Small business defense against cybercrime
Small businesses can innocently expose themselves to cybercrime when an employee opens an email that appears to be from the CEO, not updating the anti-virus program or having a laptop lost or stolen.
Eduard Goodman, Chief Privacy Officer for Identity Theft 911 has seen an increase in small businesses being targeted for cybercrime within the last five to seven years. Highly desirable data include customer information lists and personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, dates of birth and account numbers.
A recent survey by Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance shows 85 percent of small business owners believe their company is safe from hackers, viruses, malware or a cyber-security breach. Sixty-nine percent rely on Internet security for their business’s success.
Yet, the same survey shows 77 percent don’t have a formal Internet security policy for employees and 49 percent don’t even have an informal policy.
So how can small businesses protect themselves?
Ensuring your business has the latest anti-virus, spyware and firewall programs is one method of protection, according to Goodman. Training on how to recognize phishing emails is essential as fraudsters will send emails from someone like the CEO of a company so employees think they have to open the email.
“Question what you’re clicking on, question where it’s coming from,” says Goodman. Have an awareness to take that extra 10 seconds to ask ‘Hey did you send me something? Is it legit?’”
Be careful with free Wi-Fi at your business
– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
For a small business, free Wi-Fi can be a great way to lure in customers, encouraging them to spend time at your establishment.
However, offering internet access comes with a bit of a risk, opening your business up to security breaches and providing others with a place to engage in illegal activity, such as downloading copyrighted material and viewing child pornography.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to protect your business.
While it’s unlikely that you’ll be held legally responsible for your customers’ copyright infringement, it may still cause problems with your internet service provider.
AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon have struck a deal with the MPAA and RIAA that requires the providers to give warnings to residential customers believed to be stealing content. Five violations can end in termination of service.
While the National Federation of Independent Business states that this does not apply to commercial business accounts, if your small business’ Wi-Fi is part of a residential account, it is time to switch over.
GroupPrice targets small business with daily deals
Price and value is what led Chris Gafoor to purchase a press release distribution plan from GroupPrice.
“It gives you more bang for your buck,” said the president and CEO of Miami-based BluStar Media Inc, who paid $39 for a GroupPrice deal that he estimated would have cost $200 elsewhere. The deal guaranteed Gafoor’s company a minimum of 5,000 views of its press release in 30 days.
GroupPrice is a business-to-business version of the group-buying trend that offers deals specifically for Internet-based small businesses. Van Jepson, CEO of the Redwood City, California-based firm, got the idea for the business when he ran a previous Web company.
“I was trying to grow the type of online services that were offered to our members, but I didn’t have enough resources,” he said. “So I had to reach out to outside suppliers, local service suppliers and office suppliers to find solutions. I realized that this was a problem that all Internet-centric companies have.”
Jepson initially funded the website with $30,000 before attracting five investors. GroupPrice subsequently attracted $285,000 of funding. The startup closed its first seed investment last July.
GroupPrice publically launched in January and targets online companies with up to 25 employees. Jepson said there are five million such companies in the U.S. and one million such merchants.
There are so many sites for b2b group buying and many of them following the footsteps of Groupon. I would like to add that http://www.huddlebuy.co.uk is another such site that provides exclusive group deals for small businesses in UK. The world of marketing is ever evolving and this venture is another stepping stone especially for SMEs that could not avail such deals that were earlier available only for large enterprises.
It’s not a bubble, people; It’s a pyramid scheme
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared on PE Hub. The views expressed are her own. –
Mark Cuban knows a thing or two about bubbles, having profited handsomely from an earlier Internet boom. But ask him if we’re seeing Bubble 2.0 and he’ll give you a different theory.
“It’s almost the 2011 version of a private equity chain letter,” said Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion and went on to buy the the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.
“Remember the old chain letter, where you put up some money, then you got other people to put up some money, and you gave it to the people who were in the deal before you? That’s what’s happening today,” said Cuban. “The early (VCs) are getting the new (VCs) to invest enough money at high enough valuations that they get most, if not all of their money back. Then the next round (sees) someone else invest more money at a higher valuation, returning cash to the last two rounds of investors. By the time you get to the last (VC) standing, those last few rounds hope they can get a return from the public markets. That may be very tough. But the only players really on the hook are the guys from the last rounds. Just like in a chain letter.”
It’s a valid point. As certain Internet company valuations reach astronomic new heights, it’s easy to conclude that Silicon Valley has spawned another giant bubble–one that will eventually bounce its way onto the public market and soak investors. But unlike the dot.com mania of a decade ago, today’s soaring valuations don’t involve hundreds of companies and thousands of retail investors. They center on a select group of wealthy VCs chasing after a comparatively small number of very richly valued tech companies–most of which are in Silicon Valley.
Over the last three months alone, Facebook’s roughly $33 billion valuation has roughly doubled, to an estimated $60 billion. Zynga’s reported valuation has jumped to upwards of $9 billion from $4 billion last May. And both pale in comparison to Twitter, which generated an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2010 yet has reportedly received overtures that peg its worth at between $8 billion and $10 billion. (Just two months ago, when Kleiner Perkins led a $200 million investment in Twitter, its valuation was $3.7 billion.)
Fueling the fire are firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which last week sunk $80 million into secondary shares of Twitter, and Kleiner Perkins, which this week threw $38 million at Facebook shareholders to (finally) add the company to its portfolio. But they’re certainly not alone. According to the secondary shares marketplace SecondMarket, VCs have represented the majority of SecondMarket’s buyers since the third quarter of 2010 and they accounted for more than 40 percent of its transactions in the fourth quarter.
People say that groupon is losing its value but i think goup on is flying high! http://grouponbot.com site is getting increasing greater no. of visitors day by day only because of their user friendly deals of all kinds especially for the discount hunters…and you can see people are cloning groupon type of sites …thats a fact but they can never provide services as good as groupon i bet on that!
Anything business can do, the Internet can do better
– Chris Dixon is co-founder of Hunch and creator of Founder Collective, and an investor in many early-stage companies like Skype and Foursquare. Previously he co-founded Siteadvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. This blog originally appeared on cdixon.org. The views expressed are his own. –
People love to focus on horse races: NYC vs Silcon Valley, Facebook vs Twitter, IPO markets vs private exchanges, the valuation of some startup vs some other startup.
Like a lot of people in the tech industry, I’ve gotten inquiries recently on the meaning of Facebook’s “private” IPO with Goldman Sachs, whether VC valuations are indicative of a bubble, whether such-and-such startup is overvalued, and so on. These questions are all footnotes that will be forgotten in a few years.
The Internet has gone through fits and starts – in particular the dot-com crash of 2000 disillusioned many – but every year we see it transform industries that previously sauntered along blissfully denying its existence. Already transformed: music, news, advertising, telecom. Being transformed: finance, commerce, TV & movies, real estate, politics & government. Soon to be transformed (among many others): healthcare, education, energy.
The modern economy runs primarily on information, and the Internet is by orders of magnitude the greatest information mechanism ever invented. In a few years, we’ll look back in amazement that in 2011 we still used brokers to help us find houses, that doctors kept records scribbled on notepads, that government information was carefully spoon-fed to a compliant press corps, and that scarcity of information and tools was a primary inhibitor to education.
Thus far the U.S. has led Internet innovation. There are things the U.S. can do to keep this lead, including:
- Exporting the entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley to the rest of the country (including places like my home city, New York).
- Allowing talented people to go where their skills are most needed (e.g. by changing U.S. immigration policies).
- Convincing the upcoming generation to innovate in sectors that have a direct impact on the quality of peoples’ lives (Internet, healthcare, energy, education) instead of wasting time on sectors that were historically prestigious (e.g. finance and law) but add little to negative economic and societal value.
from MediaFile:
Fans still buying tickets, startup CEO says
So how's the market for sports and concert tickets holding up, given the economic turmoil that has dominated the public imagination since last year? Better than you'd think, according to Mike Janes, the founder and CEO of FanSnap, a live-event ticket search engine that launched in March.
"People's appetite for the shared experience of a game or show hasn't changed. Their bank accounts may have changed, but not the desire," Janes said.
The difficult economy has had the effect of bringing many ticket prices down, he said, meaning there are plenty of bargains out there. While there will always be insatiable demand for big-name performers or games (Springsteen; Yankees vs. Red Sox) keeping those ticket prices high, Janes said tix for your average major league baseball game can be had for below face value in some cases, as folks looking to resell tickets flood the market with supply. It's a bit too early to see about NFL games, he said.
FanSnap, whose main investor is VC and private equity firm General Catalyst Partners, runs in a similar way Kayak does flight searches. Since there is so much variability in ticket prices (unlike in airline tickets) FanSnap's search engine turns up seats within mere feet of each other -- displayed on a nifty interactive map -- but with very different asking prices. (Janes said the site aims to "make it really hard to overpay for tickets.")
FanSnap has deals in place with dozens of vendors and re-sellers, including big names like StubHub and RazorGator, and is working to bring others into the fold.
For many people going to a concert or a game is like a short escape from everyday life. They may put on hold buying a property or a new car, but food and entertainment probably are the last things they’re willing to sacrifice.
It is not just small businesses, but also small charities, churches and non-profit organisations, as they tend to be more open to communications (including emails) from others.
Bob
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