martes, 24 de abril de 2012
jueves, 19 de abril de 2012
miércoles, 18 de abril de 2012
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 8th 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
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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.”
lunes, 2 de abril de 2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek : This Week
Bloomberg BusinessweekBloomberg Businessweek
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.
jueves, 29 de marzo de 2012
BLOOMBERG GOVERNMENT INSIDER:Health Reform's Small Business Confusion
Since Lake Michigan Mailers began offering workers health insurance in the early 1990s, the company has considered the benefit as essential as paying wages. Now, David Rhoa, president of the direct-mail business his parents started, doesn’t know if he can afford to offer coverage beyond next year. Like many small businesses, the Kalamazoo (Mich.) company must contend with rising health-care costs and big questions about the reform law intended to keep them in check. “We told our people flat out that we’re having to take it on a year-to-year basis,” Rhoa says. “I’m 50-50 on whether or not we’re going to be able to do it. That’s troublesome to me.”
Starting in 2014, companies with 50 or more employees will have to provide insurance or pay a penalty, but a lot of the details haven’t been worked out. The law doesn’t penalize businesses with fewer than 50 “full-time equivalent” employees for not offering coverage. The government considers 30 hours a week to be full-time. Lake Michigan Mailers, which has more than $10 million in annual revenue, has 55 workers, 37 of them full-time and the rest part-time. By Rhoa’s math, he expects to hit the threshold. He’s also hiring, so even if the company isn’t yet big enough to face penalties, it might be when they kick in two years from now.
Rhoa faces another uncertainty: He’s not sure whether the plan he offers will meet the law’s requirements. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t know whether he can afford to buy one that does.
This year, Lake Michigan Mailers switched all its employees to a high-deductible health plan to lower costs. The company pays 79 percent of the premiums, and workers pay the remaining $55 per month. Employees get free physicals and many screenings and then pay up to $4,000 in out-of-pocket expenses before coverage kicks in. Most workers contribute to a health savings account to pay for care.
Rhoa moved to this arrangement reluctantly when more comprehensive coverage became too expensive. Whether it will be enough to help him avoid penalties is unclear. Employers “don’t know yet what is going to be considered an adequate offer of affordable coverage, so it’s a little hard to be making that determination,” says Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group.
To pass muster with the law, employer plans must be “affordable” and provide “minimum value.” Congress let regulators set both those bars. Affordability means premiums can’t cost workers more than 9.5 percent of their family income, a threshold Lake Michigan Mailers surely meets. (At contributions of $55 per month, Rhoa’s workers would need to earn less than $7,000 per year for the plan to be considered “unaffordable.”)
The “minimum value” part of the equation is trickier. That requires the insurance plan to pay for at least 60 percent of medical care covered; that way workers won’t be so burdened by co-pays, deductibles, and other expenses that they can’t afford care even with insurance. Companies are waiting on a detailed proposal from the U.S. Department of Treasury to clarify whether the law also sets requirements for what a plan must cover.
If Lake Michigan Mailers’ plan doesn’t meet the requirements, Rhoa calculates it will be cheaper to pay the penalties, which he estimates at $42,000, than to buy a more comprehensive plan. He’d prefer to keep offering the benefits the company can afford. If he drops coverage, workers may get subsidies to buy their own plans in insurance exchanges. “I’ll end up paying a fine and irritating my employees at the same time,” he says.
Alden Bianchi, who leads the benefits practice at the Boston law firm Mintz Levin, doubts that many companies already providing coverage will drop it. “It’s not like employers are going to save a boatload of money by shipping people off health care” and shifting them to insurance exchanges, says the attorney, who advised Mitt Romney’s administration when Massachusetts passed its 2006 health-reform law.
Despite all the hand-wringing, Bianchi expects that employers will quickly adapt to the new law with little trouble. He recalls that the Cobra law, passed in 1986 to allow workers to temporarily keep health coverage after leaving a job, prompted initial howls from companies. “Within two or three years, it’s like, ‘Yawn, yeah, I do the Cobra thing,’ ” he says. “Things like this go through three stages: impossible, difficult, easy.”
Rhoa can’t wait to get to the easy part. He and his managers have spent more than 100 hours studying the law, attending seminars, and trying to plan the company’s benefits. He’s frustrated that he can’t project his health costs or guarantee coverage to his workers. “I need to attract and get good people,” he says. “I also need to keep my costs under control, and I need to have some predictability on what those costs are going to be.”
The bottom line: With some rules not yet in place, small companies are struggling to figure out how health-care reform will affect them.
By John Tozzi on March 22, 2012
(Tozzi covers small business for Businessweek.com)
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