The Case for Boardroom Bullies

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today.

Should workplace bullying be legal? Business Insider's Suzanne Lucas thinks so. It's not that Lucas thinks bullying is right, it's just that she believes the anti-bullying legislation currently being considered in New York and Maryland would be bad for business. For starters, she writes, it would make hiring a nightmare. "Since almost every person who has been fired for poor performance feels like their boss is being mean, i.e. bullying, that means companies will be less likely to hire if they can avoid doing so," Lucas writes. "Restrictions on firing=restriction on hiring." Lucas also takes issue with the fact that bullying, itself, is tough to define, and just because it's illegal doesn't mean it won't happen. As Lucas puts it, "A law won't make a bully stop and say, 'Gee, I was going to torment my coworker, but since the new law is in place, I shan't!' Bullying in the workplace should not be tolerated, but the companies should have the freedom to decide what that means."

Google gets geeky with new data mag. Watch out, Wired, you may have some new competition. Google has just launched its first online magazine, Think Quarterly, whose first issue is devoted entirely to the subject of data. Although the publication is aimed at Google's partners and advertisers, Mashable notes "that it's a visually stunning piece of work" and contains "thought pieces about major business and technology topics." It's not exactly clear how many magazine editions Google will release, but it does mention upcoming issues in May, July, and October. The reason behind the new venture? "We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service," Think Quarterly notes in its introduction. "But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It's a place to take time out and consider what's happening and why it matters." Check it out here and let us know what you think.

Walgreens snaps up Drugstore.com. The drugstore giant is plunking down roughly $409 million for the perfect URL...about 13 years too late. Founded in 1998, Drugstore.com did more than $456 million in sales last year. Walgreens says it will maintain Drugstore.com's office in Bellevue, Washington, and also acquire the company's other sites, Beauty.com and SkinStore.com, TechCrunch reports.

They're in the money! Venture capitalists are pouring millions of dollars into social networking start-ups, and the one of the biggest moneymakers is a phone-based social network called Color Labs. The Wall Street Journal reports Color Labs received an astounding $41 million from venture-capital firms excited by the start-up's idea to use "a phone's location-sensing abilities [to] build a user's social network for them, allowing users to share photos, video and messages based simply on the people they're physically near." The moral of the story? If you're looking to start a new business that will get funding, mobile social networking is probably the way to go.

SCORE scores funding. SCORE, a non-profit organization based in Herndon, Virginia, dedicated to mentoring and training entrepreneurs and small businesses, received a $285,000 grant from Deluxe Corporation Foundation to help grow its mentoring base, according to The Wall Street Journal. In a statement, SCORE chief executive Ken Yancey said the grant "will enable us to attract new, highly qualified mentors and improve our ability to match them with small businesses, [and] help us achieve our goal of helping to grow one million successful small businesses by 2017."

The tax man cometh. To Connecticut. Yoga studios in Connecticut were in for some bad news this week when state Gov. Dannel Malloy announced that they'll soon be required to pay the mandatory 6.25 percent business tax, which, until now, has been waived for commercial yoga studios. The Wall Street Journal notes that "Mr. Malloy calls the new taxes part of his plan for "shared sacrifice." But consumers and business owners say the levies on everyday items come at a time when they're already stretched for cash."

The importance of start-up teamwork. The team is the only thing that matters, says Mark Suster, a VC at GRP Partners in a blog for Techcrunch. Before you go out and recruit a team, heed the advice of this two-time entrepreneur. Suster says he'll only hire the "A" players, and he'll never stop recruiting fresh talent, even it means you can't pay them initially. Read more on Suster's tidbits of wisdom for assembling a start-up team.

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Guest Blogging ? Are You Making These Mistakes? (Blogging Tips)

One great thing about blogging is that it doesn't matter how great your
content is you won't go anywhere without traffic, hence, the need for
marketing your blog. As someone who has written hundreds of guest posts I can
attest ? read more

POSTLINK



A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at
www.bloggingtips.com/books/

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Is the "Check In" Era Nearly Over?

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today.

Is the "check in" nearly dead? Could location-aware check-in services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places have already jumped the shark? Blasphemy, you say? Well, ReadWriteWeb's guest author Mark Watkins performs a pretty in-depth analysis of user bases, traffic, and check-in rates for Foursquare and Facebook Places—and the numbers might just speak louder than your sniffles, social-media junkie. Watkins, who is the founder of a "fun-things-to-do" recommendation engine, writes that while Foursquare has shown impressive year-over-year sign-up growth, "this means check-ins per user declined from 0.5 per person to 0.4. It also suggests that many of those five million users aren't active." Think about it: How many of your friends actually check-in regularly and post that on Facebook? Is it about 1 percent? Are check-ins going the way of the Hacky Sack and the eight-track?

How to get stuff done. In the latest podcast for the Harvard Business Review, the hyper-efficient Bob Pozen speaks with HBR's Justin Fox about how to be highly productive. "Let's concentrate on results, not on hours clocked," says Pozen, a business leader who wears hats in finance, academia, and on numerous corporate boards. Pozen's principles for higher productivity include think before you read (i.e. don't read randomly; read with an agenda in mind.) He also says you must know your comparative advantage—that is, what does your organization most need from you specifically? For example, if your company relies on you for PR or sales or recruiting, you should look to see a., if you are good at these tasks, and b., anyone else can do them just as well. Do what you and only you can do.

Rent too high? Blame the start-ups! From the days of the Gold Rush in 1849 to the technology boom in the 1990s, San Francisco's consumer-driven economy has long provided a haven for business opportunity and innovation. However, the influx of new start-ups and Silicon Valley firms to the city proper has caused a spike in rent costs, GigaOM reports. The average asking price for a loft space in the SoMA (South of Market) district, a hotbed for tech start-ups, has nearly doubled over the last year. "Everyone wants these creative spaces," said Blake Luger, a broker at Kidder Matthews, a commercial real estate firm based in Seattle. "But demand is growing and the supply is not." We can't help but wonder: Is this really start-up gentrification of the cool neighborhoods?

"Secret sauce" for jobs. You know Uncle Sam is looking at you, entrepreneurs. For Tim Kane, it's not rocket science: Cutting taxes will help entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs will create more jobs, more jobs will boost the economy. Kane spelled out this theory in a lengthy Huffington Post column yesterday. He writes: "What's the secret sauce for job creation? Step one is to identify who actually creates jobs (hint: entrepreneurs), and it seems like all parties in Washington finally agree on this one. Step two is to find the best way to, if you can forgive the term, stimulate them." Stimulate them, indeed. Kane calls for a less progressive tax system to limit the tax burden on entrepreneurs with sole proprietorships or LLCs, a solution which he claims is "sure to please no one." Still, he draws from his own paper to prove that start-ups create 150 percent of new jobs in the United States. As existing firms lose an average of 1 million jobs, start-ups create an average of 3 million. But are lower taxes really the answer? Inc. investigated that theory last month.

Who cheats on their taxes? University of Chicago economist Casey B. Mulligan writes in the New York Times today that "some people pay taxes not because of fines that the I.R.S. might levy, but because a tax conviction would harm their professional reputation and that, in turn, would lower their income." He posted one of the most amusing charts we've ever seen on the subject of taxes, placing various professions along a graph measuring importance of integrity in profession against net tax misreporting percentages. Guess what, sales professionals and techies? You apparently, in Oscar Vela's data supply, rank lower in misreportings, and higher in integrity than us media folks (although you don't hold a torch to lawyers. Analyze that).

Who lags in tech adoption? According to an annual study conducted by the World Economic Forum, we do. The United States is behind other countries when it comes to communications technology and computing use. The study ranks the U.S. at fifth, behind Sweden, Singapore, Finland, and Switzerland (in that order). The New York Times notes that the study compares results from 138 countries and actually began after the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2001. It also notes that the U.S. had a lot of "uneven" results when looking at its technology economic competitiveness, one which ranked the country 76th in the rate of mobile phone subscriptions. Can you hear me now?

The double-sided future of smartphones? First we had giant phones. Then flip phones came around, only to be ousted by single-sided touch-screen smartphones. Now, it seems, the next big thing could be a combination of all three: Giant, flip, touch-screen smartphones. Seriously. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the new Kyocera Echo from Sprint, which, at first glance, looks like a typical (albeit "chunky") flip Android. But when the top half is opened, it reveals another screen, giving the phone near-tablet size proportions. But will it stick? "Using two screens at once makes sense from a productivity standpoint," the Journal notes. But "I'd wager many people will use just one screen most of the time, since revealing the second screen requires the clunky step of folding back the top screen with an awkward hinge." In a broader sense, perhaps the real question that this phone begs is one of identity, that is, can a phone function as a tablet, and can a tablet function as a phone? Weigh in below with your comments and/or philosophical sentiments.

Newsweek chairman dies at 92. Less than a year after acquiring the struggling magazine, businessman and philanthropist Sidney Harman died Tuesday. He had been suffering with acute myeloid leukemia, according to The Daily Beast, the news website also owned by Harman. He made his fortune with Harman Kardon, an audio equipment manufacturer he co-founded in 1953. As The Daily Beast writes, "His stereo was a monster hit—the iPad of its day. Soon every educated music-lover in the country had to have a Harman Kardon and static became a thing of the past." He used that success to support the arts, education, and, in August 2010, to buy Newsweek from The Washington Post Company for $1. When he did so, his daughter Barbara told The New York Times "He’s a man who needs a project…He will die working—if he does die—and he'll love every minute of it, because he’ll pick things to do that are worth doing."

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LBi International N.V.: LBi International N.V.: Quarterly trading update for the period January - March 2011 (Market Wire)

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS (MARKET WIRE) LBi International N.V. (NYSE Euronext
symbol: LBI), Europe's largest marketing and technology agency, today reports
its first quarter results for the period ended 31 March 2011.

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GSP's Secret to Becoming A Champion in Anything You Do

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My App Gap Posts for April 2011 (Portals and KM)

Here are my AppGap posts for April. I am also writing in another Corante blog,
FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the
end of January 2008. Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with...

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Complete Rules of Entrepreneurship

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today.

Entrepreneurs, defined. Merriam-Webster defines an entrepreneur as "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise;" however, Business Insider columnist James Altucher believes this definition is inadequate. Altucher, who has started, invested in, and advised dozens of businesses, has created his own definitive 100 rules for being an entrepreneur. Most of the rules on this comprehensive list address the initial challenges of launching a new business—but some rules also apply to those larger, more stable, companies as well. Which rules do you follow? What's missing from the list? Let us know below.

Is the start-up bubble just "blubble?" That's the word Michael Arrington is using, at least. In a TechCrunch piece published this weekend, Arrington asserts that the state of the start-up world is a far-cry from the 1999 to 2000 years of cash and burn. "This isn't a bubble," he writes. "It's more like a Blubble. A blubble? Yes, a blubble. Because there is a lot of whining going on." Arrington asserts that start-ups 11 years ago were encouraged to raise hundreds of millions in venture capital and spend it on anything remotely useful, while today's start-ups are much leaner. High valuations on Facebook and Twitter have stoked the "bubble" buzz, he says, but start-ups are hardly raising enough funds to start using the B-word officially. Well, most start-ups at least. "Absolutely no one is telling start-ups to raise and spend money as fast as they can. With the possible exception of Color. I have no idea what those guys are up to over there in crazy picture-sharing land."

Happy employees work here. In the mist of a gradual economic recovery, how do you retain employees? Fortune highlights the best practices from three companies that made this year's 100 Best Companies to Work For list: Zappos, DreamWorks Animation, and Teach for America. Some of the perks include a live-and-work-from-anywhere policy, free dry-cleaning, meals and medical care on campus, and the ability of veto hiring decisions if a job candidate doesn't fit the company culture. One recruiting manager, Christa Foley, says: "We're looking for people who don't take themselves too seriously." The company she works for interviews job candidates in rooms with weird names, such as an Oprah-style talk show set where candidates sit on a couch next to their HR host.

The stalemate is over. Twitter is staying in San Francisco, the company announced on its blog Friday, the New York Times reports. The news puts to rest a months-long stand-off over during which Twitter threatened to leave its home by the bay, and officials debated whether Twitter should be allowed to benefit from a special tax exemption to San Francisco's only-in-the-state payroll tax. In order to take the break, Twitter is moving into a district of the Central Market neighborhood newly zoned as payroll-tax-exempt. When? "We don't yet have a timeline for our relocation, but we expect we will move into our new space in mid-2012. We can't wait," Sean Garrett posted for Twitter. What's yet to be seen is how the city reacts to similar relocation threats from other local, growing tech companies such as Zynga.

Redmond rethinks employee comp. In an effort to keep from employees from departing for start-ups, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has unveiled new rules governing employee pay, according to an internal company memo published by GeekWire. The retooled compensation scheme would raise base salaries while reducing deferred compensation awarded in the form of stock. In addition, Microsoft's performance-rating system will be retooled, and special consideration will be paid to "early and mid-level R&D, mid-level company-wide and certain geographies," the memo says. In a post titled "What Microsoft CEO Ballmer Gets Wrong About Employee Compensation," Mogulite's Amy Tennery observes a.) the shout-out for oft-maligned middle managers is surprising; and b.) "For the less-stock-more-cash strategy to be a boon to employees, Microsoft shares would need to decline significantly over time."

Big gains for tablets predicted. When the iPad was introduced a year ago, critics complained it was simply a bigger version of the iPhone—without the actual ability to make a phone call. The iPad and its competitors have since proven themselves highly useful both for consumer and for commercial use. Goldman Sachs forecasts tablets will account for 17 percent of all wireless data demand by 2020, as reported by All Things Digital this morning. Smartphones remain far more prevalent than their larger counterparts (they can make phone calls after all), but this data proves tablets are fast becoming less a luxury and more a necessity for consumer and commercial use.

Marketing begins at home. Sure, customers research large purchases, such as electronics or automobiles, before heading to the store or showroom. Research shows that "coming out of the recession, consumers are more scrupulous about researching their everyday products such as diapers and detergent, too," the Wall Street Journal reports. More than one-fifth of consumers research food and beverage purchases online, one-third research pet products, and nearly 40 percent research baby products, data from consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail shows. Is this an early knell for the end of flashy in-store shelf displays and aisle-end promotions? Not necessarily, but it does mean retail stores and brands are boosting their investments in reaching consumers online first, including on social media. Eighty-three percent of consumer-product companies say they plan to increase their investments in shopper marketing over the next three years, according to a Booz & Co. survey.

Are you a winner? Eager to learn more about the ins-and-outs of social media and how to apply them to your business? An American Express-sponsored Facebook contest could land you (and four other small companies) a trip to Facebook's offices in Palo Alto, California, as well as $2,500 in Facebook ad credits and a $20,000 check, ReadWriteWeb reports. How can you enroll? Why the AmEx OPEN Facebook page, of course.

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