Posts Tagged: "Business"

We pick up our conversation with where many inventors stumble as they attempt to move from idea person to small business person. We also discuss lessons learned from a Big Bang Theory episode, as well as the important of taking reasonable risks, protecting your innovations (Key is a fan of provisional patent applications to start) and the importance of knowing the market for your product.

Whether you are just getting your feet wet in the wild world of inventions and patents, or you already have your business up and running, social media can help expand your business. Everywhere you look, there are Facebook “Like” buttons, LinkedIn “Share” buttons and Twitter “Tweet” buttons. Even Google has entered the social sharing game with Google+ allowing you to “+1” content. Social media can help catapult your business into overdrive – if you know how to use it effectively. Here are some tips to using social media to expand business.

A lot of inventors and entrepreneurs might come up with an idea that solves a problem, but I’ve always took a different approach. I would let the market tell me what it’s looking for or what it needs or what’s missing. And I like to refer to it as looking for a sleeping dinosaur. By that I mean something that is old and tired. Don’t reinvent the wheel but come up with a small change in existing products. So number one, you’re guaranteed that there’s a market for it. And number two, the technology exists.

First, the biggest mistake lawyers make is that they primarily write for other lawyers.  That is a huge mistake.  There are only so many lawyers in any legal niche, and only a subset of them are going to be willing to read news or information on the Internet.  A smaller subset of those who use the Internet to acquire information will be willing to read blogs.  So if you are primarily writing for lawyers that means your audience is going to be kept small. Additionally, lawyers don’t typically turn into clients. So if you write like a lawyer for an attorney audience you are almost certainly missing the mark.

No matter where we go these days, social media surrounds us. It seems everyone is saying, “Follow us on Twitter.” “Like us on Facebook.” “For More Information Scan Our QR Code.” Just this week alone I have seen at least a dozen places in my everyday life where social media has come into the real world; At church, On my way home from the airport on the backs of hotel shuttle vans; At my local coffee shop to name a few. Social media is here to stay and businesses of all sizes know it. But what many smaller businesses don’t know or care to realize is that there are several bad habits that still need to be broken in order to make the most out of their social media strategies. Following is a list of these common bad habits and what small business can do to get it break away from these same old mistakes.

An assignment indicates who owns an issued patent or pending patent application. They are registered with the USPTO and available for public inspection. There is a special type of assignment called a “security agreement”. A security agreement indicates that a patent owner has used its patents as collateral for a loan. The security agreement says that the lender will get ownership of the patent if the current patent owner defaults on the loan. The security agreement also restricts what the patent owner can do with its patent so that the value of the patent is preserved. A patent owner might be obligated, for example, to pay the maintenance fees for an issued patent. Once the loan is paid off, the security agreement is released. If the loan goes into default, however, the ownership of the patent is transferred to the lender.

Social Media is not a fad. It is not something that is going to go away nor is it going to be replaced by something bigger and better. Most businesses have embraced social media and all that it has to offer. Perhaps you, yourself have taken a ride on the social media bandwagon. But, even if you have a well-established social media presence, are you really getting the most out of your online relationships? Are you missing opportunities to truly leverage your business relationships online in order to reap bigger rewards and sales in the real world? Following are 5 easy ways that you can take to utilize your online business and real-world relationships to increase your overall social media ROI.

With the advent and rise of the Internet, digital property rights have become an increasingly hot-topic in the Board rooms and Executive Offices of major companies, particularly those in the hi-tech industry. Much like the information protected under intellectual property rights, digital products provide their creators with certain protections under the law. The problems and legal challenges facing major companies like Yahoo and Facebook will help better define the laws surrounding digital property rights, and likely present opportunities as well as a whole host of new legal questions.

It is also critical for inventors and entrepreneurs to have a strategy to succeed, which seems simple enough, but is typically anything but simple for the creative types that are so good at inventing. The goal is not to create an invention that is cool, the goal is not to get a patent, the goal is almost universally to make money. The cool invention and patent are a means to the end, not the end in and of themselves. If you approach your patent activities appropriately you can lay the foundation of a business plan, at least insofar as the technology and technological advancement of your innovation is concerned. But like almost everything in life, there is a cost associated with succeeding. The cost is hard work to be sure, but there will also be significant financial requirements as well. While you may need to bootstrap your invention and business, as you move forward you will invariably need funding. From Angel investors to start, and maybe from Venture Capitalists eventually.

Protecting trade secrets is critically important if for no other reason than making sure that the time, money and energy you spend building your business is not wasted. If your employees could simply leave without having any contractual obligations that would prevent them from taking information, stealing employees away and/or soliciting your existing customers then they would be able to set up a business and compete with you for a fraction of what it cost you to do the same. After all, you were the one who spent the time and money for marketing to attract customers in the first place, and you were the one who spent the time and money necessary to train your employees. Without the cost of acquiring new customers and the costs associated with training employees that new business set up by your former employee would compete with you and have only a fraction of the start-up and overhead costs you faced. That can make it difficult for any business to keep the doors open.

Consider, for example, the old axiom that entrepreneurs must be unwaveringly fixated on a single goal. Most startups are built around a single product or service that is assumed (but not yet proven) to meet a real consumer need and offer a lucrative market opportunity. The CEO of that startup is likewise singularly focused on getting a fully-baked product out the door as soon as possible in order to start generating revenues while at the same time building a pipeline for future offerings. Given the limited resources in most startups, this often means that the engineers are building Version 2 of the product before Version 1 has even been tested in the market.

Thanks to social media everyone has the ability to connect with like-minded individuals all over the world. But if you want to exploit social media you need to have an effective strategy. It doesn’t take an enormous amount of time each day. In fact with only 15 minutes a day, you can really make quite an impact. But like everything you hope to succeed with in life it does take planning and forethought. Here are suggestions on how you might be able to use social media to develop your brand, monitor quality, engage customers, expand upon ideas and connect with others within your industry.

Frustration with registration and login isn’t limited to mobile devices, of course. As the web has become more participatory and an integral component of our lives, the average web user has accumulated dozens of accounts at different websites — each with a distinct username and password to remember. Even more problematic, many people try to cope with this problem by recycling the same password across multiple sites, thereby jeopardizing their online security. Social login alleviates this “password fatigue” problem and offers up benefits both for online users and online businesses and other websites.

The truth is that Google bought a great deal more than patents when it acquired Motorola, though there are doubtless some real gems in the Motorola portfolio. As a relative newcomer to the wireless arena, the search giant in one bold move got its hands on the unmatched innovation experience of the longest-lived mobile phone company on earth. The technical acumen and product experience of those thousands of mobile software and hardware engineers will prove hugely valuable to Google as it seeks to dominate the $250 billion global market in smartphones, especially if it decides to become a handset maker as Motorola had been.

How often do you use a telephone book to search for a business of interest? Phonebook? What’s a phonebook, right? How often do you search in the online yellow pages for a particular business? Probably anytime you want to know how to contact a company of interest. And how often do you find that the business of interest does not have a website? How often do members of the business community hand you a business card with an email address @yahoo.com or the like? In today’s business world it is amazing to see just how many businesses still do not have a web presence.