Support Limits on The Influence of Special Interest Money In Government

This letter was originally drafted and posted by Common Cause on Jan 21st, 2010. This was in response to the sellout of the US Elections to big business and powerful special interest by the US Supreme Court. Regrettably the special interest and big business  won a major milestone against the needs of small business owners and local communities.  Since BizCloud was established to support the needs of small business and local communities it would be fitting for this issue to be featured in our blog. BizCloud executives, management and the respected business community members fully support the content of this letter and the actions of Common Cause in regards to Fair Election Now Act.

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Plan And Organize Your Small Business Public Relations In 5 Basic Steps

Public relations are very important aspect of every business.


Many small businesses make a huge mistake by believing that they cannot afford a good PR campaign or that they cannont reach the attention of potential customers.  They are doing something that one small business should never do – they compare themselves with big and international companies.

Don’t think this way. Public Relations, Press Releases and well designed PR plan can and will make a difference to your business success. Energy, time and money invested in this will certainly not be wasted.

As you probably already know, when starting or reorganizing a business, the first thing to do is to make a good business plan. If you have already accepted this concept, then you have a valuable habits of good organization and realistic analysis in running a business. Read more »

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Benefits of SaaS for Small Business

Software as a Service, or SaaS, is a software model provided  by the vendor, typically on a subscription basis and is delivered through an online service. For a small business, costs of buying a software they need to perform various tasks can be very overwhelming. With SaaS, vendor makes the required software available to a business on subscription basis, and charges are based on the product usage.

There are numerous benefits of SaaS for small business, and they include:

  • Reduced costs. SaaS applications have low initial costs, there is no need to invest in costly hardware or software which translates to low maintenance costs and no licensing fees. Read more »
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Importance of having a business plan for starting and running a business

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If you are currently in the process of planning to start your own business, the first important thing you should keep in mind is a business plan. Each year, because of a variety of reasons a large number of individuals plan to start a business. Yet despite the desire and motivation to run their own business, many don’t get off the starting blocks. One of the reasons for the inability to get a business off the ground is the lack of a clear thought process – the task appears so daunting that the idea quickly fades away. One tried and tested method for developing ideas into action is to write a business plan. Business plan will serve as a stepping-stone of your business success. Whilst it may come in different formats you will find that all business plans have the same aim and that is to give a clear idea and direction as to exactly what your business is or will be.
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Originally posted 2009-08-27 11:09:27. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Free Stimulus Money Isnt “Free”

It’s out there. And, to get your piece of it you will have to jump through some hoops. Only a fraction of the latest Stimulus Package of 2009 has been doled out! Use caution in your research as there are several outfits out there that are more interested in scamming people than providing true direction. I have done some research and  uncovered how small to medium businesses (SMBs) can access stimulus funds starting with online research using a handful of search terms like: stimulus, package, Obama, 2009, recovery and economic. First you will be led to www.recovery.gov. It’s the right place to start understanding how the stimulus package is intended to work. But it isn’t clear who qualifies. Where experts, like me, come in, is we are able to determine how SMBs qualify, identify what needs to be done, work the system, and navigate through the process.
The Obama Stimulus Package of 2009 augments the Bush Stimulus Package of 2008 and is developed to target stimulus money into some key economic engines. Those categories and allocations are:
$126 B for Infrastructure and Science
$142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable
$78 B for Education and Training
$65 B for Energy
$59 B for Healthcare
Knowing what to look for increases your opportunity. You will need to research further to find the links on how each department is charged with managing and disbursing those funds. Because only a small fraction of the monies have been distributed to date, you may find that your company or you as an individual can qualify for monies. Go here for a more detailed category list.
Pumping trillions of dollars into the economy will have an impact! What is apparent is that the stimulus plan is designed to accomplish some specific results. Targeted industries will get money and others will get nothing. The stimulus is particularly aimed at law enforcement, energy, science and greentech. With the Federal Government’s help, America will move towards more energy independence and efficiency. The huge cash injection will accelerate the desired results. So, if you are in those industries or support those industries, whether a venture (VC) funded /starting a small business or an established SMB on the periphery, by undertaking a small effort and shift you could avail your firm to those monies. And, you better start now!
The venture and investment communities are asking their portfolio companies to find out how to access the stimulus money. It’s complicated uncovering how your SMB might qualify, and early stage companies can rarely dedicate the resources. Furthermore, it takes a fair amount of savy to garner stimulus funds, and more critical now than under the prior administration, it takes political positioning.
So, sharpen your pencils and start working the phones, the web and start building your small business plan and working the right relationships. Alternatively you can find a consultant with expertise in this kind of work, but be warned. One day that money is going to dry up. You wouldn’t want to miss out on something that you paid for, will pay for, and that your kids will pay for…would you?

Originally posted 2009-08-19 14:01:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Guide to Effective IT Planning for Small Business

IT can help small businesses deliver new ideas and help them cut costs through automation of processes. Technology enhancements can resolve certain problems and redundancies in business operations, and provide small businesses with opportunities to improve the customer service, and boost efficiency of employees and resources. Many small businesses put a lot of effort in planning their business activities, but somehow leave IT out of the picture viewing it as a waste of time and money. The reality is that the right deployment of technology can save resources and increase sales for businesses that are using it well. In today’s business world, not having the proper technological resources can put your company behind competition. Read more »

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Technical Differences between Internet and Enterprise Search on BizCloud

Technical Differences between Internet and Enterprise Search

We’ll first focus on the “easier” technical differences.  We’ve broken them into “User Experience” at the high and low level, and a section on data and spidering issues.

User Experience: High Level

The way users interact with a corporate search engine may be quite different than the casual use of Yahoo and Google on the web.

Single Shot Relevancy – Over-Reliance in Both Markets

Long time readers will recall that we’ve warned before that an over-reliance on “relevance” can belie a flawed usage assumption, that ANY engine can find the “correct” answer for the typical 1 or 2 word search.  On the Internet, when I type “bush”, how could the system know with certainly whether I’m referring to President George Bush, junior or senior, or the Australian outback, or one of the many beers or musical groups with “bush” in their name (with or without that exact spelling), or perhaps a shrub to plant in the yard.  In the enterprise, terms like “resource” or “schedule” are similarly ambiguous.

Ironically, this first issue is something public and private engines often have in common.  Which leads us to….

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Bizcloud Presents Viral Coupon Offer for Small Businesses

One marketing tool for small business owners that does not require big investment and can help the growth of business is coupon marketing. Coupons are very efficient small business  marketing tools that motivate your prospective and current customers to buy your products or use services your business has to offer. Read more »

Originally posted 2009-06-16 03:21:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Enterprise Search, Document vs. Data on BizCloud

Bizcloud as part of its partnership with New Idea Engineering (NIE) will be featuring enterprise search and content management strategy under our technology blog. As Bizcloud is in process of greatly improving the user search experience we wanted to share the best industry expert advice on this topic. We have invited the team at New Idea Engineering to share valuable insight on search with our business community. As always it is through participation and questions that meaningful partnerships and opportunities develop. We will deliver on a engaging conversation around enterprise search technology with you and look forward to your feedback.

Documents vs. Data

Modern search engines employ “fulltext” search, looking for specific search terms in relatively unstructured text.  The unstructured nature of the data is the key; it was assumed that most content would be composed of paragraphs of text, with very little formal structure, verses the more traditional fields in a database, with their more rigid INT, DATE and CHAR datatypes.  About the only assumption made about a document’s “structure” was that it would probably have a Title of some sort.  References to specific numbers, colors or geographic locations may be blindly treated the same as every other word in the document.  (See also Entity Extraction.)  Hopefully, if a term appears in the title, it will be given a bit more weight, but that’s about it in the basic world of documents.

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IPv6 Special Report –Google & Comcast Announce Big Steps Forward

We’ll get back to the topics I continued in previous blog entries soon, but, I wanted to share some major developments from last week with you…

The first one, Google announced that their YouTube service is now available on IPv6 if you are using Google White-listed nameservers [1] .This is a major commitment that follows on to a string of developments and commitments to IPv6 by Google.
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