New York SBDC Research Network

Under the category: a lot of stuff in one place, this site is a gateway to a lot of good international organization sites, directories, and advice relating to international trade. I had a look at the "Getting Started in Importing or Exporting?" and found a number of information sheets or pathfinders for various aspects of a international trading company. It offers a nice compilation of a number of other sites on all aspects of import/export.

The NNY Tourism Research Center was created in 2001 to fill an information void felt by communities, tourism professionals, entrepreneurs and others. Among its reports are the 2004 STATISTICAL COUNTY TOURISM PROFILES, 12 - 16 page PDF files for these counties: Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego, St. Lawrence, and Warren; plus the Town of Webb in Herkimer County.

As some of you might know, Dr. James Chrisman (from Mississippi State University) frequently conducts impact studies on behalf of the SBDC program. Surveys were mailed from Central earlier this year to those long-term clients (i.e., those with a minimum of 5 hours of contact time) seen during 2004. This, from the report: "In 2004 the New York SBDC provided long-term consulting assistance to 14,984 clients. Of these, 4,226 owned established small businesses and 10,758 were seeking to start new businesses (pre-ventures). A mail questionnaire was sent to the 9,368 long-term clients for whom the SBDC still had valid mailing addresses in 2006. A total of 1,405 clients returned questionnaires. This represented a 15.0 percent response rate." From these responses, Dr. Chrisman was able to compile his analysis of the New York program's performance for 2004. It's a detailed report, but here are some of the highlights: Aggregate sales impact: Established Firms = $354,294,30

The contents of more than 10,000 libraries, with 1.3 billion records for books and lots of other materials are now available in one place, free, and online. If a library owns it, it’s probably in here. OCLC’s WorldCat is available at the new beta site, http://www.worldcat.org/ . To learn more check out http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/ . Give it a whirl.

Another helpful site I don’t think we’ve mentioned before is www.nationsonline.org which is what it sounds like: information on nations and regions of the world. It promotes itself as “among other things, a more or less objective guide to the world, a statement for the peaceful, nonviolent coexistence of nations.”, which works for me. It also includes some useful information like population statistics, international news, maps, culture, flags, languages, currencies and airports. And most useful at this time of threat to air travel, there is a link to compilations of global travel safety advice.

From Entrepreneur magazine: The process by which persons conduct inquiries for the purposes of timely, sufficient and accurate disclosure of all material statements/information or documents which may influence the outcome of the transaction. Due diligence is a critical component in mergers and acquisitions. Due Diligence definition – usually associated with contracts or investments, this term , in general, means that proper efforts will be made in investigations or examinations of efforts put forth in a transaction. Good faith efforts are to be made in performing obligations. First, the definition should mean nothing more than an investor being "diligent" when checking out the substance of the claims made by an entrepreneur with respect to the market, the product or service concept, the competition, the management team and so on. The term "due" means that it's expected and someone has to perform this task. So the concept is really all about the diligence that is

Two quick things this week. I've been remiss in giving an update regarding the turnaround time for your requests. Right now, there's a seven-day gap between when you ask a question and when we answer it. We plan on keeping it around that level for a while longer. Secondly . . . after many delays, and a lot of work, the website for the SBDC book "What's Your Signage?" is nearly complete. It's a collaborative effort between the SBDC and the International Sign Association (ISA). Right now, a volunteer team of fifteen ISA members are looking it over to see if we've got the details correct regarding their industry. Next week, I'm going to send an e-mail out to some lucky group of SBDC advisors to look at the site from a small business perspective. You could be the big winner! Seriously, it won't take too much of your time, and your feedback will be valuable. It'll be a random selection of advisors, with a mix from upstate & downstate. (