| Senate After SBA Over Small Biz Contracts Posted: 31 Jul 2011 10:32 PM PDT 
Late last month, I mentioned an article discussing SBA numbers evaluated by the American Small Business League showing that the SBA did not give small businesses as many contracts as originally claimed. According to Entrepreneur, the senate is now taking a second look at the numbers released by the SBA and questioning their process. At a hearing Tuesday, senators questioned the SBA over its claim that 22.7 percent of federal contract dollars went to small businesses in 2010. In an effort to make sure entrepreneurs can get in on government contract work, federal agencies aim to award at least 23 percent of those contracts to small businesses each year. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, said the SBA’s system for tracking and qualifying companies for small business contracts “doesn't seem to make sense.” “We don't need to be spending taxpayer dollars to prop up a system that allows the government to take credit and large businesses to profit at the expense of the small businesses that the system is meant to help,” she said. McCaskill argued that a complicated framework of regulations makes it “virtually impossible” to track the number of federal contracts being awarded to small businesses. The Senate investigation claims several large companies abuse special exemptions to the SBA's size standards while others hold small-business contracts although they no longer qualify as small businesses.
Photo by dbking 
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| California’s New Online Sales Tax Hits Marketers Hard Posted: 31 Jul 2011 10:31 PM PDT 
The recession didn’t kill Nick Loper’s business. Jerry Brown did. Once the governor signed the new online sales tax law last month, a variety of businesses, including Amazon, cut loose the affiliates they had in California. After six years of growing what started as a $200-a-month business into a profitable full-time gig, Loper said he had no choice but to shutter his site, suddenly deprived of 70 percent of the commissions he’d earned sending customers to the big retailers via click-through ads on his site. “I always figured that in California, home to Silicon Valley and a million tech startups, they’d never pass a law like this,” said Loper, 28, who’s moving to Nevada, which has no online sales tax, to run his newest online venture, ShoeSniper. Loper’s site is fairly typical of those of affiliate marketers, who set up a website about fly-fishing, say, blog about the subject to draw readers in, then hope they click on an ad for FlyFishUsa, go to that site, and buy a fly reel, generating a commission of up to 20 percent for the affiliate. The sales-tax crisis has pulled back the curtain on this curious subculture, a corner of the Internet that Loper said was once dominated by “porn and pop-ups” but which has cleaned up its act and last year generated nearly $2 billion in ad revenue in California. Its inhabitants span a colorful spectrum, from advertising rock stars revered by their peers to home-based dreamers who end up losing their shirts.
Photo by Aurelijus Valeiša 
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| Hydrokinetic Power: The Future Of Electricity Posted: 31 Jul 2011 10:30 PM PDT 
Ted Christopher moved to San Diego three years ago to work in his cousins sheet metal shop. Every weekend he tinkered on his own secret project. In 2009, he returned to Minneapolis and launched his own business, Verterra Energy Inc. Through Verterra he hopes to bring his “small” project to life. Using power of water, he hopes to place his turbines at the bottom of certain rivers to generate energy. Hydrokinetic turbines capture the power created by the current in waves underneath the water's surface. Traditional hydropower, in contrast, uses a dam to create a reservoir above the river. Water flows downward through turbines to create energy then is released back into the river downstream from the dam. Energy developers have inundated the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with hydrokinetic proposals; nearly 240 are in the pipeline. New technology and tax credits are fueling much of the interest. The field is relatively open for new ideas and perhaps for Verterra's novel approach to the challenges of making power out of waves. The duo developed a prototype of a single shape, vertical axis turbine that can be as wide as 8 feet in diameter and as tall as 3 feet. One turbine is capable of producing five kilowatts (kW) of energy – roughly enough power for four homes. The Verterra turbine requires about 100 square feet to produce that amount of power, compared to 5,000 square feet that solar panels would need to meet that benchmark, Christopher said. With several Verterra turbines in the water at once in "pods" or "farms," the turbines could offer small grid power to neighborhoods and farms. "We're going to start small and make it scalable," Christopher said. "The power production will depend on the velocity of the river."
Photo by Maureen 
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| The Fall Of Groupon? Posted: 31 Jul 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
Groupon has helped many businesses reach new customers, but are these businesses ready to say goodbye to the service? A number of companies have been approached by Groupon and copy-cat deal a day sites for advertising, and they are no longer welcoming the service. One business owner, Joe Hargraves, who runs Tacolicious, says he's received around 40 pitches over the last year from various deals services, including Groupon. Hargraves says he has turned down all of them because his prices are already low, and doesn't believe he'll benefit much from a one-time deal that brings in customers who would likely never return. Another owner, Mark Pastore of Incanto, calls daily deals and other forms of discount marketing "the lowest form of marketing, like puns are the lowest form of humor." He too has been bombarded with pitches, about one or two a week from kids just out of college "who don't know anything about anything." While this anecdotal evidence shouldn't be taken as indicative of the attitudes of business as a whole, a recent survey of 300 business that participated in Groupon deals shows that 82 percent were dissatisfied with the number of return customers brought in by the deal, and half of those surveyed said they would not participate in future deals.
Photo by Groupon 
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