It has been proved that the recession is the best time to start a business due to myriad reasons. The main advantage is that it won’t get worse than the prevailing situation and the expenses to start up a new venture is low compared to boom. For starting a new business or improving an existing one, the entrepreneur should have a good business plan. So, what makes a business plan that stays near to perfect and attracts equity? Here are the important ingredients which makes a perfect business plan.
The Executive Summary
Write this summary last, and make sure it contains the highlights of your plan. Assume your most important readers will read only this section.
The Company
A plan for a startup describes your strategy for creating the legal entity and how the initial ownership will be divided among the founders. It should also include a table that lists startup costs and initial funding. A plan for an ongoing or already existing company should describe the legal form of the business, the company history and the business’s past performance.
What You Sell
Describe the products or services you offer. Emphasize why buyers purchase those things, what benefits they get, and what pain points they have before they buy. Show how much it costs to deliver what you’re selling.
Your Market
Describe your target market, including market demographics, market growth and trends. Include a table that shows a market forecast. Describe the nature of your industry and the competition you have.
Strategy and Implementation
Strategy is all about focus. So focus on certain target market segments, certain products or services, and specific distribution avenues. Forecast your sales and the cost of sales. Define your milestones with dates, budgets and specific responsibilities.
Management Team
Name and describe the key members on your team. Include a table that shows personnel costs. List the gaps in the management team–if any–and show how they’re being addressed.
Financial Projections
Describe your financial strategy and how it supports your projected growth. Include a break-even analysis that shows risk as a matter of fixed vs. variable costs. Include projected profit or loss, cash flow and balance sheets.
A variety of netbooks have been invading the market for quite a few months now. There have also been reports that consumers who bought a netbook later realized that they had actually wanted a notebook. Majority of the consumers cannot tell the difference between the two, which may be attributed partly to the similar suffixes of the two words.
So, what is the difference between the two?
A simple answer is that, compared to notebooks, netbooks are simply smaller, lighter and cheaper – approximately the size and weight of a hardback novel or diary, weighing around 1 kilogram. Screen sizes (the diagonal measurement across the screen) vary from 7-10 inches for a netbook to 12+ inches for a notebook, typically around 15.4 inches. Netbooks, powered by Intel’s Atom processor are not as powerful as notebooks, and lack the facility to play CDs or DVDs.
Connectivity is the central focus for netbooks and their primary use is to surf the net. Built-in Ethernet and wi-fi is used for connecting to the internet. It is intended to be used mainly by people who want to keep connected while on the go. With its prices below $300, it is an excellent solution during the credit crunch!
Statistics prove that netbooks have succeeded in creating a new market above handheld computers, smart phones and personal digital assistants. Analysts are torn whether or not netbooks will eat into the notebook market share. Since the recession is still underway, people will be looking for cheaper products, which suggest that netbooks will be in demand.
However, netbooks are presently limited by battery size, processing power and storage space, which gives notebooks a clear edge of it.
No matter what, I do believe that there is certainly space in the world for both to function and live together in peace.
Check out the netbooks available in the market
Articles on Google waves is flooding the web, trying to bring out a deeper understanding on this wave renaissance. There is so much of expectation generated now as people are anxiously looking forward to get their hands on it. With the little information revealed by Google, let us try to figure out something more on how this is going to work. In Google wave 1 we discussed about Google waves as a product. This time let us view Google waves in the perspective of a developer, that is, Google waves as a platform.
Platform in software realms can be understood as an entity on which software can be made to function. A platform provider will provide APIs (Application Programming Interface) for software to be developed in his platform. Let’s take a few examples: Java, the product of Sun Microsystems serves as a platform and it comes with APIs like AWT, JDBC, JMF and so on. These APIs are also provided by Sun Microsystems. Apple Inc, owner of iphone had APIs confidential until October 2008 when the company open sourced and made it license free to develop software applications to be run on iphone. Lately, there is facebook API which is both powerful and popular.
Google has promised to come up with a public API which can be used by any developer to create applications that run on the wave platform. There are 2 ways by which a developer can make his presence felt in Google waves. The first method is by building robots or creating gadgets. The other method is by embedding waves on third party websites. Let’s try to get some insight on these new terminologies.
Robots are automated participants in a wave. Remember the robot in ‘Lost in Space’. It is a similar kind of simulation except that these robots will function inside the computer. A robot created inside a wave will be able to read, modify and delete blips and wavelets. A wavelet is a smaller wave that is resident inside a wave and a blip resides inside a wavelet. The diagram below will give you better picture.
The developer can create robots and perform interactive operations within a wave. What are the interactive operations? Well, that is left to the creativity of the developer. Learn more about robots here. Wave Gadgets are similar to the ordinary gadgets in its mechanism to get embedded as third party development applications. But there is more offered. A wave gadget can function within a live wave. An example Google gives to explain this is one which lets participants of a wave to vote on where to go for lunch. Learn more about gadgets here.
The second method using Embed API enables to bring waves into third party websites. There will be simultaneous updates in websites as and when an update is made inside a wave. Google has already come up with a few embeds. ‘You tube playlist discuss’ is one among them and is sure to gain so much popularity. Learn more about embed APIs here.
As Facebook is dominating now with so much integration, it is certain that we can expect even more from Google waves. So if you are a developer, be informed about what is going on in Google waves and get ready to play with the tools as soon as you get them.
Links for further study:
In response to Google Chrome OS, Microsoft has announced that the new version of MS Office, which is expected to hit markets by 2010, will feature online collaboration. This dramatic announcement was made at the partner conference in New Orleans.
The new generation office suite will enable users to access their documents online with co-authoring capabilities. PowerPoint will be streamlined with video and picture capabilities which will revolutionize presentations.
Though Microsoft is coming up with online capabilities for Office, they don’t have the intention to provide comprehensive online access, which they think can scale down their business. This won’t be a great concern for Google Docs, as they are providing comprehensive access to users. Google considers it as a weaker reply for the Google Chrome OS, which is the core of Microsoft’s business.
Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds each day as more and more users are realizing its use as a marketing tool. Twitter started out as a simple microblogging tool for users to stay in touch by answering about the question, What are you doing?. It is now being used widely by companies as a means of promoting their new products, sharing their news & views, posting job requirements and keeping in touch with customers.
Recently, the computer giant Dell, revealed in one of its blog posts that more than $2 million has been generated in revenue from @DellOutlet, one of its Twitter sites. Here is how Dell has been using Twitter.
Dell identified early that Twitter is an effective means of communicating with customers. Dell Outlet, the sales division of Dell started tweeting in 2007, using Twitter as a means to attract customers by extending exclusive offers, discounts, clearance events and new arrival information.
Users who follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available at the company’s Outlet Store. Those who are interested will immediately click to purchase the product or they might forward the information to their friends.
Dell has been able to compute the revenue generated by Twitter users by tracking the clicks that came from Twitter to its site, which resulted in sales. The figure $2 million is a relatively small amount for a company like Dell. However, it goes to show that small companies can also reap rewards by using Twitter as a marketing tool. Recognizing the benefits of using Twitter, Dell has created Dell.com/Twitter to allow customers to choose the most relevant Twitter account for them to follow.
Thus, Twitter as a sales/promotional tool is no doubt invaluable to small and large companies alike; given proof of the kind of revenue it helps to generate.
Twitter continues to gain popularity and expand its user base day by day as more and more corporate companies are diving in to make the most of it. However, Twitter has yet to come up with a business model which could generate revenue for Twitter too. It is speculated that they might introduce paid accounts or take a share in sales generated from Twitter.
As the long awaited business model takes its own time in materializing, Twitter users are quite happy tweeting their way to success.
Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication – email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Tough questions! These questions have paved way for Google Wave. Jens Rasmussen and Lars Rasmussen wrestled over these questions since 2004. These geeks were the inventors of Google Maps and now they are ready to unleash Google Wave into the Internet. Google Wave comes in 3 layers. The product, platform and the protocol. Here, we will discuss Google Wave as a product.
Google describes Wave as “Equal parts conversation and document”. It is the next generation of e-mail. A Wave contains a complete thread of message saved in a common server. When this Wave is shared with other users, they can also get into edit mode. The interesting feature is that when a person is editing the wave, others will be able to see the edit process almost letter by letter. So this means that all of them will be able to collaborate in a wave almost instantly. Waves come with a rich text editor and several other functions that will enable the users to work on text, images, videos, maps and many more. Whenever a change is made on a wave, all the collaborators are notified. The complete history is stored within the wave.
Here is a screenshot provided by Google that gives us a first look.
Waves can therefore serve as e-mail and chat. It will work similar to wikis. The next layer ‘platform’ provides various APIs enabling waves to become a place where a group of people can work together to prepare documents, plan events, hold discussions, play games, etc. We will discuss about them in the next section.
Earlier, search did not have a high priority in the sites that were developed using Drupal. Analysis reveals that the slowness and lack of smartness of the search feature have made the users loose their trust on search. The integration of Drupal with Apache Solr is changing the entire scenario now. Here in this article, I am going to give you a snapshot of this revolution.
Lucene as we know, is a search engine library for enabling text-based search and is written in Java. Solr is a search server developed based on Lucene. It is easy to install and configure and it comes with an HTTP-based administration interface. Documents are first indexed through XML over HTTP. Queries are sent through HTTP GET method and search results are received in XML.
There are two types of search mechanisms used by dominant search engines. Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy). This mechanism is used by Yahoo directory, DMOZ, etc. Google, Yahoo search and other popular search engines use direct search. Both these have their own benefits and drawbacks. Recently the direct method is gaining more recognition and is evident from the growth of Internet dominance by Google and Yahoo search engines.
Faceted search is a new mechanism and it combines both the above techniques. It allows users to navigate multi dimensionally with a pool of words. Here is an illustration that contrasts faceted searching with taxonomical searching.
Lets move on to the other features. Spell checking: With this feature, the user can get search results for a given query and also get spelling suggestions at the same time. This is similar to the ‘Did you mean’ in google. The SpellCheckComponent that forms a part of Solr is designed to provide this inline spell checking of queries.
Solr provides a set of highlighting utilities with which it highlights the location of the query terms in the text of the search results. Solr caches are associated with an Index Searcher. Any item in the cache will be valid and available for reuse as long as that Index Searcher is being used. Solr cached objects will not expire after a certain period of time and the cached objects will be valid as long as the Index Searcher is valid.
Apache Solr Search Integration is a module that integrates Drupal with a Solr server for searching. Solr can be used as a replacement for core content search that already comes with Drupal. The module comes with schema.xml and solrconfig.xml which requires configuration. This module makes all the features of Solr available in Drupal for the development of the new site. A few websites that have currently implemented Solr using this project are AOL, Drupal.org, Netflix, CNET, CitySearch and GameSpot.
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-solr1/#ibm-pcon
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-solr2/#resources
Going through the number of times WCAG is mentioned in Twitter and blogs, I find that it has not got the publicity it deserves. Most developers tend to think of accessibility as a luxury they cannot afford. Consequently it finds its place way down in their priority list. However, as we shall see, making a site accessible will not cost you a lot. And accessibility is not only aimed at addressing the needs of disabled, but people who use text browsers, low resolution monitors etc. Thus if your site is designed with accessibility in mind, you will surely see more traffic to your site.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for developing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) documents. The first version, WCAG 1.0, was published in May 1999. The latest WCAG 2.0 was released on 11th December 2008. The primary intent to publish these documents was to make web content easily accessible to everyone irrespective of any disabilities. WCAG 2.0 is designed in such a way that it is simpler and easier to understand for the web developer community. The document is built on four foundational principles. Then, there are few guidelines provided under each principle. Each guideline is challenged by different testable success criteria. Satisfaction of all these criteria will make the web site conform to WCAG. Let us go through the four principles in brief.
The first principle implies that any content that is displayed on the website must be perceivable. The dictionary meaning of the word perceivable means ‘To achieve understanding of’, ‘To become aware of directly through any of the senses, especially sight or hearing’. In our context, it means that anyone who accesses the web for content should be able to apprehend the information that is presented.
There are four guidelines furnished to illustrate this principle. The first two coerce to provide text alternatives for non-text content and time-based media. This would enable the user to enlarge or render in whatever tactile form as needed. The third guideline focuses on the structure and presentation of the content. A simple design that complies to the standards will reduce the complexities when there is a requirement to extract content and present to debile users. Sometimes distinguishing foreground information from background can become difficult. The fourth guideline helps avoid this conflict and focuses on making information distinguishable. Success criteria are determined on color, contrast, background audio, text images and many more.
The second principle deals with the operability of the user interface components. Users can come across situations where they are not able to interact with the content due to issues in links, user controls and other navigation.
The first guideline under this principle recommends making all the functionality of the content available from a keyboard. This does not outweigh the use of mouse and other interfaces. On the contrary, it means that complete dependence on these devices must be forgone. The guideline also cautions of keyboard traps and advices methods to keep the user away from them. The other guidelines focus on ensuring that the users will be able to complete the tasks required by the content with their own individual response times. For every time limit automatically set by the content, it requires the user to have options to turn it off, adjust and also extend the limit. They also caution the design about seizures mainly occurring due to excessive use of Flash. The last guideline recommends helping the users in their navigation to find content. There are 10 success criteria listed to check whether a user is properly guided.
Understandability is the next issue the document addresses. The principle mainly targets the people in the lower part of the intellectual group. It compels the developer to make the content easily available in predictable ways and also help the user avoid and correct mistakes.
The first guideline stresses on making the content readable and understandable. Success criteria are set on languages, abbreviations and pronunciations. It also speaks about restricting unusual words or phrases including idioms and jargon. The other guidelines show light on making the pages predictable and providing assistance to the user in mistake-prone sections. Using instructional labels and help pages can assist the user in different areas. Detecting errors and reporting immediately, as and when the user is inputting information is also a better method of assistance. These together form the success criteria for this principle.
The last principle is the most important of all the four. It checks the robustness of the content. Accessibility by user agents is checked here. There is only one guideline and it speaks about the compatibility of the content with the current and future technologies. Avoiding deprecated features of W3C technologies makes the site more compatible. Success criteria are designed for custom user interfaces to check compatibility.
Adhere to the guidelines suggested in WCAG 2.0 will bring in more traffic. Therefore it is essential from the developers’ point of view to know these standards and make them a part of our work.
Link for further study:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
Are you a busy Internet professional or website owner who’s finding it difficult to sign into several micro blogging accounts to post your business topics? It can be quite a tedious and time-consuming process to log into each of these accounts and individually post your news.
SPNBabbble solves all that for you. With an SPNBabble account, all you need to do is enter a single posting and voila! It gets published simultaneously in Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Tumbrl, and Friendfeed. You will of course need to be a member in all these communities.
Well, doesn’t that make social media networking a lot easier for you? What’s more, many of SPNBabble’s features are similar to Twitter. So Twitter users are going to find it quite easy to operate this plugin.
SPNBabble also has other features, which are:
SPNBabble is specially developed for website owners, web masters, web developers, web designers and business professionals. An offshoot of SiteProNews, this site is in the Jayde Online Network and deployed using Laconica software.
More features are planned in the future to give connectivity to other micro blogs. With this, SPNBabble is surely on its way to becoming a hot favorite among web publishers!
How do you ensure your business stays ahead of the competition? A business is all about relationships and happy customers means a successful business. To build strong and lasting relationships with clients, you need to first understand their individual needs and behavior. Here’s when CRM comes in handy.
So, what’s CRM and what can it do for you?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a business strategy that many companies adopt whereby customer data is collected and used intelligently in order to build and maintain strong relationships with customers.
You can use CRM to track your customer’s contact information and interests, previous purchases, their preferences etc thus helping you efficiently market new products and serve your customers better. You can also use CRM to track new leads from the time of obtaining them till the sale is closed. A CRM also helps you to manage outstanding or unpaid accounts too.
Before implementing a CRM to your business you need to
consider two key factors:
Understanding your business requirements: For your CRM to be really effective, you must first review your current business processes, decide the kind of customer information you want to collect and what you plan to do with it and also where the information collected can be stored. A well-designed CRM system should be able to do all this for you.
A customer-centric team: To make your CRM work for you, you need a a strong team committed to ensuring customer satisfaction and who share a common vision of increasing sales and enhancing customer loyalty.
Make sure you focus and act upon the above points before you expect results from your CRM.
