New York SBDC Research Network

Here's a fun, short article from this month's issue of The Atlantic . Titled " Pac Rat ," it describes the efforts being made in certain circles of higher education to save the source code of video games that have long since gone out of favor (and whose intellectual property may no longer be in force). It also speaks to the issues behind technological preservation in general - with so much digitization in force, what becomes of data in general? Can it remain in a non-hard-copy ephemeral state forever? What becomes of the 1,000+ digital photos on my hard drive at home? How about this blog post? I'm fascinated by the judgments that will be made in the not-so-distant future, which reveals what amongst the deluge will live on, and what will fade away.

If you have a mail order/Internet business in New York State, and you have NYS customers, you need to charge sales tax on the eligible items at the rate of the location of the purchaser. This can seem quite onerous. Fortunately there is an electronic Sales Tax Jurisdiction and Rate Lookup . You type in the street address and ZIP Code and it will generate the correct rate. Incidentally, trying to find a list of sales tax rates by ZIP Code would be fruitless, since ZIP Codes are no respecters of county boundary. One thing this lookup does NOT do, however, is to indicate which counties have set aside, at the county level, the sales tax on individual clothing items that cost $110 or less. You need to check this chart .

Every household in the US will be receiving the 2010 Census form sometime this week. The Census has eliminated the long form, so every household will receive the same form. There is some information regarding the Census that is not well known or often debated. The links and quotes below are to help clarify Census issues. The Cost of the Census Responding By Mail Can Save Taxpayers Hundreds of Millions : - The Census Bureau today estimated that if every household completed and mailed back their census form, taxpayers could reduce the cost of taking the census by $1.5 billion . The Census Bureau saves about $85 million in operational costs for every percentage point increase in the nation’s participation rate by mail. - “It costs the government just 42 cents for a postage paid envelope when a household mails back the form,” said Census Director Robert M. Groves. “It costs $57 to send a census taker door-to-door to follow up with each household that fails to respond.” Census Confid

We all know the feeling of failure. Well, I guess those few perfect people out there don't know that feeling, but the majority of us humans know that failing never feels good. But it can be good for you. If we are open to learning from our failures, not only can we determine what factors caused us to fail in the first place, but then we can change the way we go forward. So while it's not always easy to view a failure as a learning experience, it may be the best way for your to succeed in the future. A Silicon Valley Conference About Failing Is Big Success 10 Ways Failure Leads to Success

Want to know more about the spending habits of your neighbors? Check out Bundle.com . There are lots of forums and articles about spending topics, and you can take a quiz which will assign you a “spend type” based on your usual spending tendencies. For our purposes, I think Everybody’s Money , a database on spending and saving trends, is more interesting. You can choose a location and see spending breakdowns. There are broad categories (like Health & Family) which you can then breakdown into smaller categories (like personal care, insurance, and pets). You can compare this data to other geographies, or compare within categories like age, household type or income. According to their FAQ: “Our data comes from the U.S. government, from anonymous and aggregated spending transactions from Citi , and from third party data providers.” This data shouldn't’t replace the more detailed consumer expenditure reports we can access from DemographicsNow , but it does seem to be an interesting

I'd like to offer a friendly reminder that if you have not already, you need to update your admin page on WebMQS. Even if you have done it recently, some updated information may not have been updated and it simply good practice to keep an eye on both your personal data as well as your center data. We rely on the primary email address that you wish to receive mail at to be at the top. We've noticed a few bounce-backs because of incorrect data - in one case data that was years out of date. So, please check your details often!

Over three years ago, I blogged about the efficacy of ClickZ for website user session information. But there's so much more to the site: statistics, white papers, news articles, expert columnists. It is, as it claims, "news and expert advice for the digital marketer."