New York SBDC Research Network

Looking for basic information on insurance coverage for businesses? Check out the following links: You are not required by law to have liability, property damage or other types of business insurance, but very few businesses can realistically operate without some form of optional coverage. Read more on the different types from Empire State Development . The Insurance Information Institute has launched an online edition of Commercial Insurance to help businesses better understand the basics of commercial insurance -- what it is and how it works. The site, which will be updated as new data comes in, can be accessed at http://www.commercialinsurancefacts.org . A business owner's policy protects against economic losses caused by damage to the owner's property and by legal liability to others for bodily injury and property damage involving the business. This page begins a section covering the three basic types: liability, special business forms and property insurance: http://www.fin

I’ve seen a number of articles on good web design but I sometimes wonder if anyone reads them. Maybe it looks so straight forward – like a page in Word, but really it is a unique venue and some guidelines are needed for a business to put their best foot forward. Issues to face are the overall impression of a site, the actual content, including language usage and grammar, the speed of access to your information, the design of the site, text that one can actually read organization, navigation and privacy. These books take various approaches: Don’t make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steven Krug A quick low-down on what web users are looking for and how to evaluate sites and all doe with a sense of humor. Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design by Vincent Flanders, Michael Willis . Vincent Flanders also maintains a blog highlighting more examples of what not to do on http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ Creating Killer Web Sites 2nd ed. By David

The Census Bureau has some statistics on the number of folks affected by Hurricane Katrina here and here . A PDF report on the construction and real estate implications in New Orleans Unfortunately, the Red Cross and FEMA had been working different systems while trying to find the missing, but appear to be working more closely now. Another sad occurrence: as with every disaster of late, there are unscupulous people operating in the alleged name of Katrina victims . The National Restaurant Association has planned a Dine for America event to help hurricane victims on October 5. After Katrina, and also after 9/11/01, there has been a greater emphasis on anticipating the possibility of fire, flood and other natural and human-made disasters at home and at the office . FEMA has a 204-page document about citizen preparedness . Generaslly speaking, FEMA's plan expects that individuals should have a 2- to 3-day supply of food, water and other necessities before expecting to be rescued.

Recently, I answered a request for a client who wished to retail her products at fairs and festivals. She wanted a list of such events in a given region of the state. During research, I came across a site called EventsCrazy.com. It's managed by Events Media Network, Inc., who, among other things, publish selected events directories. The site can be reached at www.eventcrazy.com , and it had the answers I needed for this client. If you've clients with similar needs, I recommend going there. On your first visit, you (or your client) will have to register. It's free, but you can't search until doing so. The site allows you to search for events and attractions in three different ways: 1) those within a given radius around a ZIP code that you provide, within dates that you specify; or 2) those by a city & state that you provide, within dates that you specify; or 3) by clicking among a list of states (say, New York), and then clicking on a given city.

Recently, I read about this scam in TVC Alert, an e-newsletter I receive daily. Thought this might be of interest to you and your clients. The Federal Trade Commission put a stop to a small business directory scam . The Montreal-based businesses, Datatech Communications Inc. and 9102-3127 Quebec, Inc. (doing business as I-Point Media), and 3 businessmen contacted small businesses in the U.S. about renewing a company directory listing when no prior relationship existed. "The defendants routinely denied requests to cancel the directory listings and harassed customers who refused to pay." The settlement and default judgment against one of the businessmen bans them from the business directory industry and from assisting others involved in the industry. SEE: FTC v. Datatech Communications FTC Filed Documents, Civil No. 03 C 6249, 25 August 2005 (Amended complaint, stipulated order, default judgment, order of dismissal, news release) < http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/datatech/dat

For current events, I like to check a few international papers to see their take on the news. There are a number of aites that make short work of listing international papers and sometimes magazines in one place. Here are a few. http://newslink.org/ NewsLink Associates is an academic and professional research and consulting firm studying electronic publishing and visual journalism. http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/ “Thousands of world newspapers at your fingertips” Simple drop menus arranged by region, the site does not list the total number of papers. Like many other sites, once you find the list of papers by region or city, unless you are familiar with the papers there is no way of knowing which are the major papers. All You Can Read.com http://www.allyoucanread.com/ Described as “the largest database of magazines and newspapers on the Internet, with listings for about 22,800 magazines and newspapers from all over the world. AllYouCanRead.com is a complete guide to world media sources

The sight of crossing guards and bright yellow buses mean the "dog days of summer" and the traditional summer break have come to a close — our nation’s schools have reopened! This edition of Facts for Features highlights the many interesting statistics evolving from students and teachers returning to the classrooms. >Back-to-School Shopping $6.0 billion The amount of money spent at family clothing stores in August 2004. Only in October, November and December — the holiday shopping season — were sales higher. Similarly, bookstore sales in August 2004 totaled $2.0 billion, an amount equaled in 2004 only by sales in December and January. (The dollar volume estimates have not been adjusted for seasonal variations, holiday or trading day differences or price changes.) If you’re not sure >where to do your back-to-school shopping , choices of retail establishments abound: In 2003, there were 24,065 family clothing stores; 6,457 children’s and infants’ clothing stores; 27,352 s

For those inventors looking to develop a prototype, the eMachineShop may be one way to produce it. A recent article at Wired.com, The Dream Factory , describes how it's done. Read on. "Boot up your computer and design whatever object you can imagine, press a button to send the CAD file to Lewis' headquarters in New Jersey, and two or three weeks later he'll FedEx you the physical object. Lewis launched eMachineShop a year and a half ago, and customers are using his service to create engine-block parts for hot rods, gears for home-brew robots, telescope mounts - even special soles for tap dance shoes. 'Designing stuff used to be just for experts,' Lewis says. 'We're bringing it to the masses.' The eMachineShop software, he explains, includes artificial intelligence that operates like a 'virtual machinist.' In the background - invisible to the user - it runs a precise emulation of the real-world machines that fabricate parts, to determine whet

As Hurricane Katrina pounds the south, with damage estimated in the billions of dollars, businesses are forced to activate disaster plans, backing up systems and many are already trying to deal with the aftermath. This brings to mind how often many businesses are not fully prepared for catastrophic events. There is an enormous amount of information available about how to go about it. I’ve listed just a few sites that offer tips and checklists. Something to think about. SBA’s Disaster Preparedness Considerations on the SBA website offers tips on creating a disaster planning toolkit covering issues such as operations, insurance and communications. Expect the Unexpected Create a monster plan to disaster-proof your business.Business Start-Ups magazine - January 1997 By Julie Cook Books in our collection: Alesch, Daniel J. ; Holly, James N.; Nagy, Robert Organizations at risk: What happens when small businesses and not-for-profits encounter natural disasters Schneid, Thomas D. Disaster

[Here's an article from the Census Bureau. The nformation particularly pertinent to New York State is in italics .] The first observance of Labor Day is believed to have been a parade on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City, probably organized by Peter J. McGuire, a Carpenters and Joiners Union secretary. By 1893, more than half the states were observing a "Labor Day" on one day or another, and a bill to establish a federal holiday was passed by Congress in 1894. President Grover Cleveland signed the bill soon afterward, designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day. Who Are We Celebrating? 149.1 million Number of people age 16 or older in the nation's labor force in May 2005. Among the nation's workers are 80.0 million men and 69.1 million women. These men and women represent 66 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized adult population. Employee Benefits 82% Percentage of full-time workers age 18 to 64 covered by health insurance during all or part of 2

Not long ago, Mary Beth posted a blog on Web sites & other resources that exist as forums for people to report scams. Good thing I knew about some of them, because recently we've had our very own scam to contend with. Last March, I received a faxed invoice from ProMedia Resources, a company reputedly based in New Jersey. Soon after, a rep from the company called as a follow-up. He claimed that, five years earlier, we entered into an agreement to have our library contact information included on a CD-ROM directory of theirs titled the "American Business Resource Guide". The five years, he said, were up, and we owed them $400. This smelled fishy, as we don't enter into multi-year agreements as a matter of practicality. Nor are we interested in marketing our private services to the general public - we exist solely to serve the New York SBDC staff. I do research for a living. A preliminary investigation of mine found that no one affiliated with the Research Netwo

Mark Wan called the Research Network recently. Besides asking a reference question, he added a personal note: He's engaged! We at the Research Network extend our congratulations to Mark and his bride-to-be. Best, Darrin, Josée, Mary Beth and Roger Today's blog is the first of a new series, "The Occasional Friday Blog," providing news of interest to the NYS SBDC community on an irregular basis at the discretion of the Research Network. If you would like to contribute, please call the Central office at x.149.

Have you had a news article printed about your center? Send us articles and press releases to add to the News page —examples include: center quotes for articles profiles of clients in the news press releases generated internally or by your host college, and anything else noteworthy. Electronic copies are preferred, but not required. Also, the Central office will need to get permission from the publisher to post articles on the Web site so be sure to include the date the article appeared and the name of the newspaper/magazine. Visit the News page for updates from around the state at http://www.nyssbdc.org/News/news.cfm . Send news items to Mary Beth, m.bobish at nyssbdc.org.

JK3430.P976 2001 New York Public Sector: JK671.F43 2005 Federal yellow book: JK3430.N49 2005-2006 New York State directory 2005/2006 Peachtree accounting 2005 (software) HD62.5 .L53 1996 Gregg A Lichtenstein; Thomas S Lyons Incubating new enterprises: HD30.28 .R644 2004 Rogoff, Edward G., Bankable business plans / TK5105.888.N54 1996 Niederst, Jennifer. ; Freedman, Edie. Designing for the web: HV7936.S56 1999 The NRA range sourcebook HD61 .R378 2004 Author Reiss, Claire Lee. Title Risk management for small business /

How Many People Move Each Year – and Who Are They? By David Bancroft Avrick Over the past quarter century I’ve heard dozens of different statistics about the percentage of people that move every year. These guesstimates have varied from a low of 10 percent to a high of 25 percent. When people move, your database takes a hit. So let’s look at who moves and why. Using the information provided by the U. S. Census Bureau, let’s clear up the confusion and misinformation. Out of a population of 282,556,000 people, 40,093,000 moved. That’s an overall percentage of 14.19 percent annually. These 40-plus-million people break down as follows: 23,468,000 (58.51%) moved within the same county, 7,728,000 (19.28%) moved to a different county within the same state, 7,628,000 (19.03%) moved to a different state, and 1,269,000 (3.17%) moved to a different country. The percentage of population that moves, when broken down by age, varies considerably – from a low of 1.55 percent to a high of 17.84 per

Once upon a time, there was a client starting a gourmet food store. The client wished to obtain a list of business fax numbers for the neighborhood immediately surrounding the store with the intent of faxing lunch menus. A bit of digging at the Research Network revealed that while this advertising method appears inexpensive it is unlawful and therefore could end up costing the client quite a bit. According to a notice on the Federal Trade Commission web site , the Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans unsolicited fax advertisements. "The Act makes it unlawful for anyone to fax an unsolicited ad to another individual or business if there is no prior business relationship - and the penalty for each violation is $500 or up to $1,500 if a company willfully and knowingly violates the law." Now, what if the gourmet food store had established a prior business relationship with the recipient of the fax? Then, the gourmet food store could send the unsolicited fax. However, afte

There are many, many sources for franchising information but I’ve outlined a few here: FranchiseOpportunities.com describes itself as the “web’s largest database of franchise and business opportunities” and offers a search facility by industry or investment level with various industries broken out into type of situation. It also offers articles and news on franchise business. BestFranchiseOpportunities.com This site offers a similar look-up including a good resources list naming well-known sources for franchise information. One can also look up company names directly. The International Franchise Association Also includes a franchisor directory as well as a supplier directory, books and reports. Entrepreneur.com Franchise Zone Slices and dices the similar information in some useful ways. Like Top-Home based , Fastest Growing , Top New and Top Low Cost among others. For a quick overview HowStuffWorks.com has an article on How Franchising Works by Lee Ann Obringer that offers pros and

I had a reference question recently. The bottom line was that the client thought that if he typed in a domain name and he didn't find it, it meant that it was available. Wrong. Your clients should be checking the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers , which will direct them to several other locations. Perhaps the most useful is the InterNIC , which provides: a roster of ICANN-accredited registrars (legitimate organizations that sell the domains), information regarding registered domains (who owns the domain names), a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding domain name registration , and more. I like to look at a couple sources for registered domains, so I also look at Whois Source . When I type in ibm or ge or fedex into Whois, I find the domains at .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .us, and are no longer available. Even if they were open, your client should be wary of using them. If a website is a variation of an existing URL that would likely create &

More about those Entrepreneur Start-Up Guides . . . Recently, I e-mailed a Word file that listed the remaining guides in the Research Network collection. While we were busy winnowing our holdings, we received a notice from a center that wondered why we allow only 2 weeks to view these books. This is one of those vestiges of the days when the Researh Network served the entire country. Back then, we had a much greater demand for the guides than we do now. Two weeks was a reasonable duration to allow people to view the guide, but not so long that others would have to wait too long. Obviously, we're not national anymore. As of now, the Research Network will allow these guides to be on loan to SBDC advisors & their clients for a period of three weeks. This includes the mailing time. It's something that should've been done many years ago. Sorry for the delay. This clause will appear in the upcoming revision of the SBDC's Standard Operating Procedures manual. In the near

By now you can probably recognize an Internet scam in your e-mail inbox. But, sometimes the text is so persuasive that you consider forwarding it to one hundred of your closest colleagues and friends. How can you tell if it's for real or not? Do a bit of research at one of these sites: Hoaxbusters: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/ Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp To discern whether you received a computer virus , search: Symantec: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html Vmyths: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html And if you get spam e-mail that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov . The Federal Trade Commission uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive e-mail.