New York SBDC Research Network

Can you walk from your home to a grocery store, library or movie theater? How about from your office? Check out Walk Score to determine just how pedestrian-friendly a location might be. You simply enter an address into the search field, and the site offers a "walk score" based on the proximity of parks, shops, restaurants, schools and all those other necessities. The site's mission: "We help homebuyers , renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment." I'd think it would also be useful to a business interested in attracting foot traffic, and wanting to know about nearby facilities. The site recognizes that it's algorithms can't account for features like highways or bodies of water that might make a route impassable on foot. But ...

From Hispanic Business : "Are there industry guidelines for how much officers of small companies [less than 10 employees] should pay themselves? Would it be 1% of sales? 10%?"

(Or so the song goes.) Last week's issue of The New Yorker features an article called "Damn Spam" - an unnerving piece that traces the recent history of this email plague. For example: * "In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent." * "The onslaught apparently began on April 12, 1994, when two lawyers . . . bombarded the Internet with e-mail offering their services to immigrants . . . The two later claimed that they made a hundred thousand dollars from the e-mail campaign - a compelling demonstration of the peculiar economics of the Internet." * "The more spam that is blocked, the greater the volume spammers will need to send in order to make money. If you used to have to send fifty thousand pieces of spam to get a response, now you have to send a million. Spammers just shrug it off and send a million." * "Spammers today almost never use t...

Telling a Good Story by Michele Miller "You may have the greatest company in the world. But if you don't know how to convey that to customers, you may as well not exist." Another way to tell a story... Duct Tape Marketing , one of my favorite sites talks about an interesting idea in a blog post of theirs. by John Jantsch Mon May 14, 2007 Blurb Books a Great Tool for Telling Your Story You've probably seen these as they are popping up everywhere. In iPhoto (if you use a Mac) you can order your photographs nicely put together in a book. Wedding pictures are also offered in this format to deliver your digital memories. This blog suggests the use of polished books for businesses to use to sell themselves. Blurb shows some nice examples of how the books could be used. A sophisticated way to tell your story. Here's one last article on storytelling: How to Tell Your Story in the Media by Ilise Benun from The Art of Self Promotion #22

“Don't get too attached to MySpace. You might want to pull up stakes from Second Life, too. And you'll probably want to stop posting inanities to Twitter. Why? All of these sites will be gone before the end of this decade.” Thus begins “ MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed ” a recent PC Magazine article by Lance Ulanoff. We’ve mentioned a lot of Web 2.0 applications lately, but are they really the wave of the future, or just a lot of hype? The author argues that MySpace pages are ugly, and sometimes dangerous. Second Life may not be as big as reported, and Twitter is way too random and useless. As a librarian, I feel there’s a purpose in exploring all sorts of information sharing opportunities, since that’s what we do, and we want to be where our users are. And I also enjoy looking up kids I went to high school with. But while I may have a MySpace page, I rarely go there, and I don't feel any great sense of community. Second Life seems pretty neat, but I don...

You probably know the Motion Picture Association of America, if at all, as the folks who administer the movie ratings. True enough, but it also collects a lot of statistics as well. They include: 2006 U.S. Theatrical Market Statistics A summary of 2006’s theatrical performance, looking at box office trends, admissions trends and consumer attitudes. US Theatrical Snapshot A brief summary of the domestic box office, admission and screen count trends, including the top five grossing films domestically. International Theatrical Snapshot A brief summary of international box office and admission trends by region for the past four years, includes the top five grossing films worldwide. Movie Attendance Study An annual study which provides a summary of the demographics of moviegoers and an analysis of the yearly changes in frequent movie attendance. 2005 Piracy Data Summary A summary of a piracy study conducted by LEK Consulting outlining losses due to piracy, profile of a typical pirate,...

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 ...