Grainger forms joint venture in Latin America

Associated Press, 06.21.10, 01:37 PM EDT CHICAGO -- W.W. Grainger Inc. has formed a joint venture with an affiliate of Torhefe S.A. to expand the reach of its business in Latin America, the industrial maintenance company said Monday.

Torhefe is a leading distributor of maintenance, repair and operating supplies in Colombia, with an emphasis on fasteners.

Grainger owns an 80 percent majority position in the joint venture and will be known as Grainger Colombia. Further financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Grainger reported this month that daily sales rose 16 percent, in part because of acquisitions.

Shares of Grainger rose 37 cents to $108.63 in afternoon trading.

Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Google Voice for Everyone

http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-voice-for-everyone.html
Tuesday, June 22, 2010

10:00 AM
A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

If you haven’t yet tried Google Voice, we can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Check out our revamped features page to learn about everything Google Voice can do, and if you haven’t seen it yet, this video provides a good overview in less than two minutes:

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology. It’s even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before

Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Cover Up and Wear Your Sunscreen!

Or "SunScream" as my 11teen yr old used to call it when he was small.  After 40+ yrs of surfing, sailing and living on the beach I went back to the dermatologist yesterday with my wife.  Oddly,she had noticed a growth on her forehead and wanted it checked, it worried me so I went with her.  When we arrived I asked if the Doc could see me as well as it had been nearly 10yrs since I had been in -bad advice when you hang out on the beach all the time like I try to.  B4 he saw my lovely wife he saw me.  Additionally, B4 he saw my wife he had carved two big hunks out of my back and shoulder and frozen another 5-7 spots on my back, cheek and nose.  YIKES!  None of them were of a big concern to the Doc but the pathologist will tell for sure. 

Point being!  WEAR YOUR SUNSCREEN and be careful! 

Another tool I started using a few yrs ago are UV/SPF shirts or rash guards.  I have some long sleeve tshirt type UV/SPF shirts that I wear sailing, paddling and surfing these days.  So as we enter summer here is my first piece of advice! Take care of yourself and your family!

PS-this is the more tame of the photos! He dug down about 1/4" or more and I could feel him carving me up!

YIKESYIKES

PSS- Wifey is fine!

Shirts I like are by two friends of mine in this biz - Mark M @ DryShirt  http://www.dryshirt.com/

And Marc S. @ http://victorykd.com/ Victory Wetsuits

Kevin Brown

www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Air Products files proxy in Airgas bid

Wed, Jun 16 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1619080320100616
* Seeks slate of 3 board members
* Air Products offering $60/share for Airgas

NEW YORK, June 16 (Reuters) - Air Products and Chemicals (APD.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Wednesday it filed proxy materials to elect three nominees to the board of Airgas Inc (ARG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) as it bids to take control of Airgas.

The filing comes after Air Products said in May it would push the board slate, which includes John Clancey, chairman emeritus of shipping company Maersk; Robert Lumpkins, board chairman of fertilizer producer Mosaic (MOS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz); and Ted Miller, former chief executive officer of wireless communication provider Crown Castle International Corp (CCI.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

Air Products went hostile in February in its bid for rival Airgas, the largest U.S. distributor of industrial gases and related equipment, offering $60 per share in cash or roughly $5.1 billion.

In a statement in response to preliminary proxy materials filed by Air Products, Airgas said its board continues to recommend stockholders reject the Air Products offer.
Airgas shares closed earlier on Wednesday up 1 cent at $63.40 on the New York Stock Exchange.
(Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf; Editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid)

7 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan

Posted by Michelle deHaaff on Jun 15, 2010 http://www.customerthink.com/blog/7_steps_for_creating_a_social_media_marketing_plan
“A blog isn’t a business plan.”

I recently saw that tweet on Twitter, and it really hit home for me the perils of using a new technology or communications tool and thinking that mastering its use or even the fact that you are using it is all you need to know and do for your business. Adding new tools to your marketing and communications toolkit is not a plan. There is nothing strategic about blogging, tweeting and updating your Facebook status if you don’t have a plan for not just using the tool but integrating it into your marketing mix. Right?

So how do you get started with a plan for social media? Social Media Marketing Plans (SMMPs) can be standalone documents but are more effective when a part of an overall marketing plan for your company. At a minimum, they should reference traditional public relations or marketing tools and tactics. Unfortunately, very few companies and organizations right now are thinking about the integration of social media marketing into what they’ve been doing marketing-wise. Instead, they tend to cage off social media marketing like a new wild animal in a zoo. It’s nice to look at and fascinating to watch, but it doesn’t quite fit into any of the cages with their other zoo animals.

When my company helps other companies with their Social Media Marketing planning, we take them back to some basic, foundational questions one might ask when coming up with an overall strategic plan, not just a social media one:

What?
Why?
Who?
Where?
How?
What?

as in…
What are you trying to achieve?
Why are you trying to do this?
Who are your trying to reach?
Where can you most effectively reach them?
How are you going to reach out to them?
What are you trying to get them to do?

We also remind companies that Social Media Marketing is not necessarily a direct sales tool but is effective at:

1.Building a brand;

2.Building brand loyalty;

3.Turning loyal customers into evangelists;

4.Leveraging word-of-mouth marketing;

5.Turbo-charging the feedback loop.

Here are seven steps you should go through (at least) to get to the heart of your Social Media Marketing Plan. This is merely a starting framework for how to think about building out your plan and how to get to the information that should be in your plan.

1.What are your marketing objectives? Make sure they are attainable and measurable.

2.Who is your audience? Know where they are online and where they are already engaged in related, relevant conversations.

3.What are your assets? Examine your social media and online assets to see what you can leverage for full social media engagement. (See assets diagram.)

4.What tactics will you use? Choose the tactics that incorporate the most logical tools for what you are trying to achieve and who you are trying to reach.

5.What are your big ideas? Come up with some creative ideas that are repeatable and scalable to attract attention and provide value.

6.How will you measure results? Establish benchmarks, monitor and be clear what you are tracking and how.

7. Re-examine over time. What works? What doesn’t? What can you build upon? What can you improve? What needs to be scrapped?

Remember as Jeffrey Hayzlett, fomer Kodak CMO said: Social media is not a campaign. It is a commitment. Your plan should cover both the immediate and short-term with an eye to the long term understanding that the technology changes daily. You may find that some of the tools you initially choose are gone by the time you get around to accessing them. Be flexible.

How is your Social Media Marketing planning coming along? What challenges are you encountering?

Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Why the reposts you may ask?

I got to thinking the other day and asked the question 'is anybody really interested in reading reposted articles from wine spectator, wine enthusiast, sailing world, watchtower/awake, Inc, Fast Company, etc etc.".  I'm not really sure if you or others are or are not.  Some may ask, 'why do you do it.'  Frankly I repost articles for two reasons,

1. To have a better reference of articles I am interested in reviewing again later than just having a bookmark in my browser and,
2. I believe that someone else out there has the same interest I have in business development, family, burgundy (or wine in general), surfing, sailing, sales, marketing, social media, etc etc.

I just post stuff or write about stuff that I find of interest.  I hope you find some of it of value as well!

kevin l. brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

If It Says "Old Vines," Will You Buy?

The benefits of old vines are debatable, particularly to those who don't have them
Matt Kramer http://ow.ly/1YZ1s
Posted: June 15, 2010

Recently, a reader (Ms. Donna White) asked, “How old do vines need to be to produce a good wine? Conventional wisdom dictates that older vines produce the best fruit. Is this a truth?”

Of all the many ambiguities of wine, “old vines” seems to be one of the more troublesome. Every grower I’ve met, everywhere in the world, who has old vines insists that older vines are better. Yet I’ve met a fair number of growers who suggest that “old-vine admiration” is, if not bunk, then certainly overstated and overrated. Not coincidentally, these same scoffers are not in possession of old vines.

So, who you gonna believe? Do old vines really make a difference? And from a wine lover’s point of view, is it enough to tip the balance of whether you should buy a particular bottle or not? Sometimes wines so labeled are more expensive (as in Burgundy, for example), but sometimes not (as in Spain, Argentina, and even California with Zinfandel, for example).

First, what exactly is an “old vine”? No one knows. A lot depends on where you’re sitting. If you happen to be a producer in, say, Argentina or Spain, both of which are chockablock with vines that are 60 to 100 years old, the notion of “old” only starts at the half-century mark. In Oregon or New Zealand, comparative newcomers to the game, you’d be feeling mighty fine about your vineyard to be able to boast of 25-year-old vines when those in many neighboring sites are half that age or less.

My own benchmark for the title is something close to the half-century mark. There’s no need to be overly precise or prescriptive about it. In the same way that I prefer bankers and doctors to have some gray in their hair, I like to see vines that have seen 40 or 50 vintages. My guess is that whatever qualities exist beyond the half-century mark probably approach the diminishing returns category. But I wouldn’t care to swear to that.

No one can say definitively whether the presumed effects of old vines increase beyond a certain age. Does a 100-year-old vine deliver four times as much “specialness” as a mere sapling of 25? Or do the perceived effects of old vines kick in at a certain age—let’s say 30 years old—and then plateau out at, say, 50?

And to make matters more complicated yet, are old vines defined strictly by their roots? Saucelito Canyon Vineyard in Arroyo Grande on the south Central Coast creates one of California’s greatest Zinfandels. Its owners grafted new Zinfandel cuttings onto the original, still-alive Zinfandel roots from 1880 that they literally uncovered when they cleared away the undergrowth.

Are those “old vines”? I think so. Yet someone could say that a new cutting no longer represents the original genetic legacy implicit in the concept of an “old vine”—a grapevine version of “new wine in old bottles.” That is, old vines are a kind of plant material repository that goes beyond old root systems.

The great Barolo producer Aldo Conterno told me that he won’t use Nebbiolo fruit from vines younger than 25 years old for any of his wines labeled Barolo. Mr. Conterno also believes that 40-year-old vines are ideal, delivering a winning trifecta of deep roots, characterful fruit and reasonable yields.

I recently tasted with Alejandro Fernandez of Pesquera in Spain’s Ribera del Duero and was particularly struck by a newcomer to his portfolio called El Vínculo. This wine surprised me if only because it comes from the La Mancha region, which is about 200 miles south of Mr. Fernandez’s native Ribera del Duero. By Spanish standards that’s a world away.

Mr. Fernandez said that he decided to make wine from La Mancha—a vast flat area with about as much reputation for fine wine as California’s Central Valley—because he came upon a vineyard of head-trained Tempranillo vines ranging in age from 60 to 100 years old. “It was too good to pass up,” he said. And indeed, El Vínculo is the best wine from La Mancha that I’ve tasted.

Old-vine love is ardent among wine producers around the world. But it wasn’t always so. When Robert O'Callaghan, founder of Rockford Wines in Australia’s Barossa Valley, started his winery in 1984, he paid triple the going rate for old-vine Shiraz to encourage his suppliers to retain their old vines.

Why did he need to do this? Because in the 1980s the South Australia state government offered financial inducements to Barossa growers to "modernize" their vineyards by uprooting their old vines.

Now, the Barossa crowd is singing—yodeling, really—an entirely different tune. The Barossa Grape & Wine Association, a trade group of 750 grapegrowers and 173 wine producers, has created what it calls an Old Vine Charter, an inventory of Barossa’s remaining old vines, which are respectively classed as Old Vine (35 years or old), Survivor Vine (75 years or older) or Centurion Vine (100 years or older).

Old vines present challenges to the winegrower. They require a lot of nurturing. Yields often are uneconomically low. The old-vine vineyard is a love that dare not speak its name to one’s banker.

But economics aside, winegrowers seem to cherish old vines. Ask an owner about his or her old-vine vineyard and, like stroking a favorite, reliable old horse, they’ll talk about the regularity of old-vine production.

Where young vines can careen from vintage to vintage—with extremes of production and unpredictable ratios of sugar levels and phenolic compounds depending on the weather—old vines are steady. Their grapes are rarely unbalanced. And they’re rarely unripe, either. You almost never hear about unripe grapes with old vines, even in places that can suffer from decidedly cool growing seasons, such as Burgundy.

And old vines provide options unavailable with young vines. You can harvest your grapes earlier in certain (warmer) climates, because old-vine grapes often achieve riper tannins sooner.

The deep roots of old vines are their greatest asset. In a rainy harvest, a young vine’s shallow root system sucks up surface water, bloating the grapes and diluting the juice. Yet old vines are often surprisingly unaffected, as their deeper roots are untouched by a passing rainstorm. And in drought conditions those same deep roots can tap into water reserves in the subsoil unreachable by younger vines.

So are old vines a deal-maker? Is it a meaningful designation that can—or should—tip the buying decision? I can only offer you one man’s opinion, based upon an awful lot of talking with producers on this very topic, and backed up, I might add, with my own checkbook.

Yes, old vines can make a difference. Everyone knows that nothing is more important than what the Italians evocatively call la materia prima, the foundation ingredient. If you’ve got a good site and good winemaking—which are hardly incidental—then old vines can make a discernible impact.

This impact is twofold. For us tasters, the sensory impact of old-vine wines typically is found on the midpalate. Think of a candy with a hard core and you’ve got it. Mostly this is a result of the low yields that old vines usually offer. (Old vines can be trained to pump out, though.)

Also, as the wine ages and the bright fruitiness of youth diminishes, you get a sense of a more layered complexity in old vines. This element of maturity in the wine is often essential to deciphering the impact of old vines, which is why tasters of very young wines are either puzzled by or skeptical about old vines’ purported attributes. These differences are often not apparent until a wine is at least a decade old.

Does all this matter to you as a wine buyer? It does to me. All other things being equal (which they rarely are, I know), I’ll buy an old-vine wine every time. It’s a kind of insurance policy, wouldn’t you say?

Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

How CEOs are Using Social Media for Real Results

http://ow.ly/1YoAH
http://mashable.com/author/sharlyn-lauby/
It’s common to hear stories about marketing or recruiting departments using social media. But what about CEOs? Could having the ‘top dog’ of your organization engaged in social media be an asset to other corporate efforts? Our case studies outlined below show that having your CEO visible on social media can bring tangible results to your bottom line.

Carmen Magar, CEO of Chocri, a make-your-own chocolate bar company, says the exposure makes a difference. “While the competition can see everything (e.g. when customers suggest a new topping) and some of them seem compelled to copy my blog posts nearly word for word, it’s worth it because authenticity rules.”

Building Marketing and Public Relations Exposure
For many companies, getting the word out about their product/service is the starting point. That positive exposure can lead to strategic alliances and increased awareness. Geri Stengel, president of Ventureneer, an online source for education, advice and peer support for small businesses looking to make a social impact, noted that positioning Ventureneer as a trusted source for information among those making a social impact is an important part of their overall strategy.

Using her experience as an expert reviewer for the Social Innovation Fund, a competitive grant program from the Corporation for National and Community Service, Stengel posted a piece on how to write a winning grant proposal on her corporate blog. “As always, I tweeted with a link to the blog post. I was delighted when the vast majority (89) of the nearly 100 bit.ly clicks were from others who tweeted about the post. Importantly, a link to the blog post was included in the daily digest of Tactical Philanthropy’s blog. Sean Stannard-Stockton, CEO of Tactical Philanthropy, is a nonprofit thought leader. Tactical Philanthropy also became one of our 2,400+ followers on Twitter, a goal we’d had for some time. Within two weeks of posting, the post became the most read on our website during that time period with nearly 200 page views.”

Stengel’s story is a great reminder that success in social media doesn’t only come via quantitative metrics but also through quality engagement. And Diane Hessan agrees. As president and CEO of Communispace, Hessan’s corporation creates private online customer communities to help marketers from the world’s largest brands explore customers’ mindsets and generate game-changing insights. They’ve created more than 350 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Hilton Hotels Corporation.

Hessan shared, “through social media, I’ve gotten free consulting and secured new clients and partners. Twitter has been a fantastic vehicle for getting information about Communispace into the marketplace fast. For instance, when Communispace launched its new blog, Verbatim, I sent a tweet out about it and more than 1,000 people checked out our blog as a result. To this day, some 40% of our blog visits have come from Twitter links.”

It’s also important to remember that not everything that happens on social media needs to stay on social media. Magar tells the story of getting into a sold-out food event because she heard about it on Twitter and offered herself as a substitute for a cancelled participant. It translated into exposure with over 150 food journalists.

Turning Marketing Opportunities into Sales
For many organizations, the CEO is also the chief sales person. That was the situation with Scott Imbrie, CEO of Original Skateboards, LLC. Eight years ago, he started a skateboard company with his brother using their would-have-been college funds. “For six years, we generally broke-even. While we were growing the overall size of our business, we were still not profitable. Then, we changed course and focused specifically on online social media creation via YouTube. We launched our first video in 2007 — sales went up 40% and never went down. The following year, we invested in the production of an entire series of videos, the first of which was featured on the YouTube front page. Sales went up 80% and kept climbing.”

Original Skateboards grew 432% in profit and 321% overall last year. And they are enjoying a great 2010. According to Imbrie, “We are up roughly 300% over top of that growth. Our focus on social media connection and innovative products seems to have finally paid off. We are now a multi-million dollar company and the 7th most subscribed sports channel in YouTube history with 73,000 subscribers.”

Magar shared that more than 15% of their customers come directly from Facebook and Twitter. “The fact that we, as founders and CEOs, can speak to customers directly now makes us much more personal and people connect with us more easily.”

Even when there might not be data supporting a direct relationship between social media activity and sales, sometimes other metrics point to the connection. For example, Magar explained that focus group participants ranked Chocri above their competitors with the main reason being that the company was “sympathetic.” And their post-purchase survey data taught them the following:

Satisfaction: A whopping 100% of our Facebook and Twitter followers described Chocri’s chocolate as “excellent or very good” (compared to 92.1% on average).
Branding: 90% of Chocri Facebook fans and nearly 99% of Chocri Twitter followers said “You guys rock” or “Like you a lot”, compared to the average (88%). Recommendations: More than 77% of Chocri Facebook fans and nearly 86% of Chocri Twitter followers recommended them to 4-7+ friends, compared to 56% on average

Staying Connected to Future Employees
Having the CEO of a successful organization speak to students is a great way to recruit talent. Hessan uses social media as an opportunity to recruit students to work at Communispace. “Rather than collecting business cards, I encourage students to stay in touch on Twitter, where I connect them directly with our recruiters, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to see how facile they are online. As a result, we’ve ended up hiring over a dozen new employees this way in the last quarter.”


Customer Engagement
Whether it’s fixing a customer service matter or soliciting feedback, interacting directly with customers can prove to be invaluable. And yes, this can be done on many levels in an organizations, but there is something about conversing with the CEO that’s just different.

Having a CEO involved in marketing and product development conversations on a consumer level encourages participation. Magar tells a story of the time before Chocri was introduced in the U.S. “We asked on our blog what toppings we should keep (toasted hazelnut), get (cocoa nibs) or toss (hemp seeds) upon entering the U.S. market. Not too long ago, we asked for submissions for ‘phrases’ to be printed in the inside of the packaging. Between Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, we got more than 47 suggestions – that are now printed. The winner was: Slow down. Relax. Enjoy.”

Hessan also turned a customer service challenge into an opportunity for feedback. “Early on, when I first launched my Twitter account, someone tweeted about an awful experience they had in one of our client communities. I was mortified and tweeted, ‘Ouch, tell me more.’ She was blown away. Ultimately the situation was resolved and this person wrote a long post about how blown away she was that I responded. Since then, we’ve become friends – I’ve helped her with a job transition and she has provided valuable feedback on our software.”

While CEOs like to see data and clear results, it’s important to remember that brand perception and customer service are very real. Magar suggests “not to ditch it because the direct and easily measured impact (sales) doesn’t directly justify the time spent on it. We found some ways around this with our post-purchase survey, but it does take a leap of faith.”

Is the C-Suite in your organization using social media? What kinds of results are you seeing?

Kevin L. Brown

www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

5 Good Reasons to Buy an iPad for Your Business

Jun 10, 2010 - OPEN Forum http://ow.ly/1YlRH
Apple's iPad is a quick hit: With 2 million units sold in less than two months, it has become a fixture in coffee shops and airports.

But do you need one for your small business?There are enough excuses if you want one to justify the purchase. Like what?

1) If you do ANYTHING involving creating or editing web pages or tools, you're going to want to have an iPad to test them on. The tablet trend is not going away, and depending on your business, iPad and iPhone users could soon become a nontrivial percentage of your customer base. If you want to make sure they're having a good experience with your products, you need to know what that experience is like, right?

2) Part of excelling at your business includes knowing about next-generation technology and business tools. How can you know what iPad apps are out there without experiencing them firsthand? How can you think about extending your business (or your clients' businesses) to tablets without knowing what they're like?

3) It could actually be a useful, productive business tool: For example, if you aren't going to use a lot of computing power, it might be the only device you need to take on a business trip, instead of a bulky laptop. (Especially if you fly coach, where it's hard to even open a laptop screen.) The iPad can even open, edit, and display PowerPoint-style presentations. An analysis of the iPad App Store shows that 20 percent of the bestselling iPad apps are "productivity" apps.

4) It's a great prop for your reception area when you're not using it. Cheaper than a giant saltwater fishtank, and your guests will be impressed!

5) It might help you save money on equipment purchases: If it's powerful and functional enough for your mobile and portable computing needs, you might be able to delay or cancel buying a new laptop. Starting at $499, the iPad is not that expensive.

By the way, these excuses should work plenty fine when other tablets hit the market later on, like those running Google's Android software.

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business

By J.J. McCorvey
http://ow.ly/1WXpK
Jun 10, 2010
Google has generated plenty of buzz with its cloud-based office suite. Here's the rundown on its features and how you can use them to upgrade your company.
While cloud computing isn't exactly a new concept, Google Apps has certainly refined the technology so that businesses everywhere can take advantage of its speed, accessibility and storage. The Google Apps suite, which includes such popular trademarks such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs, can make the workflow among your employees more fluid, and even provide better methods of interacting with clients and customers. The following guide will highlight the reasons and ways for you to implement Google Apps to improve the operations of your company.

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business: Why Use Google Apps?

One of the immediate benefits that Google Apps for businesses has over traditional desktop software, such as Microsoft Office, is cost-effectiveness. At just $50 per year, the Google Apps suite includes an unlimited number of user accounts, access to all of Google's applications, 25 GB of e-mail storage per employee, 24/7 customer support, and a 99.9 percent network uptime guarantee. (There's also a free version with a limited amount of network security and user accounts, as well as less apps and storage.) Compared to most business and IT software, which often come with a capped number of licenses per purchase (not to mention required external servers to host the system), Google Apps might just be the key to squeezing a couple of extra dimes from your budget.

"If we were buying copies of Microsoft Office for everyone in the company, we're already saving tens of thousands of dollars," says Brian Wyrick, vice president of operations at Raidious, an Indianapolis-based content development company. Along with the cost savings, Wyrick says Raidious adopted the Google Apps suite because of the accessibility it provides to their designers and producers in different parts of the country.

"Utility is good for any start-up company," Wyrick says, "and to be able to talk to a new hire on the phone, and set them up with a Web program without an IT guy having to grant access to them is a great thing."

Another benefit of Google Apps is each application's ability to integrate with one another – a feature that Ken Hayes, owner of a Toluca Lake, California-based Internet advertising company, says he's grateful for. "What's good about Google Apps is the fact that I can set up one main account for my business – and my e-mail, calendar and website are all tied together," he says. "Sure, there's better e-mail out there, but nobody has figured out how to tie it all together like Google."

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business: Streamlining Internal Communication with Gmail

When Gmail first arrived on the scene, the personal e-mail client was lauded for its seemingly bottomless storage capacity and lightning-fast inbox search capabilities. But with the integration of Google Apps, many of Gmail's functions work just as efficiently for businesses. Again, one of the most beneficial characteristics of Gmail is the cloud factor – since there's no cumbersome software to worry about, Gmail is accessible to your employees from anywhere, without having to download contacts or messages into devices.

"One of the great things about Gmail is that it's browser based," says Wyrick. "We connect through our phones and IMAP clients. It's that ability to not have to say, 'here's your installation of Outlook.'"

Gmail's threaded conversations also helps to simplify messages among colleagues. For example, if multiple parties are CC'd in an e-mail, or if multiple e-mails have the same subject line, all of those messages are grouped together with each new e-mail sent, sitting perfectly at the top of your inbox and eliminating the hassle of having to check previous messages.

Also, every office environment should have a method for sending quick, by-the-minute messages, and Gmail's answer is Google Chat, which is built directly into the interface of the inbox. "We've really reduced the need for our internal telephony system," says Wyrick about Raidious' use of the messenger. The chat feature also has a video conferencing component that can be useful when colleagues and employees need to correspond from remote locations.

While Gmail is a great e-mail client, Wyrick recommends assigning multiple account administrators for your shared business account. "Once you're signed up, you never want to have all your eggs in one basket," he says. "Some day you're going to need to do something when that administrator isn't available."

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business: Syncing Meetings and Events through Google Calendar

Depending on your type of business, scheduling appointments can be a real headache. A few employees (or, only one) are usually responsible for tracking and relaying dates and times, a method that is conducive to slip-ups and missed meetings. With Google Calendar, multiple employees can post events on a single calendar that the entire company can access and edit accordingly. Additionally, these calendars can be color-coded so that the viewer is made aware of changes to appointments. Administrators can also set permissions to calendars, so that only certain employees can see or edit items.

Greg Cross, founder of Cross Creative, a Greenfield, Indiana-based digital marketing company, says he recently encouraged one of his major clients to adopt Google Calendar to help sort and protect appointments. "[He] owns a counseling center, and he came to me and said, 'We've got four counselors and we're looking for a way that our clients can schedule appointments online and keep them private,'" says Cross. "You can set it so that it won't show that you're having a counseling session with 'John Doe' on depression."

Another useful feature of Google Calendar is the ability to create events through Gmail. When you add an employee's e-mail address to an event on the calendar, the employee is sent an invitation to confirm his or her attendance. After confirming, each employee can view and add notes to the event.

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business: Improving Collaboration and Project Management with Google Docs

Google Docs is an application that allows multiple users to create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets – all on the Web. Usually, coworkers share documents by e-mailing attachments to one another, which often results in incorrect file versions and scattered, misplaced copies. With Google Docs, the file is edited in the cloud, where revisions are saved and recovered automatically.

Like most of the other Google Apps, administrators can set permissions in Google Docs so that only certain workers are allowed to view and share files. Another convenient feature is the ability to export the documents into different types of file extensions, which can be helpful in those times when a client or customer needs a PDF file ASAP.

"I use Google Docs internally," says Cross. "I have a graphic designer that works only part time, so I post estimates and client proposals there." Using Google Docs to edit other common files such as itineraries, newsletters and articles can help resolve common issues that arise among employees when collaborating on projects.

As useful as Google Docs has been to many business owners, Wyrick of Raidious says that one thing to keep in mind is the fact that the people on your staff will have varying degrees of computer skills. So, if and when you do implement Google Docs for creating and editing your most important files, Wyrick says, it maybe helpful to designate a project champion who understands the application.

"There might be some users that will be less excited about the changes," says Wyrick. He also advises newcomers to frequent the help guide on the Google Apps site.

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business: Sharing Company Knowledge with Google Sites

Google Sites is a basic site-building tool that companies can use to create a private intranet hub of information for employees, or even a public domain that serves as the face of your business. Google Sites allows you to import information from other apps, such as your appointment calendar or standard client forms, and post it to your site for employees or customers to have easy access to.

"Google Sites is like a wiki system," says Hayes, who uses the application so that he and his business partner in Denmark can keep track of company projects, ideas and contractors. "I have sections set up for competitors' ideas we want to improve, and even problems we want to fix within our business."

You can designate only certain employees to have administrative capabilities, i.e. editing and posting site information, or grant access to your entire team (especially if you're operating with a tightly-knit staff).

How to Use Google Apps to Run Your Business: Finding Additional Resources in the Google Apps Marketplace

If the applications made exclusively by Google don't fulfill all of your needs, don't forget to check out the Google Apps Marketplace, where you can find plenty of third-party apps – some for free – which serve a variety of functions and integrate with the other standard apps. Intuit Online Payroll, for example, enables you to pay employees directly from Google Calendar and provide them online access to paystubs. Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management tool that helps improve client interaction in a number of ways, such as tracking and sorting e-mail conversations.

To augment Google Calendar's capabilities, Greg Cross of Cross Creative uses Tungle.me, an app that allows members to publish public schedules, accept appointment requests and reduce double-bookings. "It really helps mainstream my workflow," says Cross. "When the person confirms the appointment, it goes on my [Google] calendar, and I'm alerted on my phone. So between the collaboration of those two features, it works great for me."

According to Cross, Google Apps for businesses is quickly becoming a necessity and less of a neat product to try. The interoperability of the apps, along with the accessibility of the cloud, he says, provide many people the opportunity to leverage office technology efficiently for the first time. "It will be interesting to see how other software companies survive going forward, because Web-based apps are more than just a fad," says Cross. "It's not the 'wave of the future' – it's right now."



Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Bordeaux's 2009 Vintage Looks Outstanding, But Will Anyone Buy?

Retailers fear futures prices will top 2005 prices despite an unsteady economy
Ben O'Donnell -Wine Spectator http://ow.ly/1WsVu
Posted: June 7, 2010
After three days of meeting with excited Asian customers and trade members at Vinexpo in Hong Kong, a growing number of Bordeaux producers are finally testing the waters and releasing prices for their 2009 futures. But while a few classified growths like Château Giscours and Château Haut-Batailley have taken the plunge, retailers and buyers are still holding their breaths for prices from the most anticipated wines. Industry members speculate that the first-growths may not release prices until July.

The delay reflects everyone's uncertainty on how much the 2009s should cost. On one hand, all reports say the vintage is outstanding, on par with classic years like 2005 and 1982. But the global economy is very lopsided. Will Americans buy expensive Bordeaux? And if they don't, will China step in and pick up the slack? Forced to wait, U.S. retailers trumpet the vintage's towering quality-and fear prices will match.

"I'm an old guy, and it's the best vintage, I think, in my lifetime," says Steve Wallace, owner of Wally's Wine Store in Los Angeles. "I don't think there are going to be any bargains at the top."

"[The prices] are going to look ugly. I'll keep it to words that are printable," says Nikos Antonakeas, managing director at Morrell & Co. in New York. "The Bordelais seem pretty convinced that they are going to equal the 2005 pricing or go somewhere between 5 and 25 percent higher, because it is the kind of vintage that in the long run they will have no problem selling."

The Bordeaux futures, or en primeur, campaign begins each spring following reviews and barrel tastings from critics and wine merchants from around the world. Futures buyers are purchasing young wines that are still lying and aging in barrel in châteaus' cellars. The wines are delivered to buyers approximately two years later after bottling. Buying futures guarantees the consumer wines at set prices, quantities and bottle sizes. (For James Suckling's reviews of the young wines, see his 2009 Bordeaux barrel tastings report.)

If conducted wisely, en primeur can benefit producers and consumers alike: Châteaus sell much of their wine before the next harvest, while buyers snap up cases at a cost usually below the final release price. But overpricing, especially in an unprepossessing vintage, can ruin the investment. Those who bought the 1997 vintage en primeur saw their wines released on the shelves for cheaper the next year. The so-so 2007 vintage, sold at high prices right before the financial industry crashed, is rapidly becoming a similar cautionary tale.

The question this year is whether the economy has regained enough strength for American buyers to shell out for a classic vintage. Europeans, meanwhile, have watched their currency flatten this year. And on the other side of the globe, China's new wine lovers are already participating in the futures campaign more aggressively than ever before. "They are really interested," says Jean-Pierre Rousseau, managing director of DIVA Bordeaux, a négociant. "We have already made some sales-they bought high-quality crus bourgeois. First-growths they will certainly buy. For the 2009 primeurs, we expect to do more than 50 percent in Asia."

Though demand in China could threaten to freeze American retailers out of allocations and price American consumers out of blue-chip purchases, Wallace is not concerned. "It gives the Bordelais more leverage, but most of the Bordelais we've talked to are not short-sighted," he says. "They've been through this with Japan, with Russia. They're not going to sell all their wine in the Asian market. But it does make them look like the best-looking girl at the bar."

The need to achieve a delicate equilibrium between markets has top producers, who had been expected to unveil their prices shortly after Vinexpo, still deliberating. "Because the dynamic of this campaign is so different than the others, with the depressed economy on one side and the overheated market on the other side, as well as a great vintage, it is complicated to make a decision," says Jean-Charles Cazes of Château Lynch-Bages in Pauillac, which has not released its price yet. "Each campaign there are some mistakes from some properties. You can't really correct that mistake."

That potential for missteps has American retailers nervous. "I would sound a note of caution," says Chris Adams, CEO at Sherry-Lehmann in New York. "I'm worried that the appropriately great press surrounding the vintage is going to cause people to forget that this is not the economy that it was in 2006."

Trey Beffa, wine buyer at K&L Wines in Los Angeles, echoes that concern. "It's easier for people to spend $40 on a really highly rated wine," he says. "A $200 bottle that's highly rated? We'll see. That's going to be the big question."

"I'm afraid that [the Bordelais] may fall on their face, where people will balk and not buy," says Antonakeas, who is convinced that consumers will ignore overpriced futures. "That's what I hear from my customers, and that's what I hear from some of my colleagues under their breath." Antonakeas only intends to buy half the amount of futures he did in 2005.

Wallace predicts that the first-growths will climb into the $500 to $600 per bottle range for the first tranche, or allotment, and could rise to $1,000 in later tranches, but many believe that the so-called super seconds are the wines to scrutinize. "The first-growths are not going to get hurt [by overpricing]," says Beffa. "But that middle area, the second-growths, the Ducrus, the d'Estournels, those middle wines in a whole new pricing area are the interesting part."

Fifth-growth Lynch-Bages is considered a super second, and Cazes says his peer owners are of two minds. "There will be one school that will chase for the first-growths or to reposition themselves at a very high price, and there will be one school that will price the wines keeping in mind that they need to be drunk at some point," he says. "I can speak for Lynch-Bages: We need people to drink our wine every year, and we have a responsibility to release one price that will fit all markets—the fair price."

Bordeaux Futures 2005 2009 Change 2009 score

Lilian Ladouys NA $20 NA 92-95

Charmail $20 $20 unch 91-94

La Vieille Cure $23 $24 4% NR

Godeau NA $29 NA 93-96

Poujeaux $26 $29 12% 93-96

Cantemerle $29 $32 10% 88-91

Les Ormes de Pez $30 $33 10% 92-95

Haut-Batailley $38 $39 3% 90-93

Sociando-Mallet $44 $40 -9% 89-92

Monbousquet $53 $44 -17% 89-92

Giscours $58 $59 2% 92-95

Duhart-Milon Rothschild $45 $60 33% 91-94

Gazin $57 $76 33% 92-95

Certan de May $110 $104 -6% 90-93

La Fleur-Pétrus $103 $136 32% 95-98

Hosanna $130 $250 92% 93-96

Before prices came out, many retailers hoped they would be below the last great vintage, 2005. So far, that hasn't been the case. Château Duhart-Milon-Rothschild is up from $45 to $60, Château Gazin from $57 to $76. Château La Fleur-Pétrus from $103 to $136 and Château Hosanna from $130 to $250. Others held to past prices. Château Haut-Batailley budged from $38 for 2005 to $39, Château Giscours from $58 to $59 and Château Sociando-Mallet readjusted from $44 to $40.

But despite many price hikes, sales have been energetic, with some retailers even selling out their stocks, and most feeling guardedly optimistic. "We've sold through them very quickly," says Adams. "I haven't seen any [red prices] so far that make me think, 'That's impossible.'"

Wallace says his store has seen an influx of new buyers picking up wines that are under $30 or $40. "There is a new market of younger people, people that want to start collecting." Wally's co-owner Christian Navarro advises his customers, "Instead of buying a Napa Cab at $40 or $50 that got a lower score, buy this Château Poujeaux at 27 bucks and you're going to be very happy."

A final wrench in the 2009 futures campaign is the departure of Diageo's Château & Estates Wine division from Bordeaux earlier this year. The importer had been one of the most active players in the futures game and the portal to the campaign for many U.S. retailers. "It's really sad for Bordeaux," says Cazes. "Diageo was providing a great service to Bordeaux which will probably not be matched. I know less and less Bordeaux is on wine lists, and I hope that we can reverse that trend."

Though it is too soon to call this the latest en primeur campaign ever, the consensus is that many classified growths are still weeks away from setting loose their futures. But retailers are poised for whatever comes. As Navarro puts it, "In the next 30 days, it's going to be fast and furious."

Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Some Truths About Wine

Questions of decanting, aging and the necessity of visiting the place where the wine is made Matt Kramer http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/42838

Posted: June 1, 2010

Whether it’s a function of time or just a personal inclination, I’ve always been fascinated with what might be called “truths.” These are the elements that transcend fashion, that eclipse even time itself. They both enlighten and endure, because they are, well, truths.

Wine admits such possibilities. A good chunk of the first book I wrote, Making Sense of Wine, explored just such enduring aspects of wine. For example, I examined how complexity as a standard of judging a wine’s goodness is not as fashion-driven and arbitrary as you might imagine. Neurologically, we relish greater complexity. We crave the stimuli. No matter what the wine—from retsina to Richebourg—we will, over time, prefer the more complex version of it.

Not every truth about wine is quite so substantive. Some might seem lighthearted, even frivolous, but that doesn’t make them any less true. A great French fry is no less perfect than a great soufflé, even if the latter is unquestionably a greater culinary achievement. All truths are equally valid. For example:

Nearly all wines are better if decanted. Now, this is a truth that I have tested innumerable times over the decades with just about every wine type you can think of.

So why the qualifier “nearly”? Because I have yet to test it with sparkling wines. I’m no great fancier of bubbly, and therefore prefer to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get to “real” wine. (Yes, yes, I know what that makes me. You should hear my wife, a great Champagne lover, on the subject.) I do know Champagne fanciers who assert that decanting does, indeed, serve the cause of sparkling wine.

That caveat aside, I’m prepared to say that one of the truths of wine is that pretty much all wines, red or white, young or old, are better if decanted. Mind you, I’m not talking here about how long the wine should remain exposed to air in a decanter; that seems pretentious and overly prescriptive. Just pour the wine into the decanter, exposing it to some air in the process, and serve it when you like. I’ve yet to see a wine suffer for this, and I’ve seen an awful lot of wines be the better for it. Really, you can’t lose.

Most fine wines are at their best with 10 years of age. Like all truths, this is not an exactitude so much as it is reliably true for most wines most of the time. (When Voltaire famously said, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," it was for just this sort of thing. You can’t let a demand for absolute perfection be the enemy of what’s generally good and true.)

You will almost never go wrong serving any wine with 10 years of age on it. This of course assumes that the wine has been well stored in a cool place. Without that, all bets are off. But if well cellared, I’m hard-pressed to think of a fine wine that isn’t either showing its best or at least approaching its best after a decade of aging from the date of the vintage.

Among white wines, I include in this such types as Muscadet (which is conventionally thought to be best drunk very young); just about any Riesling from dry to sweet; Chardonnay, Champagne; even Moscato. I would have thought that Piedmont’s great Moscato d’Asti, which is always drunk as soon as possible after the harvest, would be an exception to this truth, but the great Moscato specialist Paolo Saracco once hauled out a decade-old Moscato for me in order to prove that even this gorgeous-when-young wine could show unsuspected qualities with age.

Among fine red wines, I can’t think of any that aren’t pretty swell after 10 years of aging. Even wines that are rightly recognized as utterly delicious when young, such as Beaujolais and Dolcetto, are surprisingly resonant with a decade’s age. (I do not include Beaujolais Nouveau in this because, bluntly put, it’s not a fine wine.)

Does this mean that you shouldn’t drink any fine wine until it has hit the 10-year mark? Of course not. Rather, this truth suggests that never more than today, when so many wines are well made, there’s no hurry. And that after 10 years of age in a cool spot, nearly all fine wines can give you the best of both worlds: a still-youthful fruitiness and the greater dimensionality of flavor that only age can offer.

You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. I mentioned this recently in a column about wines from Argentina. But it bears repeating, and expanding upon, if only because this particular truth has taken me a long time to recognize and accept.

No one disputes that it’s always a nice idea to visit where a wine comes from. But when I first became involved with wine I recoiled from the premise that I had to see the place in order to truly understand it. I felt, not unreasonably, that with enough tasting and reading and imagination, I could apprehend all that was worth knowing about, say, Volnay. I was wrong.

The key word, of course, is “understand.” It’s true that you can become expert, in the literal sense of that term, about a wine without ever having set foot on its originating site. At such a moment you are technically proficient, much like mastering a foreign language without ever actually going to its native land. It can be done.

Yet as anyone who has studied a foreign language can tell you, there’s no substitute for chatting up the locals. There’s nothing like hearing how it’s used, catching the subtle cadences and, above all, seeing how the language is inseparable from the culture.

So it is with wine. This struck me forcefully during my time in Argentina. Frankly, I already knew this particular truth about understanding wine. It’s why I’ve lived in France, Italy, California and Australia, the better to grasp and understand the wines. And why I’ve traveled to many other locations, for briefer but certainly illuminating sojourns, to at least begin to understand the likes of South African wines, Hungarian Tokaji, New Zealand’s many offerings and so on.

Yet despite all that, I was, while in Argentina, struck forcefully yet again that there’s no true understanding without your “presence in the midst of it,” to borrow a line from the poet W.S. Merwin.

I foolishly imagined prior to moving to Argentina that I had a pretty good grasp of its wines. After all, I had already tasted a lot of them. But I had no clue about why the wines taste the way they do, which is to say no real “knowing” of the culture that creates them and how that culture itself is changing. And how, in turn, that cultural evolution might transform the wines yet again.

This is why you can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. It’s why you can’t truly understand someone until you’ve met their family and visited where they were raised. It’s no different with wine—fine wine, anyway.
What are some of the wine truths you've discovered over time?

Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Stock vesting: Why is four the magic number?

(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)

http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/stock-vesting-why-is-four-the-magic-number/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter-publisher-main&utm_campaign=twitter

There’s a historical anomaly in start-up compensation that I’m struggling with. Although I know this risks being an unpopular post with entrepreneurs, I confess that I no longer get why we have four year vesting schedules for stock option grants at start-ups.

Let me explain.

Vesting is known as the time period during which you unconditionally own the stock options that are issued to you by your company. Until you vest the stock options, you forfeit them if you were to leave the company. Typically, that time period is four years.

There is also generally a one year “cliff”, which means that you don’t vest for a year and then “catch up” by vesting 25 percent of the stock options on the one year anniversary. Subsequent vesting happens monthly or quarterly, depending on the stock option plan your company has put in place.

I was explaining to a friend the typical vesting at venture capital firms is 8-10 years. That is, if you leave a fund before 8-10 years from the start of the fund, you risk forfeiting some of your unvested profit interest in the fund, or carry. I explained to my friend that this vesting schedule made sense given venture capital funds take 8-10 years from managing initial investments through to exits.

Then I realized that vesting at start-ups should also logically match the time it takes from inception to exit. In looking at the data, it appears that the average time to exit in start-ups during the 1990s was 4-5 years, so the traditional 4 year vesting period made sense.

But since then, the average time to exit has crept up meaningfully from 4-5 years to 6-8 years. So shouldn’t vesting schedules reflect this reality? Shouldn’t the vesting schedule for stock options be 6 years?

Boards are finding that they have to reissue options every 3-4 years because once an employee is fully vested, they naturally come back to the table with their hand outstretched asking for more incentive options to stick around.

In fact, why can’t vesting schedules be flexible and simply a part of the overall compensation negotiation? A CEO would benefit from having the tools at their disposal to adjust vesting dates alongside share amounts and other compensation levers.

For example, in the very early days, you might have six year vesting on stock options – but after a few years, that date might be reduced to four or five, depending on the situation. Some form of accelerated vesting upon change of control (i.e., a sale) is often a part of the package for senior executives, so if a quick exit were navigated, there wouldn’t be a meaningful penalty.

So maybe you can explain it to me, but I just don’t get why our industry clings to a historical magic figure of four years. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

KB's Notes- I'd also love to hear about your experience-successes / failures with vesting programs. Good, bad, indifferent.  Do you have a better program-have you used a vesting program or something similar that worked.  There are many tightly held private companies that aren't interested in full stock plans for key people but can offer other types of incentive programs that give something similar to ownership in a buyout etc.  What have you seen-I am VERY interested!
 
Kevin L. Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

The Elevator Speech Wow Factor

http://ow.ly/1TIRT
INC Mag
By Marla Tabaka
Jun 2, 2010
Do you make the best out of every elevator speech opportunity? You’ve heard the rule of thumb; we have 15-20 seconds to get someone’s attention, no more than 30 seconds for them to decide if it’s time to find the buffet table or give you another few minutes of their time. Furthermore, since our attention span drifts in and out every 7 seconds, time is ticking.

An elevator speech is not about you; it’s about your prospect’s needs and the emotion behind them. If you fall into the common trap of telling someone about how you got into this business, why you care so much, blah, blah, blah, you will lose them. While you’re telling your story or (goodness forbid) educating them about what a virtual assistant, coach, SEO expert or physical therapist is, they will be thinking, “I wonder if this guy makes any real money,” or “I really don’t feel like a lecture right now, I just want a drink.” Take the ego out of it by making this time about them, not you, and drive your message home.

Here are some tips to help bring the wow-factor to your 30-second opportunity. If you wow them you’re more likely to create a connection with someone who may become a great resource, new client, mentor or friend.

Your 30-second message is not about educating, explaining, or boring your acquaintance; it’s about sparking enough interest to prompt them to do something; ask for your card, introduce you to someone you should know, or even make an appointment to learn more. If you give them a reason to want to know more, they will act on their instinct.

Here are some steps and examples.

Put action in your speech – Instead of “I am” use phrases like “I teach, create, develop.” People who do are just seen as doers; people who inspire, teach and create are seen as experts. Who’s the expert here?

Before: I am a virtual assistant who takes on technical tasks for my clients.

After: I teach business owners how to save time and aggravation so they are free to do what they love and increase their profits.

Use the step-process approach – Programs, Methods, and Processes sell. If your work can be marketed as a 5-step process (no less than 3 steps, no more than 10) to a powerful end result, people will pay attention. Look at the difference here:

Before: I help business owners organize their office space so they can be more productive.

After: I teach busy entrepreneurs my proven 5-step process to create an organized work environment and streamline their workflow. My clients have less stress and more profit.

Hit home – People buy with emotion; nearly all purchases are based on a need or desire that strikes an emotional chord. Find the emotion in your target market. What is their deepest problem, concern or desire? People are almost always looking for more money, improved relationships, better health, weight loss or to somehow make life easier, happier and less stressful. Find the need and desire and speak about them directly, don’t beat around the bush. In the example below, working parents will naturally worry about qualifications and safety when looking for someone to care for their children. Which would you feel most comfortable with?

Before: My Company helps busy parents find the right nanny to care for their children.

After: Nannies For You is a licensed, bonded service whose family advocate matches loving parents with highly qualified, experienced Nannies. Our pre-screened candidates go through rigid background checks and provide care, guidance and fun for children so parents can go to work worry and guilt free.

Kevin Brown
www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com

Re-Hootsuite Post below

I have this ap and traded in tweetdeck for it.  I really like the ability to see multiple accounts with a simple click of the mouse and to be able to view 'mentions', 'direct mentions' 'pending tweets' etc on a single screen.  With a busy schedule and often being on the road it gives me the opportunity to schedule tweets for later that day and on Fridays I often schedule weekend tweets! Using both the iphone ap AND online it really ties the whole twitter process together for me!
Give it a whirl! A VERY VALUABLE Ap in my book!  I am looking at getting an Ipad shortly and Hootsuite will be a big part of it!

HootSuite's Updated iPhone App

Posted by Nadine Heintz at 11:20 AM
Hootsuite, the Twitter management tool, has added some handy new features to its iPhone app recently. Here are some of the highlights: In a single click, you can now translate foreign messages in more than 50 languages to English to keep track of international customers and competitors. You also can comment on Facebook news feeds and post messages on Facebook pages and profiles from your HootSuite account. Multi-taskers will enjoy a placeholder feature that remembers where you left off in a stream if you get distracted. You also have the option to save a draft of a message and finish it later. Cost: A free Lite version of the iPhone app is available in the iTunes App store; the full version is $2.99. Plus: Find out how entrepreneur Lori Highby uses HootSuite to manage her Web design firm’s tweets in “How to Use HootSuite for Business,” which appeared in the February issue of Inc. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/how-to-use-hootsuite-for-business.html

Stuck on Ramen-the funding process

http://epaley.posterous.com/stuck-on-ramen
Eric Paley is a Managing Partner at Founder Collective,
"I thought getting funded would be as simple as pitching my idea to a smart VC and getting a check based on the magnitude of the idea."

Two different first time entrepreneurs in their early twenties both made some version of this comment to me in the last month. I like and respect both entrepreneurs and they were confiding in me that the fundraising process has been very disappointing and were seeking advice on how to close on some capital.

The fact is that raising money is really hard unless you've built a successful business before. Of course, that actually makes some sense given that building a company is really hard and most venture-backed companies don't return capital to investors. The likelihood that an investor will fund a first time entrepreneur simply based on an interesting idea is exceptionally small. Consider that the entrepreneur has an tremendous amount of conviction about the concept. However, the investor has never heard the concept before and is likely hearing it (or at least this version of a theme) for the first time and is quite unlikely to share the depth of conviction that the entrepreneur holds. In fact, a typical investor is regularly hearing credible ideas and cannot possibly fund them all. Even if the investor is enthusiastic about the concept, she is likely meeting the entrepreneur for the first time and hasn't yet established the trust and confidence needed to believe the entrepreneur has what it takes to execute the idea and be one of the few to succeed.

So what can a first time entrepreneur do to overcome the odds and get funding? Here are a few tricks that I’ve seen work well:

Figure out who in the world you know that can afford to put some money into the company and believes in you without caring much about the idea. Even if it is a small amount of money, this can be used to create more evidence that you're building a fundable business. The value of such trust networks is actually way more effective for raising money than the idea itself. If the people you know that have the means to bet on you aren't willing to fund you, why should you expect someone that you don't know to fund you?

Find experts related to your business, preferably ones who have built a successful company in the same space, and sell them on your idea. The more you can sell that person, and the more credible that person is, the better. If that person signs up as an advisor, that's helpful, but a director is better; signing up as an investor is much better and taking a leadership position on the team is the best.

The most important thing an entrepreneur can do prior to raising money is to keep building the business regardless of the funding situation. Continue to validate the market opportunity and try to prove out that the founder’s convictions are right. Build the team with people who will work for sweat equity. Create some early product and show market traction. It is very hard to know when you will have enough evidence to convince investors, but an entrepreneur that can continuously show progress has a good shot of convincing investors that he is scrappy and capable. When an investor is trying to figure out if an entrepreneur has what it takes, that ability to keep building the business is great evidence. Certainly the entrepreneur should not sit around and wait for a check in order to really start building the business. At some point if the company is showing meaningful signs of living up to the founder’s beliefs, it becomes very hard for investors to ignore.

At what point does an entrepreneur hit the wall and cannot live on ramen noodles alone? This is a very personal decision and the reason that most successful entrepreneurs have inspiring stories of perseverance. It's a question of objectively assessing the depth of the entrepreneur's conviction, how much struggle he can endure, and how much progress he can make without capital. First time entrepreneurs rarely get a benefit of the doubt from investors and getting funded is rarely easy.

Could this be the future of magazines? Text Books?

http://m.gizmodo.com/5552315/

The Great iPad Magazine isn't here yet—but it's getting closer all the time. Popular Mechanics' app, set to launch next month, already looks like the new best magazine on the iPad.

If you've used Wired's Adobe-developed app, you'll notice Popular Mechanics' app looks and feels more like it than any other magazine app so far, even though it was developed in-house at Hearst. It's interesting, not only because Pop Mech is 1/10 the size of Wired, weighing just around 60MB, but it means we've already established a set of conventions for magazines on the iPad, if you take them, and other apps, like PopSci+, and Time, in aggregate.

Namely, they mostly reject pinch-to-zoom—what you see is what you get, true to form. (GQ and Vanity Fair are the exception, but given that Wired is effectively prototyping for Conde Nast, I don't expect it to be that way forever.) Which is interesting, in that Apple has taught everybody pinch-to-zoom as the predominant multitouch gesture, so it's what most people automatically do to anything. The idea, clearly, is fidelity to this idea of the magazine as curated object, unlike something purely digital and flighty, like a web page.

Second, there is a common navigational scheme emerging across magazines, although Pop Mech breaks it slightly. Articles are read vertically—that is, you scroll up and down—and you move to the next article or section by swiping left or right. Popular Mechanics, on the other hand, goes for page-for-page fidelity, in that you swipe to left to turn every single page. (Except for the handful of pages you don't, which is kind of confusing.) Swiping for every page, I suspect, will grow tedious, quickly.

They have a nice implementation of a sidebar, though it might also be slightly confusing if you've never used it before—essentially the top half of a page will be its own scrolling section that can go ad infinitum, showing all the steps of a DIY process, or other sequential steps magazines love to shove in sidebars. Galleries work like Wired—when you're presented with one, you tap various areas on the page to progress to the next shot in the sequence. Fine, but somewhat pointless.

Pop Mech does do a few things better than anybody else, though, besides coming in a more economical package. For one, fully embedded, seamless video—videos play on the page, so they feel like they're part of the magazine, and you're not interrupted by the iPad's movie player springing to life on top of the app. This is great. And it feels more future-y. (Apologies for the video looking a little wavy—I was hand-holding a DSLR, and the shaking was pretty bad, so iMovie's motion stabilization seemed preferable.)

Second, and key to keeping the app feeling alive and relevant, it pulls in new info, so the app doesn't become a fossil once you're done with the issue. The mini-app-within-an-app—a living infographic, if you will—that they demoed for me charted seismological data in the US, not only historically, but also using the most recent 7 days of earthquake data from the USGS. Which is really savvy—the mag retains value after you're done reading the issue. Oh, there's a built in reader that pulls in the latest articles from the Popular Mechanics website, but I figure you'll just go to the website anyway. Oh, and you can actually share articles, which you can't yet with the Wired app.

The upshot of Popular Mechanics releasing what could be the best magazine app yet on the iPad a month after the app we just deemed to be the best is that while the Great iPad Magazine hasn't arrived yet—to be clear, I don't think Popular Mechanics is quite it, either, for many of the same reasons John critiqued Wired—it may very well be on the way sooner than we think. Everybody's still just figuring this thing out, so people are mostly sticking to incrementally reformatting the magazine, instead of reinventing it, which is what we're waiting for. I suspect the HTML5 Sports Illustrated demoed at Google IO might be a peek in a different way, in that it's truly cross platform and could live on the web.

I love magazines, and this idea they could be something more than they are, given a totally blank slate to recreate themselves with. But just give it some time. [Popular Mechanics]