Small Biz Scene
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Get Ready for Emergencies
Continue reading… 0 CommentsLook out for Andrea. That's the message as hurricane season officially kicks off Friday. Still, more than half of small-business owners aren't worried about Andrea, or Barry or Chantal for that matter, the names of the first few storms this season, and 71 percent don't have any kind of plan, according to a TNS NFO study for Office Depot.
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Sarbanes-Oxley Rules May Be Eased for Small Companies
Continue reading… 0 CommentsThe Securities and Exchange Commission took a step Wednesday toward easing Sarbanes-Oxley accounting requirements for small public companies. While the little guys have been complaining about the rules since 2002, when they were put in place after Enron's collapse, legislators have not heeded their calls until now.
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Setting Up Your Mobile Website
Continue reading… 0 CommentsYou finally got around to putting together a website. But no, you can't rest now. With a growing number of people connecting to the Internet via BlackBerrys, cellphones, and other mobile devices, small-business owners now have to make sure that they set up a mobile website, too, says Jeff Grosman, senior vice president of marketing at Network Solutions, a Web hosting and design company that recently expanded its offerings to mobile sites. By next year, 1.3 billion people around the world will have Internet-enabled mobile devices, according to research firm IDC.
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Fighting Big Government for Small Business
Continue reading… 0 CommentsLast week, the National Small Business Association picked Scott Hauge as its 2007 Small Business Advocate of the Year. Hauge took over as owner of San Francisco-based Cal Insurance & Associates from his dad and transformed it into a shop focusing on small- and medium-size businesses. That led him to get more heavily involved in lobbying for small business in 1984, founding Small Business California, an advocacy group. I talked to him about how small business fits into the big picture.
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Pinkberry's Success Story
Continue reading… 0 CommentsFailing at one business venture is enough to ruin most people, but not Shelly Hwang. The 33-year-old Southern California entrepreneur ran two unsuccessful franchises before hitting the jackpot with the wildly popular frozen yogurt shop Pinkberry. But before the shop even opened its doors more than two years ago, it seemed doomed. Despite threats coming from all directions, Hwang and her business partner, Young Lee, have managed to expand Pinkberry to more than a dozen locations in California and New York and develop a cult following along the way.
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Ruling on Patents Roils Companies
Continue reading… 0 CommentsGetting a patent got a little harder this week with the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions. The case, in which KSR International challenged a Teleflex patent over an adjustable gas pedal, is likely to have the most impact on fields like biotechnology and software, where small firms play an important role.
In a unanimous ruling Monday, the court took its biggest dive into patent law for decades, broadening the standards for rejecting a patent. It showed the court's belief that too many of the patents that have been issued don't pass the key test of not being "obvious."
Renuka Rayasam covers small business, biotechnology, and other business news for U.S. News. Her stories have included a piece on the latest trends in corporate dining, as well as regular small-business profiles. She has written for the Austin-American Statesman, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bloomberg News, and tech magazine Ziff Davis Smart Business. She has a bachelor of arts in political economy and German from the University of California – Berkeley and a master of international affairs from Columbia University.