It’s hard to avoid certain mistakes, especially when you face a situation for the first time. In fact, many of the following mistakes are hard to avoid even if you’re an old hand. Of course, these are not the only mistakes CEOs make, but they sure are common enough.

Take the following self assessment: give yourself ten points for each of these entrepreneurial blunders you are in the process of making. Deduct five points for those you have narrowly avoided. Your score, of course, will be kept confidential, but do seek help. Fast!

1. Big Customer Syndrome
If more than 50 percent of your revenues come from any one customer you may be headed for a meltdown. While it both is easier and more profitable to deal with a small number of big customers, you become quite vulnerable when one of them contributes the lion’s share of your cash flow. You tend to make silly concessions to keep their business. You make special investments to handle their special requirements. And you are so busy servicing that one big account that you fail to develop additional customers and revenue streams. Then suddenly, for one reason or another, that customer goes away and your business borders on collapse.

Use that burgeoning account as both a cause for celebration and a danger signal. Always look for new business. And always seek to diversify your revenue sources.

2. Creating products in a vacuum.
You and your team have a great idea. A brilliant idea. You spend months, even years, implementing that idea. When you finally bring it to market, no one is interested. Unfortunately you were so in love with your idea you never took the time to find out if anyone else cared enough to pay money for it. You have built the classic better mousetrap.
Do not be a product searching for a market. Do the market research up front. Test the idea. Talk to potential customers, at least a dozen of them. Find out if anyone wants to buy it. Do this before anything else. If enough people say “yes” go ahead and build it. Better yet, sell the product at pre-release prices. Fund it in advance. If you don’t get a good response, go on to the next idea.

3. Equal partnerships
Suppose you are the world’s greatest salesman, but you need an operations guy to run things back at the office. Or you are a technical genius, but you need someone to find the customers. Or maybe you and a friend start the company together.

In each case, you and your new partner split the company 50/50. That seems fine and fair right now, but as your personal and professional interests diverge, it is a sure recipe for disaster. Either party’s veto power can stall the growth and development of your company, and neither holds enough votes to change the situation.
Almost as bad is ownership split evenly among a larger number of partners, or worse, friends. Everyone has an equal vote and decisions are made by consensus. Or, worse still, unanimously. Yikes! No one has the final say, every little decision becomes a debate, and things bog down quickly.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, the buck has to stop somewhere. Someone has to be in charge. Make that person CEO and give them the largest ownership stake, even if it’s only a little more. 51/49 works much better than 50/50. If you and your partner must have total equality, give a one percent share to an outside advisor who becomes your tie-breaker.

4. Low prices
Some entrepreneurs think they can be the low price player in their market and make huge profits on the volume. Would you work for low wages? Why do you want to sell at low prices? Remember, gross margins pay for things like marketing and product development (and great vacation trips.) Remember, low margins = no profits = no future. So the grosser the better.

Set your prices as high as your market will bear. Even if you can sell more units and generate greater dollar volume at the lower price (which is not always the case) you may not be better off. Make sure you do all the math before you decide on a low price strategy. Figure all your incremental costs. Figure in the extra stress as well. For service companies, low price is almost never a good idea. How do you decide how high? Raise prices. Then raise them again. When customers or clients stop buying, you’ve gone too far.

5. Not enough capital
Check your business assumptions. The norm is optimistic sales projections, too-short product development timeframes, and unrealistically low expense forecasts. And don’t forget weak competitors. Regardless of the cause, many businesses are simply undercapitalized. Even mature companies often do not have the cash reserves to weather a downturn.
Be conservative in all your projections. Make sure you have at least as much capital as you need to make it through the sales cycle, or until the next planned round of funding. Or lower your burn rate so that you do.

6. Out of Focus
If yours is like most companies, you have neither the time nor the people to pursue every interesting opportunity. But many entrepreneurs – hungry for cash and thinking more is always better – feel the need to seize every piece of business dangled in front of them, instead of focusing on their core product, service, market, distribution channel. Spreading yourself too thin results in sub-par performance.

Concentrating your attention in a limited area leads to better-than-average results, almost always surpassing the profits generated from diversification. Al Reis, of Positioning fame, wrote a book that covers just this subject. It’s called Focus.

There are so many good ideas in the world, your job is to pick only the ones which provide superior returns in your focus area. Don’t spread yourself thin. Get known in your niche for the thing you do best, and do that exceedingly well.

7. First class and infrastructure crazy
Many a startup dies an untimely death from excessive overhead. Keep your digs humble and your furniture cheap. Your management team should earn the bulk of their compensation when the profits roll in, not before.
The best entrepreneurs know how to stretch their cash and use it for key business-building processes like product development, sales and marketing. Skip that fancy phone system unless it really saves time and helps make more sales. Spend all the money really necessary to achieve your objectives. Ask the question, will there be a sufficient return on this expenditure? Everything else is overhead.

8. Perfectionitis
This disease is often found in engineers who won’t release products until they are absolutely perfect. Remember the 80/20 rule? Following this rule to its logical conclusion, finishing the last 20 percent of the last 20 percent could cost you more than you spent on the rest of the project. When it comes to product development, Zeno’s paradox rules. Perfection is unattainable and very costly at that.

Plus, while you’re getting it right, the market is changing right out from under you. On top of that, your customers put off purchasing your existing products waiting for the next new thing to roll out your doors.
The antidote? Focus on creating a market-beating product within the allotted time. Set a deadline and build a product development plan to match. Know when you have to stop development to make a delivery date. When your time’s up, it’s up. Release your product.

9. No clear return on investment
Can you articulate the return which comes from purchasing your product or service? How much additional business will it generate for your customer? How much money will they save? What? You say it’s too hard to quantify? There are too many intangibles? If it’s too difficult for you to figure, what do you expect your prospect to do? Do the analysis. Talk to your customers, create case studies. Come up with ways to quantify the benefits. If you can’t justify the purchase, don’t expect your customer will. If you can demonstrate the great return on investment your product provides, sales are a slam dunk.

10. Not admitting your mistakes.
Of all the mistakes, this might be the biggest. At some point you realize the awful truth: you have made a mistake. Admit it quick. Redress the situation. If not, that mistake will get bigger, and bigger, and… Sometimes this is hard, but, believe me, bankruptcy is harder.
Assume your costs are sunk. Your money is lost. There is good news: your basis is zero. From this perspective, would you invest fresh money in this idea? If the answer is no, walk away. Change course. Whatever. But do not throw any more good money after bad.

OK, everybody makes mistakes. Just try to catch them quickly, before they kill your company.

***
By Paul Lemberg
Paul Lemberg helps small business owners become wealthy. Since 1995, Paul has helped hundreds of small business owners achieve outstanding success. He has written three books, including Faster Than the Speed of Change, Earn Twice As Much with Half The Stress (co-authored with Tom Matzen), and his latest, the business best seller, Be Unreasonable. On television, Paul has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, Financial News Network, and dozens of national radio programs. His work has been featured in over eighty magazines and publications including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the world’s largest circulation newsletter, Bottom Line Personal.

In 2010, despite the difficult economic conditions, SCORE helped create successful startups at the extremely low cost of $119 per business and a new job at a mere $98. The expertise of SCORE volunteers helped revive and grow 11,045 businesses thus saving 17,629 domestic jobs last year. Not only do SCORE clients create jobs and businesses which invigorate the American economy through revenues of $19.4 billion, they also generously repay the federal government in the form of 3.8 billion tax dollars – an average of $548.79 in federal taxes per $1 appropriated to SCORE. SCORE continues to be passionately committed to providing free small business advice and resources, serving over 9 million clients since 1964, helping them achieve their dreams and boost the American economy.

Dr. Dolly Garnecki, SCORE client and founder and CEO of Spinal Health & Wellness LLC, is just one example of the thousands of clients SCORE continues to help each year. She reflects on her own gratitude for the organization saying, “I am incredibly grateful for the access we gain to SCORE’s enthusiastic and insightful mentors. Having a dedicated personal mentor with the business wisdom and experience I lacked was like having an air traffic controller guide me through the storm of fear and doubt experienced by so many first time entrepreneurs. I truly believe that small businesses are the means to economic recovery for our country and SCORE is the way to make that happen.”

Dolly began her career in the U.S. Air Force but turned to entrepreneurship when a serious neck injury changed the course of her life. Her own recovery process inspired her to become a chiropractic physician and found Spinal Health & Wellness, in Charlottesville, Virginia where she now provides patients with spinal adjustments, rehabilitation therapies and counseling on nutrition and workplace ergonomics. Dolly was the recipient of the 2011 SCORE Outstanding Veteran-Owned Small Business Award and was recently chosen by a panel of local businesswomen as EntreMom of the Year.

To read more stories of SCORE clients achieving entrepreneurial success, visit: http://www.score.org/success-stories

About SCORESince 1964, SCORE has helped more than 9 million aspiring entrepreneurs. Each year, SCORE provides small business mentoring and workshops to more than 375,000 new and growing small businesses. More than 13,000 business experts volunteer as mentors in 360 chapters serving local communities with entrepreneur education.

For more information about starting or operating a small business, call 1-800/634-0245 for the SCORE chapter nearest you. Visit SCORE at www.score.org/. Connect with SCORE at www.facebook.com/SCOREFans and www.twitter.com/SCOREMentors.

Also not surprisingly, industry advocates are looking to help those smaller companies protect their patents for treatments, technologies, and other intellectual property. How to help is under study by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is compiling recommendations for helping smaller businesses in and outside the life sciences gain international patent protection.

In consultation with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Small Business Administration Administrator Karen G. Mills, USPTO director David Kappos is required to submit the study by January 14, 2012, under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the patent reform law enacted in September by President Barack Obama.

USPTO held hearings on the study October 27 and November 1. Among the questions the USPTO report is intended to answer:

What role, if any, should the federal government play?
Should Washington establish a loan fund, a grant program, or both?
What criteria should be created to qualify companies for loans and/or grants?
What role, if any, should the private sector play in the funding programs?

Leveling the Playing Field

“For our small businesses, securing IP protection is as important as obtaining laboratory equipment, leasing space, or hiring creative, dedicated employees,” Stanley C. Erck, president and CEO of Novavax, told USPTO at the first hearing, testifying for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).

Hans Sauer, Ph.D., BIO’s deputy general counsel, intellectual property, explained to GEN that startups can expect to spend six figures for patent applications after accounting for filing costs and translation costs. “Just to start the process in foreign countries, you’re looking at an expense of $150,000 or more,” Dr. Sauer said. “If you have three patent applications, and you want to go into these foreign countries, you’re looking at a half million dollars. That might not be a small chunk of your R&D budget for the year.”

In addition to cutting a steep expense, Dr. Sauer said, biotech startups are also seeking the proverbial level playing field as China and other nations dole out government subsidies to their own startups looking to patent their IP Stateside. Starting in 2009, China’s Ministry of Finance established a fund to subsidize overseas patent applications, offering startups up to RMB 100,000 (about $15,700) per patent application. The Japan Patent Office grants a 50% reduction of examination request fees for smaller businesses dedicated to R&D.

And in August, Italy’s Ministry for Economic Development set aside €40 million for two programs aimed at subsidizing patents for small businesses. One covers partial drafting and filing expenses up to a maximum €6,000 per patent. The other covers expenses of up to €70,000 toward engineering, feasibility, market, and prototyping studies; technological due diligence; and drafting of license agreements.

As for U.S. startups, “companies bite the bullet and they pay,” Dr. Sauer added. He pointed out that in biotech you have to apply for patent protection early during your product development cycle. “You can’t, in biotech, kick the can down the road.”
Potential Solutions

Lila Feisee, vp, global intellectual property policy with BIO, told GEN one possible model for helping small biotech businesses is a program along the lines of last year’s Qualified Therapeutic Discovery Program (QTDP). QTDP set aside $1 billion in tax credits and grants for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies working on new therapies or other biomedical innovations.

QTDP delivered all its available $1 billion in grants and tax credits for the 2009 and 2010 tax years to 2,923 biotech companies for 4,606 projects in 47 states. The credit covered up to half the cost of a qualifying biomedical research project, up to a maximum $5 million per company of up to 250 employees, with a per-project limit of just $244,479. Startups could elect to receive their award as cash if they could prove they had yet to make a profit, a provision that has made QTDP especially attractive to early-stage life science firms.

Supporters of government aid to startups pursuing international patents argue that the help is needed given that the perpetual cash squeeze affecting most startups has worsened as many venture capital firms have retreated from life science investing. However, USPTO and the Obama administration also view such assistance as a piece of a larger puzzle, namely harmonizing U.S. patent laws with those of European and Asian nations.

The U.S. has had informal dialogue with the European Patent Office (EPO), and in February, informal talks with EPO and the free-trade group Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, whose 21 member economies include non-nations Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“There is some move afoot to actually coordinate, cooperate on harmonization, and it’s very important. You don’t need duplicative efforts done in several different offices across the world, doing the same search and examination and charging an arm and a leg for it,” said Robert L. Stoll, commissioner for patents, addressing the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s IP Counsels Committee Fall Conference, held November 3 in New York City.

Speaking minutes later with GEN, Stoll said the informal discussions are expected to lead to more formal talks at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): Asked how long it might take before the talks progressed to WIPO, he replied: “A couple of years. Not many, but a couple.”

That window of two or so years should be plenty of time for USPTO to study the issue, then offer some suggestions that Congress can adopt. But why reinvent the wheel? Among the simplest suggestions came from Erck: use existing business assistance programs to aid companies pursuing international patents.

For example, NIH’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program doesn’t allow funding of patent costs unless prospectively negotiated in a provisional indirect cost rate agreement, as a report by Edward G. Jameson, of Jameson & Company CPAs, noted earlier this year. Some patent costs can be recovered via the Department of Defense SBIR program, also subject to negotiation. But to recover foreign patent cost filing fees, a company will need to have revenues from overseas.

“Because IP business assets are at least as important as other, more tangible business assets, there is no reason to exempt patent rights from publicly funded small business assistance programs that are available for more tangible assets such as capital equipment, hiring, or leasing space,” Erck concluded.

It’s not a stretch to say that IP protection is at least as crucial to a biotech startup than capital equipment or leasing space, if not more so. But as Washington is finally on the cusp of an overdue spending diet, it’s hard to imagine the government being able to afford the kind of start-up aid that the biotech industry is seeking, at least until economic times finally improve.

Erck acknowledged as much when he suggested a matching program that ties government funds to money invested by startups. While his numbers—$8 in government money for every $2 from startups—seem high, he also said further thinking was needed. That thinking should begin sooner than later.

source: http://www.genengnews.com

The study, released on Wednesday by the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, said Americans pay more than $7,900 per person for healthcare each year — far more than any other OECD country — but still die earlier than their peers in the industrialized world.

The cost of healthcare in the United States is 62 percent higher than that in Switzerland, which has a similar per capita income and also relies substantially on private health insurance.

Meanwhile, Americans receive comparatively little actual care, despite sky-high prices driven by expensive tests and procedures. They also spend more tax money on healthcare than most other countries, the study showed.

An “underdeveloped” U.S. primary care system is plagued by shortages of family doctors and high rates of avoidable hospital admissions for people with asthma, lung disease, diabetes, hypertension and other common illnesses.

U.S. survival rates are the world’s highest among breast cancer patients and the second highest, after Japan, for people with colorectal cancer – due in part to effective early screening, the study showed. The study also said Americans experience generally good acute hospital care.

“It’s a very, very mixed pattern,” said Mark Pearson, head of the OECD health division. “You get a very high quality of care for your money in some areas. Very poor quality, compared to other countries, in other areas.”

The quality and cost of the $2.6 trillion U.S. healthcare system are at the forefront of a rancorous national political debate over how to regulate and pay for treatment, particularly for the poor and elderly.

The 2010 U.S. healthcare reform law, which seeks to control costs over time by altering incentives for doctors and other providers, faces a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court, and Republican presidential candidates on the campaign trail have called for its repeal.

LESS CARE, MORE MONEY

Federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor, is also a leading target of efforts to narrow the yawning U.S. fiscal deficit.

The OECD said U.S. public spending on healthcare reached 8 percent of the economy versus a 7 percent OECD average in 2009, the latest year for which comparison figures are available.

A forum of developed nations set up to foster global development, the OECD said U.S. life expectancy of 78.2 years ranked 28th – just behind Chile’s and well below the average of 79.5 years among member nations.

The growth in U.S. life expectancy over the past half century is also below average, gaining only 8.3 years since 1960 compared with an 11.2-year OECD average.

The United States was ranked fourth from the bottom for premature mortality, which focuses on deaths among younger people. The measure, which reflects dangers posed by violence, accidents and environmental hazards, puts America behind all others save Hungary, Mexico and Russia.

Pearson said researchers believe national mortality rates increasingly reflect the quality of healthcare, though more than half of the equation is still believed to lie with other indicators including lifestyle and diet.

Americans have fewer doctors and hospital beds, make fewer doctor visits, go to the hospital less often and stay for shorter lengths of time than about three-quarters of the other OECD countries.

But the United States is at the front of the pack when it comes to costly medical procedures including knee replacements, MRI and CT scans and tonsillectomies.

And it is consistently at the top of the cost chart for a number of procedures including caesarean sections, which are almost twice as expensive in the United States as in Germany.

Pharmaceuticals also cost about 60 percent more than in a range of European countries.

Pearson said one reason prices are higher in the United States is that the healthcare system lacks what other countries have: an effective government mechanism that acts to keep prices down.

“That’s simply not there in the U.S. system. So it’s a structural defect,” he said.

The National Federation of Independent Business’s optimism index decreased to 90.9, the lowest since September, from 91.2 the prior month, the Washington-based group said today in a statement. Six of the measure’s 10 components dropped.

Twenty-five percent of small-business owners cited weak sales as their top problem, one reason why they are reluctant to hire and invest. A measure of net price increases posted a fourth consecutive gain as business owners passed along raw- material costs to customers.

“The most apparent reason for the weak optimism is the weak recovery,” William Dunkelberg, the group’s chief economist, said in a statement. “The key is the consumer,” he said. “When sales pick up, owners will have a reason to hire more workers to take care of customers and to produce more output.”

A gauge of whether business owners expected higher sales fell 2 points to 3 percent, the lowest level since October. A measure of whether small firms plan to create new jobs fell 3 points to a net minus 1 percent last month, while a gauge of hard-to-fill openings dropped 2 points to a net 12 percent.

At the same time, more small-business owners said that expect business conditions will improve six months from now.
How Measured

The NFIB survey’s net figures are calculated by subtracting the percent of company leaders giving a negative answer from those with a positive response and adjusting the results for seasonal variations.

A measure of whether small firms think this is a good time to expand rose 1 point to a net 5 percent, while a gauge of capital outlays fell 1 point to 20 percent. A gauge of companies planning to increase inventories fell 2 points to a net minus 3 percent.

An index of earnings trends increased by 2 points to a net minus 24 percent.

“Large firms may be posting great profits, but the trend on Main Street is still not supportive of solid hiring and capital spending,” said Dunkelberg.

A net 15 percent of small businesses reported raising average selling prices in May. It was the fourth consecutive positive monthly reading after 25 months of decreases. Plans to increase prices fell one point to 23 percent, the second only to April as the highest reading in 31 months.

The NFIB report was based on 733 small-business owners surveyed through May 30. Small businesses represent more than 99 percent of all employers and have created 65 percent of new jobs in the past 17 years, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. A small business is defined as an independent enterprise employing up to 500 people.

To contact the report on this story: Bob Willis in Washington bwillis@bloomberg.net

The blurring of the lines between the consumer Internet and the business world has continued apace this year. I’ve begun referring to this phenomenon as CoIT when it happens in the workplace, but that’s not quite the full story either. What has happened is that social media has become one of the biggest mass changes in global behavior in a generation (since the advent of the Internet itself.) Over the last few years, the meme around social has filtered down into countless activities and processes across the business world, giving rise to now significant trends like Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM, customer communities, and so on. Keeping track of all this has officially become a full-time job and those just getting familiar with the Social Business world have a lot to absorb to get oriented.

To help with keeping up with the fast moving pace of Social Business, we’ve created a useful new model aimed at helping you stay up-to-date with the major moving parts of Social Business today. We define Social Business here as the distinct process of applying social media to meet business objectives.

Click to Enlarge

The Social Business Power Map, presented above, is an attempt to identify the major social media trends, how they can be mapped generally along consumer/enterprise axes, and where they are in terms of their overall maturity level today. Note that many of the aspects of social media in the consumer Web side is also heavily used in the enterprise side, while the reverse is generally not the case. This map is as exhaustive as space allows but inevitably some items had to be omitted. Any all such omissions are my fault alone. The items on this Power Map are rated on the following scale:

1. Buzz: A newer social media trend, technology, or approach that is both compelling and getting attention at the moment but its staying power and ultimate fate are still unclear.
2. Experimentation: These currently have some fairly widespread interest but lack of broad commitment from either Web companies or businesses. They may eventually hit mainstream adoption, but may also enter the dustbin of Social Business if they fail to show promise.
3. Adoption: These are aspects of social media which are currently experiencing broad uptake but have not yet broken out to a majority audience. They are all likely to become mainstream. It’s still possible that some of them will fade away before then or be replaced by something newer though it’s not highly likely.
4. Maturity: These are all widely used and very popular aspects of social media. They all have global reach and most Internet users either consume or participate in them. Note that enterprise social media currently has no aspects that are yet in a mature state, but that will likely change soon with Enterprise 2.0, customer communities, and Social Media Marketing about to cross over.

The following major social media trends were identified as significant players at the moment, either because they are currently receiving a lot of attention or they are getting a notable real-world uptake.

The Elements of the Social Business Power Map

In rough order from top to bottom, this list represents what those in social media need a good grasp of at a strategic level in order to be effective. Depending on your industry, specific ratings on the maturity scale may be slightly different, but all of these elements must be in the vocabulary of those seeking to tap into the business benefits.

• Social Analytics. Effectively participating in social media as an organization requires a lot of listening, but how do you make sense of the totality of what you’ve heard? Enter social analytics, which has recently seen a major uptick, from virtually no discussion of it in 2008. Many organizations are now realizing that, like Web analytics was early on in Web, social analytics will be crucial for obtaining a strategic understanding of what’s taking place in social media, either on the Internet or within their organizations. The hold-up preventing widespread experimentation in social analytics at the moment is that there are still too few vendors and even fewer compelling and mature products.
• Social Dashboards. iGoogle showed how many people would use a dashboard (hundreds of millions) and now there are now too many dashboard products for social media to count. They range from feed readers to apps like the popular TweetDeck, which provide a convenient way to consume and participate with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FourSquare, and others. Enterprise equivalents now exist, and are typically included as features of the more mature enterprise social software suites. At this time, most users are experimenting with social dashboards but they have not collectively broken out into a full-on adoption climb. Aggregating of social experiences will become increasingly important however and dashboards are well positioned to solve a significant portion of the channel fragmentation challenge of social media.
• Microblogging. With the rise of Twitter and its approximately 200 million users, microblogging has hit it big though it’s still not quite mainstream. The convenience and format of microblogging ensures that just about anyone can participate and this has made it very popular online and increasingly so in many businesses today. However, social networks remain overall more compelling for many despite often having a similar status message format. Those seeking the simplest and most straightforward social experience however are finding microblogging attractive. Expect microblogging to proceed to the mainstream level in the next year or two in the consumer side and a year or two later in the enterprise space, for which the tools are still emerging.
• Mobile Social. I covered this more detail in my recent Six Social Business Trends To Watch post. The world of social media is moving to mobile devices in a big way this year. Social networking apps for iPhone and Android remain among the top applications for those devices, particularly each platforms’ respective apps for Facebook. More compellingly, some of the most interesting new mobile social apps, like FourSquare, will only really function on GPS-enabled devices. Mobile social is on a fast rising adoption curve and will hit the mainstream in relatively short order (as in next year) as new large-scale usage trends take hold, such as the move entirely away from desktops, and even laptops, towards truly capable mobile devices like smartphones and slates (also known as ultra mobiles) such as the iPad. As for enterprise adoption, a recent survey by Citrix indicated that surprising 84% of businesses will not only allow iPads in the workplace but will actively support them. What this all means for mobile social in the enterprise is less clear but it will be significant.
• Social Location. This trend is tightly coupled with mobile social since effective location-based services typically requires hardware-based GPS. More and more social applications are becoming location-aware and it’s telling that Facebook has apparently decided to join in the ‘check-in’ bandwagon to compete with potential location-aware rivals like FourSquare. That said, location is definitely a good bit behind the broader adoption wave to mobile social. However, it’s on target to become an integral part of Social Business as location-enabled mobile apps get better at mining the value of physical location with new features and capabilities such as better contextual advertising and improved Social Shopping.
• Federated Social Identity. While OpenID and Facebook For Websites (the identity feature formerly known as Facebook Connect) are taking the lead at the moment, there is still a long way to go before there is a real social identity victor. Federated identity, a technical sounding term that really just means you can select the user ID service of your choice and use it on any social service you’d like, inside or outside of the firewall. A robust and usable federated social identity that automatically brings your social graph, avatar, and other personal data is barely on the radar today and mostly consists of individual standards (see Open Standards for Social Media, below). There is a good chance that OpenID will add many of the needed capabilities, but the jury is still out and most social identity today really isn’t very social, yet.
• Crowdsourcing. I’ve explored the growing promise of crowdsourcing many times in the past and great many experiments over the years have proven the model out fairly conclusively. Yet uptake has not been as broad as it might be because of the perceived shift of control issues combined with lack of familiarity and competence in crowdsourcing by most businesses. Fortunately, given the rise of innovation programs based on the crowdsourcing model, recent success stories, and other independent data points. Expect it to start climbing the adoption curve in 12-18 months. Most organizations should start planning this year to ensure they get first mover advantage, which really matters when trying to build a community of contributors in an industry or vertical market.
• Facebook Connect/FFW. Now called Facebook for Websites, the uptake for this feature has been very strong across the Web given how much it increases the percentage of users that register, up to 2 out of 3 new registrations by some estimates. Over one million Web sites have integrated with Facebook and climbing fast. Though many organizations are reluctant to overly depend on Facebook to manage their user data, the risks can be managed and it has become a leading way to access a user’s personal information and social data upon request. FFW will probably remain in the adoption phase for a couple of more years and has the potential to be disrupted by more open social identity systems.
• Social Search and Recommendation. The information that our friends are interested in is what we’re likely to be interested goes the theory. Social search is already part of the Google search engine, making it score higher on the Power Map than it otherwise would. Another way to look at timely knowledge that flows through the news feeds and activity streams of our favorite social networks is “search that finds you”. Mostly a consumer Web phenomenon, with leaders such as Mahalo and Wikia there are some business players. For example, Vivisimo’s Discovery Module has an especially interesting enterprise social search capability. Thus social search as well as recommendations are a significant and growing element of the social Web today. Social recommendations are already featured in many Facebook applications and other popular services such as Yelp. Social search has not, however, consistently found its way in terms of prime mover utility to grow a major service or revolutionize business processes yet. It will likely enter the adoption phase in the coming 24 months as more products are designed around the potential and ways to access ROI is more focused.
• Community Management. All social communities require some level of community management, which I dubbed an “essential” capability for Enterprise 2.0 last year. Almost always under anticipated at first (after all, most of us are just learning about large scale online communities and what they need to survive and thrive), community management has steadily gotten more respectable and the some of the credit it so richly deserves, though there’s a long way to go. As a result of the growing community management competence of many large-scale commercial communities and many successful customer communities, ad hoc and otherwise, this capability has had a great year. One part best practices, one part enabling technology, and two parts dedicated people, this skill is well into the adoption phase (all successful online communities today have the skill set and staff). Community management is on target to become mainstream in the enterprise within 36 months, even if it’s nearly mainstream on the consumer Web today.
• Social Networks, Blogs, and Wikis. As we start heading into 2011, it’s clear that social networking has become truly mainstream at a global scale. The data on the right shows that social networking is the now most used Internet communication tool today, with usage having eclipsed e-mail — the previous #1 method of communication — entirely. This is a sea change in societal behavior for which businesses are still now only beginning to understand the implications. Blogs have been mainstream for years and wikis exist by the tens of millions. In fact, virtually every medium and large sized business now has at least one wiki installation. What’s left? Social networking is now expected to surpass the top used application online, Internet search, in the near future. There is little likelihood that social networking will be disrupted in the near term though certainly most businesses have not yet adopted them internally and many current block their use from inside the firewall. Unfortunately, the number of businesses blocking access to social networks is going up, not down as they continue to get a handle on managing the perceived risks of social networking.. See my discussions on CoIT and how workers are increasingly using their own IT to route around excessive control of their channels of communication.
• Social Gaming. As my colleague Bryan Kotlyar said to me recently, “many people’s primary experience with social networking is with Farmville”. Farmville has become an enormously popular social game that has proved out the sector to be a rapidly-growing one. There have been many discussions of social game theory as a high-engagement way to maximize the value creation of structured user participation. Strategic thinkers like John Seely Brown has famously extolled multiplayer games as a better way to manage knowledge and work together. For now what’s clear that social gaming is a rapidly expanding consumer phenomenon that combines the high virality of social media with the focused outcomes of structured play. Expect social gaming to start to enter the enterprise world within two years (prediction markets are an early herald of what’s to come here), it will only become more significant and mature in the social media universe.
• Social Shopping When friends come together in social media to participate in the shopping process, the result is referred to as social shopping. While sites that are built around or offer social shopping features have been around for years, often tied closely to the fashion industry, it’s only be in the last year that social shopping has started to get serious attention. Grouped into three major categories, social shopping services can include group-buying, shopping communities, and social product recommendations. Typical offerings include BazaarVoice, Kaboodle, and Shop Socially. As retailers and other businesses catch on to the techniques and the features become more integrated into e-commerce platforms, social shopping is poised for major experimentation in the coming several years.
• Open Standards For Social Media. Standards for social media have not fared very well other than for the syndication standards RSS and maybe Atom. Standards are vital for new technologies to thrive because they create choice, reduce costs, increase the pool of knowledge, reduce the risks of lock-in and many other benefits. On the downside, standards can create a lowest common denominator effect and reduce innovation by proscribing advances that color outside the lines. Yes despite this, some Web standards specific to social media are climbing the maturity curve, mostly around the key functions of social networks. Except for OpenSocial, these standards are largely being ignored by businesses at this time, despite the great stake they have in shaping their future. For more details on these standards, you can consult my in-depth examination of the Social Web Technologies for 2010, but the ones to track are Portable Contacts (PoCo), Salmon Protocol, OStatus, PubSubHubbub, and xAuth in the Buzz category, Activity Streams (now used by Facebook, MySpace, and others), OpenSocial, and OAuth in Experimentation, and OpenID in the Adoption phase. For now, most organizations should focus on OpenID and keep an eye on the uptake and adoption of the others. See here for my in-depth discussion of OAuth, OpenID, and FFW and their significance to user adoption of social applications. Few social standards have lasted long or been successful but there is a sense now that we are starting to zero on the ones that we really need. Future Power Maps will track their progress.
• Social CMS. Drupal has apparently won the social CMS wars in the open source space with literally tens of millions of users. With this, traditional content management systems will never be the same and Drupal has shown how success is defined in this space by having a common sense open architecture, a rich plug-in ecosystem, and embodiment of best practices for social CMS. I’m also bullish on enterprise versions of Drupal, like Acquia. Yet there remains a nagging feeling that social software suites (see below) may ultimately become the center of focus for social in the workplace. Social CMS is the last mainstream model of social media but there is long-term potential for trouble as consumer social networks and enterprise social software suites begin to encroach on the feature space.
• Unified Communication with Social Media. The enterprise world of unified communication has amazingly had very little unification with social media. But that is starting to change with the advent of social media aware unified communication products such as Lotus SameTime and arguably Cisco Quad, which got the lion’s share of attention of such products recently. However it’s mostly buzz at this time but unified communication will reconcile with social media soon enough as I predicted earlier this year in my 10 Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Technologies To Watch list.
• Expertise Location. Despite years of promoting the fact that social tools let people find out who knows what, dedicated tools like FineBrain and features in well-known tools such as Jive’s Social Business Suite are finally coming to the fore. While still an emerging category, expertise location is expected to become a key capability as enterprise start going social in a major way.
• Social ECM. The often-stodgy vendors of enterprise content management (ECM) platforms have been incorporating more and more social media capabilities into their products in the last year. OpenText is leading the way here and most other vendors I’m tracking are following suit. You can get a sense of how many by looking at the blue space in my full breakdown last year of Enterprise 2.0 tools.
• Enterprise 2.0. The use of social media to drive collaborative performance has been a hot topic for several years know. I’ve covered this in great detail elsewhere and we’re now seeing that adoption is well under way and is likely to be the first major enterprise use of social media to hit the mainstream (most people in most enterprises engage in it) sometime in the next 12-24 months.
• Social Media Command Centers. Gatorade famously made a splash earlier this year with their high-gloss social media command center and I think it’s safe to say that generated enormous interest in the concept. As social media becomes a critical channel to engagement in and deal with, command centers (more practically realized as virtual tools and teams than physical ones) are going to be a hot topic with widespread experimentation consisting of integrated sets of monitoring, analytics, and engagement tools increasingly happening in the next year..
• OpenSocial Apps for the Enterprise. Jive and SocialText have added support for internal only OpenSocial applications that lets enterprise build or buy business apps that tap into their worker’s social capital. It’s still very early stage yet but now that the app containers and providers exist, it’s likely that this will grow into a strong ecosystem in the next couple of years particularly if an enterprise app store is successfully built to create a low-barrier distribution conduit for business-grade OpenSocial solutions.
• Enterprise Syndication. The proliferation of social media on the Web drove the need for syndication. Now enterprises are in the same situation but vendors have been struggling in this space for a long time now with poor enterprise-friendly syndication management tools and inadequate feed readers. That’s still only changing slowly as enterprise users are just now grasping how much their intranets are starting to look and work like today’s highly social Web. I expect this functionality to increasingly appear in social software suites and enterprise integration platforms like ESBs.
• Social Media Monitoring. Being able to listen to social media has now become an imperative for a large percentage of organizations and it’s been a banner year for listening platforms from organizations such as Radian6, Sysomos, and BuzzLogic. Expect it to remain a high growth adoption-phase trend for the next 12-18 months and the move to maturity.
• Social Media Marketing. Marketing departments were one of the very first groups to get involved in social media and they are nearly ready to move into the maturity phase of adoption. While the best social media marketing campaigns are combinations of traditional and social media as part of an integrated approach, social media is where the growth and deeper opportunities will lie for the foreseeable future.
• Crisis Management. Combined with a good social media listening capability, identifying brand and customer crises and then responding effectively to them will be a capability that many organizations will build in the coming years. Expect lots of improvement in practices and methods as companies determine where best to locate and organize around this increasingly important capability that wasn’t required in the days before customers had louder voices collectively than most organizations.
• Social Software Suites. The premise with suites is that it makes sense to create an integrated whole out of the standards set of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, activity streams, social networks, social dashboards, and microblogs with the security, audit, archiving, and other business requirements that enterprises expect. Collaboration industry-leader SharePoint 2010 recently added many of these features while others such as Lotus Connections, Jive Social Business Suite, and SocialText have had them for a while now. Most CIOs and other senior decision makers looking to activate on the promise of Enterprise 2.0 are going to focus on the proven and ready-to-go aspect of suites in their evaluation efforts and it appears that they are increasingly favored for company-wide deployments while individual tools are selected to match specific, high value problems.
• Customer Communities. Creating or participating in customer communities is something that most organizations must do yet many of them are missing the opportunity, despite 70% of senior managers recently reporting that they offer significant business value. I’ve explored this paradox before and the urgency of letting customers engage before they go elsewhere to create their own or find companies that will work with them. .
• Enterprise Microblogs. Twitter virtually created and proved out the value of making social communication simple and compact. Now the command-line of social media is coming to the enterprise. While still in the experimentation phase for most organizations, microblogging will be commonplace and growing in adoption towards a mainstream breakout in 18-24 months.
• Social Supply Chains. Companies such as Inovis have been proving out what is possible when you bring social computing to the supply chain. I explored social supply chains in detail recently and while it’s still in early stages, those who are using it are achieving significant benefits. At this point, social supply chain will be well in the adoption phase in 24-36 months

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.), March 7, 2011 – During the Great Recession, more Americans have become entrepreneurs than at any time in the past 15 years. However, while the economy and its high unemployment rates may have pressed more individuals into business ownership, most of them are going it alone, rather than starting companies that employ others.

According to the “Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity,” a leading indicator of new business creation in the United States, 0.34 percent of American adults created a business per month in 2010, or 565,000 new businesses, a rate that remained consistent with 2009 and represents the highest level of entrepreneurship over the past decade and a half. In contrast, however, the quarterly employer firm rate has dropped from 0.13 percent in 2007 to 0.10 percent in 2010.

“Since it began, the recession has triggered annual declines in the rate of employer enterprise births,” said Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation. “Far too many founders are choosing jobless entrepreneurship, preferring to remain self-employed or to avoid assuming the economic responsibility of hiring employees. This trend, if it continues, could have both short- and long-term impacts on economic growth and job creation.”

Capturing new business owners in their first month of significant business activity, the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activityprovides the earliest documentation of new-business development across the country. The percentage of the adult, non-business-owner population that starts a business each month is measured using data from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition to this overall rate of entrepreneurial activity, the Kauffman Index presents separate estimates for specific demographic groups, states and select metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). It provides the only national measure of business creation by specific demographic groups.

New 2010 data allow for an update to previous reports, revealing important shifts in the national level of entrepreneurial activity, and in the demographic and geographic composition of new entrepreneurs across the country between 1996 and 2010. View an interactive data visualization spanning all 15 years of the study

Entrepreneurship rates by race show that Latinos experienced the largest entrepreneurial activity increase between 2009 and 2010. The Latino business-creation rate rose from 0.46 percent in 2009 to 0.56 percent in 2010, the highest rate over the 15 years of Index data. The Asian entrepreneurial activity rate increased from 0.31 percent in 2009 to 0.37 percent in 2010, also the highest rate in the past decade and a half. Both African-Americans and non-Latino whites, on the other hand, experienced declines in entrepreneurial activity rates.

Entrepreneurship growth was highest among 35- to 44-year-olds, rising from 0.35 in 2008 to 0.40 in 2009. The oldest age group in the study (55-64 years) also experienced a large increase in business-creation rates from 2008 to 2009, contributing to a two-year upward trend to 0.40.

Among states, Nevada and Georgia had the highest entrepreneurial activity rates, with 510 per 100,000 adults creating businesses each month. Rounding out the top five highest rates were California (470 per 100,000 adults), Louisiana (460 per 100,000 adults) and Colorado, with 450 businesses started per 100,000 adults. The five states with the lowest rates of entrepreneurial activity were West Virginia (170 per 100,000 adults), Pennsylvania (180 per 100,000 adults), Wisconsin (180 per 100,000 adults), South Dakota (190 per 100,000 adults) and Indiana (190 per 100,000 adults).

“Regional patterns have a significant effect on entrepreneurial activity rates,” said Robert W. Fairlie, the studys author and director of the masters program in applied economics and finance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “From 2009 to 2010, entrepreneurial activity rates increased in the West, further widening the gap between the West and other regions. Rates in the South remained steady, but declined in the Northeast and Midwest.”

Other key findings for 2010 include:

• The immigrant rate of entrepreneurial activity increased substantially – from 0.51 percent in 2009 to 0.62 percent in 2010 – and declined slightly for the native-born. This increase expanded the large positive gap that already existed between immigrant and native-born entrepreneurial activity rates.
• A growing immigrant population and rising entrepreneurship rate contributed to a rise in the share of new entrepreneurs that are immigrant, from 13.4 percent in 1996 to 29.5 percent in 2010.
• Entrepreneurial activity increased slightly for men and decreased slightly for women. For men, the entrepreneurial activity rate increased from 0.43 percent in 2009 to 0.44 percent in 2010. The female entrepreneurship rate decreased from 0.25 percent to 0.24 percent.
• The African-American entrepreneurial activity rate decreased from 0.27 percent in 2009 to 0.24 percent in 2010. The white entrepreneurial activity rate decreased from 0.33 percent to 0.31 percent.
• The entrepreneurship index was highest among the least-educated group, moving from 0.49 percent in 2009 to 0.59 percent in 2010, suggesting an increased number of people entering entrepreneurship out of necessity. The largest decrease in entrepreneurial activity occurred for high school graduates.
• Among the United States fifteen largest metropolitan statistical areas, Los Angeles had the highest entrepreneurial rate (0.62 percent) in 2010. Philadelphia had the lowest rate (0.15 percent)

If you are looking to start your own company or want information on how to launch a new product, please contact Alveris.  We can help fill in the gaps between your idea and building your own company.

For more information about this report, please contact:
Rossana Weitekamp, 516-792-1462, rossana@weitekamp.com
Barbara Pruitt, 816-932-1288, bpruitt@kauffman.org, Kauffman Foundation

• Google provides the most dating site search referrals
• 25% of new vehicle buyers utilize the mobile web during their research process
• Portable PC shoppers do an average of 14 searches before deciding what to buy
• 75% of patients research their symptoms before going to a doctor for diagnosis

Hopefully Google will make their data more readily available to the public to help better analyze and research online behavioral and marketing activities.

According to Parks Associates, the U.S. digital health industry expects to triple revenues by 2015.  Currently Alveris is working with a number of digital medical companies including Digi Fit Life (http://www.DigiFitLife.com) and CyberMedix (http://www.CyberMedix.com).  I anticipate this market to be closer to the $7B to $10B range in 2015 as new devices provide better management of care for specific diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and sleep disorders.  General fitness devices that count steps, calorie intake and your body mass (weight) are also becoming very popular with fitness trainers and gyms.  Article below:

Parks Associates Forecasts U.S. Digital Health Industry to Triple in Total Revenues by 2015

Mobile Technologies Motivate Growth in Digital Health

DALLAS, TX–(Marketwire – February 2, 2011) – U.S. revenues from digital health technology-enabled solutions and services will exceed $5.7 billion in 2015, fueled by chronic-care monitoring solutions, senior aging-in-place services, and connected wellness and fitness apps and programs, a new industry report from Parks Associates forecasts.

According to “Delivering Quality Care to the Digital Home: 2010 Update,” industry revenues in 2010 hit $1.7 billion, and the projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the next five years will be 27%. Mobile broadband will be a key growth driver as many emerging health devices and services rely on high-speed connectivity to track vital signs or enable interactive features.

“The digital health industry has many subsectors, and near-term growth will be uneven across these segments,” said Harry Wang, director of Parks Associates’ health research team. “Adoption of chronic-care monitoring will grow slowly, and medication management and senior fall-detection programs will expand at above-average rates. The real engines of growth will be mobile care solutions and tracking applications.”

For example, CES 2011 featured a “Fitness TechZone” showcasing digital innovations such as mobile apps designed to promote healthy living. In 2010, Philips introduced its consumer-focused DirectLife service, which includes an Activity Monitor that tracks a user’s physical activity and helps with fitness and wellness management.

Wang is optimistic about the digital health industry but notes the political impasse over the new healthcare law could create challenges for healthcare technologies and business models. “To move forward, this industry needs smart entrepreneurs and visionary industry leaders and a regulatory and reimbursement system amenable to innovative, effective, and cost-saving technology advances.”

“Delivering Quality Care to the Digital Home: 2010 Update” provides a detailed breakdown of individual market segments by users and revenues. For information, visit http://www.parksassociates.com or contact 972-490-1113, sales@parksassociates.com.

About Parks Associates
Parks Associates is an internationally recognized market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services. Founded in 1986, Parks Associates creates research capital for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-ups through market reports, primary studies, consumer research, custom research, workshops, executive conferences, and annual service subscriptions.

Each year, Parks Associates hosts executive thought leadership conferences CONNECTIONS™, with support from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)®, and CONNECTIONS™ Europe.

http://www.parksassociates.com | http://www.connectionsconference.com | http://www.connectionseurope.com | http://www.connectionsindustryinsights.com

Mindi Sue Sternblitz-Rubenstein
Parks Associates