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Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
The United States Business Database
Dec 8th
United States Business Database Is A Collection Of Businesses Registered In The Us! Use This Software To Build Lead Lists, Start A Directory Website, And So Much More! One Of My Clients Used This To Develop A Directory Site That Made Her 10k A Month!
The United States Business Database
Are You Operating Your Business in Multiple States? What You Need to Know
Jul 21st
As a small business owner, it can sometimes feel like you’re expected to be an expert in tax and state law. One common area of confusion and misconception is conducting business in multiple states. By law, if your company plans to conduct business in any other states than your state of incorporation (or LLC formation), then you may need to register your business in those states. This process is called foreign qualification.
For example…
- You have a restaurant in Florida and decide to expand into Georgia and South Carolina. Once you have locations open in those states, you’re doing business there and will need to file a foreign qualification in both Georgia and South Carolina.
- You incorporated your business as a Delaware LLC, but are physically located in New York. You’ll need to file a foreign qualification to conduct business in New York. (For this reason, it’s often best for small companies with fewer than five shareholders to incorporate in their home state.)
- You live in Washington and your business partner lives in California. You incorporated your company in Washington, but recently your partner has been finding and meeting with the bulk of your clients near his home in California. You’ll need to file a foreign qualification in California.
- You’re a consultant who performs the majority of your work online, with clients in multiple states. In this case, you do not need to file a foreign qualification. Just because you’re making money from clients in other states doesn’t mean you’re transacting business there, according to the law.
What is meant by “doing business?”
In today’s mobile/virtual world, it can be difficult to know just what constitutes doing business in a state. If you’re uncertain whether your particular business needs to foreign qualify, you should check with your attorney or accountant. However, here are some general questions to answer:
- Does your LLC or corporation operate out of any physical presence in the state (i.e. office or retail store)?
- Are you frequently conducting in-person meeting with clients in the state (and not just conducting business via email/phone)?
- Does a significant portion of your company’s revenue come from the state?
- Do any of your employees work in the state? Do you pay state payroll taxes?
- Did you apply for a business license in the state?
If you answered yes to any of these, your business may need to file a foreign qualification in the appropriate state.
What is a foreign qualification?
To register your company in another state, you will need to submit a Certificate of Authority application (sometimes it’s called a Statement & Designation by a Foreign Corporation) with the particular state’s Secretary of State office. You can download the form from the Secretary of State’s website or have your incorporating company handle the filing and requirements for you. Some states will require you to have a certificate of good standing from the state where your LLC/corporation was formed (which means you’ll need to be up to date on your state taxes, fees, etc.).
Why is a foreign qualification important?
Foreign qualifying your company in states where you conduct business is your legal obligation. Failing to properly register your company could result in:
- Fines and interest for any time when you were not foreign qualified (in addition to paying the standard fees that should have been paid)
- Liability for back taxes for the time when you were not foreign qualified
- Inability to sue in a state where you are not registered
You’ll want to foreign qualify in as few of states as possible. After all, with each foreign qualification comes filing and/or annual fees, additional laws to learn, and added paperwork. However, you simply can’t overlook your business’s legal requirement to foreign qualify; it could end up costing you much more in the long run.
Are You Operating Your Business in Multiple States? What You Need to Know
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
How to Get States Into the New Economy
Dec 27th
Many think tanks produce dashboards of economic indicators to help government officials formulate public policy. While these tools are almost always well-intentioned, sometimes they aren’t well thought out, making them problematic to follow. One example is State New Economy Index, produced by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
This index is designed to provide policy makers with a set of 26 measures to guide efforts to move states to the “new economy,” which the two foundations say is “knowledge-based, globalized, entrepreneurial, IT-driven, and innovation-based.”
The effort is flawed because the designers of the dashboard combine uncorrelated and negatively correlated measures to create overarching indicators. Because combinations of unrelated measures aren’t indicators of anything, the dashboard isn’t useful.
For those who find this point too academic to follow, let me give an example to clarify what I mean. The report on the index says that to adjust to the new economy, states need more “economic dynamism” and offers several measures of what more dynamic places look like. The authors explain that states with a lot of “job churn” (a lot of businesses starting and failing); more “fast growing firms” (a high share of Inc 500 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 firms); higher value of initial public offerings as a share of worker earnings; and a larger fraction of the population starting businesses (adjusted for how fast the state has been growing), have more economic dynamism, which makes them more successful in the new economy.
At first glance, the economic dynamism measure seems useful. It says that a state needs a lot of people starting businesses, more businesses starting and failing, more high growth companies, and more initial public offerings, to be successful in the new economy.
The problem appears when we look at the measures of economic dynamism. Several of them don’t move in concert. Across states, the job churn measure correlates only 0.03 with the fast growing firms measure and -0.01 with the IPOs measure. This means that states that are high on job churn don’t have a lot of fast growing firms or IPOs. Similarly, the measure of entrepreneurial activity doesn’t correlate very highly with the measure of fast growing firms(0.13) or IPOs (0.11). That is, states with a high share of the population starting businesses don’t have a lot of high growth firms or IPOs.
The job churn measure does correlate reasonably well (0.51) with the indicator of entrepreneurial activity. States that have more new firms starting and failing also tend to have a higher share of their population starting businesses, and vice versa.
If we look at a measure that isn’t part of the economic dynamism index, venture capital – the amount of venture capital invested in the state as a percentage of earnings of workers in the state – the nature of the problem becomes even clearer. The job churn indicator correlates only -0.07 with the venture capital measure and only 0.16 with the indicator of entrepreneurial activity. States that have a lot of businesses starting and failing and a higher share of the population starting businesses don’t have a lot of venture capital.
Which states have a lot of venture capital? The ones with a lot of IPOs (the correlation between the measures of venture capital and IPOs is 0.64) and fast growing firms (the correlation between the indicators of venture capital and fast growing firms is 0.45).
Together these measures show states that have a lot of IPOs also have a lot of venture capital and fast growing firms and states that have a lot of job churn also have a lot of entrepreneurial activity. But states that are high on the second set of factors aren’t high on the first set.
This pattern suggests an important policy issue that is obscured by the State New Economy Index: Whatever factors give states a lot of venture capital, IPOs and fast growing firms are different from those that give states lots of people starting and failing at business creation.
Government officials can’t encourage everything and often have to choose one policy to promote at the expense of another. Given the data pattern described above, which alternative would you hope your state’s leaders would choose: policies that generate more venture capital, IPOs, and fast growing firms or policies that stimulate a lot of new business starts and stops?
Many of us would prefer the former. And that’s where the harm comes from New Economy Index. It obscures the difference between states that have a lot of high growth entrepreneurial activity and states that have a lot of high volume entrepreneurial activity. This lack of clarity leads policy makers to believe that they can get more high growth entrepreneurship by getting more high volume entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, places appear to be strong in just one or the other.
How to Get States Into the New Economy
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Twitter, Twitter, little stars, United States Internet, Media
Jul 18th
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As United States Collapses, Media Worships LeBron James
Jul 10th
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In the camp they’ll find social equality. We’ll prohibit all forms of competition except one. They’ll compete for prestige, and it’ll ONLY be gained… |
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States Probe Google Street View
Jun 22nd
About 30 US states may investigate Google for illegally collecting private information from unsecured wireless networks when taking pictures for its Street View program. The LA Times has more:
(When driving past homes to take pictures for Street View) Google did not disclose to users…that its cars were also fitted with radio receivers meant to gather information about home and business Wi-Fi networks in the areas where the cars were traveling. Because Wi-Fi networks tend to be static — like street names and ZIP Codes — they are useful for Google applications that need to triangulate the current location of mobile phones — as when Google Maps is helping a user determine driving directions.
However, along with the names of the Wi-Fi networks, Google was also collecting private information that was traveling across those networks — much of it from people who had failed to password-protect their personal networks. In the three years that its fleet of cars has been roving the streets, Google says it has collected 600 gigabytes of unsecured data.
The company has apologized for collecting the private data, saying it failed to realize that its software was sniffing the data out of the air. Google maintains it has not used or analyzed the data for any of its products and has begun destroying the data in several countries where it was requested to do so.
“It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal. We’re working with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns,” a Google representative said in a statement.
Google was collecting MAC (media access control) addresses, SSIDs (service set identifiers), and unencrypted Wi-Fi network content, according to privacy expert Alexander Hanff. Such content could include email addresses and Web browsing information. Collecting network content is criminal in some places, writes Hanff, which is probably why Google apologized right away. He also says that
the data is incredibly rich as it contains the IP address of the user, the IP addresses of the services they are using, the content of those communications such as web pages or emails and more importantly it was tagged with GPS data.
Google already stores and retains IP addresses and search data and over time builds up a profile of individuals based on their online behaviours, which it argues allows it to deliver more relevant advertising. But one thing Google has not been able to do until now is accurately predict where you live (unless you tell them), as IP addresses are not generally registered to a real person – they are usually registered to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) which in turn allocates an IP address to you.
Whereas there is limited geographical information on an IP address – usually to the country level though sometimes more granular – by correlating this Wi-Fi data with existing IP data Google would then be in a position to determine your geographical location to literally within a few meters. There is a real value in this for location-based advertising, which attracts a premium compared to generic advertising as it is more focused.
He goes on to explain why Google should be held legally accountable here.
French authorities are also in the process of deciding whether to prosecute Google for the same issue.
How much responsibility Google has for obtaining information that was publicly visible anyway is up for debate (as herds of lawyers seem to be proving). To me, what makes this case creepy is the same thing that makes any Google data collection creepy. That is, Google may collect and organize data for its own commercial purposes, but governments, in turn, could request that data for different, potentially more sinister purposes. For example, Google has handed over its Street View user data to the governments of Germany, France, and Spain. I doubt the governments can do much with this particular data, but the point is that Google can collect information and hand it over to governments, who may then use it for anything from criminal investigations to censorship.
Interestingly enough, Google itself has a new tool that tracks government requests for its data. Brazil is leading the pack, but the US is close behind. I’d love to see the tool record statistics on what that data is being used for.
View full post on Business Pundit
New Business Insurance – Best and Worst States For New Businesses [Infographic]
Jun 21st
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By the Numbers: Facebook vs The United States [INFOGRAPHIC]
Apr 6th
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Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. Follow him on Twitter for… |
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7 States Probe Monsanto for Anti-Competitive Business Practices
Mar 10th
Image: Educate-yourself.org
Seven US states are investigating market abuse by seed giant Monsanto. Attorneys general in Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, and two more states are investigating Monsanto’s competitive practices. The US Justice Department is also investigating marketing at Monsanto. Bloomberg has more on Monsanto’s brewing storm:
Monsanto rose to dominance via its genetically engineered Roundup Ready seed line, which was in 93 percent of the soybeans and 82 percent of the corn produced in the U.S. last year. The gene Monsanto adds to the seeds allows crops to withstand use of its Roundup weed killer.
The states are probing whether Monsanto violated any laws by offering rebates to distributors for excluding rival seeds, imposing limits on combining the product with other genetic enhancements, or offering cash incentives to switch farmers to a more-expensive generation of seeds, according to one person involved in the probe who asked not to be named because he isn’t authorized to discuss it.
The five states known to be part of the inquiry accounted for almost 39%, or $31 billion, of U.S. corn and soybeans last year, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. A state- level investigation, on top of the federal one, “can lengthen the lawsuit and potential settlements, and it can increase uncertainty and costs for Monsanto,” said Daniel Sokol, a law professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville who edits a blog on antitrust and competition policy.
Of Monsanto’s $11.7 billion in revenue in the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009, $7.3 billion came from sales and licensing of seeds and seed genes. Revenue grew by an annual average of 17% from 2004 to 2009, as earnings expanded eight-fold to $2.11 billion, driven by genetically engineered products and acquisitions of other seed companies.
Monsanto will take part in a hearing on March 12, the first of a series of government-sponsored hearings on agriculture and competition, according to Bloomberg. The Monsanto hearings are part of a torrent of regulator activity on big agriculture.
Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant (yes, you heard right) is accustomed to these kinds of investigations. According to the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette,
The legal and public relations fights are the latest battles for the Scotland native (Hugh Grant) who rose from demonstrating weed killer in barley fields to the company’s top executive in his 29 years with Monsanto.
Grant resolved intellectual property disputes early in his tenure as CEO, settling patent lawsuits with Bayer, Syngenta and Dow Chemical by agreeing to cross-license technologies. The United States abandoned an antitrust probe focused on its herbicide in 2004.
The company said it’s working to help double food production by 2050 as the planet’s population reaches 9 billion and portrays itself as a friend of farmers with its americasfarmers.com Web site.
If history repeats itself, the Feds, state officials, farmers, and companies (mainly DuPont) supporting the latest wave of allegations are going to have a tough time getting anything out of Monsanto.
If you’re like me and find Monsanto’s behavior both problematic and dangerous, I encourage you to sign a petition here.
View full post on Business Pundit
