Entrepreneurial

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.

– Jeremy Reis is the founder and president of That Network, an interactive publishing firm. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –

WikiLeaks is in the news due to their release of U.S. government files, but for many years the site has been releasing both government and corporate secrets – and with a pending release of files from a large U.S. bank, it provides an opportunity to think about the lessons this teaches business managers.

A business generates a lot of internal documents from the inane emails to complex, secret business processes that provide us a competitive advantage. Learn five lessons every manager should know from the WikiLeaks affair.

1. There are no completely secure systems