 4 a.m. to to work on pet projects and side ventures that they normally don't have the time to focus on during the traditional workday. As one of the group's co-founders explains, "It's six hours of uninterrupted, productive time where you're surrounded by other creative people doing awesome things." The concept of late-night work sessions seems to a perfect fit for New York, it is the city that never sleeps after all, but similar groups have also formed in nearly a dozen cities including San Francisco and Boston.

The Huffington Post isn't immune to revenue issues. When considering the future of online media, you can't engage in conversation without referencing The Huffington Post. The liberal online newspaper/aggregation site/blogging community founded by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer attracted more than 24 million unique visitors last month, almost as many as The New York Times. But as Newsweek explains, HuffPo "has a big audience, but like most Web sites, it can't monetize it very well." Still, the site's audience just keeps growing and growing, and as Huffington told Inc. in her How I Did It, her site is already valued at $100 million.

Gulf Coast business owners' fate rests with one man. When the owners of Gulf Coast businesses affected by the BP oil spill apply for damage claims against the oil giant, the legitimacy of those claims will be determined by one man, Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called Spill Czar. Feinberg determines which businesses will be eligible for a piece of the $20 billion escrow account BP has established to pay for damages. As CNNMoney reports, Feinberg has already warned that not every business who applies for damage reimbursement will get paid. For example, to a motel on an oil-soaked section of beach, Feinberg says "Pay them. Pay the claim." However, a claim from a Boston restaurant that can no longer get Gulf shrimp is "highly unlikely" to get paid says Feinberg.

The real cost of smartphones. We recently told you why you should say no to conflict minerals from the Congo that are used in smartphones and other gadgets. Now, legislation included in the financial reform bill will make it easier for you to identify which electronics are truly conflict-free (via The New York Times). Under the new law, companies are required to certify whether they're using minerals like tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold that have been mined from the Congo or its surrounding countries. Many of the mines where these minerals are found are operated by rebel groups, and are the source of much of the violence in the war-torn country. The Enough Project, a humanitarian group that has been advocating for the legislation, hopes tech companies don't boycott trade in the Congo altogether. Instead, a rep tells the Times, "We want them to take a hard look at where their materials are coming from, but also contribute to positive change out in the region."

Start-up lets you rent an iPad (or chainsaw) for a day. Sometimes you just want to take a high-price gadget on a trial run, like perhaps if you'd to test out a Kindle on a business trip, or borrow a high-powered drill for some DIY time. TechCrunch has a profile of a company called Snapgoods which, like Zipcar for autos, lets you rent expensive doodads by the day. Though the company has a few competitors, the post sees its hyperlocal focus as its strength. The company which has only launched in New York so far lets you deal with people in your physical vicinity, you meet up with them in a local business, and you review the transaction afterwards to screen for crazy or klutzy individuals. Sounds promising but consumers will still need to take the leap of faith.

What's happening in your neck of the woods. This morning on Inc.com, we launched 12 city-specific pages, so you can find all of the stories relevant to your area. We're calling them Local Sections, and they cover everywhere from San Francisco to Shanghai; from Atlanta to London. Check them out, and check back for the latest local content, and for more cities as we launch additional Local Sections in coming months.

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The Book: The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane by Randall Lane, Portfolio, $27.95, Hardcover, July 2010.

Every decade seems to have a nickname: The Roaring Twenties and The Swinging Sixties, for example. Randall Lane makes a strong case for the past decade to be christened The Zeroes. In his new memoir of the same name, Lane—cofounder and editor of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker magazines—tells the story of his own experiences during that decade of financial excess that we all are now paying for.

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin is still the definitive book about the actual banking crisis that changed our world so radically. The Zeroes offers more of a People magazine (or possibly TMZ) look at how we got here. And that is not an insult. The entertainment rag aspect comes from the author's willingness to name names and pull no punches when describing, with an insider's eye, the excesses of the decade. The people gracing these pages include Sen. John McCain gambling at a craps table and ex-Major League Baseball player Lenny Dykstra behaving as an authority on the stock market.

As a magazine publisher—the traders loved the PR he could provide—Lane was smack dab in the middle of the lunacy. This unique view—a bit like Alice in Wonderland—is presented with the use of a self-deprecating humor that pervades the book and creates sympathy for a man misled by opportunity.

What Michael Lewis did for '80s traders in Liar's Poker, Randall Lane has now done for trader rock stars of The Zeroes. You will be stunned by the craziness and cautioned by the consequences.

Reviewer Jack Covert is the founder of 800-CEO-READ, a leading bookseller to corporations and large organizations, based in Milwaukee.

It?s almost too easy to make fun of Jamba Juice, what with the overpriced drinks, allegedly ripped-off ad campaign, and--no, this isn?t a joke--recently launched clothing line, featuring neon-green hoodies emblazoned with the phrase ?official taste taster.? That said, it?s truly refreshing (ha) to see the smoothie titan finally start dishing it out.

Earlier this month, McDonald's made a play for Jamba's market share by launching a line of "real fruit" smoothies. (They're actually made from purees.) Rightfully rattled, the San Francisco-based company has responded by launching a new drink called the Cheeseburger Chill, described in a press release as "beefy, smothered in cheese, loaded with your favorite condiments and blended to creamy perfection." There's even a commercial to whet our appetites:

[youtube W_oLzOBgIRU]

>We know what you're thinking: This sounds insane. And that's the whole point. The stunt is a fake-out, engineered to suggest that a burger joint getting into the smoothie business is just as ridiculous as a smoothie joint blending up cheeseburgers.

Coming from Jamba Juice, the logic is dubious. This is, after all, the same company that's trying to broaden its business by selling pint-sized pizzas and oatmeal, which is no less far-fetched than McDonald's dabbling in smoothies.

But we'll give credit where credit is due. The spoof-commercial is pretty funny, and offering viewers a $1 off Jamba Juice coupon for having to endure a full minute of "stomach clenching video" is a nice touch. Plus, we've heard those McDonald's smoothies are kind of nasty.

The Gulf oil disaster has obliterated the BP brand name. It's a deserved problem for the company, but what of all the BP gas station owners now faced with a tarnished reputation and declining sales? BP has tried sending them signage to encourage customers not to punish local owners for their mistake, but that mostly fell flat. Our own Jamey Boiter suggested last month that BP change its name back to Amoco. The company bought Amoco in the 1990s, but the name has remained dormant since. But according to the Associated Press, some BP gas station owners are considering a name switch.

In his FastCompany.com piece on BP rebranding, Boiter suggests:

Granted, BP isn't considering a rebranding back to the Amoco name. But station owners, who in many cases have few to no ties to BP (besides a gas contract), have been tossing around the idea. And apparently, the idea may be brought up at the station owners' annual convention with BP bigwigs this fall.

Nothing is finalized yet, but we hope that BP executives at least consider the request. After all, why should nearly-independent station owners suffer because of the incompetency of BP?

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

The Salton Sea is one of California's most intriguing attractions. It's one of the planet's largest inland seas, the home of over 400 species of birds, the product of an irrigation project overflow, one of the planet's lowest points and, perhaps most creepily, surrounding by a number of ghost towns. Now the ultra-salty body of water may be able to claim a new title: lithium production center of the U.S.

In 18 months, Simbol Mining will attempt to make some serious cash from the Salton Sea's lithium-filled waters (the Sea has a lithium concentration of at least 200 parts per million) with its first commercial lithium extraction plant. The company, a spinoff from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, plans to swipe lithium from the geothermal brine of already-existing geothermal plants in the sea, according to Greentech Media.

The toxic brine--a byproduct of geothermal energy production--is usually treated as waste. But Simbol believes that the brine byproducts of just one of the five geothermal plants in the Salton Sea could produce millions of dollars worth of lithium each year. With four more 50 MW geothermal plants lined up for production in the sea, Simbol could be looking at a veritable cash cow.

The Salton Sea's lithium riches won't just benefit Simbol. As it stands, the U.S. relies on often-unstable countries (Bolivia, Afghanistan) for lithium supplies. And as electric cars become more popular, the demand for lithium batteries also continues to grow. If Simbol can remove international lithium producers from the equation, lithium prices could drop precipitously--and that might mean cheaper hybrid and electric vehicles for consumers.

Photo Credit: Keith Scharwath

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

"BlackLight: Tango Down" is a first-person shooter focused on multiplayer online skirmishes, in the vein of mega-hit "Modern Warfare." The difference? "BlackLight" can only be downloaded and costs just $15, far less than a boxed game. Fast Company asked Marcus Beer, Director of Public Relations, and Shane Bettenhausen, Director of New Business, at Ignition Entertainment, about their strategy in releasing downloadable games, and whether digital titles are the industry's destiny.

Kevin Ohannessian: What is BlackLight: Tango Down?

Marcus Beer: BlackLight is the first downloadable game that delivers enough content so you can keep playing for months and months on end. A lot of the downloadable games that come out are smaller, with regards to the amount of content. This is a futuristic online shooter with 12 maps, 4 modes, 4 player coop, and over 2 trillion weapon combinations.

Shane Bettenhausen: We first talked to developer Zombie Studios about BlackLight last September. At that point, what they had was this semi-featured multiplayer mode, which was going to be part of a larger product. Originally this game was going to be a giant boxed product, like a Halo or a Modern Warfare. We were really interested in focusing on the multiplayer. You look at the stats of a lot of games, like Modern Warfare 2, on day one tons of people, before they even try the single player, are going straight to multiplayer. There have been all of the advancements in the genre to keep it sticky, to keep people going back online, fighting to get new weapons and new ranks. There's this whole movement toward multiplayer first. So we were like, "Let's do that. Lets give people the mode they really want and not spend all our efforts trying to make a single player game they may not even play." This allowed us to make a game with a much smaller budget and really focus on delivering a quality experience to the hardcore guys online.

You mentioned Modern Warfare, how come big franchises like Modern Warfare or Halo don't go digital?

MB: That's a tricky question. At the end of the day, they make games that sell huge amounts in retail. Let's not forget that retail is the key component in the games industry. We are at the start, the second year now, of digital downloads on console being a big thing and starting to evolve. The bigger companies know they can sell 7, 8, 9 million units of Modern Warfare, or Halo: Reach. They can do that and get a lot of money back. They also sell a lot of consoles. That's the situation now. That's going to be the situation for the next couple of years, because they want to make sure they can deliver stuff that you can't deliver on a download yet. Until we've all got T1 lines tapped into our 500 terabyte hard drive consoles, I don't think you will see a Halo or a Modern Warfare, or a game of that budget of $60 million or $70 million, delivered digitally. They want to keep retail happy. The pipeline is not quite ready yet.

SB: Digital distribution on the consoles has been a bit of a frontier. Microsoft was really disruptive with XBLA. If you look at the last few years, the progress being made, up until Battlefield 1943, a lot of publishers were afraid to really invest in a game that looks like a boxed experience and is a little more fully featured. The price points are creeping up for these games, and people are expecting more from that. We are going to see better experiences coming out on downloadable platforms.

You mentioned before the budget of the game was considerably less, because it was multiplayer only.

SB: Almost a third to a fourth of the cost, had it been a boxed product. This game is running on the Unreal engine, which is the graphic engine that powers Gears of War and a lot of huge games. That engine isn't cheap and because of that it does end up costing more than your average XBLA game, but we feel that we added enough value and functionality so that it's not that risky after all.

What do you expect to see in the digital market in the next two years?

MB: You'll see more small companies, like ignition. We're the companies that are able to act that much quicker. You'll see a rise in the quality of games. You might see a rise in the price point to $20, where the games are big enough to justify it. I think that's when you'll start to see a leveling out in regards to different tiers in downloads. The growth of the console downloadable stuff is dependent on a couple of things: It's dependent on how Sony and Microsoft want the content delivered to their machines, what content they are prepared to allow, what limitations they put in place, and it depends on the pipeline. It depends on what sort of Internet connection everyone has. Downloading BlackLight, which comes in under a gig, on a DSL is not a big issue. But if you're going into the 3, 4, 5 GB games that's when it becomes a bit trickier and people will have to leave their machines on overnight. As people's wireless connections in their homes improving, you'll see bigger games.

SB: And digital distribution is becoming common place. A console like the Wii, a majority of users don't know that you can download games that way and are connected to the Internet. But on a console like PlayStation 3, 80% of users are connected to the Internet and it's a much better way to reach those guys. Now, it's okay for a publisher to just put a game out digitally. In the future, there are things like OnLive, these cloud computing solutions where you don't even have the game. You are logging in, playing the game, and transmitting it to your screen. I think the industry is moving away quickly from physical products. Physical products are still here, but clearly there's always new solutions to get games to people. I think moving forward, the kids growing up in this age of Facebook, they're not as tied to physical possessions and going to the store to buy games. Clearly, it's going to keep going in this direction.

As a publisher of digital titles, what would you like to see Microsoft and Sony, and possibly Nintendo, do for their next consoles to help foster digital downloads?

SB: I think Microsoft and Sony made big strides with the current platforms. I am excited to see how they can build upon this: make it more user friendly, make it a more seamless experience. What Sony did with PSP Go, their recent revision of their handheld--even if it was a bit of a failure at retail--it was an experiment, because there was no physical media and only downloads. That's clearly an indicator of where the consoles could be going. I don't think it's going to happen right away. With Nintendo 3DS, which is shipping next year, that's Nintendo's chance to get it right with digital distribution. Most publishers would agree that WiiWare and DSiWare on the current platforms have been slightly mishandled and there is not a lot of awareness. We're all hoping that Nintendo takes a serious look at the usability and the functionality and make it easier for the end user. Ultimately for the publisher, if the users don't know how to get these games, it's not very viable.

MB: One of the things we have to remember is that none of the console companies need to think they are reinventing the wheel here. At the end of the day, the PC has had downloadable content, downloadable games for such a long time. Look at the success of Steam.

SB: Now there is parity between boxed and download games on PC--those markets are equal. Which is pretty telling.

MB: PC owners always had the mindset, "I don't need a disk. I can install my games on my hard drive. I can download a game. I can play. I don't need to see a physical copy." I think now the consumer of consoles games is starting to see that you don't need a physical boxed copy for a game that is going to cost you $15 or $20. I think that, and the quality of games progress, you'll see sales numbers go up. What I would like to see for the next iteration of consoles? It's things we are starting to see with the new Xbox 360: built-in wireless, much bigger hard drives, the ability to store scores and saved games offline. Take a look at what Blizzard does with World of Warcraft, or what Steam does. The fact you can easily access your account from any machine without lugging a hard drive around. I think that's a key thing.

SB: Another cool thing Steam does is buying in bulk. If you buy three copies of a game in steam and disseminate them to your friends, you get a discount. It's a cool way to view virtual goods as a commodity. There is still a lot of room for growth in terms of how to tell users about these download services.

Are there other unique issues with publishing downloadable games?

MB: The key thing to remember, and this is the way we're tackling downloadable games at Ignition, DLG does not mean cheap. There's still a lot of snobbery when people look at downloadable games, "It's cheap, it's a throwaway game." There are games out there, whether it be Battlefield, Shadow Complex, DeathSpank, or BlackLight had they been released on the last generation of console, these could've been full-priced released that would've done very well. Yes there is, whether it be retail or online store, there is a fair amount of dross out there. But inexpensive games don't have to be cheap and nasty. I hate to see XBLA and PSN go the route of the Wii--look at how much shovelware that's been put out just to take advantage of the Wiimote. I would hate to see that amount of shovelware coming out on XBLA and PSN moving forward. I think if we continue to have great games like Deathspank or Braid, or BlackLight and Swarm, which is another one we are publishing next year, confidence is going to get bigger and bigger. That is a lesson we all need to take on board, as opposed to slapping out cash-ins and cheap little games that people download and go, "Oh crap, why did I bother wasting my $10. I don't want to touch DLG for a while."

SB: Probably the coolest thing about these downloadable games on console is allowing games that might not have ever seen the light of day in a box, because they are a little too different or too disruptive, able to find a huge audience. I think BlackLight isn't one of those games, it's a little more mainstream and like other popular titles. Swarm is a little quirkier and different, and reminds me of the successes we have seen like Braid, or Limbo which just came out on XBLA. Games that I couldn't imagine would ever get put out for $60, but for $10 or $15, a lot of people are willing to take a risk and try something different that has a point of view and is unique. It's cool to be able to foster those kinds of experiences and get them to a huge audience that never would've found them otherwise.

BlackLight: Tango Down is available now on Xbox 360 and the PC, and will be available soon for PlayStation 3.

Ballmer's eccentricity can be exemplified in one sentence, taken directly from Microsoft's official transcript of the session: "Now, we've got some other competitive actions coming back, and we'll talk about slates and tablets and blah, blah, blah, blah...." Yes, Steve actually said he was going to talk "blah." And he did. Interestingly enough, this part of his speech was tackling the iPad, and how Apple had "done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out," and completely owned a market that MS probably wished was theirs. In fact we know this to be true, since Ballmer noted "they sold certainly more than I'd like them to sell, let me just be clear about that."

Anyway, check out the word cloud at the top there. It's from Ballmer's long introduction to the event, constituting some 13,000 words--quite enough to get a flavor of how Steve's words came out.

What can you see? Immediately we're reminded that MS is almost a one-trick pony, and that trick is called Windows. That word came up 39 times in the first part of Ballmer's speech, compared to just 13 appearances of "Office" and 12 for "Xbox". Interesting, no? On the other hand, Steve used the word "thing" 46 times, as in "let's talk about this thing" and the word "think" 34 times. "People" are also things Ballmer's fond of, as that word showed up 37 times.

Other stand-out words are "kind," "consumer," "going," and "got." What's conspicuous by its absence are words like "success" or "positive" or "great" or "well"--indeed there were only nine "good"s used during Ballmer's segment. Is MS really not performing well, or is Ballmer merely not happy about the state of things? You'd be forgiven for thinking that, but there are also remarkably few "bad"s, no "fail," and just 3 "quit"s. In other words, Ballmer was treading a very neutral road, in terms of his language--neither being overly enthusiastic or revealingly critical.

For fun, contrast Ballmer's words with Steve Jobs' ones from the big D8 conference in June. Sure, it's a different context, but Jobs said words like "well" and "going" and "want" and "like" a lot. Almost as much as he used the word "people." So while Ballmer "blahs" and "thinks" "people" "kind" of "get" "windows" "things," Jobs is "going" to do "well" for "people." If you were being super-insightful, you may even see these words as a window into the two different CEO's management styles. Just maybe.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Not all ethical clothing lines are like American Apparel. Izzy Lane is one fine exemplar of wholesomeness.

Sometimes being small is good. And in the case of London?s Izzy Lane, an innovative sustainable clothing line sourcing its fabrics directly from its very own sheep farm in the U.K., being small allows the company to stay true to its core value of authenticity. While companies like American Apparel are similar in that they bear the ?Made in Downtown LA? stamp and pride themselves on the ?sweatshop-free? thing, American Apparel has had its fair share of corporate challenges as of late (rumors about naked staff meetings and the resignation of AA's accounting firm), and let?s hope that Izzy Lane stays wholesome enough on its farm to never go there. Ever.

Speaking of naked farms, the whole U.K. farm thing came about when Izzy Lane founder Isobel Davies stumbled across a Mr. Ernest Ayre and found that after his parents passed away, he could no longer look after the farm. With five sheep of her own in hand, Davies pleaded with the shepherd to stay put and help her get her company off the ground, which he did, and he has stayed put ever since.

So where will you be seeing Izzy Lane and why are they important to pay attention to right now in the rather large sea of eco-washed clothing lines? Well, the Ethical Fashion Forum just announced that Izzy Lane will be one of the suppliers present at the Ethical Fashion Source Expo later this year. The expo will be held on October 6th and claims it is the ?world?s only annual industry trade show for suppliers of ethical and fair trade fabrics, components, and manufacture to the fashion industry.? Clothing is not optional.

I love those Kia hamsters. The first commercial showed a trio of hammies tooling around in their Kia Soul while the rest of the world ran in stationary wheels; it was cute and clever and made a nice statement about the cool factor of the car.

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But the second one blew that right out of the water. The combination of CGI and Black Sheep's "The Choice Is Yours" is a whole new level of awesome. Now, these kinds of commercials are nothing new, but in this instance the match of the product name--Soul--and the theme of the commercial (rapping dudes on Hamsterdam Ave.) is just perfect. I know that they didn't create this car name to appeal to hip hop hamsters, but man, it works.

Which is why the recent rumors about Kia dropping their car names in favor of alphanumerics puzzles me. Automotive News reports:

Okay, I admit that "Cadenza" isn't the greatest name; I know it's a musical term, but for me it's too close to "credenza", and I don't think anyone wants to be driving around a big wooden sideboard. But more to the point, what does Kia think they are accomplishing with the K names?

Typically, alphanumerics have been used by car companies who want to bestow some prestige on the brand; think BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. The letter usually indicates the class, and the number refers to model features like engine size. But this isn't always the case, and that's where the confusion comes. BMW and Audi, for example, use numbers for the product lines, with the letters signifying fuel injection, or "standard" vs. "sport", or some other damn thing I can't figure out--that is a problem.

Kia seems to feel that sequential numbering (where "K" presumably stands for Kia) is the answer. But what happens when they get into the double digits? And how to distinguish sedans from SUVs from sports cars? And don't forget that alphanumerics are inherently less memorable and brand-y than names--especially when the market is flooded with them.

Which gets me back to the hammies. With the Kia Soul, the company found a perfect match of brand and brand image as exemplified in the TV ads. You couldn't have done the same commercials with a car named Morning (another Kia model). The whole joke is that the Soul has so much soul that it's the car of choice for people who aren't part of the bland, boring, middle-aged go-nowhere American culture. I don't know if Kia is specifically targeting African Americans, but they certainly are capitalizing on the marketability of gangsta culture to a young buying population, no matter their ethnicity.

It's a triumph of naming and branding. And now they're considering throwing it away for a bunch of letters and numbers? Kia, the choice is yours.

DoSomething award winner Jessica Posner brings education to Kibera.

DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized five young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants--and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week. Click here to read the other winners' stories.

More than 1.5 million people live in Nairobi?s Kibera slum, squeezed together in a labyrinth of rusted tin shacks and garbage-lined alleyways. Although Kibera is Africa?s largest slum, the Kenyan government considers it an illegal settlement and provides no public services to the impoverished residents. Access to clean water and electricity is almost non-existent; HIV rates are some of the highest in the world; a fifth of all children die before the age of five; and roughly 66% of young women routinely trade sex for food. Here, 23-year-old Denver-native Jessica Posner decided to start a school for girls.

Posner first visited Kibera as a Wesleyan student studying abroad in Kenya. An experienced stage performer, she began working with a youth organization called Shining Hope for Community that used theater as an engine for education and healing. ?[Founder] Kennedy Odede had been doing theater to teach public health, and to start a conversation in the community about gender and equality,? says Posner. ?We used the space to talk through difficult issues.?

Before long, Posner decided to move into the Kibera slums to bring herself closer to the residents and their everyday struggles. ?People were totally shocked--they?d never seen anything like it. Kennedy even said no,? explains Posner, recalling the resistance she met. ?But I wanted to be exposed to a world that was totally different than my own.? She describes her experience to me: how fragile life is in the slums, how difficult it is to live without water and electricity. But she?s not looking for sympathy. ?I?m lucky,? she makes clear. ?I made a choice to live in Kibera--everybody else there did not have that choice.?

Inspired by her time living there and working with Shining Hope, Posner began envisioning another project: a school for girls. ?Such staggering odds are stacked against women--there is such a need for opportunities for them,? says Posner, who points out that just 8% of girls in Kibera will ever have access to school. ?We wanted to place women at the center of development--we felt it would be the best possible way to change the society as a whole.?

The following year, Posner returned from her second trip to Kibera, and turned all her attention to furiously raising funds. Along with Odede, she established Shining Hope as a 501(c)3 non-profit. She wrote to friends and family, appealed to the Wesleyan community, and applied for grants. After raising thousands of dollars through her grassroots efforts (?I sent out a lot of emails?) and winning a grant from 100 Projects For Peace, she returned to Kibera to turn her dream into a reality. Soon, she had secured land, engaged the community to build an eight-classroom school, and hired teachers and an education specialist to design a curriculum based on the needs of the children--a curriculum that encouraged theater and the arts.

Of her endless passion, Posner credits her youth. ?Being young, people are often skeptical, but I don?t think about it,? says Posner, now 24. ?It just means I have a lot more energy, and the ability to be more optimistic. When challenges and obstacles come up, I am less likely to be deterred.?

In the summer of 2009, the Kibera School for Girls opened as the first and only tuition-free school for girls in the Kibera slum. But even after overcoming so many challenges, she had yet to face her most difficult. ?The hardest part,? she says, ?was selecting only the students we had the resources to take.? Of the some 500 applications the Kibera School for Girls received, Posner could only accept 45.

But her school is rapidly expanding thanks to aggressive fundraising efforts. In the past year, Posner won the Dell Social Innovation competition, a Newman?s Own Foundation grant, and the Echoing Green Fellowship. And just last week, she won the Do Something award, a prize of $100,000. ?We built our school with just $25,000,? she exclaims. ?With $100,000, the possibilities for Kibera are endless.?

The school now serves 65 students, and will soon take on 370 through 8th grade. Posner has also launched the Shining Hope Community Center, which provides much-needed public services including a library and health clinic, literacy and computer classes, Internet access, and other infrastructure.

Posner isn?t celebrating yet though--there?s still work to be done. When I tried contacting her shortly after the awards ceremony, she couldn?t be reached. She was already on a flight back to Kibera, ready to put the money to good use.

More winners' stories: Micaela Connery: Knocking Down Barriers With the Power of Performance Jacqueline Murekatete: Genocide Survivor Embraces Her Ordeal to Educate Others Will Perez: Med Student Pioneers ?Political Medicine? in Rural Haiti Mark Rembert: DoSomething Winner Returns to Save His Stricken Hometown

Is News Corp head honcho Rupert Murdoch planning a game-changing digital news outlet?

That's what sources are telling CNBC, which today reported that "this new digital news venture would incorporate text, photo and video, tailored for the iTunes app format."

Of course, with the iPad's rapid success and many companies from Microsoft to Google to HP planning their own tablet devices, it's not too surprising News Corp, which owns a slew of newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, would want to corner the digital market sooner rather than later.

What's surprising, however, is that sources say the new subscription service would "not be based on any of News Corp's existing papers." Though still too early to say, it seems the service would be aggregative news from the company's many assets for a fee--a Google News just for News Corp--rather than having apps created on a by-paper basis.

And Murdoch has already seen some success in the app market. The subscription Wall Street Journal iPad app has brought in more than 10,000 users at $17.29 per month, earning the company well over $2 million annually.

Genevieve Bell knows your digital habits better than you do.

Genevieve Bell, Thinker in Residence at Intel, Stanford PhD in Anthropology, and all-around bad-ass technology-in-society expert, released her much-anticipated report, Getting Connected, Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia?s Digital Futures, earlier this week. Fast Company has had its eye on Dr. Bell for some time now; we chose her as one of our 100 Most Creative People in Business while she was still hard at work on the report.

Key findings from the report suggest that, as Bell told FastCompany.com, "New information and communication technologies are deeply embedded in many people?s everyday lives, but they are sharing space and attention with older, stubborn technologies like TV, radio, and newspaper."

Bell is kind of like a female version of Jan Chipchase, but for Intel. (Chipchase was formerly at Nokia and is now at Frog Design in Shanghai). She travels the world observing and recording user experience across a range of platforms. And what surprised her the most in the research of the Getting Connected report was the ?fact that technology has grown far ahead of the larger eco-system needed to support it--people to repair, maintain and upgrade all forms of technology (including infrastructure), those who will help teach, coach and guide us through the complexities of a digital world, and those who will help shape and regulate the world in which all that happens.?

With the final release of her ethnographic investigation into the uses of technology in South Australia, one has to wonder: Can these results be applied elsewhere? Bell told FastCompany.com, "Yes, I firmly believe the report has applicability elsewhere. Certainly in the rest of Australia, but I would argue there are some important insights/recommendations that are relevant in other countries, especially those who are in the midst of developing new high-speed broadband infrastructure networks, or transitioning to 'information societies,' 'digital societies,' etc."

And something she said that we at Fast Company especially like, since we generate all of the following (if I don?t say so myself): "Creativity, communication, and community/personal engagement are just as important as drivers of technology use and adoption as content consumption."

[Top image courtesy of Intel, center image courtesy of Genevieve Bell]

Amazon is credited with basically inventing the modern e-reader phenomenon, just as Apple is reinventing the entire slate PC genre--but Copia, who we wrote about yesterday with their color-screened $99 Kindle challenger, really plans on entering both markets with a huge splash.

CrunchGear has been speaking to the new pretender, and discovered that in addition to the super-cheap Wave5 e-reader there's a bunch of other slate-format devices en route. First up is the actual challenger to the Kindle, the Copia Tidal, which has a 6-inch e-ink screen, physical keyboard, SD card slot, optional Wi-Fi and MP3 player. It's also priced at Kindle-levels--$150, though we wonder if Copia will adjust this pricing in the light of the new Wi-Fi-only graphite Kindle.

There's also the Wave7, a bigger version of the Wave5 with a 7-inch LCD screen, capacitive touch tech and a shockingly low $130 price. This is going to be a serious threat to the Kindle, because although it can't compete on the display tech front (where some people still prefer the paper-esque appearance of the e-ink screen) it can do so much more.

Meanwhile the Ocean Color is an even more exciting machine, a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen slate PC with 16:9 ratio, 4GB of onboard storage, stereo speakers and a "tilt sensor." At first blush this sounds like a serious iPad competitor, but we doubt it'll have quite the same "oomph" under the hood as Apple's A4 ARM chip. On the other hand, its $300 price may certainly tempt some folks who want to buy into the slate PC market, in a similar way as netbooks seduced many folks into buying their first notebook-format PC.

Is this another "race to the bottom," though? Will the Ocean Color actually disappoint users in the end with a lackluster performance that doesn't live up to their expectations? It's almost impossible to imagine that its performance will live up to Apple's vaunted OS experience at the price it's being sold at--the components simply can't compete--if it's to deliver any sort of margin to Copia it'll have to have cheapish components inside.

Interestingly, that's a route that Sony has majestically decided to avoid. It's trading on its massive bulk, steady revenues (despite recent glitches) from its wide product base, and has stated that it doesn't want to "lay claim to the cheapest e-reader." It's Reader device won't take a knock on price because "pricing is one consideration in the dedicate reading device marketplace" and "Sony won't sacrifice the quality and design we're bringing book lovers." It's an interesting move, and positions Sony's devices as a high-quality option compared to the burgeoning cheap-end of the e-reader market. This may not be too surprising, though, when you remember that Sony's products often occupy the higher end of the many markets they operate in.

But ... it may backfire. Why? Because if the e-reader market gets flooded with cheaper, better competition--like Copia's machines--Sony may find itself stuck as a minor player.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Can we ignore violence and forgive urban vice in the name of the cool factor?

Bangkok is one hell of a place. On any given day you'll find street riots (which occasionally result in scary violence), crushing poverty, side-road critters for dinner, high-end hotels, chic restaurants, a thriving film and arts community and last, but not least, a progressive design scene. But it's still rather surprising that readers of Travel + Leisure named Bangkok the top city in this year?s poll, given that the city was just on the brink of civil war. The selection makes us wonder: what criteria do we use to evaluate our own modern cities and urban lives? If Bangkok can win the international competition, can economically-depressed Detroit or hurricane-ravaged New Orleans also top the American cities list?

Despite its deep pockets of poverty and strife, Bangkok offers well-designed neighborhoods and attractions that blind vistors to the darker realities of the city. Here are a few of them.

Playground! Playground! is both a niche mall for the design-partial and penthouse store atop the mall that displays progressive industrial designs from Thailand?s best firms. Think of it as a Thai version of Design Within Reach. Along with some of the city?s best food and clothing shops, the mall has a distinctive theme of play, as made clear by the colorful bean bag chairs on every floor.

J Avenue J Avenue is a dedicated design and arts district, with tenants ranging from the Apple Store to the KPN Music Academy. This is also where the city?s artsy folk come to mingle with one another and their supermodel friends. A neighborhood like this is one of the first steps toward becoming a "top city."

Endless Socialite Options From restaurants to clubs to shops and malls, Bangkok takes the edginess of Berlin, the fanciness of Tokyo, and the culinary and fashion genius of Paris, rumbles it all together and spits out this colorful, playful, mesmerizing ball of progressive design goodness that, yeah, might make you say it?s a top city. Specifically, Bangkok?s take on the BED Club from Miami, housed in a spaceship, definitely leaves an impression, as does the city?s host of restaurants ranging from leopard-spotted Dream Bangkok to the pristine Greyhound.

Transportation The SkyTrain is yet another feat for the modern Asian metropolis, conveniently stretched throughout the city?s main jaunts and lifted off the ground to free up some of the congestion. Definitely a perk for the design-sensitive.

When we evaluate modern city life and the urban landscapes in which we enmesh ourselves, it is important to remember that a shared space, a city, is what we make of it. Hippies have made Portland their paradise. Others, because of the rain, may say "Screw Portland!" And Boston? Well, let?s not go there. But you get the picture. I guess Bangkok makes sense, because we at Fast Company love design (obviously), but it?s just interesting to note that the city has enough going for itself that readers somehow overlooked the safety and security threats -- and some other notable social challenges, ahem, trafficking and prostitution -- to call it a top city. Says a lot about the modern urban dweller.

So with the above, I?d say that Bangkok merits a "top city" credential, but like I said: rampant poverty? Civil war threats? Well if you look at our own Fast Cities, which we think are pretty dandy, each one is a winner for a different category. I mean, Oakland? Yeah, it?s had some problems lately. And riots, too! And in the U.S., despite being a developed country, every city has its distraught neighborhoods, homeless communities, and other less-than-ideal conditions.

[Photographs by Jenara Nerenberg (top image, J Avenue, BED); flickr/kwankwan (Playground!); flickr/Ian Fuller (SkyTrain)]

Electricity is one of the staples of modern life that it's easy to forget, but you miss horribly when it's gone: And the people of Iraq have been feeling this recently as the electricity supply infrastructure has been decimated by neglect and fighting.

Demand for electricity has also been growing as Iraq rebuilds itself after decades of war, and this is straining the already damaged supply--the situation was so bad back in 2005 that on average the nation only received nine to 15 hours of power per day. The supply reliability is better in the north of the country, and the new contract that Alstom has just signed with the Iraqi government will try to redress the balance--a new power station for the south is now on the cards. This will cost somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, and result in a power output of 1.2 gigawatts ready to supply Najaf, the port city Basra and other towns in the south. 

In addition to the new power station, a 180-megawatt plant in Najaf will be "re-established" and Iraqi engineers and technicians will get training to keep the performance of the electrical grid up to standard when the French experts depart. 

All of this will take several years to swing into action, and while it's fabulous news for Iraq, and Alstom's investors, there's one aspect that some watchers will be concerned about: What kind of power stations are we talking about here? The obvious, eco-disastrous type, is one that uses locally-sourced fuel, and has a huge carbon footprint. Yup--this may be all about the oil, again.

Image via link.

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If there's excess cash lying around in your organization, you could probably use it. And GE thinks it can help you find it as part of a Treasure Hunt program launched in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The aim is to find energy savings at companies, universities, and even in entire cities. The first program, conducted at Roosevelt Hospital as part of New York City's Hospital Challenge, found $2.1 million in energy savings (with a payback period of 2.6 years) that will save 7,500 metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

The process is fairly simple: Treasure Hunt teams (made up of staffers) are trained by GE experts to survey facilities, looking for energy savings of all sorts--from HVAC systems and lighting to washing machines and computers. Teams use GE and Gensuite's Eco Prospector tool to help them along the way. Each Treasure Hunt lasts for two days, so that each team can observe equipment during downtime, start up, productive time, and breaks.

Though it was officially launched this week, GE has long conducted internal Treasure Hunts for easy energy savings. Since 2005, the company has conducted 200 internal hunts, saving a total of $130 million.

Now that GE has proven the Treasure Hunt model can work elsewhere, it has set its sights on facilities run by facilities run by Merck; Atlanta, Georgia; Orlando, Florida; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. GE isn't charging for its services. But we imagine that the company hopes that the Treasure Hunts will prompt organizations to look into GE's myriad energy-saving solutions, which come mainly from the $10 billion-plus ecomagination program.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

Gary V.'s got nothing on Jeannie C.

The wine and Asian food pairings Jeannie Cho Lee dreams up are about as diverse as her background: Master of Wine from the Institute of Masters of Wine in London and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Born in Seoul, raised in the U.S., and now residing in Hong Kong where she's raising four children, Lee is the first Asian Master of Wine, and at the heart of the explosion of the Asian wine market. (Christie?s recently announced that the prominent Korean business house, SK Networks, will be auctioning off over 100 cases of premiere wines in Hong Kong next month.) Her work is, in many ways, an exercise in targeted messaging -- that is, how to present her fusion sense of wine culture to an Asian audience that has its own customs and rituals and yet is less familiar with what she was exposed to growing up in the West.

It?s entrepreneurs like her that gnaw at your brain when you're questioning whether to pursue your ultimate dream or not. I mean, really, switching from public policy to fancy food and wine? We?ve all been at that point, the crossroads between practicality and creativity, and thanks to Lee we?ve got one more success model to look up to. And oh yeah, we get to enjoy her awesome recipe, wine, and restaurant suggestions as well. (Take a look at her blog for more on that). Without further ado, FastCompany.com presents to you Master Lee and the inside scoop on how she carved out a niche market for herself in crowded Hong Kong.

What was the Asian wine market like when you first started out?

This was early 1994, when I arrived in Hong Kong to work in the publishing industry. It was quite dismal in Hong Kong as well as in Korea/Seoul where I travelled to quite often. Hong Kong only had Remy wine shops with very little competition. The beer selection in the supermarkets during those days were bigger than the wine sections. I also remember my first trip to Shanghai and Beijing in 1994 and in these cities, wine was not available except in the hotels which were frequented by tourists and business people. It is a very different scene now.

How did you make the choice to switch from public policy to wine and food?

I interned at the Korean Embassy in Washington DC and briefly at the United Nations. I had a sense of what my life would be like if I had pursued a career in public policy and I felt that working in something closer to my heart (writing, food, wine, travel) was better suited for my personality.

It was when I arrived in Hong Kong that I realized an entire world of enormous possibilities laid in front of me. Given that the regional Asian economies were booming and given my educational background and my numerous interests in many fields, I knew I could pursue many career options and I chose publishing. My other loves in life (food and wine, in that order) tugged at my heart and over time I was fortunate enough to combine my many passions in life -- writing, food and wine.

Can you compare the Western love affair with wine to the Asian love affair with tea?

Interesting question. Both beverages are part of their respective dining and beverage cultures for centuries and both have avid fans and aficionados. The love affair with these beverages are more similar than different, however the beverages themselves are very different in what it brings to the dining table.

Teas have a huge variety of styles and a fairly wide range of flavours. Tea at the Asian dining table acts as a neutral backdrop to most dishes and is not meant to be overtly present. Wine on the other hand is definitely present during the meal and has a much wider and more pronounced range of flavours.

In terms of the attitude towards these beverages, I think there are more similarities than differences. Both are revered and have a long heritage and tradition of enjoyment at the dining table.

You are something of a rockstar, to be honest. How do you raise four children, travel constantly, write, and run your own businesses?

Not sure my children would agree that I am a rockstar; they see me as just a mom who has a strange profession of spitting wine for a living. When I taste a lot of wine at home, I am always spitting into a spittoon and scribbling notes so they are used to this but to others it probably seems odd. How do I juggle the numerous demands on my time? Very carefully!

It is a challenge that I believe all highly educated women face in this modern age -- we have triumphed and proven that women are just as capable as men in the work force but we have not been able to reduce the demands from us in our family and personal lives. There is no clear cut solution to this except that for each of us needs to prioritize our time and really understand what is most important in our lives. Being organized, loving what you do and bringing your family as much as possible into your work life are some of the ways I try to maintain balance.

What is the most unique and surprising aspect of working in wine and food in Asia?

The most unique and surprising aspect of sharing my love for wine in Asia is how very quickly Asian wine lovers develop fine palates. There is such a strong food culture -- of enjoying and seeking delicious food that wine quality is very quickly appreciated. I love teaching and sharing the concept of wine quality to a region of foodies makes it that much easier!

How do wine producers in the West view the Asian market?

Many see Asia as a panacea to wine sales troubles in other markets or surplus situations which I think is a mistake. China and the key markets in Asia will certainly grow in parallel with economic growth, but there will be a saturation point. In Japan it has been 2 litres per capita which really is not very much at all. In addition, growth has been focused on highly recognized large-volume brands and the top prestigious brands mainly from France. The very large middle sector has struggled and will likely continue to struggle since the polarized market seems ready to splurge for the luxury brands or buy according to price.

Last but not least, a little pairing tip just for us?

To choose a versatile wine for most Asian meals, go for wines from cool climates (e.g. Germany, Burgundy, New Zealand, etc).

There is no shortage of prognostications about what climate change will do to our planet. In reality, there are few ways to tell for sure; human beings have never been around for this kind of world-shifting event before. But an international team of researchers led by University of Copenhagen Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen may have found a way to predict what will happen if Greenland's ice sheets melt.

Researchers involved in the project spent the past five years drilling through 1.6 miles of Greenland's ice before reaching bedrock this week. Now that the bedrock has been found, scientists can figure out just how much Greenland's ice sheet melted during the last major warming period--the Eemian Period, which occurred about 120,000 years ago--when temperatures averaged up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are today.

A number of techniques will help the researchers make predictions: Examination of isotope variations, greenhouse gas bubbles trapped in ice, crystal structures of ice, the bore hole temperature, and biological material found near the bedrock will all contribute, according to the AFP. What they find will determine whether Greenland's ice sheets were responsible for the Eemian Period's sea level rise.

The upcoming warming period will probably resemble the Eemian Period. Even taking into account voluntary pledges made at last year's worldwide Copenhagen climate summit, scientists estimate that temperatures could rise up to 7.2 degrees in the coming years. So the information gathered by Greenland researchers could potentially tell us whether coastal residents should start heading for the hills if Greenland's ice block starts to melt--or if they can stay put.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

From Facebook to facial recognition, the police state imagined in the Tom Cruise flick feels a bit more real every day.