People Make Business

i4i Chairman Loudon Owen and founder Michael Vulpe

That cry was closer to a whimper two years ago when i4i, a 30-person document collaboration firm, sued Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), claiming it violated a patent with features found in Word 2003 and Word 2007. The offending technology lets users edit XML, a computer programming language that customizes the way a document’s contents are interpreted and displayed.

In August 2009, a Texas jury agreed with i4i, ordering Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages and stop selling Word in the U.S. Although Microsoft appealed that decision, a federal appeals court upheld the judgment on Tuesday, issuing an injunction that bars Microsoft from selling versions of Word that contain the offending patent technology.

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2010 is approaching.  In our professional and personal world we use this time of year to think/plan ahead on where or what we may want to accomplish in the upcoming year.  The first part of trying to figure out where we are going is determining where we are.  What is your status?  In Facebook and Twitter we want to tell others of our status in our personal life, but do we tell others or even really tell ourselves what our professional, business or financial status really is.

Are you happy with your status?  Are you better off this year than last year?  Did you start that business you wanted to start, get a new job, buy a business, sell a business, retire… ?

It is said when planning  ”How do you know if you got there if you dont know where you were going.”   But preceding this above-mentioned planning tenet is the need to know where you are starting from.

A person wanting to start a business or buy a business and has $1,000,000 in the bank will plan to start or buy that business different than a student that just graduated from college and owes $40,000 in college loans and $0 in the bank.  It’s always a good time to plan ahead – it’s almost 2010.  What is your status?

1. Working for a wonderful b

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What the Christmas story tells us about big government.

The story of the virgin birth–Joseph, Mary and Jesus–is told often at this time of the year. The book of Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus decreed that a census should be taken. Mary delivered the baby after arriving in Bethlehem and “placed [baby Jesus] in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Conventional wisdom assumes that Mary and Joseph were somehow mistreated by a greedy, evil capitalist innkeeper. This hearsay is repeated in just about every play, skit or sermon on the subject, with nothing to back it up.

The Bible does not name an innkeeper. There is no record of anyone complaining at the time, nor apparently were Mary and Joseph charged for the use of the stable. The town was overflowing because of the census, which was ordered for the purposes of taxation. Small towns all over were packed as people returned to their ancestral homes.

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The answers won’t entirely please either side.

These are hard times for climate scientists who want government action on global warming. Not only has the Copenhagen summit largely produced discord, but an embarrassing public release of private e-mails exposed attempts by a group of climate scientists to hide scientific evidence that didn’t conform to their beliefs or pronouncements.

As CBS News put it, the scandal, called “Climategate,” is “casting doubts on the very science on which this summit is based.” In a widely noted Washington Post column, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin argued, “the documents show that there was no real consensus” among climate scientists. And a new ABC News poll finds that only 29% of the public now place “a lot” of trust in what scientists say about the environment.

The question of whether there is a scientific consensus on human-induced global warming has long inspired heated debate among both scientists and politicians.

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Successful businesses know how to keep a steady stream of sales through prosperous economic times and the weak economic times that we’re experiencing right now as a nation. In either economic climate, it is critical that businesses maintain a solid sales strategy and avoid certain pitfalls during a sales approach.

In their article entitled “Five Common, Avoidable Sales Mistakes,” Bnet.com lists five traps that salespeople can fall into if they do not keep a consistent, customer focused approach:

• Mistake #1: Valuing new customers over existing ones. In most cases, the easiest sales are to existing, happy customers.  However, many sales pros get so obsessed with feeding the pipeline that they neglect the easy sales that are just a phone call away.
• Mistake #2: Honoring numbers over relationships.