Yahoo can’t find buyer for small business unit

The sale of Yahoo’s small business unit, which had been rumored for months, has apparently found no takers and now the Internet firm has pulled the offer from the table, news website DailyFinance reported.

Last September a source “familiar with the matter” told Reuters that Yahoo’s asking price of between $350 million to $500 million was “likely higher than what buyers were willing to pay.”

Yahoo’s small business division provides domains, email, Web hosting and other merchant services to customers.

The Reuters story listed private equity firm General Atlantic LLC as a potential buyer because it owns Network Solutions, which provides similar services to small businesses.

Do entrepreneurs need education?

Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook from his Harvard dormitory, but after the social networking website exploded in popularity, he promptly quit school and became a full-time entrepreneur.

An informal roll call of Fortune 500 CEOs that dropped out of high school or university and went on to become self-made billionaires, includes the following: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Page (Google), Michael Dell (Dell), David Geffen (Geffen Records), Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin), Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lauren), Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and the aforementioned Zuckerberg.

Most on this list received a modicum of post-secondary education, before bailing and pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams.

Like Zuckerberg, Gates also went to Harvard. Page and Yang both attended Stanford. Jobs only completed one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Dell left the University of Texas at 19. Geffen dropped out of three universities before launching his record label. Lauren went to little-known Baruch College in New York State, but left after two years. Branson, a mild dyslexic, never made it out of high school. And it’s not clear if Ford founder Henry Ford ever had any formal education, outside his training as a machinist.

Getting word out, scale are obstacles for software startup

A couple years ago, while working for a large engineering consulting firm, Kristen Carney was hired to complete what she thought was a straightforward analysis: directly connect two roads that were currently joined by an intermediary road. More than 100 hours later and thousands of dollars over budget, a frustrated Carney felt there had to be an easier solution.

The Austin, Texas entrepreneur complained about her ordeal to friend and software whiz Anthony Morales, who offered to design a program that could drastically reduce the time it took her to gather and format her data. Morales’s software worked so well, they founded Cubit Planning, a Web-based platform that provides cut-and-paste ready environmental data.

“A lot of people say, ‘Hey, you’ve lived my nightmare,’” said Carney, who launched Cubit last year with just $2,000. She said their open-source technology operates in similar fashion to that used by stock websites. “They go out and they grab information from a bunch of different resources and they compile it nicely for you, so you can make a decision based on that data. That’s what we do, but for environmental engineers.”

THE PITCH

from The Great Debate UK:

Vikas Pota on ten business icons in India

Amid jitters about uncertainty in the financial markets over the past 16 months, many investors have continued to look toward the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China, which by 2050 are expected to be wealthier than most current major economic powers.

In all four countries, GDP has more than doubled since 1998, and in China and India it has trebled.

The Confederation of Indian Industry, a non-profit non-governmental, industry-led organisation, estimates India's GDP growth rate at 6.1 per cent in 2009-10.

With those facts in mind, Vikas Pota, managing director of public affairs firm Saffron Chase, wrote "India Inc.", a book about 10 global success stories he parallels with such powerful businessmen as Microsoft's Bill Gates, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett.

A lost generation of entrepreneurs?

– Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm in Boston. This post originally appeared on Bussgang’s blog www.seeingbothsides.com. The views expressed are his own. –

I’ve been worrying lately that we are suffering from a lost generation of entrepreneurs.

That was my first reaction when I read what Sequoia’s Doug Leone said a few weeks ago about innovation and age at a recent talk with MIT Sloan students visiting Silicon Valley. Leone claimed only people under the age of 30 are truly innovative. Over 30 folks can manage innovation, Leone observed, but you need to be under 30 to create it. He cited people such as Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder who was 30 at the time he started the service.

Now you can argue whether this is right or whether it’s a hyperbolic statement for effect, but let’s put that aside for now. Here’s my worry: when I was under 30, I had the opportunity to be a part of a rocket-ship startup – Open Market – that promoted me into an executive position of a public company in my 20s. The lessons and skills from that experience inspired me to delude myself into thinking I could be the founding president of another startup, Upromise, when I was 30. At the time, when I looked around at my peers and friends, they were all doing the same thing at a similar age. Folks like Jeff Glass, who started m-Qube at around the same time and age, Scott Friend, who became president of ProfitLogic, Russ Wilcox at e-Ink and many more. These startups all became substantial companies that resulted in exits north of $100 million.

The state of small business

After spending most of his first year in office focused on Wall Street, President Obama tried to reconnect with disenchanted Main Street voters in his first State of the Union address.

Mentioning “small business” at least 13 times in his speech (get the full text here), the president unveiled a two-pronged attack to get America’s “true engine of job creation” back on its feet and hiring again. Obama pledged to redistribute $30 billion in repaid bailout money from big banks to smaller community banks “to give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat.” He also promised to eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment, to give tax breaks for small businesses who raise wages or hire more workers, and for those who invest in new plants and equipment.

Nydia Velazquez, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Small Business, said the president clarified the “central role small businesses play in our economy,” and added the tax initiatives “would spark growth by helping firms reinvest in their facilities.”

Washington, DC-based tax policy expert Clint Stretch, of Deloitte Tax LLP, said the president’s tax incentives would address the “cashflow issues” facing small businesses and added the tax credit on the purchase of new equipment is especially significant for companies looking to expand as the economy recovers. “If you’re looking at a recovery, you’re going to want to start updating your equipment or start bringing in new equipment in as you hire workers back. The quicker they can write it off for tax, the quicker Uncle Sam is picking up the bill.”

Winning businesses will deliver meaning online in 2010

— Thomas Bonney is founder and managing director of CMF Associates, a financial consulting, staffing and recruiting firm based in Philadelphia, PA, that serves private equity, middle-market and small-cap public companies nationally. The views expressed are his own. –

Back in January 2000, we talked extensively about the “New Economy” that was expected to accompany the commercialization of the Internet. Then what I characterize as the “Decade of Speed and Connectedness” was upon us, in which 24/7 information transparency and accessibility imparted an overlay of urgency to every potential communication, task, or issue.

This all-encompassing connectedness drove the corporate decision-making of the past 10 years to be ruled by speed. The ability to focus on priority issues at hand was lost in the rush to be first to market, in the race to rack up website hits, blog comments, and online “friends.”

Such widespread informational momentum created pressure for businesses to stay in the online conversation 24/7, and expend valuable time and energy on both high and low return-on-attention “connections.” As a result, many firms adopted a mentality that simply “getting connected” with prospects and customers through multiple online touchpoints would be enough to meet customer wishes and objectives. What is now apparent is that such an approach actually created the risk of completely disconnecting from the real needs of customers, as evidenced by the fates of CD Now and AOL in the early part of the 2000s. Additionally there were the social media missteps that cropped up in 2009, such as Facebook’s “terms and conditions” controversy and Mars/Skittles’ one-sided Twitter feed that left negative comments unanswered.

U.S. program helps African entrepreneurs

Ronald Mutebi can now do in three months what might have taken him a year. With his $100,000 share of a grant to benefit Africa, the entrepreneur will soon be sending solar ovens to his native Uganda.

Mutebi obtained exclusive Ugandan rights to market the units from Illinois-based maker Sun Ovens International. His goal is to reduce the country’s dependence on wood and agricultural waste products for cooking fuel.

Mutebi was one of 14 African American entrepreneurs, selected from a group of 58 finalists and more than 700 applicants, awarded just under $1.4 million in total grants at last week’s inaugural African Diaspora Marketplace (ADM) in Washington, DC. The ADM is a joint public-private initiative on behalf of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Western Union, aimed at boosting employment in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to USAID data, there are more than 1.4 million African immigrants in the United States, many of whom are entrepreneurs who operate small businesses in their native countries and send money back to their homelands. In 2008 an estimated $10 billion in remittance flowed back to sub-Saharan Africa from U.S.-based African diaspora members, according to USAID.

High-end water filters a tough sell

Manuel Desrochers and his sister, Noemie, are the founders of Aquaovo, a Montreal, Canada-based startup that designs unique water filters, aimed at reducing the environmental hazard from billions of plastic water bottles filling up landfills (see original story here).

Their trademarked Ovopur unit is a 23-pound ceramic egg-shaped apparatus that holds 11 liters (2.9 gallons) of water and uses the combination of gravity and a glass filter cartridge to purify ordinary tap water.

“Our target market is really 30-50-year-old young professionals, who really like the design of it and they’re thrilled to hear that it’s actually functional,” said Noemie (read her journal here), who added they raised the price for the filters from $560 to $660 after their first six months in business. “We really came to this price thinking this clientele is willing to pay for quality, so they’ll spend around $700 for the Ovopur.”

Desrochers said that despite the Ovopur’s premium price tag, the unit actually saves families money when compared against buying bottled water. After the initial expenditure for the device, Desrochers said it costs consumers roughly another $200 annually for three glass filter cartridges (they retail for $50 each, plus shipping), which have a four-month lifespan. Desrochers added that the average family spends anywhere from $300-600 a year on bottled water and that the Ovopur starts to save families money after two years.

Holiday sales like “crack” for retailers

Over the last few years Black Friday and Boxing Day have become the two biggest sales days on the U.S. retail calendar, but some experts say it may actually be bad for business.

According to ShopperTrak, Americans spent a total of $10.66 billion the day after Thanksgiving and $7.9 billion on the day following Christmas, making them the No. 1 and No. 2 sales days respectively. Overall, ShopperTrak said holiday sales volumes were up 1.6 percent over last year.

So what does this really mean for struggling retailers, especially small businesses that can’t match the door-busting discounts offered by retail giants like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Future Shop?

“The current frenzy of sales activity is just purely being born out of desperation on retailers’ parts,” said retail industry veteran Doug Stephens, who recently started his own consultancy firm – RetailProphet – after having formerly worked for big-chain retailers Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Lowe’s.