HP to settle suits over Autonomy deal; make claim against ex-CEO Lynch

(Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co HPQ.N and attorneys representing shareholders have agreed to settle litigation over its troubled $11.1 billion acquisition of British software company Autonomy Corp, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

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Kleiner Perkins files to raise $1.2 billion in new venture funds

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers filed to raise a total of $1.2 billion for two new funds, reflecting scaled-back ambitions compared with previous funds.

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U.S. auctions some 30,000 bitcoins from Silk Road raid

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Marshals Service on Friday auctioned off about 30,000 bitcoins seized during a raid on Silk Road, an Internet black-market bazaar where authorities say illegal drugs and other goods could be bought.

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U.S. auctions some 30,000 bitcoins from Silk Road raid

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Marshals Service on Friday auctioned off about 30,000 bitcoins seized during a raid on Silk Road, an Internet black-market bazaar where authorities say illegal drugs and other goods could be bought.

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Search Giant Shuts Down Ads, Review Site Gets Messaging

News this week includes the shutting down of a fairly high profile online ad program. Meanwhile, a more famous online review site introduces instant messaging to its options. Here are the headlines you need to keep up with this week to keep your small business competitive.

Marketing

Microsoft Puts Brakes on Bing Ads Express. Bing is apparently putting the breaks on its Bing Ads Express service launched in October of 2013. Microsoft, which owns Bing, had apparently hoped the service would appeal to small local businesses especially. But apparently, there haven’t been enough takers.

Yelp Will Let Your Customers Message You. For small businesses, including those with a brick and mortar presence, handling customer feedback is getting to be a 24 hour, 7 day a week job. Looking at sites like Yelp alone, you have regular customer reviews good and bad to monitor and respond to. There’s also the opportunity for customers to upload photos (and more recently even Yelp video) of your business.

Pinterest Introduces Faster Location-Based Search. Pinterest is introducing a faster location search to make better use of some of the site’s other location-based features. The social pinning site introduced Place Pins about six months ago, letting people pin their favorite travel destinations, local guides and locations.

HubSpot's Timothy Dearlove On Why Content Marketing Isn't A Shortcut. Timothy Dearlove is a Senior Channel Consultant at HubSpot. Recently, Tim shared his inbound content marketing perspectives with Small Business Trends, focusing on how inbound success can make good marketing campaigns awesome and why content marketing is not a shortcut.

Payroll & Online Payment

Two Year-Old ZenPayroll is Offering Time Tracking Features. Two-year-old ZenPayroll has added time tracking to its other features. The company says it is part of an ongoing effort to simplify the payroll process, especially for small businesses. ZenPayroll already claims the process of setting up payroll on its system takes only minutes.

Send Money Without a Dwolla Account With New Dwolla Direct. First, Dwolla simplified the B2B payment process. Instead of the nearly 3% transaction fee charged by some digital transaction services, Dwolla charges just one fee. Most transactions are 25 cents. (And transactions of less than $10 are free.) Now the company says it’s trying to eliminate the barriers preventing your customers from being able to easily pay you this way.

Operations

Microsoft Exchange Down for Nine Hours. For all their benefits in making small businesses more cost efficient and competitive, there are, of course, negatives to cloud services too. When a cloud service is interrupted for any reason, those relying on the service are without recourse until it is up and running again. That’s what apparently happened to an undetermined number of Microsoft Exchange customers this week.

PNC Bank Introduces Mobile Payments From Pogo. Taking mobile payments on a tablet or phone is a hot area of interest for small business merchants. It’s the way a lot of small businesses choose to do business these days. One advantage is obvious. Mobile device in hand, you can accept credit card payments wherever you may be.

Resources

A Review of Optimizing AdSense, a Google Training Program. Do you publish a website or blog that you monetize using Google AdSense? Then Google has a self-help training course just for you.

New PayPal PassPort Website is Your Portal to Global Sales. We hear it so much it's become cliché by now – we live in a "global society" with a "global economy" and a "global marketplace" that is at everyone's fingertips via the Internet. But in reality, it's the 'big guys' who are participating globally (and reaping the benefits).

Constant Contact Launches Startup Accelerator. Do you have a startup that serves other small businesses with a product or service? Would you like that startup to grow? Then you may be interested in applying to Constant Contact’s 4-month startup accelerator program.

Liber8Me Teaches Lessons From a Veteran Entrepreneur. Laura Humphreys may have started her career as a secretary in an ad agency. But to date she has started three successful businesses and sold two. Her latest venture, Liber8Me attempts to help others learn from her experience and visualize their businesses in a whole new way.

Startup Stories

Entrepreneurs Create the World’s First Soda Can Watch. The Can Watch S is a unique approach to recycling. Instead of treating old soda cans as junk, these entrepreneurs have used them to create a watch that actually functions as a fashion accessory. Alchemist Designs, the company behind the watch, is trying to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter to put it into production.

How to Turn a Love of Fashion Into a $700,000 a Year PR Firm. Starting a public relations agency isn't necessarily the most traditional path to find work in the fashion industry. But a love for art and fashion eventually led Katherine Niefeld to do just that – and it allowed her to realize her dream of working in fashion.

Online Sales

Don’t Want to Sell Your Own Stuff? eBay Valet Will Do It! It’s finally happened! If you’re an eBay seller but no longer want to deal with the…uh, selling part…now you can outsource that too. A new app, eBay Valet, and the service it supports, are kind of like an online version of an eBay consignment store. You download the app and take a photo of the item or items you want to sell.

Social Media

Twitter Tries Retweet With More Room for Comments. Have you ever wanted to comment on a retweet? You can, of course, but only if the tweet is short enough. On the Web, your only option is to copy the tweet you want to comment on. (It needs to be much shorter than 140 characters to even do this.) You then open a new tweet box and paste the tweet in it.

Research

What Is The Best Country in the World for Women Entrepreneurs? If you expected us to say anything other than the U.S., well, you’d be wrong. A recent study shows women entrepreneurs in the U.S. have the best chance of success. Other countries seen as favorable for women entrepreneurs include Australia in the number 2 position, Sweden at number 3, France and Germany tied for the fourth and fifth positions and Chile taking up sixth place.

Average Sales Are Up At Non-Employer Firms. In February, I wrote a post about the downward trend in real sales at the average non-employer business – a company with yearly sales of at least $1,000, but no payroll – since the late 1990s. In it, I predicted that the 2012 non-employer data would show a continued decline. I'm happy to report that my prediction was wrong.

Employment

Should You Ever Make a Counter Offer to an Employee? It's no secret that competition for experienced employees is heating up. Despite the economy's ups and downs, the news continues to be filled with reports that businesses seeking to hire can't find qualified workers.

Technology Trends

Should Your Small Business Just Ignore These 7 Technologies? New technologies are released every day. For those small business owners that have shiny object syndromes (SOS), they can be hard to resist. Many are pushed to thinking that in order to have a competitive edge, they need to offer their customers the latest technology.

Tablet by the sea via Shutterstock

The post Search Giant Shuts Down Ads, Review Site Gets Messaging appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Etailers Pay Only For Actual Returns With Endicia’s New Return Labels

The space for etailer tools has been heating up recently. There’s an eBay service, eBay Valet, that will list your products for you and an analytics tool, Terapeak, that provides data about the amount your products can sell for online.

There are also tools like Chirpify that help you sell your products via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And, for those uninterested in selling on the big sites, there are also a ton of small eCommerce store options out there.

But one of the latest innovations has less to do with selling than with the all-important customer service aspects of product shipping — and returns.

Etailers often provide free package return for customers as an added service. In fact, free return shipping is becoming the expected norm (with 51% of consumers wanting free return shipping as identified in the graphic below), from merchants selling online.

[Click image for larger version]

But, while the option is popular with customers, it’s expensive for shippers, particularly if those shippers use the United States Postal Service (USPS) to deliver their products.

You see, placing a U.S. Postal Service return label on shipments means absorbing the cost of the return whether a customer sends back their order or not. And with only an estimated 10 percent of orders resulting in returns, this ends up being a considerable additional cost.

Major USPS competitors FedEx and UPS already provide an option for return shipping that charges only if there is an actual return.

The USPS does offer it’s own version of this service, said Emma Johnson, director of marketing for shipping software provider Endicia in a recent phone interview with Small Business Trends.

But to qualify up until now, shippers have needed to guarantee at least 10,000 returns per year. That’s well beyond the ability of many small eCommerce businesses, especially those just starting out.

FedEx and UPS may offer viable alternatives cost wise for sellers shipping bulkier items of 15 to 20 pounds or more. But for those shipping products less than 5 pounds, their cost does not justify the savings on returns, says Johnson.

That’s why she says Endicia has developed a Pay-On-Use Returns label in partnership with the Postal Service. Once downloaded, the software allows shippers to print out the new Endicia return label or email it to customers allowing them to print it out for returns, Johnson added.

Endicia already provides a wide variety of  software and other products for eCommerce sellers, warehouse shippers and other businesses.

Johnson said the product was developed as a result of the company’s 25 year relationship with the USPS as a software provider. She explained:

“For us it came down to, the Postal Service has so many great products. How do we make them work more easily?”

The software was also a result of the company’s own experience as an eCommerce shipper of printers and other products from its online supplies store.

The new Pay-On-Use Returns label will be rolled out officially on July 1, 2014 and will be available to Endicia’s Professional and Label Server accounts. Or you can contact the company for more information.

Images: Endicia

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Hey Folks, Guess What? LinkedIn Is Not a Dating Site!

LinkedIn is an incredibly valuable business connection and resource site. When used properly, LinkedIn can help you expand your reach, increase your credibility, and grow your business.

But lately, I've experienced a lot of people using it incorrectly. Because I do a lot of writing and public speaking, I tend to accept LinkedIn connection requests from many people I don't know. It's a decision I made consciously.

In the past, the majority of the people who sent me requests were people who genuinely wanted to connect professionally and build a relationship. Or they wanted to be able to follow what I was writing and find out where I'd be speaking in the future.

Lately however, people have chosen to use LinkedIn to solicit, and even worse, to try to create personal relationships.

In one week, every connection request I accepted was immediately followed by an email telling me about the person's product or service and why I should want to purchase it from them. Beside the fact that I didn't even really know them yet, they didn't know me. They didn't know my company or my needs. They assumed because of my title and my company, that I must need what they were offering.

This, in my opinion, is one of the worst sales techniques in the world.

The other day I was contacted by someone who I share a connection with. So, you'd assume that 1 degree of separation would be a good thing and there would be a conceivable reason for us to connect. I accepted the request and then received this:

"I want to thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn and I am glad you did because I will like to get to know you more and share lovely ideas with you both business and other things. I must tell you that you are so beautiful and nice and I will love to know you more, so please feel free and tell me more about yourself? Thank you and hoping to hear from you soon."

Okay, the first thing is – I'm not sure what this person is actually wanting. There could be a language gap. So I asked and then received this response:

"I have gone through your profile and found out that you are dealing with Project, I am contractor engineer in mining and pipelines and I can invest in any good business that can bring good money, I am not giving you a compliment about you being beautiful, think I am telling you the fact about your looks, can I ask you. . .hahaha, are you married? Can we be friends? I know it will sound like a bombshell to you now lol. . .but I am serious about it. Can you share a little about yourself and also give me your private email address for more communication with you?"

Seriously? LinkedIn is not a dating site!

When people use LinkedIn incorrectly it does two things:

• It diminishes the value of the platform. If too much soliciting and inappropriate communication persists, good people will disengage from the site. This will lead to the site becoming less and less valuable for business development – and that would be a shame.
• The people who are behaving badly are really hurting their businesses. When you interact, whether in person or online, you are acting as a representative of your company. Therefore, the decisions you make can result in growth or destruction.

It's my opinion that you don't want to become the person others avoid or warn others about. If you want to maximize your LinkedIn experience, consider doing the following:

Reach out to people you know for connections. If you want to connect with someone you don't know, tell them why – and make sure it's a business reason:

• Seek to learn about companies: Their goals, needs and challenges (instead of seeking to sell them something).
• Connect people to solutions: Even when it’s not something you sell.

If you approach your LinkedIn experience with these ideas in mind, you'll find it to be a very valuable resource for your business.

Disengaged Photo via Shutterstock, Frustrated Photo via Shutterstock, Surprised Photo via Shutterstock

The post Hey Folks, Guess What? LinkedIn Is Not a Dating Site! appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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