May 4. 2008 by admin.

What do startups Ning, Meebo and Slide have in common? They have all been awarded large sums of venture capital funding. Ning,is a platform for creating social networks and has raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation. In July, 2007, Ning raised $44 million USD in venture capital, led by Legg Mason. Ning is located in downtown Palo Alto, California. Slide which creates widgets has raised $50 million at a $550 million valuation. Meebo has now joined their that elite group of Web 2.o stratups.
Ning investor and co-founder Marc Andreessen has explained his company’s Series D round as a way “to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter.” You may recognise Marc Andreessen as one of the founders of Netscape.
Other bellwether social media startups including music discovery site Imeem, and widget factory RockYou, are also rumored to be on the fund-raising trail.

With M&A seemingly drying up, many Web 2.0 startups are scrambling for another round of venture capital money so they can survive — most won’t. In the last few months, VCs and other private equity players have become reluctant to pour more cash into all but the most wildly successful Web 2.0 companies.
Stay tuned to see which of these companies become wildly popular (and successful) and which evaporate to web purgatory.
ps visit our very own Ning group On Entrepreners http://www.opennetworkers.info/group/onEntrepreneurs

Posted in start-up, venture capital, entrepreneurs, capital, business, business finance, finance | No Comments »

April 24. 2008 by admin.

Top 5 Reasons Small business start-ups fail

If you’ve ever started your own business and bootstrapped it, then you can can probably relate to this post.
Question: Why do most small business startups fail?
Answer:
5. The owner runs out of money
4. The owner’s friends run out of money
3. The owner’s spouse and children run out of money
2. The owner’s employees run out of money
and the Number One reason why small business start-ups fail….
1. The owner runs out of family, friends and employees

Can you relate??? Hopefully, this gave you a reason to laugh out loud today.

Posted in start-up, entrepreneurs, business finance, business | No Comments »

April 17. 2008 by admin.

Promoting Your Business: Once you have obtained the working capital or business finance to launch your business you will need a marketing plan in order to sell your service or product. The options are advertising and marketing, or employment of a PR firm and/or a telemarketing company to take your product to the consumer. It is not enough just having the perfect concept as it will be useless unless it is successfully marketed.
The following is an overview of different areas that you may wish to consider:
Your business is your business; most businesses need promotion in some shape or form and this is the area that can be left to the professionals whilst you handle the day to day running to bring profitability.
Your business success and credibility rely on the support of many different communities. Yet simultaneously communicating with multiple audiences can be a complex challenge. Effective public relations can help drive your business goals and can establish and maintain your credibility. If you position your company and its offerings clearly and consistently to all of your audiences, you will begin to build credibility with them. You will also gain their trust and attention when you interact with them again and again. Most of us are influenced by the media and what it has to report. There is no greater benefit to your company than a positive mention in a printed article, a newscast or online publication

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 8. 2008 by admin.

I am looking forward to a conference I’ll be attending tomorrow night, 4/9/08 for entrepreneurs and business leaders in Orlando. The keynote speaker will be Guy Kawaski, founder of Garage Technology Ventures . If you know Venture Capital, you know Guy Kawaski. Guy is author of Art of the Start.
Guy Kawasaki will be joined by local community leaders such as Jerry Ross, Director of the Disney Entrepreneur Center of course my team from Innovative Marketing Solutions. The event is sponsored by Network Solutions to help educate Orlando-based small business owners and entrepreneurs about what they need to know to succeed in today’s business environment.

During this two-hour networking event, Kawasaki will share advice and personal experiences about starting and growing a successful small business. Local entrepreneurs will have a chance to meet Kawasaki, ask questions and learn from his successes.

Posted in Guy Kawaski, venture capital, Jerry Ross, start-up, entrepreneurs, business | No Comments »

March 27. 2008 by admin.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger Help Videos
Just as a follow-up to the previous post on the Blogger Video hosted on YouTube , remember you don’t have to learn everything at once. If you are a newbie, my best advice is to start slowly, BUT START. Sign up and give some thought to what the name of your blog will be; this is an important step; it should relate to you, your business or the subject matter you’ll be blogging about. Try to make it easy to remember and unique if you can.
If you already have a website that updates, you can use that domain, or you can do it later. If not, just host it on blogger.com and you can switch to another hosting domain later if you decide.
What are you waiting for?? …. Ready…Set.. Go

Posted in blogger, youtube, blogspot, blog | No Comments »

March 27. 2008 by admin.

I know many of you are already blogging experts, many more are just getting started, and many, many more are thinking about starting their own blogs. …If only there were an easy, user friendly way to get started for the non-technies among us. It seems the two most common platforms are Blogger and Wordpress. I checked them both out, and I decided that Blogger seemed the least complicated of the two although WordPress seemed to have a few more features. And now to make it even easier (and remove that last excuse), here is a short video hosted on YouTube that will get you started on Blogger…. Ready…Set.. Go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnploFsS_tY

Posted in youtube, blogging, blogspot, wordpress, blog | No Comments »

March 24. 2008 by admin.

Did the term “Peep Show” get your attention, at least for a second?? A word to the wise: Find a way to grab your customer’s attention (i.e. marketing). You did know we were referring the sugary marshmellow treats that are so popular this time of year, right??

The Washington Post’s just hosted their annual Peeps Diorama Contest which drew over 800 entries. The list was then narrowed down to 37 favorites which you can view in a slideshow. Top peeps shows include the first place winner, The Tomb of King Peepankhamun, No Country for Old Peeps, Sponge Bob SquarePeeps, The Wizard of Peeps, and my personal favorite, “Amy Winepeep’s ‘Rehab’” featuring drunken peeps with tattoos singin’ the blues and snorting sugar.

Posted in peep show, Amy Winepeep, humor, Washington Post, peeps, marketing | No Comments »

March 21. 2008 by admin.

If you are reading this blog, then you are probably already familar with LinkedIn, THE site for business networking. I’m guessing that you have heard of LinkedIn; now the question becomes: are you using it and how well?
Are you a LION with thousands of connections, or are you more like a kitty cat with just a few connections with the people you already work with? Are you an open networker who believes that there is power in numbers and wants to connect with as many people as possible? Or do you belong to the school of thought that “its about the quality” of the connections and you only want to be in touch with those that can have a direct impact on your business? Do you belong to 3 groups or to 30? Do you partcipate in the forums of those groups, answer questions, and leave comments on the various blogs?
There is no right or wrong answer to the above questions. But there is no doubt that if business networking is valuable to you, then using LinkedIn should be part of your strategy.
ps. I’m an open networker, so send me an invite if you like. http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnieims

Posted in networking, linkedIn, blog, business | No Comments »

March 6. 2008 by admin.

One truism I’ve observed about blogging, the more you learn, the more there is to learn!! If you are a relative newcomer to the world of blogging, it can be rather overwhelming; truthfully, it can be VERY overwhelming! That fact discourages many people from starting to blog, and of those who start, many give up after a short while and quit. That, of course, creates its own problems in the blogosphere since many blogs will wind up a dead link or you’ll visit what you hope is a grreat site, only to discover that it hasn’t been updated in two years.

For those who are entering the blogosphere, SEO expert Chris Bennent gives out some basic pointers about blogging that are useful. See his article, Thirteen Ways to Make Your Blog ‘Go Viral’. I particularly like the one about using social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. I, personally, tend to use del.icio.us the most.

(What, did I hear someone say “What the heck is social bookmarking??”)

See what I mean…. ALWAYS MORE TO LEARN!!

Posted in blogosphere, StumbleUpon, Digg, viral, del.icio.us, Chris Bennett, blog | No Comments »

February 27. 2008 by admin.

This news just in. Maybe the article should be entitled “Where’s the roof in healthcare spending?” Economists are now redicting that by 2017, total health care spending will double to more than $4 trillion a year!!! That translates into one of every $5 the nation spends will be on health-related costs.
This represents a 6.7 percent annual increase in spending, nearly three times the rate of inflation and will be primarilydriven by higher prices and an increased demand for care, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Monday. A primary factor in the equation is our growing and aging population. As difficult as it is to believe, the first wave of baby boomers become eligible for Medicare beginning in 2011. With the aging population, the federal government (programs such as Medicaid and Medicare) will be picking up the tab for a growing share of the nation’s medical expenses. Overall, federal and state governments accounted for about 46 percent of health expenditures in 2006. That percentage will increase to 49 percent over the next decade.”
Health is projected to consume an expanding share of the economy, which means that policymakers, insurers and the public will face increasingly difficult decisions about the way health care is delivered and paid for,” CMS economists said.Overall health care spending in 2017 was estimated to increase to $4.3 trillion. That would be about 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. In 2006, people and the government spent $2.1 trillion on health care, an average of $7,026 a person. In 2017, health spending will cost an estimated $13,101 a person.Health experts tell Congress that Medicare pays much more for each beneficiary who opts for a private plan than it would if they stayed in the traditional Medicare program, which reimburses providers at a set fee for a particular service. That difference increases the burden on taxpayers as well as beneficiaries, because participants pay higher monthly Medicare premiums.The government economists say it’s hardly a new trend that the health care sector will grow more quickly than the overall economy. Over the past 30 years, health spending has exceeded growth in the gross domestic product by about 2.7 percentage points each year. Over the coming decade, that difference is expected to narrow slightly. Still, the continued gap is worrisome, said the agency’s acting administrator, Kerry Weems. He said consumers, particularly businesses, need more information about the quality and cost of care.”We have an approaching crisis in this country unless we change the way we do business,” Economists project that spending on hospital care will increase at rate of 6.9 percent a year over the coming decade, spending on physician services will rise 5.9 percent annually, and spending on nursing homes will grow 5.2 percent a year.The economists’ report will be published online by the journal Health Affairs.Health Affairs: http://www.healthaffairs.org/

Posted in baby boomers, healthcare spending, healthcare, medicare, medicaid, GDP, economists | No Comments »