This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

Get started at: http://spr.ly/SAPStartups and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

Working with video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Domino’s stamped DVDs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and scented varnish. Since DVDs and Blu-Ray players tend to get hot during operation, the discs warm up throughout the movie. By the time the movies ends and you pull the disc out, you’re both seeing an image of pizza on the DVD … and smelling what you could be tasting.

And, in thermal ink, a message invites you to enjoy your next movie with a “hot and delicious” pizza from Domino’s.

Here’s the video:

That’s simply a brilliant marketing campaign. And a very savvy mixture of both high and very standard technology.

While broadband has killed the video rental store in North America and much of Europe, Brazil’s Internet is not quite so robust, according to the marketing agency that created the campaign for Domino’s. So unless you’re wealthy or in a neighborhood with good Internet, chances are, you’re still using DVDs.

photo credit: bunchofpants via photopin cc

This sponsored post is produced by FoundersCard.

That’s what you might be thinking after you read this article.

If you’re starting the next big thing, building a business or looking for your next venture, likely you could use all the networking opportunities you can get. The challenge is to find a high quality community made up of entrepreneurs and VCs who have the know-how, clout or resources to facilitate your success.

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This post is part of a series brought to you by TriNet. VentureBeat is collaborating with TriNet to discuss smart scaling for growing businesses and best practices for managing growth. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial credibility.

In the fast-paced world of startups and small business, hiring good talent is as much of a skill as programming, marketing or anything else. It requires its own brand of finesse and insight to identify top performers and separate them from the hundreds of other candidates that apply for competitive positions.

For this article, we’ll focus on the interview process. Sifting through resumes requires its own sharp-eyed endurance, but will never be as revealing as sitting across from someone face-to-face.

Professional culture, much like romance, is a lot about chemistry. This is doubly true if you have an established team and you’re looking to scale up fast. Your goal in an interview, in addition to checking qualifications, is to look for that chemistry — or the absence of it.

Here are 5 questions you should ask (and 5 more you definitely shouldn’t) that will help you zero in on the most likely, most compatible candidates.

Must-ask interview questions

1) What the best thing you’ve ever done?
In preparing for an interview, most people curate a neat list of answers to questions about their strengths, weaknesses and past experience. Few people will have singled out that one thing that has made them most proud, and they won’t see this question coming. Keeping it open-ended, without qualifying that it must be the best thing they’ve done on the job, may also elicit some interesting personal victories and give you a sense into who they really are, and how they might fit into the broader company culture.

2) What did you think of [recent news item about your company or industry]?
You want a hard worker who will ask questions when they need to and figure the rest out themselves. Someone self-sufficient but hardworking. The best way to gauge these qualities is to see if they did their homework for the interview itself. The best candidates will have vacuumed up the info on your website, stalked their interviewers via LinkedIn, and done a thorough Google News search for your brand and competitors. All it requires is several hours of their time, and really shows how much they care about nabbing this position. If they didn’t do any of this, it’s pretty clear that they just want or need a job, or they think they can wing it. And neither would make the ideal employee. So test them a bit. See how much they know. And if they start to sweat, don’t shy away from pressing further. They should know this is what it takes.

3) How would you handle [insert crisis situation here]?
Have fun with this one — it’s an opportunity to get extreme and see how someone can handle it. Don’t be surprised if this question flusters the strongest of candidates. It’s hard to think on one’s feet so fast. Some might even give up, or say they don’t have enough information about the company to say. Here’s the thing though: you want someone who will try to answer this question, and talk you through it as they do. This gives you a chance to see a) how they manage stress, b) how their brain works through a problem, and c) what degree of confidence and humility they will probably bring to their work — ideally a balance of both.

4) Why’d you leave Company X, Y or Z?
Sure, people may have a narrative planned to explain their twisty-turny job history — especially if they’ve hopscotched around quite a bit. But this is also a sensitive topic that tends to bring people’s emotional responses and nervous tics to the forefront. If you’re looking to suss out what their real goal or long-term plan is, it’s usually contained somewhere in the answer to this question. Things to watch for: allusions to burnout, mismatches with company culture, a lack of upward mobility. If they’re going to work for you, make sure their dreams will complement your own.

5) If you were me, what’s the last question you would ask?
No one will see this question coming. It puts them in the driver’s seat right at the end of the interview. Some candidates may awkwardly fumble here, pass, or flatter you by saying you did the perfect job already. Not impressive. The best response will be the candidate who smiles, and then uses the opportunity to hit a homerun on an interesting question they ask themselves. It will also tip you off to what they truly think their strengths are, rather than what you simply want to hear.

Questions to ditch

If there are some must-ask questions, there are also a few you should stay away from.

1) What are your top strengths and weaknesses?

You might be asking for these as separate questions, or for people to name their #1 awesome trait or shortcoming. No matter what though, this is what every candidate is waiting for (and therefore, prepared to answer like a pro). Why ask a throwaway question that has nothing to do with the reality of what someone is capable of? It’s a waste of interview minutes. How else can you explain all the people who are apparently “too much of a perfectionist or “annoying prompt”?

2) What did you do at Company X, Y and Z?
Asking people to describe their previous roles or enumerate past accomplishes is another good way to walk into an overly-prepped response. Remember, these are people who just dusted off their resumes, and had to comb through their brains for impressive cover-letter nuggets. They know how to spin past experience to speak to you and your company. Plus there’s no way to know if they really did double sales year over year, or plan that whole conference solo.

3) What are three (or however many) adjectives that describe you?

A lot of people seem to like questions like this. Maybe because they seem fun or unserious. But in the end, all it will test is the person’s vocabulary. You’re likely to get words like fun, hard-working (technically two words), sweet, creative, kind, and all the synonyms thereof. No one is going to throw in a weakness or character flaw here, and there are better ways to see how fast they can think through something. Other, even more “fun” variations of this question include: “If you were a color, what would you be?” “What’s your spirit animal?” etc. At best, these questions give the candidate a breather. At worst, they make them doubt your professionalism.

4) Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years?
No matter how many years you ask someone to flash-forward to, they aren’t going to envision a future that doesn’t include your company. In fact, few people will dare to say they will use the role as a springboard to get closer to their ultimate dreams. This is yet another opportunity for them to give a pat answer that they think you want to hear. Even if they say their grandest hope would be to turn your 20-person startup into the standard bearer for photo sharing, big data, online retail, etc., that’s hard to believe. After all, what if they don’t get the job? Will their dreams be eternally crushed?

5) How do you handle pressure or stress?
No one is going to tell you that they buckle under an intense workload, or that their brain short circuits around tight deadlines. It’s just not going to happen. Even people who do in fact snap easily won’t admit to it — even as they’re sweating bullets just sitting across from you. The best way to get the answer to this is to actually ask truly smart, incisive questions that get at what candidates have actually accomplished and what they want to get out of working for you.

Photo Credit: Eleaf/Flickr

Kabbage announced today that it will provide loans to both online and offline businesses, and will reject or approve a claim in minutes.

The Atlanta Georgia-based company’s bread and butter is to provide cash advances to sellers on online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. It is one of a handful of startups in the “alternative finance” space that offers an alternative to the traditional bank loan.

Today, the company is expanding its scope to brick and mortar stores. The expansion was precipitated by an integration with Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software that is used by millions of small businesses.

The company claims to be the first to leverage Quickbooks data to determine whether to give out a loan.

Kabbage has experienced rapid growth since it launched two years ago. It recently closed a credit facility of $75 million, and projected that it would fund 100,000 businesses by the end of the year.

Kabbage makes its money by charging fees to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the cash, and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from two percent to seven percent of the original advance amount.

Chief executive Marc Gorlin said that he’s received a ton of requests for Kabbage to serve offline businesses — “that day has arrived,” he said. “Today’s expansion dramatically accelerates Kabbage’s vision of democratizing access to capital for all small businesses. ”

In other words, PayPal is all in.

PayPal Here, which offers a triangle dongle to compete with a certain rival’s Square, offers a mobile dongle that you can attach to smartphones or tablets to take payments on the go. But it’s also now a pre-integrated solution for existing point-of-sale machines from multiple vendors such as ERPLY, Leaf, Leapset, NCR Silver, ShopKeep, and Vend.

Source: PayPal

PayPal’s triangle

“The cash register has been a familiar sight for generations, but it’s time to replace it with a modern solution,” PayPal says.

While PayPal was late to this particular game, it has quickly added partners like Home Depot and Abercrombie & Fitch, and, after being available just in North America for some time, recently entered the UK. And the company absolutely crushes all other competitors — including Google, MasterCard, and Visa — in consumer awareness for its digital wallet services.

But the real juice in this latest program is the free payment processing for the rest of the year. That’s huge to merchants who are looking to squeeze a few extra percentage points of profit out of typically skinny retail margins. Payment processors can easily take one to three percent of a company’s gross sales, right off the top.

Merchants can also skip the cash register upgrade and simply go directly to an iPad solution with PayPal Here running as an app, in which case PayPal Here can connect wirelessly to a cash drawer and printer.

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

We asked startups throughout the health care industry to apply and stipulated that founders must only have raised a seed or series A round of funding. In each category, our expert judges selected five finalists who will pitch their products and services live in front of more than 400 health care executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

The judges include representatives from Norwest Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Venrock, Qualcomm Life, Burill & Company, AARP, and one patient advocate. During the competition, they will look for digital health and health IT startups that are developing innovative solutions that serve the smart hospital, patient, and provider and has early signs of industry traction and user engagement.

The finalists have the opportunity to win editorial coverage in VentureBeat, four hours of partner meetings and mentorship from Morgenthaler Ventures, a $250,000 convertible bridge loan from Venrock Quarry (only in the seed category), and more. Read the full list of prizes here. 

It wasn’t easy to narrow down our finalists, so we included an honorary mention for promising startups that just missed the cut.

Here are the finalists for HealthBeat 2013 Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown.

Seed Stage

Smart Patients is an online community where cancer patients and caregivers learn from each other about treatments, the latest science, and how it all fits into the context of their experience. A built-in clinical trial search engine helps patients find relevant trials and discuss them with the community.

Clinicast builds risk scores, cost scores, and workflow tools that identify high risk patients, match patients to appropriate interventions, and streamline workflow. By mining actionable insights from health data, CliniCast enables providers to optimize outcomes and minimize unnecessary costs.

ReferralMD is an enterprise business relationship management health care service that helps primary care and specialist providers bridge the communication gap by providing real-time status updates, business intelligence, and performance measurement for referrals, insurance authorizations, and progress updates. ReferralMD complements all electronic medical record software.

Liviam is a personal sharing site that give you a simple way to bring together your team of supporters when you need them most. Anyone who has ever been hospitalized knows, care for a sick or injured loved one, coordinating family members seeing the new baby, or asking for help from friends during a tough time knows that it can be really hard to find the right way to say, “I need you.” Your friends and family want to help, Liviam makes it easy.

mHealth Technologies makes any compiled application (.ipa, .exe, .apk, etc.) on any platform HIPAA compliant with proximity-based security. The patented three-part solution consists of the Token, an application or container, and a dashboard. MHT embedded security enables any application to defend itself or self-destruct without a network connection, making breach impossible.

Honorable Mentions: 

Socialblood is a social network that connects blood donors and recipients of the same blood type through Facebook. They are on a mission to connect the entire Facebook population of over a billion users to their blood types. So when in need users could help each other and potentially save lives.

Jumpercut engages patients through personalized video. It’s increasingly difficult to reach patients in a busy media environment. By using JumperCut to engage patients with instantly personalized videos based on their immediate needs, you’re reinforcing the personal nature of your relationship with them, increasing their loyalty, and driving them towards positive action.

Series A+

Procured Health helps hospitals tackle their fastest growing cost item, medical products, with a web-based device analysis platform and an evaluation workflow solution. Procured also proactively highlights savings opportunities based on purchasing tendencies and market insights. In the face of multiple revenue pressures, hospitals can take control of their input costs with Procured.

Empower Interactive brings scale to behavioral health by transforming evidence-based psychotherapy into interactive e-learning programs, teaching structured coping techniques in a cost-effective, highly accessible way. The underlying platform is structured to ensure that end users will benefit from data-driven, proven methods that help them improve their psychological well-being.

Beyond Lucid is an award-winning company that makes software to connect Fire, EMS, and Industrial Emergency Response Teams in the field with the care facilities they serve. BLT’s MEDIVIEW platform incorporates industry-leading, mission-critical features to make emergency response safer, more efficient, and cost-effective, with zero integration engineering required.

Ringadoc simplifies communication between doctors and patients. Ringadoc empowers doctors, giving them the capability to triage patients, centralize communications, and manage their after-hours calls on any device. Based in San Francisco, Ringadoc is backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including FF Angel.

Better Doctor helps people find the doctor that’s right for them. Each year over 70 million Americans struggle to find the right doctor. BetterDoctor seeks to solve this by offering web and mobile apps that make doctor discovery simple and transparent. Since the launch in October, BetterDoctor’s health marketplace has helped a million patients find the right doctor

Honorable mentions:

Tiatros Inc. is a cloud computing company that dramatically improves coordination across the healthcare sector to make clinical services, telemedicine services, and clinical research more efficient. Pioneered in alliance with experts across the University of California Health System, the Tiatros solution is a private, secure mobile solution that connects healthcare providers to each other, to their patients, and to family members and other caretakers using social-network styled tools and interfaces that are already familiar to 1.5 billion people.

Zeel is a revolutionary way to book same-day, in-home massages with the best licensed massage therapists in New York City.

Check out the full HealthBeat 2013 program here, which is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers and two days of high-level chats, breakout sessions, and networking initiatives. And make sure to register today. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

Top image via Shutterstock

HealthBeat 2013 is less than two weeks away, and we’re confident it will be the most provocative and influential health-tech event of the year. The program is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers, high-level chats, breakout sessions, networking initiatives, and a brand-new health-tech startup competition.

CEOs of the nation’s most disruptive health-tech companies will share the stage with the long-established and respected giants of the health care world. They’ll share insights, analyze trends, highlight solutions, and showcase breakthrough products that are transforming health care.

Check out the full agenda here, and make sure to grab your tickets today. New participants include:

Albert Santalo, CEO, CareCloud
Albert Santalo is president and CEO of CareCloud Corporation. An experienced entrepreneur, he founded the company in 2009 with the vision of becoming a health care information technology leader focused on eliminating the waste and inefficiency in the healthcare industry today.

Albert will be participating on “The Next Generation Electronic Health Records.” With provider incentives being issued by the government (CMS) for electronic health record (EHR) adoption, overall hospital adoption of EHRs has doubled since 2009 (up to 35 percent). To date, about $5.7 billion in incentive payments have been made. With all this money pouring out to providers, what is next for EHRs? How can vendors stay competitive and fresh in this regulatory landscape? And how can they keep up with the building towards the new criteria for Meaningful Use Stages 2 and 3? Will cloud-based solutions take over legacy software systems because they are easier to update? How will interoperability between competitors really play out?

Other panelists include: Ryan Howard, CEO & founder, Practice Fusion; MaryKate Foley, VP, user experience, AthenaHealth; and moderator John Cooper, partner, ArchPoint Partners

Paul Tang, VP, chief innovation & technology officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
Paul Tang, M.D., M.S., is an internist and VP, chief innovation & technology officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), and he is a consulting associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. He directs the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation and also oversees PAMF’s EHR system and its integrated personal health record (PHR) system, MyHealthOnline.

He’s speaking on “The Death of the Personal Health Record (PHR): Rebirthing the SMART Patient.” Why did Google Health and other nontethered products fail? Are PHRs really what patients want? With Meaningful Use Stage 2 going into effect in 2014 and CMS starting to ding hospitals for poor survey results on patient satisfaction, will “engaging the patient” really be more than an industry buzz word? Come see how entrepreneurs are re-creating this space: PHRs 2.0, social networks, mobile apps, and transparency and payment tools in health care.

Other panelists include Kristin Baker Spohn, director of business development, Castlight Health; Tomer Shoval, CEO & founder, Simplee.com; Sterling Lanier, CEO & founder, Tonic Health; Eric Peacock, CEO & founder, My Health Teams; and Chini Krishnan, CEO & founder, GetInsured.com

Jody Holtzman, SVP, thought leadership, AARP
At the AARP, Jody Holtzman leads the thought leadership group, where his focus is to find ways for AARP to stimulate innovation in the market that benefits people over 50. This involves areas such as the future of technology and the 50-plus, technology design for all, and 50-plus entrepreneurship.

Jody will be part of “How to Use Tools for Patient Activation/Patient Engagement: A Cross-Generational Look.” Everybody knows it’s important to eat well, exercise, get plenty of rest, and quit smoking. This is easier said than done. Harder still is adhering to medication schedules and weight loss programs. Patient engagement is not just for the young and healthy. Here from a panel of experts as they share tools and strategies for what works for all demographics.

Other Panelists include: Chanin Wendling, director of eHealth, Geisinger Health System; and Alexandra Drane, cofounder & chief visionary officer, Eliza Corporation

Joshua Newman, M.D., director of product management & health strategy, Salesforce.com
Dr. Joshua Newman works on building and promoting clinical health applications, developing partner presence on the Force.com platform and enabling health applications for nonprofit organizations through the Salesforce foundation.

He’s speaking on “The Health Care Cloud: Everybody’s Jumping In.” Is health care embracing the cloud? Are we seeing more personal health information (PHI) stored in private clouds? What are the advantages to hosting and storing document data in the cloud in health care? How can cloud solutions increase productivity, real time pushed product updates and scalability of data and analytics in health care? How can on premise solutions be integrated with cloud-based solutions in health care?

Other panelists include: David Chao, product management, MuleSoft; and moderator Tim Kwan, senior associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

Register today for HealthBeat 2013. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

Get started at: http://spr.ly/SAPStartups and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

This is a guest post by Nikhil Behl, founder and CEO of Zoostores.com and Supplizer.

One of the many challenges a business must face is the decision to buy a pre-packaged solution or to build a customized version that meets the business’s exact specifications.

The latter often requires extraordinary time, money, and human capital resources. In the entrepreneur-friendly environment of today, it can seem like the best option. However, as many former “build your own solution” enthusiasts can attest, it’s often easier said than done.

During my stretch as VP of sales and operations for HPShopping.com, I learned the entire process of building our own solution was not only disruptive to our internal business process, it was also incredibly expensive. Having had that experience, if I were evaluating buying a solution versus building one today as a CEO or CIO, it would be a no-brainer — I would prefer to buy it.

But, before you go rushing down the proverbial shopping aisle, here are a few things to consider and some questions you should ask:

1. Is the solution I want to build a core competency of my business?

I have found that the answer is typically no. Current resources should not be stretched to do something outside of the business core competency or focus. Before deciding if you are equipped to tackle your own solution, first look at what you are trying to build and the resources you have available.

For example, if I am an e-tailer, do I build my own credit-card-processing engine or do I integrate an existing solution from CyberSource or Braintree?

2. Do I have the subject matter and technical expertise to build the solution?

One of the most critical considerations you can make is to determine whether you have enough subject knowledge internally to solve your problem.

Ask yourself: Are you really the expert at this? Can your team identify what solution needs to be built? And it’s not just subject matter experts you need to worry about — it’s also your technical resources. Do you have in-house expertise to utilize the latest technologies and capabilities to effectively build out and maintain the solution? If not, you may need to leverage external expertise to make this happen.

For example, in supply chain automation you need very specific subject matter knowledge. It’s a specific need set and the solution requires standard integration capabilities allowing customers rapid deployment at low to no initial cost.

Do you really need to build this capability in-house and will you have long-term value for it or does it make sense for you to adopt an existing solution built by experts who will continue to invest in it and make it better? Not to mention monitor the solution and make it scale without you worrying about it so you can focus on your core business.

3. Do I have the team to support the solution, as well as provide custom updates in the future?

Not only must you understand what the solution is going to look like today — you also need to know what your future requirements might be. You don’t want to address only your customers’ current needs. You need to find solutions as they evolve. Think about whether you have people available who can both support the solution and provide custom updates down the road as they emerge.

4. What is the total cost of ownership?

As a business, you need to carefully evaluate the total cost of ownership of your solution. Building your own solution means making ongoing internal tradeoffs. It all boils down to whether you are committed to making the sustained investment required in the DIY method or making the upfront investment required to buy the decision.

Part of this equation also relates to scalability. Can you continue to invest in scaling your platform as your business grows, or do you want to leverage a platform provider’s ongoing investment? When you work with a solution provider that has multiple customers, that provider learns from each of them based on each customer’s unique needs and requirements. So, if you end up buying instead of building your solution, you’ll have an insurance policy that your needs will be constantly invested in and updated.

5. Is the time to market faster if I use an existing cloud-based solution?

Though you may have determined from the questions above that you’d prefer to build your own solution, don’t forget time to market, which includes the time to design and architect the solution, build, and test. These steps all take time and if not done correctly result in a poor output.

Ask yourself: Do you have time to build a custom solution, or do you need rapid deployment? If it’s the latter, investigate whether there’s a comparable cloud-based solution that already exists in the marketplace. When there’s a need for speed, it may make more sense to pay for an existing system such as Salesforce for sales force automation or Zendesk for customer service.

6. Can you offer security and the ability to control data?

Security is a key component to the dialogue today for any customer solution. People need to ensure that their sensitive data can be stored securely. A decade ago, I would have advised being wary of cloud solutions, emphasizing the importance of maintaining control. But we’ve come a long way in the last decade, and as SaaS solutions have evolved, security has increased; sometimes they’re more secure than what an internal team can create.

For example, look at credit-card processors. Today, many processors prefer e-tailers integrating with their services, allowing the credit-card data to go directly to the processor, bypassing the e-tailer and their database. That’s because not all e-tailers have the core competency of managing payments and protecting their customers’ data. Likewise, by going with a service provider, your data may actually be safer because you’ll be buying their security capabilities and expertise.

From an adoption standpoint, people are putting fairly sensitive data into cloud solutions. For example, Salesforce is a leader in its space; small businesses are uploading customer data and market information into the cloud. NetSuite runs financial accounting for many companies, including publically traded companies. Finally, Workday houses private HR-related data for thousands of companies in the cloud. This trend reveals a shift in mindset that proves there is a greater comfort in the security of SaaS solutions.

The takeaway

While some of these things may sound simple, they require planning and resources. The devil is in the details. You have to make sure that you’re committed, that you have the capability set, and that you have the right team in order to execute on your plan. Your technical resources need to be strong enough to architect and code the solution, and you need to have the ability to scale it based on your business needs in a timely manner.

If you keep all of this in mind at the front end, then it shouldn’t take a herculean effort to accomplish your goals or require an expensive rebuild to get it right.

With 15 years of e-commerce and technology experience, Nikhil Behl is a successful entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Supplizer and Zoostores.com. Prior to Zoostores.com, Nikhil spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where he held a number of executive-level positions, including vice president of sales and operations for HPShopping.com. Nikhil is best known for being a part of the founding team that built HPShopping.com and turned it into one of the Top 5 of the IR 500 retailers in just seven years.

Businessman with two roads via ollyy/Shutterstock

This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

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Author, speaker, and general startup guru Eric Ries should know. His movement, highlighted in his book The Lean Startup, is almost impossible to miss in the startup community. And he’s eager to build and market in simple, minimum viable product ways.

“People are stuck on massive legacy technology,” Ries told me. “Anything new they want to do, there’s an approval process, versus with a tool like this one you can just get started immediately.”

But smart sites are a new type of website, built in two weeks for less than $5,000 … with heat-mapping analytics, A/B testing, goal tracking, and logging built right in. Everything on the otherwise standard HTML and Javascript site is built around a story, and that story is told on just one single webpage … which can get long, but never feels long.

“This is for everyone that wants to tell a story or start something great,” says Chuck Longanecker, whose Digital Telepathy firm created the concept of smart sites for Ries as well as Tim Ferriss of 4-hour body fame. “Sites don’t necessarily need pages, and working with people with like Eric challenged us to change the way a site could be.”

The key is story.

Part of Eric Ries’s Lean Startup website

Like Ries’ lean startup philosophy, a smart site is focused on one particular story. The story of your app, perhaps, the story of your project … or the story of your life. That focus on story ties all the elements of the site together.

For example, Ries’ site theleanstartup.com begins with an introduction: a full-screen photo, a headline, and an email sign-up form. After a “learn more” click, the browser view scrolls down to a teaser: three key benefits of lean. A third click gives you the heart of the story, an overview of the principles of lean startups. A fourth goes even deeper, as does a fifth, a sixth, and more.

Each time, you stay on the same page. And each time, you’re presented with a bit-sized chunk of story — never too much, always just enough to want more. A chapter, you might say, with a cliffhanger ending that you just have to click to find.

It’s a deceptive simple design ethic.

“I was really looking for something different,” Ries says. “It’s especially important to me that the site is not just a good marketing tool, but also a good example of the lean philosophy.”

And it all lives on a single page, tied together with elegant, logical steps, each of which is a user’s click indicating interest, engagement, and, ultimately, desire.

The ability to keep those clicks coming, of course, resides in the power of stories, of narrative. Stories are how we’ve shared information from the beginning of time, Longanecker says. Stories are what has connected us against the backdrop of campfires and coffee, and stories are how we interpret our world — and ourselves.

So storytelling was a natural metaphor for smart sites. The challenge is that storytelling is an art, not a science. And yet, Digital Telepathy has found a way to add both.

“Content is king, but you can’t just plaster it all over the page — you have to kind of currate the story,” Longanecker says, and therein lies the art. “You don’t necessarily know the best way to tell a story off the top of your head … you need to test it, iterate it.”

That’s where the built-in analytics come into play, and therein lies the science.

That science means that built-in A/B testing allows Digital Telepathy to play with the design and the story while the site is live, testing to see what works, what’s better, and what needs to die a quick death on the cutting room floor. Built-in analytics from Optimizely and KissInsights help, and more are coming.

The difference versus a standard website is immense, Longanecker says:

“Your website knows what its objectives are the day it goes live, and it’s giving you all this information on the backend,” he told me. “The design’s never done, it can always get better.”

I asked Longanecker and Ries who smart sites work for, who they’re optimized for.

Ries obviously uses smart site technology for the Lean Startup, among other sites, and he’s joined by diet, health, and learn-anything guru Tim Ferriss. These are examples of movements accompanied by products, but startups are also a core demographic — Longanecker cites companies in or exiting from Kickstarter, Y Combinator, and TechStars as a core demographic.

But it’s clearly not for a large corporation, and on purpose. It’s more focused than that.

“I don’t think HP corporate is going to call us soon,” Longanecker says. “However, it’d be a great page for HP for hiring.”

The U.S. Senate voted to once again advance the Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would place a mandatory state sales tax on things sold over the Internet.

The vote is the second favorable push for the bill this week, with the Senate voting 74-20 Monday to end debate on changes within the bill prior to bringing it to the floor. With today’s vote, it seems very likely the bill will gain approval on a final vote expected to happen later this week, reports The Hill.

The bill is better known as the “Internet Sales Tax” law, which consumers generally don’t like because it will boost the total cost of what you buy on the Internet. Brick and mortar retailers love the bill because they view it as a way to level the playing field with online retailers who often already sell items below the cost of what you can find in physical stores. In its current form, the Marketplace Fairness Act gives a free pass to businesses that collect less than $1 million in revenue from out-of-state consumers. States would also need to provide those online retailers with software that would calculate sales tax for customers.

But there’s a reason it’s so popular among senators. Remember that ANYTHING you purchase online is technically supposed to be taxed by the state you live in. If the vendor you purchase something from online doesn’t collect sales tax for your state, it’s assumed that you (the consumer) will keep a record of how much you owe and pay the state government during tax season. Since very few consumers do this, state governments have started going after larger companies that generate tons of revenue, such as Amazon.

Under current law, online retailers are forced to collect state sales tax on purchases if they have a physical presence within the state where the transaction is taking place. For a number of years, Amazon avoided charging sales tax by keeping its distribution centers out of highly populated states.

But Amazon is supporting this bill. Why? Because the company has had plenty of experience handling and collecting sales tax for multiple states, while smaller online businesses could face a huge obstacle collecting these taxes; that could give Amazon yet another advantage over the little guys.

eBay, on the other hand, is against the bill, since it has a huge community of sellers to keep happy, and if the bill passes, those sellers will need to start factoring in sales tax on all the items they sell.

“The Internet sales tax bill threatens small businesses by treating them the same as multibillion dollar retailers that have stores and warehouses around the country,” wrote eBay VP of government relations Tod Cohen in a formal response published on USA Today’s website. “Complying with 9,600 tax jurisdictions nationwide, and more menacingly, being audited and threatened with litigation by tax authorities around the country, is daunting. The family-run business worries about its survival.”

eBay is suggesting to lawmakers that the current bill be changed so that businesses with fewer than 10 employees that collect less than $10 million in revenue from out-of-state consumers be exempt from collecting sales tax on online. That might be a good quick fix, but ultimately, it’s not addressing the real issue.

If the bill does pass both the Senate and the House, I’d expect we’ll see quite a few enterprise-level transaction startups emerge to take on the challenge of processing online sale tax across all 50 states. But it could be pretty harsh for those small businesses in the meantime.

Handling multiple tax codes

One of the biggest problems with collecting taxes that businesses face is knowing the proper taxes to apply.

“Typical businesses do not keep up with tax laws, and neither do software companies. Tax codes change too often,” said Nate Stewart, founder and CEO of point of sale startup ZingCheckout. “Just in New York you’ve got different sales taxes on apparel that’s under $100 dollars. And what about if there’s a sale tax holiday they don’t know about? That’s something that a business owner in another state probably isn’t going to know about.”  If a particular business has a variety of items across multiple categories, the tax collection process could get even more complicated, too.

In fact, there are so many tax codes and stipulations that the ZingCheckout software handles it by allowing clients to create and name their own tax rules for individual items — assuming they know those taxes. Stewart said that, with the businesses he’s worked with, you’d need a dedicated employee working full time just to keep up with all the taxes. That’s something that might not be possible for small businesses.

“You’re not just talking about state (taxes) either, there’s city and county taxes in some cases,” Stewart said, adding that these issues are already being dealt with by businesses who are trying to process transactions from both online and from physical locations. “This would be a definite roadblock to growing the business for some companies because they’d have to decide if it was cost prohibitive to take their physical business online.”

Revenues were up 68 percent to $52.2 million, paid memberships were up 60 percent year-over-year — hitting two million just two days ago — and its cost-per-acquisition was down 12 percent. Even total revenue per average paid member (consumers pay a subscription fee to belong to Angie’s List) was up.

The only negative number — a net loss of $7.9 million — was also up, from $13.5 million in Q1 2012. That loss is due to heavy marketing costs as Angie’s List continues to pursue quick growth.

“Our business grew very well in the first quarter, achieving new records for membership, service provider revenue and total revenue, due to continued strong and consistent operating metrics,” Angie’s List CEO Bill Oesterle said in a statement.

While subscriber revenue was up 47 percent to $14.6 million, Angie’s List makes most of its money from service providers — the plumbers and roofers doing the work, who pay to advertise on the site and pay fees when consumers purchase their services on Angie’s List.

That revenue was up as well, increasing 78 percent to $37.5 million.

Consumers must be happy with the service, as the average first-year membership renewal rate is 73 percent, the same as a year ago, and the average overall membership renewal rate is slightly higher, at 75 percent. That does, mean, however, that Angie’s List needs to grow its 2,000,000 members by 500,000 in 2013 just to grow by 25 percent, and marketing costs that the company anticipates reflect that.

Source: Google Finance

Angie’s List stock price over the last three months.

For the second quarter, the company expects revenue of $58.5 million to $59.5 million, with marketing expenses of $27.8 to $28.8 million. At the company’s current customer acquisition cost of $72, that would translate to almost 400,000 new users in the second quarter alone.

“We will continue to invest in acquiring new members, adding advertising service providers and innovating products to drive further scale and penetration, while maintaining secure levels of liquidity,” the company’s interim CFO, Chuck Hundt said.

That will probably translate into another net lost next quarter, but the company is approaching profitability within perhaps just a few more quarters.

As mentioned above, the service just passed two million members on April 22. At the time, Angie Hicks, who co-founded the site with current CEO Oesterle, said that the company’s growth was accelerating exponentially:

“It took us more than 16 years to get to one million paid households but just 18 months to double it.”

Investors have driven the stock, which debuted at $13, from around $10 to the $20 level in the past three months.

This sponsored post is produced by Elizabeth Priestman, CMO of Fuse Powered.

If you’ve ever worn the hat of “user acquisition” manager, you’re already familiar with the challenges and complexities of acquiring players for mobile games. When it comes right down to it, there are only three ways to acquire players; 1) they respond to your marketing campaigns (paid), 2) they discover you in the store (organic) or 3) they hear about your game from their friends (social).

All players, however, are not equal. To develop profitable acquisition strategies you need to know the source and quality of your players. Value of players is determined by their level of engagement, willingness to bring more players with them, and ultimately, monetization.

More often than not, the highest quality players will come from social acquisition – friends of your existing player base. Including features that encourage players to bring others into your game is key to generating virality. Of course you have to build an enthusiastic initial player base in your game before you can expand your audience.

The organic installs generated as a result of a high rank or feature in the store is the best way to establish an initial base of high quality players. In order to achieve a high rank you have to run marketing campaigns to acquire a high volume ‘burst’ of players in a concentrated period of time, or have an incredibly popular game everyone loves and wants to download. It’s difficult to predict the latter.

No matter what your strategy, it is critical to know what your players are worth, not just overall, but by source, so that you can continue to optimize your strategy and grow a quality audience as cost effectively and profitably as possible.

For the purposes of exploring the value of acquired players, this article will focus on the valuation of players secured through marketing campaigns, paid and unpaid.

Mobile gaming is one of many industries that leverage performance-based marketing. The acquisition of players is generally priced on a cost per acquisition model, most often referred to in the gaming industry as, “cost per install” or “CPI.” Cost per install rates vary greatly, largely because of the variance in quality and volume of users any given source provides. The primary factor in cost is whether players are being acquired through incentivized networks versus non-incentivized networks. Incentivized networks are traffic sources that compensate players for downloading your game, usually in the form of virtual currency for other games or points that are redeemed for digital gift cards, etc.

Regardless of how you secure installs, to model the profitability of your game, it’s critical to determine the cost per install for each individual marketing campaign you’re running. This is easy when buying CPI campaigns from incentivized and non-incentivized networks because you run the campaign based on a CPI you’re comfortable with. You can set the CPI in advance of the campaign start date, or adjust the CPI in real-time as you go.

It’s important to also calculate the effective cost per install (eCPI) on both CPC and CPM campaigns. To figure out what these players cost, simply calculate the total campaign spend by the number of players acquired in that channel.

I often hear publishers say they didn’t spend any money marketing their game, they just ran a ton of click-swaps. Although many publishers think click-swaps are a free marketing option, they couldn’t be more wrong. The clicks that publishers are so willing to swap have an inherent market value, and often with click swaps the effective value realized is far less than what an open market would generate. Game publishers need to work out a relative CPI for the revenue they’re giving up since they could have sold their clicks or installs to an advertising network that would optimize their market value.

We’ll get to analyzing monetization by source in another paragraph or two, but it’s essential to evaluate how well your click-swaps monetize. Click swaps are becoming a breeding ground for unfair play. Some of the more sophisticated publishers are keen to run click-swaps but only show your ads to low-value grinders in an effort to protect their high value players. This means you are essentially trading legitimate, valuable players for those that may have little or no value to you.

The eCPI must also be calculated when advertising with any of the “daily app” promotional apps. A good rule of thumb when working with companies in this space is to demand player tracking. If they can’t, or won’t, provide any tracking, move on to other channels. Chances are they don’t have a clue how many players their promo drives to your game or if they deliver any actual value.

So here’s the tricky part, when you launch a series of concurrent marketing campaigns and your game is being downloaded by thousands of players, how do you figure out which network or marketing initiative drove each install and what the value of each install is by source? The answer is… drumroll please… “Attribution Modeling.” Attribution modeling allows mobile publishers to identify the CPI by marketing source so you can quickly and easily identify your lowest cost channels. Identifying which networks delivered the most traffic at the lowest price is one of the essential variables in your profitable game formula.

Even more relevant to figuring out CPI by acquisition source is the ability to then track and measure retention and monetization by source. With this kind of transparency, publishers can figure out the Player Lifetime Value by source. Once you’ve identified the best sources for your most profitable players at the lowest cost you can hopefully secure a boatload more and be well on your way to a multi-million dollar game by running profitable marketing campaigns.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

HealthBeat 2013 — May 20-21 in San Francisco — is putting the long-established and respected giants of the health care world on stage with CEOs of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive health technology companies.

Together, they’ll debate how IT can drive out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. They’ll share insights, analyze trends, highlight solutions, and showcase breakthrough products that are transforming health care.

The program is packed with 60 plus industry leading speakers, high-level chats, breakout sessions, and a brand new startup competition.

Check out the full agenda here, and make sure to grab your tickets today. New participants include:

Ben Rattray, CEO, Change.org
Ben is the founder and CEO of Change.org, the world’s largest petition platform, and leads the company’s strategic vision. A graduate of Stanford University and the London School of Economics, Ben is a frequent public speaker about the intersection of technology, innovation, and social change at events like Google Zeitgeist and SXSW and on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2012, Ben was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of FORTUNE’s 40 Under 40 rising young business leaders.

Session: Grassroots Patient Empowerment

Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for HIT, U.S. Dept of Health & Human Services (ONC)
Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM serves as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Farzad joined ONC in July 2009. Previously, he served at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as Assistant Commissioner for the Primary Care Information Project, where he facilitated the adoption of prevention-oriented health information technology by over 1,500 providers in underserved communities. Dr. Mostashari also led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded NYC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics and an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded project focused on quality measurement at the point of care. Prior to this he established the Bureau of Epidemiology Services at the NYC Department of Health, charged with providing epidemiologic and statistical expertise and data for decision making to the health department.

Session: Get Your Data On

Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer & EIR, HHS
Bryan joined HHS as the Chief Technology Officer in July 2011. In this role, he is responsible for helping HHS leadership harness the power of data, technology, and innovation to improve the health and welfare of the nation. Previously, Bryan served as the Chief Innovation Officer to Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, where he has led Maryland’s efforts to embed concepts of innovation into the DNA of state government. He has distinguished himself in this role as someone who can work creatively across a large government organization to identify and implement the best opportunities for improving the way the government works. Prior to his time with Governor O’Malley, Bryan served as Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, where he created a technology infrastructure that enhanced communication between the District’s residents and their government, and implemented organizational reforms that improved efficiency, program controls, and customer service.

Kristin Baker, Dir. Business Development, Castlight Health
Kristin currently leads strategic partnerships with health insurance companies in her role as Director of Business Development for Castlight Health. Founded in 2008 by Dr. Giovanni Colella and Todd Park, Castlight Health works with self-insured employers and health plans to empower consumers to take control of health care costs and improve care. Prior to Castlight, Kristin was with Goldman Sachs, & Co. in the Healthcare Investment Banking Division, working with clients across various areas of the healthcare ecosystem—biotech, medical device, life sciences, and HCIT—on M&A and financing transactions. Kristin received her BA from Middlebury College and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business where she was the President of the Healthcare Club and led deal management and due diligence processes for Life Science Angels investments. She lives in San Francisco, CA with her husband.

Session: The Death of the Personal Health Record (PHR): Rebirthing the SMART Patient

Chanin Wendling, Dir. eHealth Department, Geisinger Health System
Chanin is Director of the eHealth Department within the Division of Clinical Innovation at Geisinger Health System. Ms. Wendling is responsible for employing Internet and related technology to address digital patient engagement and community provider support. She has developed key strategies for digital patient engagement using the patient portal, patient-reported data and text messaging. She is in the process of developing a mobile app strategy. Her strategies employee technologies such as web portals, the Epic electronic medical record, questionnaire tools, smartphones, touch screens and iPads. Her projects have included expanding test results and offering provider notes in the patient portal, delivering medication reconciliation and asthma monitoring online, depression and pediatric obesity screening using iPads, and text messaging for appointments, medication adherence and weight management.

Session: How to Use Tools for Patient Activation/Patient Engagement: A Cross Generational Look

Mark Gehring, President & Co-Founder, Asthmapolis
Mark is co-founder and President of Asthmapolis, a company dedicated to improving asthma control and reducing cost using medication sensors and mobile apps. He has previously served as CEO of three companies: Geometrics, developer of the first commercial 3D radiation treatment planning system, now marketed by Philips and used to plan 25% of the radiation treatments worldwide since the mid-90’s, UltraVisual, a medical imaging (PACS) startup that merged with another startup, Emageon, reached $100M in sales, and went public in 2005, and Sharendipity, a software development environment for non-programmers.

Session: mHealth for the Underserved–Seeding a New Market

Amanda Goltz, Health Management Solutions Leader, Aetna
Amanda is the Health Management Solutions Leader at Aetna, advising large national plan sponsors on wellness and consumer health engagement strategies and solutions. Previously, Amanda managed the Innovation and Consumer Engagement portfolio at Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), a coalition of 60 employers who collectively provide self-funded health coverage to over 10 million employees and dependents at an annual cost of $12B. Prior to PBGH, Amanda was senior advisor to the national healthcare practice at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, and its policy and business advisory unit, Manatt Health Solutions. From 2005 to 2009, Amanda served as Program Director at Partners Healthcare, the integrated delivery network founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, managing a system-wide quality improvement and transparency portfolio across the care delivery spectrum. Amanda also advises several start-up companies as a mentor at Rock Health, a San Francisco-based health IT incubator, and StartXMed, health and life sciences incubator for Stanford University’s top entrepreneurs through experiential education; as well as serving on the board of several companies with seed and Series A funding.

Session: Healthy Employees = Smart Patients

Register today for HealthBeat 2013.

Thanks to AARP, ArchPoint Partners, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Venrock, and Voalte for sponsoring HealthBeat 2013.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

Get started at: http://spr.ly/SAPStartups and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

Today, I’m wondering if Sarah Hanson really exists.

When I originally contacted Hanson to chat about the auction, her startup, and why she’s skipping college to go straight into the tech startup world, she didn’t want to talk on the phone. Instead, she asked me to conduct the interview via email. That happens from time to time, so I said OK.

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson, according to the 32 Auctions site

But then a TV network reporter called VentureBeat, telling us that Hanson asked to be interviewed via email for a segment she was planning to do. Not only that, the reporter said, Hanson absolutely refused to do a phone interview. A VentureBeat reader contacted me and questioned whether Hanson was too good to be true. And when a journalist at another publication asked me if she was real or existed, I had to dig a little deeper.

My story began when Sarah Hanson, or someone purporting to be a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Hanson, contacted VentureBeat via email about how she funded her startup:

Hi, I wanted to follow up and let you know the auction ended at $125,000

http://www.32auctions.com/organizations/7349/auctions/8138/auction_items/167988

It’s the result I hoped for but I’m still a bit stunned.

A couple week ago, I was sitting at my desk trying to come up with an idea that would enable me to work on Senior Living Map full-time.

Today, I have someone willing to invest $125,000 in me. The beauty and power of the internet. It’s amazing.

Sarah

An email conversation ensued, and after she asked to be interviewed via email, I sent her a list of questions. I also checked for a LinkedIn account or a Twitter account, but didn’t find one, and put that down to her age. At that point, perhaps I should have been more suspicious.

Her answers, as you can see in the story, are superb and reveal a precocious teen (or someone) with insightful answers such as “my definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity,” which she credited to Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box. But there’s also a lack of specificity to her answers that some people find suspicious: no mention of which college she’s attending, no city or location, and no name for the angel investor who won the auction by bidding $125,000.

The website itself, Senior Living Map, is light on details about the company, organization, or people behind it. It lists no address, no location, and no phone number. There is an email address, feedback@seniorlivingmap.org, but no other contact information. One clue, however, can be found in the sites terms of service, the legal framework under which it can be accessed:

Governing Law

Any claim relating to Senior Living Map’s website shall be governed by the laws of the State of Washington without regard to its conflict of law provisions.

A search of the Washington State corporation records turns up no company called Senior Living Map. Neither does a search of Nevada or Delaware corporations, other tax and investor-friendly places where many companies incorporate.

That doesn’t necessarily prove anything: The company could be listed elsewhere, or it could be listed under a different name.

But pair that with the fact that I can’t find a Twitter account for a Sarah Hanson who is running a startup, or a LinkedIn account, or a Facebook account for a Sarah Hanson who seems to match the profile, and there’s a massive lack of corroborating evidence. In short, I have no idea whether the Sarah Hanson I thought I was dealing with actually exists, is who she says she is, built Senior Living Map, or even took a $125,000 investment.

I contacted Madison, Wis.-based 32 Auctions to see if I could learn more. The answers I got were less than satisfactory, mostly due to the auction sites’ design:

I’m including a general response which we are providing to reporters in regards to this particular auction.  This should answer most of your questions.

We built 32auctions in a way that makes it very easy for anyone to host a silent auction online without needing to work directly with us.

In regards to this particular auction…

We have had no contact with the auction administrator.  We first saw mention of this auction on April 14th through Twitter.  From what we’ve seen, the auction looks legitimate.  However, only the parties involved will really know.

The majority of auctions hosted on 32auctions are fundraisers for non-profits, schools, churches, friends/family with a significant life event, and businesses looking to help their communities.  This is the first time we’ve seen someone auctioning off their future earnings to fund a start-up.

Anyone who complies with our terms of use can host a silent auction on 32auctions.  Auction administrators are responsible for the content of their auction.  It’s also up to the auction administrators and winning parties to finalize the transaction.

In response to further requests to speak on the phone, the 32 Auctions contact apologized and said that “we only offer support through email.” I hate to say that this is starting to sound familiar, but frankly, it is.

I have also attempted to contact Sarah Hanson multiple times via email. I told her I would like to give her a chance to set the record straight and prove that she is who she says she is.

I have received no response yet.

So here we are. I can’t guarantee that the woman I wrote a story about exists. And I can’t disprove it at the moment, either. All I can do is lay out what I have learned so far, and keep digging to learn more. If I have written about a fake, constructed persona, and have been the victim of an elaborate hoax, either for publicity or kicks or some as-yet-unknown reason, I apologize to VentureBeat readers.

One additional note: My original Sarah Hanson story has  been picked up by a massive number of publications, with Huffington Post, CBC, Yahoo, GeekWire, and AOL writing about Sarah Hanson and Senior Living Map.

If this was an attempt to gain publicity, it was massively successful: There are no less than 242,000 Google results for “sarah hanson senior living map,” many of them stories about how she crowdsourced her startup funding.

So if the original story is accurate, I ask Sarah Hanson to please stand up … and take off the mask. As you said in your first email to me, the beauty and power of the Internet is amazing.

Just not always the way we hope it would be.

photo credit: gato-gato-gato via photopin cc

You guessed it: startups.

U.S. immigration rules are extremely challenging for foreign-born engineers and founders to navigate, with many spending years and thousand of dollars working through the byzantine maze of rules and regulations … all while their businesses potentially languish and cofounders, employees, and customers suffer the consequences. Silicon Valley has been prominent in the fight – particularly around the Startup Act – to admit immigrants who want to start businesses and create jobs.

The precisely what Engine is working toward as well, with the backing of technorati like Google, SV Angels, 500 Startups, and many other technology-focused startups and organizations, such as Mozilla, Yelp, and the Startup Genome.

The problem, Engine’s Michael McGeary says, is that the startup community is typically underrepresented in government. Today’s speech is just the first step in redressing that imbalance and putting immigration — as well as startups’ other major concern, software patents — on the top of the government priority list.

Here’s the full text of McGeary’s presentation:

REMARKS, AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY MR. MICHAEL MCGEARY and ENGINE ADVOCACY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS

Chairman Rice, Ranking Member Chu, Members of the Committee, thank you for having me here with you this morning.

I want to spend my time talking about issues that will impact the true engine of economic growth in this country: our startup community. Startups promise the rebirth – - and rejuvenation — of the American economy. Far from the idea held by many about startup life — of bespectacled youths in ironic t-shirts gallivanting around Downtown Palo Alto or the Flatiron in New York, spending their days writing code for the next great game about unicorns which we can all play on the subway on our way to work — the startup community in America reflects the best of American business. It’s dedicated men and women, working in coffee shops, and co-working spaces, office parks, and garages in Kansas City and Austin, and Nashville, and yes, San Francisco and New York, creating economic growth and multiplicative effects not seen in any other industry, helping power not just their own business, but in many cases countless others across the country.

These men and women have created all of the net new job growth in this country for the last quarter century, and according to our recent study, Technology Works, are projected to create 4.3 jobs in local communities for every job created in a technology concern.

It’s for these reasons, and so many others, that a few of us got together to form Engine Advocacy. For those unfamiliar with Engine, we got started about a year and a half ago with the intention of connecting the startup community with government at the federal, state and local level. We did so with an eye towards turning some of the workarounds, good ideas and innovative solutions to common problems faced by the startup community, into new legislation or government programs that can help make it just a little easier to start and run those businesses here in America.

We do that in a number of ways for a community that has largely been under represented in the halls of government. Our work is balanced between direct advocacy, convening our members from all over the country with leaders in government, and educating all of the players by arming them with good stories and strong data that point to the impact that startups can have in driving economic growth.

And that’s why I came here today. If you took a survey of startup founders and entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, developers, engineers, and the myriad others working in startups today, they would tell you that two issues more than any others threaten the promise and progress of their companies. These issues — immigration reform and software patent reform — are Engine’s immediate priorities and will form the basis of our advocacy work this year.

First, immigration: despite our historical competitive edge, we in the United States are facing a growing gap between the jobs we can create and the skills and employees needed to fill them.

In the long term, we need to continue to work to evolve our American education system to help power that growth and give young people the skills they need to compete in a global marketplace. But in the short term, we must also realize that our most valuable resource, talent, is already on our shores attending the University of Wisconsin, or Kansas University, or Stanford, and that, unfortunately, we seem to be looking for ways in the current system to send these smart, talented, entrepreneurial individuals either back to their countries of origin, or to places like Canada, Chile and South Korea where they have hung out the welcome sign to these promising minds, as we did for so long at Ellis Island and Angel Island. It’s imperative that we find a way to keep knowledge here, working and building business in America so that our economy can continue to grow and our businesses continue to thrive.

Second, for those who do stay and others who start business, another spectre is lurking, threatening to choke off innovation nearly at its source — the danger of patent trolling. According to recent findings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, patent trolls, forgive me, “Non-Practicing Entities” account for 56 percent of all lawsuits filed against innovators. This environment creates a legal and regulatory thicket which many young companies of two and three people find incredibly hard and costly to navigate.

We must find smart ways to protect innovative intellectual property, and as the constitution says, to promote science and the useful arts. The current system in place does no such thing — in fact, it even threatens to chill innovation as young companies find fewer and fewer avenues for capital as the prospect of patent troll lawsuits grow.

In the end, what’s good for startups is good for small business on the whole, because startups power small business. Consider the single mom making jewelry in Boise who is able to sell to consumers all over the world thanks to Etsy. Or the rural doctor in Kansas who is better and more readily able to diagnose cardiovascular problems in a patient because of increased computing power, and new data culled from existing MRI scans paired with three-dimensional flow visualization — a technology being pioneered in our own office in San Francisco by Morpheus Medical. And the bakery in my neighborhood in San Francisco’s Sunset District that accepts credit card payments via Square on their iPad rather than having to buy a costly point-of-sale system. The promise and potential of America’s entrepreneurial future is also so much more — we can create gaming apps that distract and delight, but also technologies that save lives, bring people closer together, and allow us to see our world, and ourselves, from a reframed perspective.

Startups can power the next generation of growth in the American economy if we let them, and it will be in working with this committee and other allies in Congress which can allow for that future, our future, to be prosperous.

Thank you.

photo credit: laverrue via photopin cc

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Technology is transforming health care more rapidly than ever before. That’s why VentureBeat is putting together our first-ever HealthBeat conference.

Today, we’re announcing the latest additions to our speaker lineup. These experts will help you learn what’s new in health IT, digital health, cloud-based medical services, and more.

With leading health and technology voices headlining the conference, plus a look at new concepts and technologies that have not yet penetrated the marketplace, HealthBeat 2013 promises to be one of the most important and provocative health tech events of the year.

Check out the full agenda for HealthBeat 2013, and make sure to grab your tickets today – they’re going fast. For the full roster of speakers — more than 60 confirmed so far — check out the HealthBeat speaker list.

Our latest confirmed participants include:

Dr. Alan Greene, Chief Medical Officer, Scanadu
Dr. Alan Greene is a physician, author, medical expert and entrepreneur. He has been named the Children’s Health Hero of the Internet by Intel and recognized as one of the Top Influencers in Healthcare IT by Advance for Health Information Executives. In 1995, he launched DrGreene.com, cited by the AMA as “the pioneer physician Web site” on the Internet. He is the Founding President of the Board of the Society for Participatory Medicine and sits on the Board of Directors for Healthy Child Healthy World, The Lunchbox Project, and the Center for Information Therapy, and is a founding member of the e-Patient Scholars Working Group.

Session: Precision Health: Big Data Gets Personal

Rebecca Mitchell Coelius, Medical Officer for Innovation, ONC
Rebecca Mitchell Coelius, MD currently serves across the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the HHS Office of the CTO as the Medical Officer for Innovation. In her role she develops and executes the ONC Innovation Strategy, and is a core team member of the Blue Button Initiative. She has worked extensively as an advisor and consultant to digital health startups, mentors physicians considering the leap to entrepreneurship, researches patient preferences within novel delivery models enabled by IT, and previously Founded and served as President of the international not for profit SpanAfrica. Rebecca completed her medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco.

Session: Scaling Up Innovation: Creating a Formal Pathway from Innovation to Clinical Partnership

Ryan Howard, Founder, Practice Fusion
In 2005, Ryan Howard founded Practice Fusion to help solve the serious issues he saw in health IT. Leaving behind a successful career in technology, he used his background in Software-as-a-Service and health IT integration to create an Electronic Health Record (EHR) that would go on to revolutionize US healthcare, with the help of a team of experts who understood his vision. Since Practice Fusion’s early days in a Starbucks in San Francisco, when Ryan had to sell his house and his BMW to support the company, it has become the fastest growing EHR community in the country. Its free, web-based platform appeals to doctors who can’t afford $50,000+ legacy systems, and has attracted the backing of prominent such as Founders Fund and Artis Capital Management. Ryan Howard continues to lead Practice Fusion as CEO and Chairman, exemplifying a new breed of health IT leaders revolutionizing healthcare from the doctor’s office up.

Session: The Next Generation Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

Josh Stevens, CEO, Keas
As CEO of Keas, Josh is responsible for driving customer demand, product engagement, and B2C and B2B monetization of the company’s offerings. With 20 years of experience in sales and marketing, Josh is a recognized leader in driving topline and valuation growth for public and private companies. Prior to joining Keas, Josh was responsible for driving top line growth at YouSendIt, the market leader in B2B cloud collaboration. While at YouSendIt, Josh was responsible for building the team responsible for driving and accelerating growth above and beyond organic viral growth of the core file sharing business. Josh is an advisor to several Silicon Valley start-ups who seek to accelerate top-line growth and develop scalable sales and marketing capabilities.

Session: Healthy Employees = Smart Patients

Kim Tyrrell-Knott, Partner, Epstein Becker & Green
Kim Tyrrell-Knott is a Partner at Epstein Becker & Green, P.C. in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s San Diego office. She has nearly 15 years experience in health care and technology and regularly advises companies on regulatory and commercialization matters with novel technologies. She also has significant experience in developing and implementing comprehensive compliance programs addressing on a broad range of health care regulatory issues. Ms. Tyrrell-Knott also serves a general counsel to the mHealth Regulatory Coalition and the Clinical Decision Support Coalitions. Ms. Tyrrell-Knott has extensive experience negotiating clinical research agreements, managing privacy and regulatory product reviews, and advising on advertising and promotional activities. Ms. Tyrrell-Knott was formerly Associate General Counsel of GE Healthcare IT.

Session: When is a Mobile Phone a Medical Device? Washington Wants to Know.

Stay tuned for our next batch of speakers. Register today for HealthBeat 2013. Seats are limited!

Thanks to AARP, ArchPoint Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Venrock, and Voalte for sponsoring HealthBeat 2013.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ll drive 2.8 miles for a sandwich, but 7.1 miles for a great Italian restaurant. And while we may only go 3.6 miles for a coffee shop, we’ll easily go almost nine miles for just the right mall.

Nagivation services company Telenav knows a little bit about what people will drive for — and when it’s worth showing hyper-local ads to them.

Powering navigation apps like Scout for iPhone and running its own advertising team gives Telenav billions of monthly data points on ads and services that people will drive for. The company has summarized that data in a new report, unveiled today.

“Location is an extremely powerful tool for targeting mobile ads, but most advertisers are still applying a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to location targeting,” Eli Portnoy, Scout Advertising GM said in a statement. “For example, I live in Los Angeles and it makes no sense to show me an ad for coffee in Pasadena because I will never drive the nine miles it would take me to get there. That would take me over an hour.”

One size especially doesn’t fit all when you look at different cities.

While shoppers in Dallas, Seattle, and California’s Bay Area routinely drive between 7-8.5 miles for shopping, New Yorkers and Chicagoans drive few than five. And in San Diego, car owners travel on 2.7 miles for gas, while Houston drivers almost need a top-up station on the way to the gas bar, driving 7.1 miles, on average, to fill ‘er up.

All of which data needs to inform your local marketing strategy.

Here’s all the information, in visual form:

Image credits: Telenav

This is a guest post by SilkRoad’s co-CEO Flip Filipowski

In the past, small businesses could afford a certain lack of sophistication in their human resources processes.  It was common practice to rely on Excel and labor-intensive reporting, but health care reform is changing the game.

Compliance reporting, benefits administration, and managing employee data are just a few of the back-office tasks that will become more difficult for small businesses to handle manually once further requirements of the Affordable Care Act take effect.  The first open enrollment in the health plan exchanges are expected in October and for penny-wise small business owners, throwing additional manpower at these challenges isn’t the answer.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to enter the age of HR automation.

The new health care exchange — what’s the goal?

A central feature of the new Affordable Care Act is the government’s new health care exchange. While the finer details are still being worked out, the goal of the exchange is to empower citizens to choose affordable benefits from an array of state-sponsored plans. 

So what does this mean for small business owners?  It means that the onus is on you to ensure that your employees are offered an employer-sponsored plan and offered information on the exchanges as an alternative option.  Having a systematic way of tracking, reporting and communicating this data will be essential to the bottom line.

First, you’ll need to provide a report to Uncle Sam including basic demographic and health coverage data for employees and their dependents.  Tracking these details will be a time-intensive burden, unless you can automate your reporting.  Beyond that, you’ll need to provide proof of enrollment or risk paying $100 per day, per employee for non-compliance.

You’ll also need to make the complete details of health care plans readily available to your employees.  Chances are, you already share the details of your own offerings but, later this year, you will also need to provide employees written notice on the state health insurance exchanges.  Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) can be set up to provide information on all of an employee’s health care options.

You can also expect each state to have unique reporting requirements to supplement federal mandates.  This might be manageable if you have a single office location, but take notice if your company is spread across the country, or if you have a remote workforce. Your ability to meet the specific criteria will be tricky unless you have technology that can track data and provide customized reports to meet each state’s standards.

Pay vs.play?

For many small businesses, the big question of 2013 is whether it’s more costly to play along with new health care reform mandates or pay the penalty taxes associated with eliminating employer-supported health benefits altogether.  If you have 50 or more employees, one thing is certain – you’re going to have to change the way you do things.

If you’re considering reducing your workforce by moving employees to part-time or contract status, consider this: the IRS will be watching.  Employers will be required to track employees’ hours, and full-time or part-time status, and report to the IRS.  “Variable hour employees” need to be carefully monitored and only those that work less than 30 hours in the designated period may be excluded from eligibility for health benefits.  If you have less than 50 employees, your decision to play could pay off –you may qualify for a 25 to 50 percent small business tax credit, which would help offset the cost of your insurance plan.

Pay or play, accurate reporting will be the lynchpin of your success in avoiding costly penalties, or cashing in on valuable incentives.

HR automation tools aren’t just for the one percent

As the chairman of an HR technology company, I know most small business owners consider automating anything beyond their payroll to be a luxury.  However, in the age of health care reform, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

HR automation is no longer reserved for companies with big budgets and lots of employees.  Cloud-based solutions have alleviated the need for businesses to build expensive HRMS system in-house. Today, you can find a scalable, subscription-based HRMS to suit your needs for as little as $10 per employee, per month. These systems will keep you compliant and ease administrative burdens, freeing up time to allow you to focus on taking care of your most valuable resource — your employees.

Flip Filipowski is Executive Chairman and Co-CEO of SilkRoad, a leading global provider of cloud-based social talent management solutions. 

A high-tech entrepreneur and philanthropists for more than three decades, Flip was the Founder and CEO of PLATINUM technology, inc, which he grew into the 8th largest software company in the world at the time of its sale to Computer Associates.

photo credit: Dell’s Official Flickr Page via photopin cc

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Robert Wonish is a director at the alliantgroup.

Considering the expensive and rapidly rising costs of the software industry, the game development cycle has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Many companies are feeling trapped by rising overhead and have been forced to outsource development to compensate. Luckily, tax incentives are available to software companies that can ensure crucial product developments remain in-house and even be the deciding factor that keeps a company’s doors open.

More often than not, software companies will discover that they qualify for the benefits of tax incentives, such as the R&D tax credit; however, many are simply unaware of its existence or assume that it doesn’t apply to them. If your company has invested time, money, and resources toward the advancement and improvement of designs and processes, then you most likely meet the requirements of the R&D tax credit.

More gaming activities may qualify than you think. In addition to designing and testing new games, software coding, hardware development, and iterative testing can make a company eligible for incentives. A gaming developer of innovative video arcade games had annual sales of $38 million and qualified for $650,000 in state and federal R&D tax credits. During the development process, the company created code for their new products to load into customized arcade devices.

If you are a game developer and the above activities sound in any way similar to what your company does on a day-to-day basis, the R&D tax credit is an available and powerful government endorsed incentive to which you are most likely entitled. If you would like to find out how you also can obtain thousands to millions of dollars in tax credits, read on.

R&D qualifications

The R&D credit is a reward for taxpayers that perform qualified research activities domestically. If you think that you have to have developed groundbreaking software platforms for Fortune 500 software companies to be conducting qualified activities as defined by the Internal Revenue Code, think again.

Game developers simply need to develop new or improved software features or functionality and go through a development process (agile, waterfall, prototyping, spiral, RAD, and so on).

If you don’t ask, you won’t receive

Firms of any size may qualify for this incentive. A smaller developer of gaming software with annual sales of $2 million developed touchscreen, video-based casino games. To develop new products, the company created innovative solutions to simulating games of chance. By utilizing custom algorithms, the company simulated real-world statistics and scenarios. Additionally, they created efficient and streamlined methods of delivering premium sound and graphics from compressed resource files. This company received over $250,000 in state and federal credits.

Sadly, it remains the case that one of the biggest roadblocks for businesses taking the R&D tax credit is self-censorship. It was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal that 19 out of 20 small and medium businesses that are eligible for tax incentives, such as the R&D tax credit, fail to take advantage. This is overwhelmingly due to self-censorship. Small and medium business owners frequently think that only Nobel Prize winners and rocket scientists should bother applying.

Happily, in the rare example of Congress getting tax policy right, the R&D tax credit is intended to support a broad range of industries and is focused on encouraging not only the new thing but also improvements and modifications to existing products and processes based on known scientific principles.

Act now

This incentive is one of the largest available to game developers, but is also one that is often overlooked. “The federal R&D credit has been in place for several decades, and it has become more generous over the years. Businesses that looked at the credit in the past and determined that they didn’t qualify may now realize significant benefits due to the credit’s broader applicability,” Mark Everson, alliantgroup Vice Chairman and former IRS Commissioner, said. “I can certainly attest to the complexity of the tax code, and the requirements for the R&D tax credit are no exception. That having been said, at almost $10 billion a year, the R&D credit is one of the most generous tax benefits established by Congress.”

With a challenging economy and costs continuing to rise, it is essential that every company avoid self-censoring and take advantage of the R&D tax credit.

While this incentive can be of extreme benefit to game developers, it is also complex, and fully identifying the proper substantiation for capturing the credit requires a deep understanding of the tax code. For this reason alliantgroup, a specialty tax firm, has developed a Software Specialization Group that includes industry experts with educational backgrounds and hands-on analytical and developmental experience.

The available federal and state R&D tax credits can offer substantial financial support to gaming developers. At over $10 billion credits awarded a year, if you did not think you qualified in the past, it pays (literally) to take a second look!

Image source: Warner Bros.

Robert Wonish, J.D., is a director in alliantgroup’s Tax Controversy Services department. Robert holds a bachelor’s in business administration in information systems and international business and a J.D. The alliantgroup is a national specialty tax service provider, working with businesses to ensure companies receive the full benefit of available federal and state tax incentives.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When it comes to mobile, a lot of companies are biting off more than they can chew.

That’s according to the findings of the “2013 Mobile Strategy and Sophistication Study,” report we’ve just recently published with Econsultancy. In it, we learned about the market’s readiness to succeed in mobile, as well as the main drivers of success. Through all the incredibly insightful data, here are a few data points in particular that hit home:

• 75% of you don’t have a solid mobile strategy that extends beyond 2013
• 72% of you don’t have a concrete plan to measure your mobile app and marketing efforts
• Still, 67% of you plan to spend more on your mobile efforts this year

Do these figures make you nervous? How prepared are you for mobile success? Well, since 75% of you self-reported that you’re likely not prepared (and another 20% are just really optimistic), we decided it was time for a change.

What exactly are we changing? Simply put, we feel “analytics” doesn’t cut it anymore. Not in a market as early, undefined and potentially lucrative (but extremely expensive if not executed properly) as mobile.

It’s a whole new world–a new domain with new rules, new customer behavior, new challenges, new business questions, new metrics and new opportunities. All of this adds up to a whole new opportunity for businesses like yours to start using mobile customer data to build truly incredible customer experiences and engage your customers in an entirely new way.

Here at Kontagent, we strongly believe that, with these new platforms and new ways to interact with your brand, it takes more than just analytics to understand your customers. It takes mobile customer intelligence.

Mobile customer intelligence goes where traditional analytics won’t. It’s part mobile analytics, part data science consultation, and part just knowing what questions to ask and getting the right answers.

Here’s a checklist that shows the big differences:

The big issue we see with traditional analytics vendors is that they aren’t answering the right questions for businesses looking to succeed in mobile. Remember, 75% of businesses today don’t have a long-term mobile plan, and 75% don’t report on specific mobile KPIs. It’s as if the market is having this conversation:

MOBILE BUSINESS: How can I use data to help me understand my mobile business and create a really engaging customer experience that drives value?

ANALYTICS PROVIDER: 54

It’s just the wrong answer to a very important question.

Mobile customer intelligence is an entirely new category that’s been built from the ground up to support the needs of enterprise brands who recognize the need to use data, but aren’t quite sure where to begin. It’s a comprehensive solution that combines the power of an industry-leading data intelligence platform with domain and data science expertise (people), and a proven process that helps organizations become more data-driven and prepared to succeed in a new domain with very little precedent.

So, how prepared are you?

Click the image below and read more:

Mitchell Fox is a Co-Founder of GoodApril.

Why is it that each spring, so many of us cringe, cross our fingers, and start filing our taxes without knowing what we’re in for?

What’s worse, we rarely feel confident that we’ve achieved the best possible outcome for ourselves when it comes to taxes – and with good reason.  Back in 2002, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that people were overpaying their taxes by nearly $1B a year. (And they only looked at one of many ways to mess up – with the real number of overpaid taxes likely much higher).

Even more striking is that these problems affect most Americans regardless of whether they’re firing up tax filing software, working with an accountant, or filling out IRS forms by hand.

So, what will tax filing be like five years from now if technologies continue to advance and consumers demand better tax policies and better software solutions? Will this process be easier or the same? Lets take a look:

You will already know your outcome

While tax rules are complicated, they are well defined.  A majority of the things that affect the average taxpayer’s return are already digital and available online: paychecks, investment gains and losses, mortgage payments, and the like.

Five years from now, this data will be collected, organized, and crunched on your behalf, in near real-time.  You will know whether you’re going to owe the IRS or get a big refund at any point during the year.  That job change, stock market windfall, or new home will have been considered as they happened, and your forecast adjusted.

Tax law changes, like this year’s Taxpayer Relief Act (the “Fiscal Cliff” deal) and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), will have been analyzed in the context of your financial situation, and their impact explained and accounted for.

You won’t owe a dime

If you can already know your tax outcome, then why shouldn’t the tax withholdings on your paycheck (or estimated tax payments if you’re self-employed) have been adjusted automatically to ensure you have paid only what you owe?

Started a freelance gig on the side, or purchased a house? Your tax software should detect that and guide you to make the appropriate adjustments to keep your tax bill as close to $0 as possible. A small refund is probably always in store, but the days of big tax refunds and tax bills should be over.

Your data will be waiting for you

Why is it necessary for me to wait for tax documents to arrive in the mail in order to file my taxes?  While tax prep software providers are making tremendous strides toward financial data aggregation, it’s still a gruesome process of individually looking up each account, digging up long-forgotten passwords, and cursing when the connection invariably fails.

As financial institutions get better at providing secure data connections, and software providers get better at extracting and interpreting it, your tax data should already be loaded when it comes time to file your taxes.

The experience of filing your return should be a lot more like checking out your Amazon shopping cart – clicking to confirm the numbers are accurate and as-expected – rather than an epic weekend of wrangling 1099s, W2s, and 1098s.

You will only pay your fair share

The tax code is full of incentives that taxpayers can use to their advantage to pay less in taxes and get access to services at lower cost.  Getting a college education, home ownership, and paying for childcare are just some of the many activities that are tax advantaged.  The IRS also gives you a break when your expenses pile up: supporting a dependent parent, for instance, or paying excessive medical bills.

You should know what tax benefits are available to you, and what actions you could be taking to pay less.

In order to only pay your fair share, tax software must be watching out for your best interests throughout the entire year, and be presenting this analysis and advice to you in a timely and easily understood way.

You will have access to your own history

You probably have filing folders of tax documents for the last few years somewhere in your house.  If you’re more tech savvy, maybe those are PDFs.  But that data is not stored in a way that you can use it for your own analysis, nor is there an easy way to share it, for instance with a loan underwriter trying to decide whether you can afford to repay that mortgage.  Today you’re still stuck opening or sending the actual tax filing documents, and manually extracting the data.

Your historical tax data should be yours to consume not just as documents, but as bits.  While your tax return provider ought to be giving you access to this data, it’s the IRS that should not only be collecting that data each year, but making it available to you and the financial institutions you authorize.

Your taxes will be simpler

Technology can’t solve every part of what makes taxes so painful.  A big part of the blame lays with policy makers who, with the best intentions of rewarding “good” behaviors (like donating to charity or investing in retirement or getting health insurance), create a spaghetti code of tax law so confusing that less than 10% of taxpayers are brave enough to even try to do their taxes without the assistance of software or a professional.  Even the IRS’ own National Taxpayer Advocate called the complexity of the tax code the “#1 most serious problem facing taxpayers.”

In 2005, the GAO estimated that the cost of complying with tax policies, in the form of time and money spent on this like tax planning, preparation, and filing, cost our nation at least $100B annually and projections by the Tax Foundation estimate that by 2015 the cost will reach nearly $500B.

Five years from now, let’s hope that we have done our part as the end-consumers of that tax code to have advocated for simpler, easier to use tax policies that the average American can understand, comply with, and get back to their lives.

Where innovation should come from

Even without tax reform, however, as I hope I have shown, smarter technology can make taxes easier for the average consumer.

The most obvious place where these innovations should arise is within one or both of the consumer tax software powerhouses: Intuit (TurboTax) or H&R Block.

Another possibility is through one of the personal financial management platforms that consumers use today to get a complete perspective on their finances: Mint (also owned by Intuit), PageOnce, Personal Capital, and most recently, Credit Karma.

Additionally, there is an emerging crop of financial planning startups that could develop to include tax capabilities: for instance FutureAdvisor (investments), LearnVest (wealth planning), Ready for Zero (debt), and PlanWise (goals). And yes, my own company, GoodApril, is working on these problems as well, and look forward to collaborating with other financial innovators to realize this vision for pain-free taxes.

Here’s to a future where our taxes are no longer a surprise, and we have confidence that we’re only paying our fair share to Uncle Sam.

Image via Warner Bros.; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

Mitchell Fox is a Co-Founder of GoodApril, an online tax planning startup for consumers. Follow him and GoodApril on Twitter @mitchellwfox and @goodapril.

Yes, the digital age has changed the way business works (thankfully, computers don’t take up an entire room anymore). But productivity is still king, and not everything can be shared electronically.

No matter how much they can multitask with technology, business owners still don’t have the time or patience for printing jams, smeared handouts, or copy jobs that take all day. A quality, efficient, color inkjet printer with an output rivaling Indy 500 racecars would be a dream come true.

Good news: the HP Officejet Pro X fits the bill, and it’s actually recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s fastest desktop printer.

As part of their new “Share. Accelerate. Win.” campaign, HP wants to hear from savvy business professionals about their speed & productivity tricks of the trade, starting April 1st and running through the 21st.  In return for sharing their expertise via a question of the day participants have a chance to win a weekly prize — the world-record-holding HP Officejet Pro X, or the grand prize — a trip for two, airfare & hotel included, to the Indy 500. Another bonus: participants profit from the sharing of best practices by business community peers.

To maximize your chances of heading to Indianapolis this May, answer all 15 daily questions posted each weekday. They’re fun, trust us! For example: “If your company was the ‘World’s Fastest___’, what would it be?” or “What mobile app is your secret weapon to boosting your productivity?”

Visit the HP Business Accelerated site to learn more, and check in for questions starting April 1st.

Clearly, those BlackBerry users are far too busy working.

While social and search are obviously critical for digital marketers, email marketing continues to rank as one of the highest return-on-investment activities that marketers do. However, where we read and respond to our email is changing as mobile devices penetrate farther into our lives and our work.

Today, about 75 percent of us read and answer email on our phones in addition to — or instead of — our computers.

Marketing automation firm GetResponse, which offers email marketing services for companies like iStockPhoto, the Blue Man Group, and Men’s Health, recently studied how to optimize email for mobile. And it turns out that companies that learn to deliver email that’s better formatted for mobile get up to 30 percent higher open rates.

So, how do you optimize for mobile?

Some of the information is fairly obvious to long-time marketers: Keep it simple, keep it short, use large enough fonts so consumers can see your content on a small handheld device, kill the Flash animations, and so on. But interestingly, GetResponse says that iPhone users open rates are almost double Android users and an astonishing 73 times higher than BlackBerry owners. Which means that you need to know what devices your customers own and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Here’s all the data in visual form:

photo credit: marimoon via photopin cc

Roey Brecher is co-founder and CTO of pricing intelligence startup WisePricer.

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in an apartment that our business development guy is renting in Oakland. I’m practically homeless at the moment but I couldn’t care less.

If there’s anything the past year had taught me, is that owning less stuff keeps me happy. I (partly) own one big ‘thing’ that I’m most proud of, and that is WisePricer. The clothes I wear are either startup t-shirts (x3 @olark, so thanks @ben) or Uniqlo whites. I take next to nothing from the business account but I’m positive better days will come. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

We launched WisePricer in 3 months.

It was a dirty alpha version with core functionality missing, but we got a few paying customers right off the bat. There was (and is) a real need for what we came up with, even in its barely functional state. That proved to be the first lesson which is something most entrepreneurs know these days but as I came from the corporate world, I had no clue.

Moving forward and getting early traction while trying to raise seed money was another eye opener. It wasn’t before long that we realized that our product was suffering from the time we spent talking to investors. We did raise a small amount but made a mental note to focus on generating revenue. It worked.

Scaling efficiently was our next big challenge. We learned not to solve any problem before it was real and actually hurting us. You only begin to understand your true power to persevere when your server crashes 40 minutes before an important demo. If you can keep yourself from tending to tasks that are fun but you are not entirely sure will be fruitful (like developing that awesome feature your team considers really cool), pat yourself on the back, that’s how it’s done.

Spending money is another big thing. As we soon decided that we would try to minimize our dilution by growing slowly through earnings rather than investments, we started to take our cash flow seriously. We spent December’s holidays in a cheaper country (rent, food, booze and whatnot). We relied on some good friends and set up office in their conference room (they have kicked us out since, all on good terms).

I won’t tell you how three of us shared a two-bedroom apartment … but let’s just say my co founder knows my snoring pattern pretty damn well.

We were also hustling. When attending demo days or conferences, asking for discounted admission tickets is nothing to be ashamed of. Paying for a booth? Not in our budget. You will be amazed how many people you can meet when you are actually waiting around a conference hall premises and engaging in conversations.

There’s another truth I learned: Always ask for discounts. And if you are getting something for free, ask for an extension (Yuval from our team will say, ask for two). In one five minute phone call my cofounder saved us $12,000 in hosting fees.

Are we making enough money to live long and prosper? We soon had to face that question when we wanted to bring more people on board. More people means more expenses, but our time was devoted to onboarding new customers. And the B2B world is different in that you need to have a solid sales funnel.

We went back to Israel only to realize we needed to be in Mountain View two weeks later for a YCombinator interview. That interview didn’t go as expected (unless you are expecting to not get picked which I can honestly say we didn’t). It did however gave us the push we needed to pivot into the enterprise world. Think big and you shall receive.

I learned some things about working while spending your spare time with your co-workers. In a normal world, you rarely see your co workers outside of work. Heck, you rarely think about work outside of work. In a startup world, you are spending so much time with your team you sometime want to drive a fork through their hearts and twist it, but you don’t, because that’s illegal, and you need them.

Jokes aside, it can be most stressful. Learning to push aside differences and keeping non-work issues where they belong (outside of work) is how you grow.

It all comes down to Ego. The more you have of it, the less you will be willing to compromise.