Entrepreneur Mag New Website

Entrepreneur Magazine (by far the best magazine focused on new business development in South Africa) have recently launched a new, upgraded website. It is RICH with VALUABLE resources for anyone wanting to launch or grow a business.

You can link to some of my recent feature articles from Entrepreneur mag through the website. So if you are struggling with (1) writing a business plan (2) raising capital (3) measuring performance in your business (4) a fear of failure then some of the these resources may be of use to you.

Check out these articles:

How to Write a Business Plan – Step-by-Step
Entrepreneur's comprehensive five-step guide to writing a knock-out business plan.

No Capital, No Collateral, No Problem
Don't let a lack of cash sabotage your start-up or growth plans. Turn sense to rands and bootstrap your business to get going.

Made to Measure
Driving a powerful new car without instruments to give you feedback on its performance can be equated to setting up a promising new business and not measuring and reporting back on its performance. Too many business owners find themselves in this position.

Road Map for Business Survival
It happens to the smallest companies and the largest corporations. a time when crisis strikes so hard it threatens their very existence and puts the character and resilience of leadership to the ultimate test. In this special report, Entrepreneur showcases companies that faced a crisis and lived to tell the tale. Plus the real life account of a corporate success that turned into tragedy

Facebook = Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

On 24 May 2007 Facebook opened up their platform to 3rd party developers. This means that for the past 7 months coders and entrepreneurs have been able to create new applications for Facebook. This has resulted in over 14000 new applications -- some of them are useless and will soon die while other applications are really useful to those of us that use Facebook. For example I love the books application -- I am able to load up a record of all the books I have read, am currently reading and still want to read. I am able to write reviews for the books I have read and I get book recommendations (via Amazon) from based on my reading history. In isolation this application has limited power but as I get to see the book reviews and recommendations of some of my friends on Facebook so I get ideas for new books I would like to read and to comment on other peoples reading preferences. It is like an ongoing book club meeting with my best friends (minus the wine and gossip that usually goes with most book club get together). This application may not appeal to everybody but for me -- an avid reader -- it is really cool.

The developers of the books application make money through commissions on books that are sold on Amazon.com via their Facebook application. They get access to a huge user base (Facebook is the 5th most popular website in the USA), I get access to great book recommendations and an insight into what my friends are reading and Facebook have more users spending time on their site as more and more useful applications are added by third party developers (and this results in more targeted advertising revenue for them)

The underlying message here: there is a new economy developing dubbed "THE FACEBOOK ECONOMY". This economy offers excellent opportunities for entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world to to create applications and access a large user base via the internet in order to generate previously ignored revenue streams.

For more on THE FACEBOOK ECONOMY see the recently released Knowledge@Wharton article entitled: "Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry"

Calling all Web Entrepreneurs - Collecting Data For Business Model Research

HELP!!!

I am doing some exciting research project on business model development in web-based entrepreneurial businesses. If you are a CEO and/or founder of web-based business that was launched in the last 5 years then you are invited to PLEASE participate in the initial data gathering process for this research project.
Click on the following link to contribute to this research:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=dDtyCOG_2f9oWYQXFkaKkeZg_3d_3d
The survey takes no more than 10 minutes to complete and every person who participates will be given access to regular updates on the findings from this research project.

If you are not the founder of a web-based business but you know an entrepreneur who has founded a web-based business in the past 5 years, please forward this posting to them.