Small businesses offer bin Laden specials
As Americans took to the streets to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, C. J. Grouse was rushing to print thousands of new t-shirts to take advantage of the occasion.
“This is probably the biggest bounce we’ve seen from an individual news story in the last five years of doing this,” said Grouse, 43, who launched RoadKill T-Shirts with his brother in 2005. “We had our designs up yesterday by noon and we sold over two thousand of the different designs in 24 hours.”
Grouse said his most popular seller has been a shirt with an Uncle Sam icon and the message: “We Got You Osama bin Laden May 1, 2011″. Other shirts include a bin Laden likeness behind red crosshairs and the slogan “Burn In Hell” and one inspired by Facebook, with the words: “Osama bin Laden Is Dead. 311,275,382 People Like This”.
Grouse said he normally sells about 2,600 t-shirts through the website every day, but expected to “more than double that” with the bin Laden merchandise.
“It’s driving traffic to us that we may not have seen in the past,” he said, noting the Cornelius, North Carolina-based company has done well in the past with shirts based on the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson and with the recent antics of actor Charlie Sheen. “We’re seeing business pretty much equal to a back-to-school peak for us. It’s been pretty impactful for the last two days.”
Restaurants were also jumping on the public euphoria surrounding bin Laden’s death by offering drink and food specials to patrons.
Seattle-based coffee house, Candi Shack, is offering cups of java for $1 as their “Osama bin Laden Shot In The Dark” special.
PeopleDeals offers its spin on group buying
It appears there’s no end to the number of startups the group-buying space can contain. The latest entrant offering a better mousetrap is PeopleDeals, which allows small and medium-sized businesses to create deals that increase in value the more they’re shared across social networks.
Whereas Groupon-type deals are basically a two-for-one model that doesn’t change, PeopleDeals makes the price cheaper after a certain number of participants share the virtual coupon across social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. To illustrate, a pizza joint could offer an online deal for 50 cents off a slice, then as soon as it’s shared with another person it increases to 60 cents and then to 70 cents after it’s shared five more times, up to a maximum of $1 when 20 or more people share it.
“The key is the business owner decides. At any given time they can make it go from 50 cents to $5, or from 50 cents to 70 cents,” said Darin Myman, the CEO of Red Bank, New Jersey-based social network PeopleString Corporation (PLPE.OB), which launched PeopleDeals last week. “When they (customers) share it with their friends and their friends share it they’re becoming your new social media.”
PeopleString, which Myman said originally raised $500,000 from friends and family when it launched two years ago, began trading on the secondary market in January, which “allowed us to get into the market in a timely fashion.” He added the company now has 1,100 sales reps, a million users and is already profitable.
Myman said PeopleDeals is a more cost-effective way for small businesses to use social coupons, as it charges merchants a subscription fee of $80 a month or $649 a year that lets them run a maximum of 10 deals simultaneously (they are charged more for each additional deal above 10). A typical Groupon deal for a $25 coupon that nets them $50 worth of food, ends up costing the merchant $12.50. Should the deal explode in popularity, the business owner is able to stop it immediately or keep increasing the discount.
“One thing that we capitalize on is the loyal customers spreading your word. Hey look, I go here, help me save more, but you could save more also – it’s a team sport,” said Myman, noting PeopleDeals should be available on Android smartphones at some point this week and eventually on iPhone and BlackBerry devices. “I think we disrupt the industry for both the traditional Valpaks and clipper magazines out there and also the new guys like the Groupons and the Living Socials.”
Just found out about PeopleDeals moments ago, Groupon is not my favorite anymore http://www.peoplestringsignup.net
Small firm produces royal wedding comic
Many Americans can’t seem to get enough of the royal wedding. That’s good news for Darren Davis, president of Bluewater Productions, an independent producer of comic books with a celebrity bent.
This week his Vancouver, Washington firm is releasing both a comic book and graphic novel of the royal romance of Britain’s Prince William and bride Kate Middleton.
“In a weird way, I wanted to create my own memorabilia,” said Davis, 42, whose 10-year-old company has produced biographies of famous personalities ranging from Ellen DeGeneres to Hillary Clinton and Glen Beck. “I watched Princess Diana get married.”
Bluewater’s 32-page comic will retail for $3.99, while the longer, 40-page graphic novel will sell for $7.99. They will be sold in comic-book stores throughout the U.S., as well as mainstream book retailers like Barnes & Noble – even such unlikely outlets as Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts.
“There are people who are collecting royal memorabilia; parents buying these for their kids,” he said. “There are also people buying them because they want to collect non-fiction comics.”
Davis expects to sell at least 25,000 copies of each version. His most popular comic book yet was a biography of Justin Bieber, which sold 65,000 copies and was available on shelves at Wal-Mart.
Already Bluewater is planning a second printing of “The Royals: Prince William & Kate Middleton.”
Startup sees boost after Japan quake
Blacksburg, Virginia is far from the epicenter of the earthquakes that have rocked Japan over the last six weeks, but resident Kirk Cameron has felt the virtual aftershocks.
Days after the magnitude 9.0 shaker hit, Cameron’s startup MiserWare tripled the number of downloads for its proprietary Granola energy-saving software.
“Before (the quake) Japan accounted for about 5 percent of our downloads in a day and now they’re more like 20 to 30 percent,” said Cameron, who prior to the quake averaged about 25 daily downloads. “Now we’ve basically covered the entire island.”
The software has clearly resonated with Japanese PC users desperate to keep their computers running longer and preserve their generators, as authorities urged a crackdown in energy usage following the quake that wreaked havoc on the power grid. Cameron said there have been more than 35,000 downloads of his software in Japan since the quake.
Cameron, who maintains his day job as a computer science professor at Virginia Tech University, said his software – available only for PC – is free to download (up to a maximum of 5) and runs in the background, so is virtually invisible. It provides an energy savings of 10 to 40 percent per computer and extends battery life.
“We treat your computer like it has a dimmer switch,” said Cameron, using the example of adjusting the light in your room depending on whether you’re reading or watching a movie. “You’re doing Word at one moment, but then the next moment you’re playing World of Warcraft and then the next moment you’re surfing the Net. We make the energy use match what you’re doing.”
Depending upon what type of hardware Cameron’s program runs on the annual savings vary from $20-$50 for a desktop PC, to $40-$100 per server and anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour in battery life for a laptop.
Dave McClure: SEO still relevant
Dave McClure, venture capitalist and founding partner of the Silicon Valley tech incubator 500 Startups, remains a staunch advocate of search engine optimization and its benefits. He shares some of his thoughts about SEO with Reuters.
Q: Do you think it’s harder for startups to gain traction with SEO now that Google and other browsers seem to be more quality focused? A: People can build a history in three to nine months. It’s not forever. There’s quite a bit of traffic being driven by search and quite a bit of monetization.
Q: Besides technology startups, is SEO important to other small businesses, including those without a deep understanding of tech? A: Absolutely. There’s still a huge amount of traffic that comes from people typing into a search box. The point is, even though social (media) is rising in ascendancy, it’s going to take a long time for (SEO) to become irrelevant. To suggest that SEO is somehow over is basically predicating a future that’s 10 to 20 years out.
Q: What should small companies be doing to help assure success with SEO? A: You should build a great product, no question. There’s plenty of best practices that use anchor texts for links relevant to your site and content. Reach out and link to other people that are relevant sites and ask them to link to you.
Q: What’s changing now in SEO? A: I think there is rising prominence for social signals. I don’t know if they’re more valuable than search; they’re probably equally valuable at least in terms of driving traffic.
from Tales from the Trail:
Former “start-up” Obama wouldn’t mind being as popular as…SpongeBob
He's been president of the United States for about two-and-a-half years, but Barack Obama still remembers being a "start-up" -- and he wouldn't mind being as popular as SpongeBob SquarePants.
The Democratic president, who is in the middle of a road show to sell his ideas for cutting the deficit, spent the evening in San Francisco on Wednesday raising money for his campaign, and he targeted tech-savvy donors who had started successful companies of their own.
"Some of you are involved in start-ups, well I was a start-up just not so long ago," Obama told a dinner fundraiser at the home of Marc Benioff, the chief executive of salesforce.com.
There's big money in California. Donors paid as much as $35,800 a piece to dine with the president or hear him speak.
Earlier in the day the president held a townhall meeting at the social networking giant Facebook. At a second fundraiser later in the evening, he said he was pleased that his own Facebook page was so popular.
"I've got 19 million friends," he marveled, noting, however, that he was less loved than the cartoon character SpongeBob.
Something to aspire to, he said.
The cloud is not just about storage
– Cindy Bates is vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. SMB organization where she is responsible for the company’s end-to-end SMB sales and marketing efforts. The views expressed are her own. –
Have you ever owned something that you didn’t use to its full potential? Perhaps you have a four-wheel drive vehicle that you’ve never taken off the city streets or a digital camera you didn’t know had video capabilities.
The same phenomenon can occur with technology. Take cloud computing, for instance. By now, most small and mid-sized business (SMB) decision makers know they can use the cloud for storage. Hosts of online service providers offer space in the cloud to safely backup business data, and scores of SMBs are taking advantage of this cost-effective way to store data.
However, SMBs aren’t always aware of the cloud’s uses beyond data storage. Yet, cloud computing solutions have advanced to the point where they now provide businesses with a myriad of ways to improve operations. Here are a few examples of what else you could be doing with the cloud:
Improving communication and collaboration. Consider the communication/productivity tools you use everyday – e-mail, phone, chat, contacts, calendars, document creation software and more – deploying cloud-based versions of these programs can give you access to enterprise-level capabilities. You’ll also be well taken care of when it comes to daily troubleshooting as well as more involved IT issues. Instead of worrying about how much it’s going to cost to get support for a critical IT issue that evolves over the weekend, your subscription to the online service may afford you the ability to call a support line and get help within minutes, or reach out to your IT partner for expert help in navigating your issue.
Aisle 7, a marketing services firm based in Portland, Oregon, recently deployed cloud-based productivity software, much to the delight of its employees. Providing powerful integration among all productivity programs, the software helps Aisle 7’s workers save time and communicate more efficiently. They enjoy advanced functionalities that make it easier to see if colleagues are available to collaborate, have Web conferencing tools at their fingertips and can even request time off from any location with an Internet connection. Additionally, the company’s sole IT representative now has a reduced workload and can direct more of his attention to more strategic business priorities.
Creating a better technology platform. If your business provides a Web service to customers or clients, you have a tremendous opportunity to transition your technology platform to the cloud for greater flexibility and reliability. Moving applications to the cloud allows you to scale them up or down depending on your business needs and gives your developers more choice in where and how they manage, deploy and store data.
Our organization has been actively investigating our options to implement cloud based technologies. We know we want to move forward, and will incur benefits of increased flexibility and productivity. Our problem is that we cannot seem to avoid purchasing the minimum 5 license requirement. This becomes cost prohibitive for our small 2 person office. We have heard rumors that when Office 365 is rolled out later this year the minimum license requirement will be waived.
Can someone please confirm or deny that future MS based cloud applications will remove minimum license requirements?
Erik OBrien
Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference
eobrien@swamc.org
Whole Foods on lookout for emerging brands
Got the next great organic food product? Wondering how to get it into your local Whole Foods store? Then Tom Rich is the guy to talk to.
Rich is the grocery coordinator for the 27-store Rocky Mountain region of the Austin, Texas-based supermarket chain. He works in the health-oriented, food-centric city of Boulder, Colorado, where the company’s recently expanded Pearl Street store is considered a rich testing ground for new concepts.
“Part of the responsibility in our position is to find new, emerging brands,” Rich said. “We’re trying to build our bullpen. We’re tasked to do that here.”
He gives two examples of concepts that began in Boulder and were subsequently given national treatment throughout Whole Foods’ 300-store network: all-natural nut butter producer Justin’s and flatbread and burrito bowl maker EVOL.
“If you saw my office, I have 100 products in here that I’m in the midst of tasting and trying,” he said.
The company typically works with manufacturers to ready them for the sharp boost in resources required to go national, including significant increases to production and staffing.
Says Rich: “We’re constantly trying to do that. It’s the favorite part of my job, meeting people, learning about their product, and kind of seeing where we think they can go.”
From a notebook to launching a startup
– Shane Mac is the co-founder of online job recruitment startup Hello There. He is also the director of marketing at Zaarly and formerly spearheaded marketing at Gist (acquired by RIM). This is an edited version of the original article that appeared on Quick Sprout. The views expressed are his own. –
About a year ago, I sat in a coffee shop pitching a new idea to one of the founders of Startup Weekend, Clint Nelson. Never would I have predicted that this one meeting would have such an impact on the next year of my life.
The entire concept was all on one page of my notebook: sketches, pricing models, tag lines and even people I should sell it to. I’ve put every idea from notes, books, speeches, and product sketches in an indexed notebook since I read a post by Tim Ferriss two years ago.
This is my best effort to share what it takes to get a (bootstrapped) startup off the ground, while also having a fulltime job. We launched three months ago, and I’m ecstatic. Here are the ups, downs, the good and the bad:
The 10 things we learned
1. What you think people should pay for, may be what they think should be free.
When I had the idea for Hello There (that’s the name), I was obsessed with video and the ability to display more effectively who you actually are.
It’s Tax Day: Do you know where your tax return is?
– Kelly Phillips Erb is a small business owner and practicing tax attorney at the Erb Law Firm in Philadelphia. She is also the author of the popular Tax Girl blog. The views expressed are her own. –
Chances are, you’ve already filed, as only a third of all tax returns are filed during the last week of tax season. But if you haven’t, keep these tips in mind:
- Postage rates for large envelopes went up yesterday (yes, yesterday). If you’re mailing your return – and it’s a big one – make sure to allow extra time at the post office.
- A number of post offices will be open to accommodate last-minute filers. You can find a list of those offices open past 6 p.m. EDT here (downloads as a pdf). You can also find a post office by location on the USPS website.
- You can also use a private delivery service to file your tax return or extension. The IRS considers the following private delivery services as acceptable to meet the timely filed rule: DHL Express (DHL): DHL Same Day; Federal Express (FedEx): FedEx Priority Overnight, FedEx Standard Overnight, FedEx 2Day, FedEx International Priority, and FedEx International First; United Parcel Service (UPS): UPS Next Day Air, UPS Next Day Air Saver, UPS 2nd Day Air, UPS 2nd Day Air A.M., UPS Worldwide Express Plus, and UPS Worldwide Express.
- You may also e-file your return in order to file on time.
- If you need to file for an automatic extension, use federal form 4868 with the IRS. You can download the form and mail it in by the deadline or file electronically using your tax software.
tasteless…