Economics

Is There a Tech Bubble? We’ll Know If It Pops

May 2, 2012

Earlier today I posted disruption vs. revenue and the tech bubble on the gust.com blog. I’m suggesting in that post that some special-case web-based startups have to choose between disruption or revenue, because they can’t have both. That may or may not be true, but I’ve been guilty of suggesting it is to a couple [...]

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What To do When Business Research Collides

May 3, 2011

I follow two reports on small business employment, one done by Intuit, the king of small business accounting, which also has a payroll service, and the other by SurePayroll, which is a small business online payroll service. But here’s the rub: reporting on small business jobs in April, the Intuit index has good news … [...]

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Quick Dollar View of National Priorities

March 14, 2011

Andrew Sullivan posted this as Infographic: Tax Breaks vs. Budget Cutson his Daily Dish blog on The Atlantic. He traced it back to this possible origin, which has a lot of detail at the bottom about sources and assumptions. I apologize for politics, not my normal fare on this blog, but it’s such an eloquent [...]

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Small Business Labs on Trends for 2011

January 10, 2011

Sure, there are lots of trends pieces going around these days, but Steve King of Emergent Research is the best expert I know on researching trends and putting them into sensible pieces. His company does some really good trends research that is often published by Intuit. , so I’d like to share his Top 10 [...]

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Helping Women Fight Poverty With Entrepreneurship

January 7, 2011

I don’t know much about this, but it certainly impressed me, so I decided to share it here. I assume the video here speaks for itself, but, just in case you’d like a summary, it’s about an organization called FITE, for Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship, that is powered by Kiva.org and focuses on  microloans for [...]

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2011 As Good Times for Entrepreneurs?

December 31, 2010

So, on last day of the year, eve of a new year and (I think … correct me if I’m wrong) a new decade, Steve Blank posted his optimistic 2011 may mark the beginning of a golden era for entrepreneurs on VentureBeat. He cites several reason, all of which make sense to me: Compressing the [...]

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Does the Kindle Tell You Something About Your Pricing?

December 14, 2010

While I tend to think pricing too low is one of the most common mistakes in small business, there’s still something to be said for finding the pricing sweet spot. Sometimes elasticity works. For example, in Amazon says it has sold millions of Kindles This Quarter, Business Insider notes: Amazon [says it] has “already sold [...]

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Do We Give a Damn About Public Schools?

November 8, 2010

Last Thursday I attended an evening meeting at a local public school that’s on the close-down list as our school district (4J in Eugene, OR) reels in shock over massive budget cuts. I have a 7-year-old grandson in first grade at that school, so I joined his mom at the meeting. It was a sad [...]

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Graphic Evidence of What We Value Most

July 30, 2010

Like it or not, your real priority, my real priority, our society’s real priority shows up not in what we say but in how we spend our resources, including, of course, how we spend our time. Time is the scarcest resource. Author David McCandless at Information is Beautiful called it Cognitive Surplus Visualized in honor [...]

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Free is Fashionable, But Still, Beware of Free Lunches

January 22, 2010

I’ve been thinking about this Free business a lot. There’s Chris Anderson’s book Free, and the debate around it. There’s free content everywhere. I find great free photos on Flickr. And I read free blogs every day. It’s not like free is all that new. I grew up with free radio and television, funded by advertising. [...]

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