New York SBDC Research Network

From ThomasNet : Your supply chain is similar to a line of standing dominos, if one piece goes down, it could cause a chain reaction and take all the other pieces down with it. If you have a supplier or manufacturer in your supply chain that goes bankrupt or consistently delivers late, you could have a serious disruption on your hands. It makes sense that you’d want to take the necessary precautions when choosing new businesses to add to your supply chain, in order to try and avoid the domino effect. But, you can’t exactly predict the future, so you’re often taking the risk that a key component to your operations may fall flat. There are a few ways, however, that you can assess a potential supplier or manufacturer and decide in advance if it seems stable enough to add to your supply chain. By analyzing a business’s credit report, you can use data and predictive scoring to help you decide which companies you want to partner with.

From the Library of Congress : The following is a guest post by Brad Greenberg, counsel in the U.S. Copyright Office, Office of Policy and International Affairs. Copyright law and new technologies have a long history, arguably dating back to the Gutenberg Press in the 15th century—more than 200 years before passage of the matriarch of copyright statutes, Britain’s Statute of Anne. New technologies provide new tools for creative expression and new vehicles for sharing those works. But sometimes they also disrupt existing copyright regimes—as seen with player pianos (late 1800s), radio (1920s and 1930s), cable television (1960s and 1970s), photocopying (1970s), home video cassette recorders (1970s and 1980s), and, of course, digital downloading and streaming technology (today). Emerging technologies continue to raise novel questions for copyright, particularly with a copyright system built around a law now more than forty years old. Is a poem written by a computer entitled to copyr...

WannaCry: What can you do to protect your business? By Matthew Wall and Mark Ward Technology of Business, BBC News 19 May 2017   From the section Business There's been a lot in the news over the past week or two about the WannaCry cyber-attacks and what companies, in particular, are doing about the risk.   As well as keeping antivirus, firewall, application and OS software up-to-date, backing up key data regularly to offline hard drives should be a top priority, most cyber experts agree. This is because  data breaches and cyber-attacks  are inevitable these days. The bad news is that the average cost of a data breach globally stands at $4m (£3.1m), according to SailPoint, an identity management firm. This article from the BBC discusses what attacks mean for business and what steps can be taken.                       And this from Department of Homeland Security ...

From eMarketer : A leaked document published by The Guardian outlines the guidelines Facebook is using to monitor big topic issues like violence and racism. Saying “#stab and become the fear of the Zionist,” for example, would be considered a credible threat—and Facebook moderators would be able to remove that particular content. But saying “kick a person with red hair” or “let’s beat up fat kids” is not considered a realistic threat of violence. Similarly, videos featuring violent deaths will be marked as disturbing, but will not always be deleted because they might raise awareness about issues such as mental illness. Clearly, there are gray areas in the way content is handled. What the leak has done is shed light on one simple truth: Publishing mammoths like Facebook and Google (which has also experienced its share of controversy over content) can’t currently provide 100% brand safety. At scale, user-generated content provides too great of a challenge. And this doesn’t ne...

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics : The unemployment rate for foreign-born persons in the United States was 4.3 percent in 2016, down from 4.9 percent in 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The jobless rate of native-born persons fell to 5.0 percent in 2016 from 5.4 percent in the prior year. Data on nativity are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of approximately 60,000 households. The foreign born are persons who reside in the United States but who were born outside the country or one of its outlying areas to parents who were not U.S. citizens. The foreign born include legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants. The survey data, however, do not separately identify the numbers of persons in these categories. Highlights from the 2016 data: --In 2016, there were 27.0 million foreign-born persons in the U.S. labor force, comprising ...

From ImpactBnd Managing employees is never easy, but managing employees who aren’t even in the same room can be a whole different ball game. Consider some of the most common questions people have about managing remote employees: “How do I tell if my remote employees are actually working?” “How can we make sure our remote employees feel part of the culture?” “How do I foster communication with all the challenges of being remote?” “How do I manage in-office and remote employees effectively?” If any of those thoughts have crossed your mind, read on. That’s exactly what we will address.

From eMarketer : Millennials are different than older generations in many ways. According to new research, that generation gap is even wider when it comes to the sharing economy. March 2017 data from Maru/Matchbox, which surveyed 1,000 adult internet users in North America, found that millennials participate in many aspects of the sharing economy at a greater level than older respondents. Millennials were almost three times as likely to use a space to stay, like Airbnb, or use professional services, like tax preparation, than people ages 35 and older. They were also more likely to use car services like Uber.