With national healthcare reform a done deal, it’s interesting to see how some industries are moving to solve the problem now instead of waiting until 2014. Last week, the restaurant industry made its bold move — the National Restaurant Association announced a partnership with United Health Group that will allow independent, small-restaurant owners to offer [...]

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What if you could get your small-business questions answered on the fly, for free? It turns out you can — at the Small Business Administration’s touring Speed Coaching events.
The SBA has teamed with American Express OPEN to offer this touring networking and business-resource information event, which started [...]

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I am a huge fan of the Heaths’ first book, Made to Stick, so it was a no-brainer to pick up Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, especially because it dealt with “change.” Change is a difficult thing for most people. This has always been hard for someone like me to understand [...]

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Apparently shoppers’ mouse-clicking fingers are recovering from the down economy faster than their legs: E-commerce is up sharply, while retail as a whole is just beginning to rise again.
E-commerce picked up sooner, too–research firm eMarketer reports ecommerce was up 15 percent in the last quarter of 2009, and up 14 percent in the first quarter [...]

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According to the latest figures from the Kauffman
Foundation, for each month in 2009, 340 out of 100,000 U.S. adults started a
new business. That statistic, the highest in the last 14 years, represents a 4
percent increase over 2008, or 27,000 more starts per month than in 2008, and
60,000 more starts per month than in 2007. What [...]

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The sites seem to pop up overnight and proliferate like mushrooms. Associated Content, Demand Studios, Helium, CrowdSpring, Elance, Guru, Amazon Mechanical Turk. 

In the freelance writing world, they’re known as content mills — places that offer writing and design services, often at astounding low prices. This technique is known as crowdsourcing — tapping a large pool [...]

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