BlueTie Blog

More Business Ideas From the Web

Most start-up experts will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen- it is execution that attracts their attention. Nevertheless, a great business concept and a great plan for turning that concept into a business is the formula for success when starting your own business.

Whether you're looking for your great idea or seeking ways to make it happen now, here's some recent web articles that can help:

• The 20 smartest companies to start now. Business 2.0 went around and asked venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs what kind of companies they'd like to see. Then they went further and asked how much capital they would commit to a great team with a great plan to create those businesses. I'm guessing there are a lot of hungry entrepreneurs working on these ideas- you could be one!
• Can a cartoonist who draws his toons on the back of business cards offer value to a new business owner? He can if he's Hugh MacLeod and he's writing about How To Be Creative. Highly motivational and the real thing.
• Are you a freelancer or independent contractor? Like working from your local Starbucks or on the road? Web Worker Daily is a blog that covers all the issues you deal with daily- staying organized, procrastination, collaborating at a distance (shameless plug: BlueTie is a great collaboration tool that can really liberate an independent worker!)
• Trying to raise money? AskTheVC is just what it says- a site where venture capitalists explain the arcane aspects of their business.

The beauty of the world we're in now is that incredible tools and information sources are at your fingertips. Any new business owner owes it to themselves to get out there and take advantage of these resources. Stay tuned for more ...

Naming Your Business, Product or Service

We get asked a lot about where the BlueTie name came from. The story, as I understand it, is that our (then) 19 year old CEO was in a board meeting in 1999 during BlueTie's start-up phase. They were discussing names and one of the older board members looked at David's bright blue tie and said, 'these days you can name a company anything- you could call it BlueTie'. And so they did.

In hindsight, that was a very lucky decision. Anyone trying to create a unique and marketable name for a business or product these days knows it is extremely difficult yet extremely important to your success. The right name is unique, memorable, non-descriptive (more on that in a minute) and available both as a trademark and a web URL. If the names you're looking at don't fit these basic criteria, they won't cut it.

So why can't you use descriptive words for naming? You can and should if you're operating a local business and using your own name in the business name, i.e. Smith and Smith, Attorneys. But If you're selling business email to a global market you wouldn't want to call yourself Business Email, Inc. because you cannot protect a descriptive name via trademarks and you're extremely unlikely to get a web address even close to this name.

This conumdrum is why we see so many start-ups with funny made-up words for names like Squidoo which tell us nothing about their business (Squidoo has something to do with publicizing blogs). They pick a name and hope it's memorable and that they can market it into recognition.

So how do you pick a name? You could use a naming consultancy but that it going to cost you thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars (I kid you not). My advice is to get creative, do some word play and keep the Internet handy to see if your ideas are taken. And be patient- this is something you need to get right. Remember, once you have a web address, that's your storefront to the world and everytime you send an email via BlueTie your customers will be reminded of that address.

Here's two online resources for finding URLs:

Interactively Search for Domains

and to search for Trademarks:

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

Here's a final tip: Your trademark only has to be unique to your type of business. A company called Lure-It that sells fishing lures could file a trademark even if another company called Lure-It that did business lead generation had the same name. It's not a conflict when there is little likelihood of creating confusion among consumers. In any case, no matter what name you choose, get some legal and marketing advice before you fully commit to it.

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

Looking Ahead: 2007

2006 has been a big year for BlueTie with many product upgrades, rapid growth and the introduction of our BlueTie Free product. 2007 promises to be an even faster-paced year here. Some of the things you'll be seeing in the weeks and months ahead include:

• Major upgrade to our Contacts application (much more detail coming soon)
• Changes to our user interface to enable easy customization of how your BlueTie account looks and functions
• Multiple integration of new business services including the ability to initiate and manage email campaigns with Constant Contact, fax receiving and sending within BlueTie via eFax, the ability to book travel within your calendar via Orbitz and a lot more. Watch for announcements as these and many more business services become available within your BlueTie environment
• Enhanced Outlook integration in BlueTie Pro

As usual, all upgrades to existing products are free to all affected BlueTie users. To put this in perspective, the expected per user cost of upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 is between $150-250 depending on system configuration!

Here at BlueTie we're excited about the year ahead and a lot of even cooler stuff we can't talk about just yet...

The Small Business Computing 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards: We'd appreciate your vote!

Are you a happy BlueTie business user? We hope so because we know we offer the best collaboration solution on the market for small and mid-sized businesses. The most storage space, best anti-spam, widest feature set and it's a crazy good deal- after all who can beat Free with no ads? Not to mention that BlueTie Pro is a great product at $4.99 per user per month.

So, enough pitching. The voting for the Small Business Computing's 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards is open to business owners like you and we'd appreciate your support. You can vote here (you'll find BlueTie listed under Collaboration). It's easy, requires no personal info and only takes a minute.

Voting is open until January 7, 2007, so vote early and vote often (;-)...and a big thanks in advance!

in it Spam: Tips for optimizing your anti-spam protection in BlueTie

Over the weekend a group of Russian spammers created a virtual network of hijacked computers and sent millions, if not billions, of spam messages touting penny stocks. You may have seen some of these messages- they typically have a name followed by 'in it' in the subject line. BlueTie's spam filters caught most of them but a few got through, in part because of the sheer volume: it's been estimated that they hit 70% of the mailboxes in the US alone and many millions more worldwide.

According to the Register, the plan did not work. This spam is fairly unique because it is easy to track its exact effect on the stocks they were pushing and, apparently, the stocks did not make significant moves after the spam blasts. Most spam success is not trackable like this. The good news is that they'll probably stop this particular pattern.

Using BlueTie's Anti-Spam Controls

Anti-spam is a major feature of BlueTie and one we are constantly monitoring and improving. In spite of what the boxed AS software may claim, there is not one simple fix for the problem as spammers are constantly adjusting their systems to bypass filters. Because they adjust, we adjust and our systems have the ability to adapt to new patterns of abuse. We filter domains that are known spammers at the perimeter of our system so you never see spam from them.

In your Preferences page (there's a link to it at the top right corner of BlueTie) you can set your level of protection. If you see an increase in spam getting into your Inbox, try raising it by a point. The most important activity you can do to cut down on spam is to Mark any spams that do get through as Junk. This is done by highlighting the email, then clinking on the Mark As button and selecting Junk. This moves the email into your Junk folder and blocks any more email from that address from getting into your Inbox.

Managing Your Junk Folder

You'll want to check your Junk folder before emptying it to make sure there are no 'false positives' in there, i.e. emails you wanted to get. Use the Mark As button to mark these Not Junk and it will work in reverse, placing them into your inbox and clearing that sender's address from the spam system.

To Empty your Junk folder, right click on the folder name and select Empty. This will permanently delete the contents so make sure you've taken a look at the mail in there first.

Finally, never open or download an attachment or mail message from someone you don't know- delete it without opening if possible. BlueTie's anti-virus strips known viruses off of email before they get to you but no system is 100% safe. A few precautions and regular maintenance of your Anti-spam system by following the steps above will keep your email safe and secure.

Update:

There's a new batch of spams from the same group. They now are a name followed by 'wrote:'. Same deal so something must have worked. Fortunately they're all ending up in my Junk mail folder.

Which 2.0 is it?

There's a lot (a real lot) of hype out there about Web 2.0, the current wave of web applications and sites that encourage user-generated content. While we don't consider BlueTie a Web 2.0 company as we've been around since the 1.0 days and have a litle more traction, there are some aspects of many web 2.0 apps that we've embraced.

For a great overview of what this is all really about check out Andy Kessler's long and very well thought out piece on the subject.

Future of the Internet?

The Pew Internet research group just published a report called The Future of the Internet II. They interviewed over 700 longtime Internet leaders to compile a picture of what things might look like in 2020. It's not a survey, rather it's a set of informed speculations, many of which are not only fascinating but also scary, and/or far out. Internet Luddites who commit acts of violence against technological society, huge gaps between Internet classes, countries who try to wall in their citizens' access- these are only a few of the observations in this report. And I've only read part of the way through it (it's 115 pages!).