New York SBDC Research Network

Grader.com offers a "family of tools that helps measure all that matters in inbound marketing." Read "inbound marketing" as the Internet, social media and blogs. And they are all free. Website Grader is a tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website or blog and provides recommendations for improvement. Press Release Grader evaluates press releases and provides a marketing effectiveness score. Twitter Grader measures one's Twitter profile. (Last I checked, the NYS SBDC Twitter feed had a score of 87 out of 100.) These are all services of Hubspot.com , an Internet marketing company that also offers a website redesign kit gratis, as well as some useful seminars. Oh, and Are You Using Your Business Cards to Socialize? ; i.e., to use social networks. It's All About Networking.

The state tax department is portraying its website thusly: "Business taxpayers can refer to our new and improved web pages designed to help them comply with New York State tax law throughout the business lifecycle." For more information, select the links below: Starting or buying a business Expand a business Close or end a business

I went to the business.gov booth and asked them, "You have a good service, so why don't people know about you?" The person at the booth shrugged and said, "I just don't know." And that was before I learned that this SBA business gateway had won a "Prestigious Search Engine Award", the ONLY government program to win: WASHINGTON – The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Business Gateway Program was selected by the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference for the prestigious Best Use of Local Search award on August 20, 2008, the only government finalist in any category. Business Gateway was selected over two private sector companies. In celebration of its 10th anniversary, SES incorporated its first annual awards, honoring 15 outstanding “search marketers.” The Business Gateway Program was selected as the winner of the “Best Use of Local Search” category because of its unique solution for handling geographically oriented search queries. Business

Websites come, websites go. But are they really gone ? Not always. There's something called The Wayback Machine , where you can retrieve old versions of current, or even defunct websites. It's not every page, and it's not every version of a given page; some companies block access to their pages. It's not just curiosity, though, that fuels the Wayback's usage. Once, I had a question that involved accessing a form or document from the Bureau of Indian Affairs website. For some bizarre legal reason, the BIA page was blocked, but I was able to access the piece using the Wayback Machine to get an earlier version of the BIA site. Here are 50 Fun Ways to Use the Wayback Machine .

From the SBA Press Office: WASHINGTON – The U.S. Small Business Administration launched a new Web site, www.NationalSmallBusinessWeek.com , for National Small Business Week 2008, featuring information about the agency’s premier annual event. The celebration of National Small Business Week is April 21-25, with events in Washington, D.C., April 21-23 and in New York City April 24-25. Among the featured speakers confirmed are Secretary Mike Leavitt, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Ambassador Susan C. Schwab, United States Trade Representative; Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker; David Latimore of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City; John Bryant of Operation HOPE, and other prominent business leaders, CEOs and politicos. Visitors to the site will find it richer, deeper, and easier to navigate, with a look and feel that conveys the spirit of excitement surrounding this year’s Small Business Week events. Up-to-the-minute highlights, multimedia content and information

Josee often tells you about new books added to our collection. Today, I'm going to steal a bit of her thunder (sorry, J!). We recently obtained an electronic version of the book "Web & Software Development: A Legal Guide". It's published by Nolo , a publisher of self-help legal books for people & businesses (and provider of lots of other titles in our collection). I like the books from Nolo, because they're an honest attempt at boiling down complicated legal issues into terminology that's straightforward. A lot of their titles (like this one) are written by practicing attorneys with practical experience in their chosen specialty. We bought this book primarily because of a recurring type of request: Is software patentable? And, if it is, is it worth pursuing? I tried researching this question without this book, and the stuff I found was just dense and likely of little use to the client who needed it. Fortunately, chapter 9 - "Software and Internet

I learned of a new website from a recent e-newsletter from ASBDC. It's called TheFunded.com , and it has a feature that comes at the need for venture capital from a different angle. Since we frequently have clients who seek this kind of financing, the site is useful in that they can search for VC firms in their part of the country. They can also narrow their search by the size of funding being sought. The results of their search, however, aren't simply contact information for the fund. In most cases, each firm will have written commentary by business owners who've had experience with them (usually a paragraph or so). Each firm gets rated (on a scale from 1 to 4, I believe), and the firm's rating appears prominently when the search results come in. The site doesn't appear to have a function where you can search for firms that deal with a specific industry (we have a tool like that in the library). However, getting the feedback directly from those with past exper