New York SBDC Research Network

From Entrepreneur : By Brandon Turner, Real Estate Investor and Co-host of the BiggerPockets Podcast! Starting a business is exciting -- and scary. I've started more businesses than I'd care to admit. In my experience, it's a bit like driving through a heavy fog where you are only able to see a few feet in front of the windshield -- you don't know what's up ahead until it's upon you. However, the longer you are an entrepreneur, the better you can navigate through that fog. As I've been driving through the fog for over a decade now, I thought I would take today's post and boil down 15 of the biggest lessons I've learned over the past decade of building and growing businesses. Consider these tips "stuff I wish I had known when I was young and stupid." From Forbes : By Nicole Robinson, CEO, Gloss and Glam. Starting my company Gloss and Glam was the best thing I ever did. But before I opened my business, I spent countless hours s...

From MarketProfs : Email has come a long way from rich-text messages and hidden images, and today some emails are works of art. They contain animated gifs and they're responsive by device. So if that's the present, what does the future of email design look like? The folks at EmailMonks took a stab at answering that question in an infographic that looks at email design trends over the past year and predicts what we can expect to see as 2017 moves along. Some throwbacks from 2016 that we're continuing to see are lightweight animated gifs in emails, flat design, and design that builds suspense as the user scrolls on a mobile. Last year also gave us some technical updates to email, such as how emails render in Gmail, and iOS 10's allowing embedded video, the infographic explains. Moving forward, EmailMonks predicts, we'll be seeing...

From Daily Inequality : Younger employees keep getting stereotyped as insecure and needy - perhaps the rest of us need to reconsider why we find it normal for bosses to be jerks Recently, the University of British Columbia’s faculty of medicine circulated a video meant to make its instructors aware of "student mistreatment." With a minor-chord piano medley providing the soundtrack, viewers were asked to avoid putting students on the spot with questions, to minimize "cold and clinical" interactions, and to cultivate "safe" learning environments for the young residents. It seems a little like something created by The Onion, but the video was sincere, and its message will be familiar to a lot of employers dealing with people in their 20s. For many who remember what business was like pre-Internet, millennials seem an appallingly sensitive lot, having been protected from the vagaries of the world by helicopter parents, trigger warnings and—to especially cy...

From AIER : One mistake made frequently by economists is to focus on the destination rather than the journey. We like setting two sides of an equation equal, solving for a variable and focusing on that neat and tidy result. But a little common sense shows that even the most canonical equation in the field, “supply equals demand,” requires a process to become true. Firms don’t know the magical market clearing price, they must experiment to find it, and every time there’s a shock an adjustment process must ensue. If shocks are frequent enough, that process would never end—a complex real-world economy might be all journey and no destination. Alexander Salter has an interesting post at the Sound Money Project about nominal versus real interest rates that echoes the scenario above. Economists like to think central banks can only influence real variables in the short-run.

From eMarketer : What’s stopping mobile users from making purchases on their phones? Unfortunately, the solution is out of the hands of retailers. For one thing, the screens are too darn small. That was one of the findings of a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey conducted in September 2016. The data was part of a UK-focused report that compared consumer usage and attitudes in the UK with those in China and the US. According to eMarketer’s latest estimates, some 147.3 million people in the US will use a mobile device to make a purchase this year. That works out to slightly more than 55% of all mobile phone users.

From the Federal Trade Commission : “Free” and “risk-free” trials come with hidden charges The Federal Trade Commission has charged a group of online marketers with deceptively luring consumers with “free” and “risk-free” trials for cooking gadgets, golf equipment, and access to related online subscription services. According to the FTC, the defendants asked people for their credit card information to cover shipping and handling, and then charged them for products and services without their consent. The FTC’s complaint alleges that Brian Bernheim, Joshua Bernheim, Jared Coates, Robert Koch AAFE Products Corp., JBE International LLC, BSDC Inc., KADC Inc., Purestrike Inc., and BNRI Corp., formerly known as Bernheim and Rice Inc., violated the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act. According to the complaint, the defendants’ websites, TV infomercials and email deceived consumers by prominently claiming that their products and services were free, without clearly d...

Re-posted from the NYS Enterprise Information Security Office 's March 2017 Newsletter.   View more of their great newsletter topics here .  From the Desk of Thomas F. Duffy, Chair Day in and day out, employees hear the same things from their IT staff about cybersecurity and safety. Though they may sound like a broken record, there are very important reasons and rationale behind these practices and advice. Keeping safe and secure while connected isn't just about how your system is set up - it is also very much about how you end up using it. Below, we discuss some common IT staff wisdom and provide some background information and the rationale as to why it definitely merits your attention.   Make sure you lock your screen when you are away from your desk: Screen locking policies exist for a reason. Even if you are leaving for just a few minutes at a time, be sure to lock your screen. Though physical intruders are rare during daytime and in convent...