New York SBDC Research Network

The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting oil from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks. “I cannot support high volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” said Howard Zucker, the acting commissioner of health. That conclusion was delivered publicly during a year-end cabinet meeting called by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Albany. It came amid increased calls by environmentalists to ban fracking, which uses water and chemicals to release natural gas trapped in deeply buried shale deposits. The state has had a de facto ban on the procedure for more than five years, predating Mr. Cuomo’s first term. The decision also came as oil and gas prices continued to fall in many places around the country, in part because of surging American oil production, as fracking booste...

Daniel Fine is the founder and chief executive of Glass-U, a two-year-old, 10-employee maker of foldable sunglasses bearing the licensed brands of universities, music festivals like Lollapalooza, and the World Cup soccer tournament last summer. He arranges for the manufacture of the glasses in China and their distribution around the country. He’s also a senior in college. Mr. Fine financed Glass-U, which operates out of off-campus housing, in part with proceeds from a tutoring company, NexTutors, that he started right after high school. He has also founded Fine Prints, a custom apparel company he started during high school, and Dosed, a health care technology company that is working on a smartphone app to help diabetics. In a recent conversation that has been condensed and edited, Mr. Fine, who is 21 and attends the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talked about how he got started in entrepreneurship and why he decided not to complete his application for a Thiel Fellowsh...

FATHER AND SON PIZZERIA is a 900-square-foot, eight-table restaurant in Guttenberg, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Opened in 1971, it was bought in 2007 by Carlos Vega, now 45, from its aging founder. Mr. Vega soon doubled sales by expanding the menu, improving service and selling the restaurant’s “gravy,” or red sauce, over the counter in 12-ounce Mason jars. THE CHALLENGE Mr. Vega left a corporate job producing print publications for the financial industry to take over the pizzeria. He felt constrained by his business’s size and location: a small restaurant without a parking lot on the six-block main street of a blue-collar town. Even with his improvements, the business was bringing in only about $10,000 a week. It was profitable, but only because he was working long hours, typically seven days a week, to hold down labor costs. Mr. Vega knew he couldn’t continue like this. More from the New York Times .

Last June, Facebook released a tracking pixel, a snippet of code that allows advertisers to track customers who come to their websites from Facebook ads. For Amy Norman, co-chief executive officer of Little Passports, the pixel was a game-changer. Ms. Norman, whose San Francisco company sends children a monthly package to introduce them to geography and history, began testing ads on Facebook to see which ones brought in more customers. In June, Little Passports spent about $30,000 on Facebook ads and the company’s revenue for the month was about $130,000. By the end of the year, the company’s monthly advertising spending on Facebook had grown to as much as $150,000 and its revenue for December was $700,000. Ms. Norman acknowledged that $150,000 was a huge amount of money to spend on advertising in a month for a company with annual revenue of just under $2 million, but she said “we also tripled our customer base in six months.” More from the New York Times .

From the New York Times : I remember learning in business school that business is supposed to be rational and efficient. Markets sort themselves out, supply and demand curves eventually intersect, and spreadsheets and algorithms lead to smart decision making. In my life as a loan broker, however, it often seems as if the opposite is true. Every day, as I work with small-business owners, I make decisions that are at least partially emotional. And this is particularly tough, because I know that sometimes small-business owners may take my guidance as the last word on whether they can expect to obtain capital, which may affect their dreams and livelihoods, as well as other people’s jobs. So somewhere I have to find a balance between rational decision making and my own moral compass.

Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago, apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering, organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad have about 700,000 apps. In the latest article of the iEconomy series, David Streitfeld discusses the question of how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be, particularly with an economy yielding few good job opportunities. Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small number of developers actually make a living by creating apps, according to surveys and experts. And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their résumés, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers...

In an article in yesterday's (September 18, 2007) New York Times by RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, the paper announced that it would stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight night, "two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives." "In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free." The story indicated that while the Times had generated about $20 million from 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating, the paper didn't release how much traffic would be generated by the search engines, visitors who ...

One of you fine folks at a NYS SBDC center (I won't mention who, but the person has the same first name as my father AND my sister) sent me this nifty link to the New York Times Small Business page with news, tips, and the like. One of the stories, also sent separately by this SBDCer, is this story : "The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions." Interesting stuff. Please feel free to send us useful sites such as this one. *** New postage rates , as you probably know, started yesterday. But while the first ounce charge went up from 39 to 41 cents, the subsequent ounce rate went DOWN from 24 cents to 17 cents. So the cost of a two-ounce letter has gone from 63 cents to 58 cents. *** I thought those of you who attended last year's staff training would find this story rather intriguing.

The New York Times had put most of their opinion columns and online archives behind a subscription wall and called it Times Select. It suddenly cost fifty smackers to access their columnists. Not this week. http://select.nytimes.com/pages/timesselect/index.html November 6-12, 2006