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Cigna wants to make sure their supplier base is as diversified as it’s employee base and are looking for small businesses to be partners with Cigna as suppliers. In this quick video interview Tanya Marksteiner - Supplier Diversity Manager explains their mission in recruiting small business and coaching them to get certified as a diversified supplier. Tanya is here as part of the Cigna Partnership with Startup America at SXSW
More information on Cigna’s Diversity Partner program
But if you run a home-based business, you might just want to be aware of this new system because there are circumstances under which it might impact you. And business owners will of course want to know how this system may affect their families.
The recently launched Copyright Alert System (CAS), is an anti-piracy plan that some have called the “six strikes†system.  By design it focuses on consumers. It is intended to help stop downloads of pirated, copyrighted works such as films and music.
But small companies that are run from home using a residential ISP account to connect to the Internet, could find themselves in the crossfire if they, someone in their home or in their employ uses their Internet connection to download pirated material.
The Copyright Alert System was established by something called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI).  That’s an innocuous sounding name, but the Center is more than just a think tank or a website providing information. The Center is really a joint effort of groups such as the  Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).  They’ve been joined by 5 major Internet service providers here in the United States - AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon.
Last week the group gave a series of public presentations available on CSPAN to explain the Alerts system, at the Congressional Internet Caucus.  Essentially, groups like the MPAA have people go out and sign up for accounts at P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing sites â€" also called torrent sites.  According to Marianne Grant, Senior Vice President of the MPAA, when one of these people see a copyrighted work being shared, they verify it and report it to the ISPs.
In turn the ISPs notify the consumer or may take other action.  The nature of the notices or actions varies, depending on whether it’s a first occurrence or repeat occurrence, and depending on the ISP.  But in general terms, here is how it works:
Ars Tehnica has an image of what a Copyright Alert looks like, this one from Comcast.
The Center for Copyright Information has said that public Wi-Fi providers such as coffee shops and other small businesses will not be impacted by the new plan, contrary to some previous reports.
Jill Lesser, Executive Director of the CCI, wrote in a statement on the group’s website that businesses and organizations providing legitimate open Wi-Fi connections (such as coffee shops) have specific business connections, not residential connections.  Therefore, they are not part of the CAS network, so they should not receive notices based on customer activity.
However, in her statement, Lesser was more specific about how some very small businesses might be affected by the new system:
“Depending on the type of Internet service they subscribe to, very small businesses like a home-office or a local real estate office may have an Internet connection that is similar from a network perspective to a residential connection. In those cases, customers are assigned Internet Protocol addresses from the same pool as residential customers. The practical result is that if an employee of the small business, or someone using an open Wi-Fi connection at the business, engages in infringing activity, the primary account owner would receive Alerts.â€
The CAS has received a lot of criticism from consumer rights groups and others.  Critics claim it violates privacy rights by giving ISPs access to user activity and the ability to penalize them. However, CCI has put some consumer safeguards in place. For example, consumers are allowed to challenge alerts they believe were sent in error.  The following video  explains the Alert System in more detail.
A survey of popular applications has revealed that most have SQL flaws, store sensitive details in an unencrypted format and have fragile backends.
According to IntegriCell president Aaron Turner there are so many vulnerabilities in mobile applications, as every one has a backend API, particularly free applications, and as so many developers use SQL Light to implement things, no one checks whether this is secure or not.
In a survey of a number of applications that had versions for Apple and Android, Turner found that 35 per cent had SQL injection flaws, while 99 per cent had unencrypted data.
Further analysis of the backends found that all of the applications assessed had a web sever and patch configuration flaw, allowing an attacker to control a server, while authentication bypass was permitted in 79 per cent of applications. Unencrypted data was also present in 99 per cent of application backends.
Turner told SC Magazine that there were significant errors and if an open application were seen, it would allow an attacker to collect data from the handset and if it were connected to a network, all of that data too.
“I pointed the scanning tool at the application backend and did a simple scan and as they were default Linux builds, I did the configuration and all of the administrator passwords were not changed,†he said.
“This is an issue of the lack of maturity of mobile application developers who are ‘not solving stupid'. Look at the eco-system; once the backend has been attacked an attacker can use JSON to control the frontend also. There is no firewall to protect the user or application monitoring to do control, it is a complex backend and [there is] no security on either.â€
Presenting at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week on the subject ‘mobile applications - the vulnerability tsunami is coming' with this research, he recommended deploying a PIM container, as although it is not very good, "it is the best we have right now".
Turner told SC Magazine that he had sought permission from the developers of the applications he assessed, initially contacting them at the end of last year, but had no permission given to independently analyse their applications. He admitted that this might have led to some false positives.
Check out the video here, or simply watch below:
This past week we had some fantastic stories on what you should be learning about your customers from analytics, tech solutions for retailers wanting local customers, what you can expect from the Microsoft Office 365 upgrades and a social network advertising comparison: Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
Plus we gave you a list of must-have travel apps to keep you organized and productive on the road, a look at why technology training helps you, your employees and your business, some compelling stories about why you might want GPS tracking devices on your assets and a discussion on how social selling is beyond technology and the focus should be on human relations.
We examined the wisdom of Yahoo’s decision to stop allowing employees to work remotely, showed you how you can hire more rock star employees, saw how the printer is evolving to stay relevant and asked if you should offer printing to your customers.
We had app ideas, a way to cut through App Store competition with text messaging and computer cleaning tips.
In business news, Evernote started off the week with a worrisome email letting their users know they’d been hacked. We gave you some tips on how to minimize the damage if you are hacked.
We covered Yodle’s expanding their dental marketing software, Groupon launching new analytic features for all users and a Google AdWords upgrade that made it easier to advertise on more devices.
This week coming up, there’s a lot more coming your way.
We’ve got all that and a lot more coming up, so stayed tuned. If you have an idea for something you’d like to see on the site, let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to make it happen!
The reasons as to why businesses fail can be many. Here’s what I think. The reason most businesses fail is because entrepreneurship is a lifestyle shift, which most entrepreneurs do succeed in. It is, however, the mind shift that’s an integral part of entrepreneurship that remains incomplete. Most entrepreneurs do make mistakes during the startup phase.
Below are 9 entrepreneurship principles you shouldn’t forget, to help you be more successful.
It’s easy to blame everything on the economy. The reality is that entrepreneurship has nothing to do with your idea, previous experience, education and training. Although all of these do help you later on.
Entrepreneurship is always about you. It’s about how you organize resources and manage them. It’s about how you market your business and it’s all about your commitment to see it through to the end.
If you are in business, you have to make those sales happen. The first hat you wear as an entrepreneur, apart from conceptualizing and designing your products and services, is that of a sales person. A sale manifests itself in various forms and doesn’t always lead to a financial transaction. Wooing investors, convincing customers to buy from you and roping in beta testers for your new startup are all successful sales closures.
As long as it’s about sales, there’s a cardinal rule that applies to it: It’s always a game of numbers while you focus on doing it right. The more customers you talk to, the more you’ll sell. Apply that rule to first hires, venture capitalists and everyone else involved in the startup phase.
Needless to say, rejections will come with 9 out of 10 interactions. It won’t matter since the 10th person is likely to buy. Rejection is the fuel that should keep entrepreneurship alive. Are you letting it fan that flame in your belly
The new economy demands new approaches to business. The Internet has already turned the tables around. So when you are starting up, is your approach going to be contemporary or traditional The contemporary route is going to pull you towards the rewards of using technology. You’d typically start a website; create a blog, set up social media accounts and one of the many tools available to run your business.
The traditional way still holds (depending on your business), but it still plugs itself into the contemporary way of doing business. That is, even brick-and-mortar business models will end up using technology.
Customers are not serial numbers. They aren’t entries in your CRM solution or on your accounting ledger. When entrepreneurs come up with ideas, they could fall in love with their own ideas, concepts and product prototypes that they forget that they are selling it to humans with the aim to solve a pressing problem with an effective solution. That process ought to reverse. Find the problem, come up with solutions for it, launch your product or service and then look to serve customers for life.
The story isn’t over after the sale. Serving customers to the best of your ability kicks in and stays over.
Entrepreneurs are people too. They have needs as everyone does. That’s where the fault line is. Nowhere is it more visible than in the sales or deal making process itself.
If small business owners need a better conversion ratio in their sales process, they’d have to do the gargantuan task of “removing themselves†from the equation. Your idea might be unique, you’d have invested millions in product development and you’d have hired the best people your money could buy. Still, you aren’t important in the process; the customer is.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t earn you bragging rights. Nothing ever does. The more you tend to give away in a sales process or while making deals, the more you stand to lose.
How familiar are you with these elevator pitches
“We are a edu-tech company with 8 different portals to facilitate online education in the emerging economies. We show up when learners demand better access to education.  $8.5 billion in funding, and having bagged 3 prestigious Startup of the Year awards. â€
That pitch does sound nice but it’s got “you†written all over it. It’s not personable, it’s not customer-centric and it doesn’t even say how it benefits your client or customer. All it does is brag about how quickly you grew.
Entrepreneurship itself is a visionary endeavor. While your broad vision for the company can change as you grow and explore opportunity, it should have one to begin with.
What do you aspire to be How do you purport to serve customers as you grow What, exactly, do you want to achieve
No, you don’t need a business plan. At least, you don’t need to create a 67-page business plan with financials forecast for the next decade. Your business plan puts your ideas onto paper. It gives you a document to go back and refer to when you need to refocus your entrepreneurial efforts. It’s not etched in stone. It’s printed on paper or it might even sit as a document on your computer hard drive.
Change plans if you must. Dump the original plan and go for a completely new one. Whatever you do, print it on paper and keep it with you because it guides you along your way.
Most successful entrepreneurs are well-read, knowledge-hungry, information addicts. Reports, magazines, books and countless hours on the Internet are all in a day’s work for the typical new age entrepreneur.
It’s actually a pretty simple trait that’s still so powerful. Entrepreneurs cannot rest on their laurels. Changes are the only constant that everyone has to deal with. The only way small business owners can keep track of changing trends is by keeping on top of what’s happening in the world, in their industry and elsewhere.
Entrepreneurship keeps the world’s economy spinning. It’s the reason why jobs are created and new products and services are launched. Entrepreneurship is the sum of all the work that goes behind the scenes to bring us everything we enjoy, use and experience. None of that would have been possible if any of those entrepreneurs behind everything we have today had not acceded to even one of these fundamental entrepreneurship tenets.
So what’s the plan, entrepreneur
Principles Photo via Shutterstock
Check out the video here, or simply watch below:
This past week we had some fantastic stories on what you should be learning about your customers from analytics, tech solutions for retailers wanting local customers, what you can expect from the Microsoft Office 365 upgrades and a social network advertising comparison: Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
Plus we gave you a list of must-have travel apps to keep you organized and productive on the road, a look at why technology training helps you, your employees and your business, some compelling stories about why you might want GPS tracking devices on your assets and a discussion on how social selling is beyond technology and the focus should be on human relations.
We examined the wisdom of Yahoo’s decision to stop allowing employees to work remotely, showed you how you can hire more rock star employees, saw how the printer is evolving to stay relevant and asked if you should offer printing to your customers.
We had app ideas, a way to cut through App Store competition with text messaging and computer cleaning tips.
In business news, Evernote started off the week with a worrisome email letting their users know they’d been hacked. We gave you some tips on how to minimize the damage if you are hacked.
We covered Yodle’s expanding their dental marketing software, Groupon launching new analytic features for all users and a Google AdWords upgrade that made it easier to advertise on more devices.
This week coming up, there’s a lot more coming your way.
We’ve got all that and a lot more coming up, so stayed tuned. If you have an idea for something you’d like to see on the site, let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to make it happen!
Writer.ly, which debuted in late 2012, is a website where writers can assemble a team they need to publish and market their books.
On the site, writers can sign up for a free account. They build their own profile and post biddable job requests for a copy editor, book designer, ebook specialist, book marketer, and other professionals.
Professionals can find work on Writer.ly.com by bidding on the jobs that writers post.
Kawasaki made his name first at Apple, and then by becoming an investor in tech ventures. Along the way, he became a best-selling author.  His “Art of the Start†published in 2004 is still one of the most all-time-popular startup books, according to our statistics here at Small Business Trends.
Recently Kawasaki has become an advocate and leading voice for writers in a dramatically shifting publishing industry.  It’s no longer your father’s publishing industry, where traditional publishers rule the roost.  Today, publishers pay smaller up-front advances. They invest less in marketing, except for a handful of books. Thus, it’s up to the author to market the book.
More books are being published today.  Often they are self-published with authors intentionally bypassing traditional publishers.  Another key trend is a surge in popularity of ebooks, with some authors choosing to publish in ebook-only format.  And increasingly authors are trying out new techniques to market their books, such as marketing heavily through Facebook as Kawasaki did with his book “Enchantment.â€
Kawasaki calls this role of the author being in control and publishing on his or her own, as “artisanal publishing.†In an interview here at Small Business Trends last month, Kawasaki also spoke about the challenges of publishing and funding a new book.  Kawasaki said:
“ Our guideline is that it takes about $4,000 to content edit, copy edit, design a cover, and lay out the book. Really great marketing costs another $20,000. This makes the total cost approximately $25,000, worst case. There are ways to cut this to $2,000 by paying for professional copy editing and cover designing only. But $25,000 would pay for doing everything in a first class way.â€
It takes a lot of book sales to just break even against $2,000 to $25,000 in costs - let alone make money. Â So finding good talent at a reasonable cost is important.
Writer.ly doesn’t appear to be about driving costs down to levels that are unsustainable for writing professionals, however.  Its focus is more on finding talented people who are expert in particular niches, so that you bring in someone who helps you with many of the things publishers traditionally have done.  Writer.ly charges a 10% fee for using its marketplace.
Kelsye Nelson, CEO and co-founder of Writer.ly, is an author herself, as is co-founder Abigail Carter (pictured below, Nelson right and Carter left). Â Nelson (@Kelsye)Â told us that the two came together through their writing interests:
“We actually met at a writing group I started four years ago. I have a degree in Writing from the Evergreen State College and did graduate work in publishing arts. However, went on to a career in marketing. [Co-founder] Abigail’s memoir, “The Alchemy of Loss,†about being widowed on 9/11 was a national best-seller in Canada, and one of the top 100 books of 2008 from the Globe Mail.â€
Writer.ly is broader than serving book authors.  According to Nelson, it covers “the services marketplace infrastructure for the entire publishing industry. Everyone from writers, to magazine and journals, to publishers may post jobs on Writer.ly to find the help they need.â€
And just how did Writer.ly manage to snag someone as high-profile as Kawasaki as a board advisor  It turns out that Nelson didn’t need to ambush Kawasaki as she initially intended at the recent San Francisco writer’s conference where he was keynoting.
Instead, she checked her contacts. Â One of them introduced her via email, and she and Kawasaki ended up having lunch at the conference.
Writer.ly came on the scene in late 2012. In the four weeks since it has been accepting writers, Writer.ly has had over 900 writers  and writing professionals sign up, according to Nelson.
Writer.ly was founded after Nelson and Carter attended The Founders Institute, an early-stage startup accelerator.
Image still for Guy Kawasaki from ReadWriteTV.
Two days of  SXSW 2013 have passed and the word on the street is that there are over 25,000 people attending the conference. On the second day we were part of two Small Business events.
SXSW SMALL BUSINESS MEETUP
The first ever SXSW Small Business Meetup hosted by Ramon Ray that took place at the Proof Annexe on 6th Street in Downtown Austin. To make the event more participative Ramon Ray organized the event  to make the attendees network as part of a group and discuss the top challenges and solutions to overcome them. Attendees also had a chance to win the book “The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing†and many other prizes from InfusionSoft.
The Original Kings of Technology: Leveraging eCommerce to Triple Your bottom Line.
This panel was part of a larger SXSW conference track †Blacks in Technology† and the panelists notes and video interviews are posted online here https://www.facebook.com/OriginalKingsofTechnology
Two days of  SXSW 2013 have passed and the word on the street is that there are over 25,000 people attending the conference. On the second day we were part of two Small Business events.
SXSW SMALL BUSINESS MEETUP
The first ever SXSW Small Business Meetup hosted by Ramon Ray that took place at the Proof Annexe on 6th Street in Downtown Austin. To make the event more participative Ramon Ray organized the event  to make the attendees network as part of a group and discuss the top challenges and solutions to overcome them. Attendees also had a chance to win the book “The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing†and many other prizes from InfusionSoft.
The Original Kings of Technology: Leveraging eCommerce to Triple Your bottom Line.
This panel was part of a larger SXSW conference track †Blacks in Technology† and the panelists notes and video interviews are posted online here https://www.facebook.com/OriginalKingsofTechnology
Two days of  SXSW 2013 have passed and the word on the street is that there are over 25,000 people attending the conference. On the second day we were part of two Small Business events.
SXSW SMALL BUSINESS MEETUP
The first ever SXSW Small Business Meetup hosted by Ramon Ray that took place at the Proof Annexe on 6th Street in Downtown Austin. To make the event more participative Ramon Ray organized the event  to make the attendees network as part of a group and discuss the top challenges and solutions to overcome them. Attendees also had a chance to win the book “The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing†and many other prizes from InfusionSoft.
The Original Kings of Technology: Leveraging eCommerce to Triple Your bottom Line.
This panel was part of a larger SXSW conference track †Blacks in Technology† and the panelists notes and video interviews are posted online here https://www.facebook.com/OriginalKingsofTechnology
