Finding Your Innovation Inspiration

Innovation is the driving force behind business. For many people it’s the reason they started a company altogether. There’s a thrill in thinking up the next big idea, and breathing life into a product or service that revolutionizes the way we think and live. Then again, innovation doesn’t always have to be HUGE, as long as you’re solving a problem or meeting a need in a new way it still counts.

No matter how you define it, innovation begins with the germ of an idea. Genius is not required, rather all you need do is drop your pre-conceived notions, and open yourself up to new experiences. Here are a few ideas to get your brain matter sparking:

1) Start with yourself. Keep a notepad in your pocket and make a note of everyday products or tasks that either frustrate you, or take up an absorbent amount of time. If it’s causing you headaches, chances are you’re not alone.

2) Look to your hobbies. Look and the tools used and products you buy for your hobbies. Why do you like them? What makes them better then the ones you don’t buy? Can they modified and applied to a different industry?

5 Reasons Why SMBs Should Not Ingnore Security

1. So they can sleep at night instead of worry about Conficker.

A lot of unscrupulous IT “professionals” made good money scaring their clients into paying for their network to be scanned for vulnerability for Conficker when really the network should not have been vulnerable in the first place. SMBs should not have to fear the next Internet disease; they should rest assured that they have made the right decision in hiring a professional IT firm that understands their business and manages the network to avoid the mad scramble.

2. Defending yourself against a sexual harassment lawsuit is no fun.

Audits on over 125 corporate and public sector networks in 2007 that 25.8% of the 10,000 PCs scanned contained digital pornography or other inappropriate images.

Blogging Break.

We are on a temporary blogging break for the week.  Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend!  The weather yesterday here in New York was beautiful.

How to Bootstrap a Startup Company

As I wrote earlier, bootstrapping can be a great way to finance your startup company without having to take on a swath of bank debt or give up equity to a private investor.  But the other side of the coin is that bootstrapping a company requires a lot of time, energy and patience; you won’t have piles of cash to solve the problems your startup encounters along the way.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind should you decide to bootstrap your startup.

Bootstrapping: Finance Your Startup From the Ground Up

Lot’s of people tell me that they have great ideas for a startup, but don’t know how to obtain investment funding to get the business off the ground.  Indeed, these days it’s hard to qualify for a bank loan and private equity investors with an open pocket are hard to come by.  Even when money is rolling, investors of all varieties are more likely to invest in startups and businesses that have generated real, hard numbers that verify their business model predictions.

This leaves many startup owners in a catch-22: to startup one requires capital, but to obtain capital one requires business performance data.  Not to fret, for the most part, we all play by the same rules.  The issue isn’t how to obtain private equity funding, but rather how to startup without private equity funding.  This is where bootstrapping your startup comes in.

Bootstrapped startups take whatever money their owners can raise from friends, family, and their own pockets, and use that as the basis for the company’s financial foundation.  It situations where very little money can be raised through the channels, bootstrappers may opt to take on personal credit card debt to help get the company off the ground.  Regardless of how its done, bootstrappers have one common goal: launch the startup and grow it to the point of profit generation for as little money as possible.

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