Entrepreneurial

from Summit Notebook:

Where are you spending?

Ruben Ramirez

Jun 8, 2009 15:05 EDT

This week we're getting inside views from some of the biggest names in retail...from high-end fashion houses like Hermes to department store chain J.C. Penney. Optimism among those in the industry about a turnaround toward the end of 2009 springs eternal...but what are you seeing? Where are you spending? Or, are you trading down? Ditching Saks and heading to Target? Barclays retail analyst Bob Drbul says the key for consumers in the current economic environment, no matter where they shop, is "value." Click here to hear his thoughts:

Are you changing your buying behavior? from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

SBA announces new ARC loan guidelines

Jon Cook

Jun 8, 2009 07:36 EDT

Today the U.S. Small Business Administration announced new lender guidelines for the America’s Recovery Capital (ARC) loan program it unveiled last month.

According to the SBA release, the ARC program provides emergency funds, in the forms of deferred loans, of up to $35,000 to “viable small businesses suffering immediate financial hardship.” These loans are not provided directly by the SBA, but through SBA-backed lenders – mostly smaller or community banks – and are 100 percent guaranteed by the government and have no lender fees attached.

The SBA defines a “viable” business as an “established, for-profit business with evidence of profitability or positive cash flow in at least one of the past two years.” The term “immediate financial hardship” is subsequently defined by the SBA as “evidence to show a change in the financial condition such as declining sales, frozen credit lines, difficulty meeting payroll, paying rent, difficulty making loan payments or perhaps something else.”

SBA lenders will start dispensing ARC loans next week,  on June 15.

Eric Zarnikow, associate administrator for Capital Access – the SBA department overseeing the new loans, said he expects 10,000 ARC loans to be doled out over the next 15 months until the September 30, 2010 cutoff date.

In an attempt to make sure all small businesses from across the country benefit from the program, Zarnikow said there will be an ARC loan cap of 50 per week to each SBA-approved lending institution, with no more than 1,000 loans issued from any one lender in total.

If a lender was only able to make 30 loans in any one weekly period, they would be able to catch up the next week by making up to 70 loans, in what Zarnikow referred to as a “rollover” provision.

Competing for buzz and cash: Startup 2009 conference

It’s too late to get tickets for today’s Startup 2009 conference in NYC, but you almost don’t even need to be there. Event co-host Silicon Alley Insider, a NYC tech blog, is streaming the entire conference via live video now (watch below) and attendees inside are busy giving a blow-by-blow on Twitter.

The one-day conference features interviews with seasoned entrepreneurs and presentations by 10 emerging online companies carefully chosen by a panel of venture capital judges to compete for “bragging rights, buzz, and a $50,000 prize.” Here are the companies in the running: Advanced Marketing and Media Group, Adzoomi, Article One Partners, BeliefNetworks, Expensify, GlobeFunder Ventures, Good Health Advertising, Micronotes, Path 101, and Portfolio Monkey.

Update: Article One Partners, a startup that helps company’s establish patents or fight already existing ones, took the prize at Startup 2009.  Watch an interview with the company’s founder Cheryl Milone moments after the win (via The Deal).

from DealZone:

E Ink sale not much of a VC payday

E Ink's "electronic paper" is the special sauce that makes e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle possible, but it hasn't proven to be much of a meal for its venture capital backers.

The privately held company was purchased by Taiwanese display maker Prime View International on Monday for $215 million, 12 years after it emerged from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory.

peHUB notes that the decade-plus span is far from ideal for VCs (the ideal horizon is five to seven years). Even worse, VCs including Intel Capital, Motorola Ventures, Solstice Capital, the McClatchy Company, Lucent Technologies, FA Technology Ventures, and the Hearst Corporation sunk some $148.8 million into E Ink over the years, for an underwhelming 1.4 multiple.

E Ink holds more than 100 patents on its "electrophoretic" ink technology, in which electric charges are sent along a grid embedded in the paper. The charges cause tiny black and white particles to move up and down, creating text and images.

E-Ink and Prime View are already close business partners, with E-Ink providing the front part of flexible displays to Amazon and Sony. Prime View makes the back end and assembles the displays. The companies said said the deal would provide the financing and manpower needed to fuel development of color displays, slated for mass production at the end of 2010.

What’s next for Cubes & Crayons?

Jon Cook

Jun 2, 2009 09:55 EDT

After the birth of her first daughter, Felicity Chapman decided she would only work part-time, but found it all but impossible to juggle both her clients and childcare. Chapman knew she needed to find some flexible childcare that would allow her to accommodate her clients’ needs, without shortchanging her daughter.

“I didn’t want to leave her with just anyone and I couldn’t tell my clients that I can only come from Monday to Wednesday from 9-12, because that’s the only time when I have childcare,” she said, echoing the sentiment of many working mothers. “I thought there has got to be a better solution.”

The seed that began as a line in Chapman’s notepad has grown into Cubes & Crayons, a hybrid business offering moms a place where they can literally take their kids to work.

One part office space provider and one part daycare, Chapman believes her Silicon Valley-based business is the answer for working moms, or dads, who are finding it impossible to get the job done from home and look after their children at the same time.

THE PITCH

Not one to rest on her accomplishments, Chapman has an ambitious plan to expand Cubes & Crayons in 3 to 6 more cities over the next 18 months. San Francisco is first up, with other possible locations in Austin and New York.

Young entrepreneurs to watch in the tech sector

Bill Gates was 19 when he came up with the idea for Microsoft. Michael Dell was the same age when he started selling computers out of his dorm room. Who are the teenagers and 20-somethings trying to hatch the big tech and media ideas of tomorrow?

paidContent.org has compiled a list of likely candidates under the age of 21, from web design impresarios to “pimp my MySpace” tycoons.  Taking advantage of the Web’s low barriers to entry means that you often only need a really good idea.

Age: 19 Company: myYearbook

Some great ideas come from analysis and introspection. For siblings Catherine and David Cook, it was the result of a snarky comment. “My brother David and I were flipping through our high-school yearbook during my freshman year,” Catherine recalls. “We were looking for a girl in his class—I think he liked her—and he was trying to show me who she was. Once we finally got to the picture he was like, ‘She looks nothing like that.’”

The problem, they realized, was that the yearbook photo was a year old. The conclusion: “Yearbooks suck.” The Cooks figured they could make a better yearbook online, one that allowed people to choose and update their own pictures. They got $250,000 from their older brother, Geoff, who had started and sold the web sites EssayEdge and ResumeEdge when he was a student at Harvard.

In less than two months, they finished myYearbook (outsourcing the programming), and launched it in April 2005. By the fall, it was bringing in some 3,000 new members a day. Today, it has more than 9.8 million unique visitors a month from students all around the world, according to comScore.

MyYearbook had more than $10 million in sales last year, according to Cook and First Round Capital, an early investor in myYearbook. Besides advertising revenue, the site has built interest around its “lunch money” program. Users pay $10 to get $1 million in myYearbook money to buy virtual gifts for friends or finance assorted acts of do-goodery, such as sending books to Africa, saving the rainforest or buying carbon offsets. Says First Round Capital partner Chris Fralic: “There are a number of sites that have gotten to their size, but not many that have been able to build aa business around it like they have.”