Small Business Labs

AUGUST 8, 2017

The "Big 4" accounting and consulting firm Deloitte has released a series of articles, podcasts and videos on the future of work.  It includes an interview with Thomas Friedman, who also authored one of the future work articles. Deloitte’s not the only big company diving into the future of work.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 25, 2016

Bloomberg has a good article  on Uber using self-driving Volvo XC 90s in their test. Google, of course, is still in the driverless car business. But Fortune reports some of their employees have moved on to other ventures because they felt Google is not moving fast enough. 

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 22, 2019

First, the author of this article is in talent development. And 3rd, this didn't happen at Google or Facebook or some tech startup. And in this case, the signal is corporations are starting to consider creating digital nomad programs. There are 3 reasons we see this as a strong signal. million American digital nomads.

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Small Business Labs

MAY 22, 2013

The announcements that Google and Lockheed Martin have purchased quantum computers has led to a lot of recent coverage on the topic. MIT's Technology Review reports both Lockheed Martin and Google likely paid in the $15 million range for their quantum computer.  Quantum computers are very, very fast.

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Small Business Labs

NOVEMBER 12, 2012

  As a recent Washington Post article on the company points out, it has two major differences from Google - they don't track their users and they don't filter search results based on tracking their users.   DuckDuckGo has some other interesting advantages relative to Google. An 

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Small Business Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

The number of citations has accelerated since, with Google reporting more hits on this term this month (January 2015) than all of 2010. There's been a number of good articles on digital nomads lately. My guess is this term will have 3x or so the number of citations in 2015 than it did in 2014.  And it feels great.

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 3, 2015

Same day delivery services are being offered by Amazon , Ebay  and Google  in a variety of geographies.  As a side note, I really like Google's same day logo (pictured to the right). The New York Times article Same Day Delivery Resurges, Adding Alcohol covers a number of these companies.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 27, 2014

The cloud storage price wars being waged by Google, Amazon, Microsoft have been getting a lot of press this summer. As the article points out, the current price is not far from $0.   And Google is telling everyone to expect price declines to continue.   But the price declines are not just limited to storage.

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Small Business Labs

JUNE 15, 2015

According to Time's How Silicon Valley is Addressing the World's Food Crisis : the food industry and tech industry have started to intersect and companies like Google and Yahoo have major research projects related to the future of food. Their cricket-based chocolate cookies are shown above.   All in all, it's not bad.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 14, 2012

 The article covers the usual trends related to retailing - smartphones, electronic cash, augmented reality, etc.   But is also had the following quote:  "Google trucks will deliver local services."  But the concept, with or without Google's involvement, certainly looks like it's happening. ."

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Small Business Labs

JANUARY 20, 2014

  Using web-crawling technology similar to Google's, they've amassed data on over 27 million U.S. They have an article summarizing the trends on their blog.   For anyone interested in small businesses and/or small business trends the article and trend presentation are well worth looking at. small businesses.

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Small Business Labs

FEBRUARY 26, 2015

There are also about 30 million Google searches per month for the search term “cat" Despite cats dominating web traffic, a few dogs and other animals also do well online. The  The article picture below shows a mix of animal Internet stars.

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 30, 2015

The article chart below shows the impact of these efforts on the prices of common Google adword search terms related to the on-demand economy. For example, Lyft is reported to have budgeted $50 million for driver recruitment this year alone. And

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Small Business Labs

APRIL 19, 2016

Key quote from the article: The NTRS data shows that while men are still the most prevalent consumers of the on-demand economy (55%), 45% are women. As the article chart below shows, even those who are not big fans of technology are starting to use on-demand services (see the article for the definitions of each segment).

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

Good article from JWT Intelligence on smart objects. A good example from the article is the smart beer bottle from Heineken. Apple is including Bluetooth LE (they call it iBeacon) in iOS7 and Google has already adopted it for Android. These are objects that have been enhanced by the addition of computers of some kind.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2011

  The chart below shows the number of Google search hits for the term "coworking"   Yes, you don't want to read too much into Google search data, but we've found it to be a good indicator of trend directions. .  This is illustrated by several clear signals.   .  

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Small Business Labs

JULY 30, 2014

If you Google "economic uncertainty" you will find many references to its impacts on the economy and business.   Several articles this week provide some insight on some of these changes: 1.   Several articles this week provide some insight on some of these changes: 1.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 25, 2015

As reported in the WSJ article 3D Printer Firms Fall Flat , both 3D Systems and Stratasys reported ugly earnings due to "an increasingly uncertain outlook as many potential buyers hold out for what they hope will be better, faster machines."

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

 Key quote from a Tech Crunch article on the talk : The tools and platforms listed above have given way to a “personal revolution” that’s delivered unprecedented productivity and reach to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Moritz also covered the downsides of this shift. That’s not just some ambiguous sense of hardship.

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Small Business Labs

DECEMBER 11, 2013

 Key quote from their article: every iOS device since the iPhone 4s and iPad 3rd gen is already capable of being either an iBeacon  receiver  or  transmitter , as long as it’s properly configured. .  .   The reason this is so important is the size and scale of Apple's reach.

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Small Business Labs

JANUARY 24, 2011

.  Fortunately, there are several excellent, recent articles with good summaries of the mobile payments space.    Several of these have coverage of Starbucks' recently released mobile payments system: BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Mobile Payments is a special section with several articles on the topic. 

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 1, 2011

We contributed an article to Banking.com discussing how non-traditional small business lenders - including folks like Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Google and others - are starting to provide small business credit services. 

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Small Business Labs

JUNE 1, 2011

  The San Jose Mercury News has an excellent article describing the 8 major sub-valleys of Silicon Valley.    Google and Paypal started in the same building and In 2010, 83 companies in Palo Alto raised $966 million in venture capital. Social Mediaville:  The SOMA district in San Francisco. 

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Small Business Labs

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

  If you read articles on lean startups, you will learn about agile programming methods, open source tools and rapid code development.    Also, as Tim Berry points out in his Entrepreneur article Is Your Next Startup an Ultralight , lean startups tend to be "high-powered firms." 

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 29, 2010

  The article 10 Best Jobs of the Future includes the usual far out, futuristic stuff Popsci is known for.    Key quote on this job from the article: "As the barrage of data grows—tweets, insulin-meter uploads, facial-recognition billboards—we’ll need skilled people to choose what data to pull and how to make it useful.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 17, 2010

  A Google search on "Gazelles jobs" illustrates this.     In case you haven't already given up, Scott Shane has an interesting article that compares U.S. .    Probably the most prevalent view is that Gazelles , a small number of small, fast growing firms, create most of the U.S.

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Small Business Labs

MAY 26, 2010

has an interesting package of articles on the best industries for starting a business.    According to article, 90% of the facilities are owned by small businesses.    A growing industry is the best bet, and as the article points out, industry experience is clearly a plus. 

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Small Business Labs

JANUARY 13, 2011

.  Branding expert Laura Ries presents this point of view in her article Coupons, Groupons and Cocaine.   We have a decent Google page rank and links from our site help with SEO programs.  The 2nd topic of this post is the power of good content.    Our policy is not to accept these. . 

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 30, 2017

Yahoo rather famously did this several years ago and Google and Apple have always tried to limit telecommuting. Again from the Quartz article: What IBM should value most, says John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who specializes in HR strategy, are better ideas. Hence the paradox.

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Small Business Labs

JUNE 30, 2014

 Adweek quickly countered with an article titled Gallup's Buzzy Social Media Report 'Deeply Flawed' Key quote: These claims have caused a pretty good media ruckus despite having a methodology that appears flawed on multiple levels.     Needless to say, not everyone agrees.

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