Going Global: Workshop

Hay futuro para el comercio al detalle?

SBDC: Introduction to Business Plan Jueves 19 de Abril

Introduction to Business Plan

 Thursday April 19, 2012

10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Cost: $15 if pre-register, $20 at the door.Credit Card preferred

Location: SBDC Miami, Festival Plaza,  

8500 SW 8^th Street, # 224, Miami FL 33144 

 

 Business Planning is the foundation to start a new venture, raising funds, or growing your business.The objectives of this seminar to discuss the basic elements of a business plan, explore the sources of information for a business plan, and understand the role of the business plan once it is formed.  

Bloomberg Business Week: Esta semana

This Week's Top Story :

Internet Freedom

A Startup's Tool Helps Evade Iran's Censors, for Now

By John Tozzi on April 11, 2012

 

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In early 2011, David Gorodyansky watched the Arab Spring unfold on his company’s server logs. “We came into the office, we’d see that our usage in Egypt went from 100,000 to 1 million overnight,” says Gorodyansky, co-founder of AnchorFree. The 30-employee Mountain View (Calif.) startup makes free virtual private network (VPN) software which Internet users install on their computers to secure their connections and reach websites blocked by censors.

Egyptians turned to VPNs when the Mubarak regime blocked access to Facebook and Twitter, which activists used to share information and organize protests. Workarounds such as AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield, which Gorodyansky says has been downloaded 60 million times since 2007, are becoming increasingly important for people in countries where the Web is censored, particularly as repressive regimes get better at blocking access.

Iran is building a national network that will be closed off from the global Internet and controlled by government censors. Yesterday the country denied reports that it plans to cut off access to the Internet once its Iranian intranet is in place.

If Iran does disconnect from the Internet entirely, VPNs would not help, says Eva Galperin, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for Internet freedom. “You simply cannot get out,” she says.

Blocking VPNs, which encrypt users’ transmissions and hide personally identifiable information such as IP addresses, is an extreme step, says Galperin. She also says the networks have been blocked on and off in Syria during the uprising there. (In February, Iran blocked access to Gmail and other sites, including through VPNs, ahead of parliamentary elections.) Cutting off VPNs to stifle citizens would also mean that foreign businesspeople who use the networks to connect to their corporate networks back home would be blocked. “That’s one of the reasons why governments are hesitant to block VPN,” Galperin says.

Another common workaround, known as Tor, protects users’ identities by routing data through a network of computers that don’t know the locations of other machines relaying data. Some governments have attempted to block the software, which was originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and now run by a nonprofit. “Tor is involved in this arms race with both China and Iran right now,” Galperin says.

More typically in such places as China or Turkey, where censorship is common, authorities filter sites based on their content. In those situations, Hotspot Shield and other VPNs allow Internet users to reach censored websites.

Gorodyansky launched Hotspot Shield in 2007, thinking its main user base would be business travelers who wanted to protect their connections at airports, hotels, and Starbucks. The next year “we saw millions of people starting to use our service from overseas, particularly in China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East,” he says.

Now he estimates about half of Hotspot Shield’s users are in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and the other half are in emerging markets, many of which fall victim to censorship. The company makes money from advertising on its free version or from premium subscriptions that cost $5 a month, or $30 a year.

Gorodyansky estimates there are 600 million Internet users around the world who are subject to censorship. Although he didn’t set out to make software for activists abroad, “we believe that social good and human rights and freedom can be a profitable business,” he says. “This is a huge business opportunity.”

Tozzi covers small business for Businessweek.com.

Talleres para empresarios gratuitos : Miami Dade College

Bloomberg BusinessWeek : This Week

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Women Suffer Most When Government Cuts Jobs

By Peter Coy on March 29, 2012

 The “mancession” seems to be ending, if not over. Two years ago, men’s unemployment rate was fully 2 percentage points higher than women’s. Now the rates are exactly the same for men and women aged 20-plus: 7.7 percent. Men’s employment has grown twice as fast as women’s employment over the past year (2 percent growth for men vs. 1 percent growth for women).

All that’s great for men, of course, who got hit hard early on by the drop in manufacturing and construction. But why isn’t the economic recovery doing more to boost women? WBEZ in Chicago asked me to talk about the mancession on Wednesday morning, so I did a little research. This table I put together from Bureau of Labor Statistics data makes the reason clear: Women depend heavily for jobs on some sectors that aren’t doing well in the recovery, particularly government.

Government employs about 12.5 million women (57 percent of the government total)—and women’s employment in the sector fell by 0.8 percent over the 12 months through February. The same pattern is true in Britain, and judging from a casual Google search it has stirred more attention there.

There are also about 10 million women working in the sector that BLS calls “trade, transportation, and utilities.” Jobs for women in that sector have grown, but at a subpar 0.4 percent over the past year.

The biggest percentage growth for women’s employment (7.8 percent) has been in the mining and logging sector, which has been buoyed by a pickup in oil and gas exploration and development. But even with that boost the sector employs only a little over 100,000 women, so the impact on overall women’s employment is minimal.

The bright spot for women? Their biggest employer, education and health services, powered through the recession and has continued to grow since. It employed 15.5 million in February—a healthy 2.1 percent gain over a year earlier.