Acroment recently returned from the COSE sponsored Small Business Conference held at the Cleveland IX Center.  This two day event featured educational workshops, a business-to-business tradeshow floor, tons of networking opportunities and outstanding keynote speakers.

The conference was kicked off by keynote speaker Daymond John (Founder and CEO of FUBU and current star of ABC’s Shark Tank.  John weaved his discussion around 5 “Shark Points” for businesses to be successful: Read the rest of this entry

Back in July, movie-on-demand giant Netflix raised their prices setting their customers on a rampage and their stock prices into a free fall.  (Read the initial announcement from July here).  If you’re not familiar with Netflix, they’re a movie rental company which sends you your movies in the mail.  You can get as many movies as you want for one flat fee.  There’s no late fees so if you want to keep a particular movie longer than another that’s your prerogative.  Netflix also offers a streaming option where you can watch a (limited) portion of the catalog directly on your device (PC, TV, iPhone, etc.)  Essentially what Netflix did was split their pricing for the home DVD and streaming services, effectively doubling their rates.  This, naturally, upset quite a few folks which left the company with a slew of bad publicity and a customer base that was leaving in droves.

And today… Netflix has finally responded.  I received this email in my inbox this morning from Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings: Read the rest of this entry

As reported yesterday, HP (http://www.hp.com/) has announced their intent to exit the personal computer Business.  This move comes as the company struggles to stay relevant in the ever dynamic consumer products marketplace.

For years, HP has attempted to build upon its successful printer business by acquiring other consumer product companies such as Compaq and (most recently) Palm.  The move to now exit those businesses is a win for Apple computer with its hugely successful iPhone and iPad products which have been competing with HP’s Palm Pre and the just released HP TouchPad.  Another big winner is Dell who is already the leading PC manufacturer.  Based on HP’s exit, Dell can only expect to continue to  gain market share. Read the rest of this entry

Cloud computing is all the rage these days.  Every time you turn around you’re hearing something about how it’s the wave of the future and how it’s cheaper, better, faster, etc.  For some businesses, the “move to the cloud” can be a good thing, but in other cases it can be a very risky proposition.  You need to ask yourself – can your business rely on the cloud?

Recently, Amazon’s EC2 cloud server service went down for more than a day.  If you are/were an Amazon customer using this service you lost service.  In some cases you lost data and in some cases the data that was lost was NOT recoverable.  Some major players in the social media landscape (Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby) were completely unusable.  Additionally portions of CNET’s functionality was compromised.  CNET’s response?  “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” Read the rest of this entry

Small businesses (especially new businesses) often struggle with getting paid.  Bank accounts, checks, credit cards, cash, etc.  The payment options seem endless.  For ease of use for the end user many businesses choose to accept credit cards.  For a small business this can lead to some roadblocks as you typically need to have a merchant account, a payment gateway, etc.  For the non web savvy out there this can be a daunting task.  Luckily there is another way: PayPal.

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