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While creating a profitable company may provide for a comfortable retirement, that's no way to plan. And many entrepreneurs, perhaps believing their businesses will be their retirement, don't plan sufficiently for their retirement. That's the finding of two reports recently released by the Small Business Administration. Saving for Retirement: A Look at Small Business Owners , written by SBA economist Jules Lichtenstein, finds that entrepreneurs' retirement account ownership, contribution, and participation rates are low. Among his key findings: Sponsor Just 36% of business owners have individual retirement accounts (IRAs), and only one-third of business owners with an IRA contributed to one during the 2005 tax year. Only 18% of business owners have a 401(k) plan, and less than 2% have a Keogh plan. Business owners are more likely to own tax-deferred individually based IRAs if they are older, female, white, non-Hispanic, citizens, better educated, and married. Entrepreneurs who own homes and have other retirement accounts are most likely to have IRA, Keogh or 401(k) participation. A second SBA study, Small Business Retirement Plan Availability and Worker Participation , surveyed the participation in retirement plans by employees of small businesses. Among the results: Approximately 72% of employees working for small businesses (almost 41 million workers) do not have a company-sponsored retirement plan available where they work. This contrasts with those who work for businesses with over 100 employees. 78% of employees for large firms have retirement plans available at their work. Of the employees at small businesses who do have company-sponsored retirement plans, 9% do not participate. Only 19.5 percent of workers in small private sector companies report participating in a retirement plan. Lichtenstein suggests the findings in his study point to the need to develop ways to help owners of small businesses, especially home-based sole proprietorships and minority-run businesses, increase their retirement savings. "There is a need to better coordinate employer-based retirement accounts with individual-based accounts like IRAs and make plans less complex and burdensome on business owners, especially for owners of micro-businesses." Are you saving for retirement? Do you even have a plan? Let us know in the comments. Discuss
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SBA Finds Entrepreneurs Aren't Saving for Retirement
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The cloud fundamentally changes the way enterprise applications function. Increasingly we are seeing traditional enterprise applications emerge in the cloud and partner with other Web-based services that have consumer appeal. In turn, we are seeing cloud-based consumer type services transform into enterprise grade offerings that provide customers with the same experience they get in their work as they do at home. Sponsor IBM's Lotus Note s is a clear example of how this symbiotic relationships is evolving. Yesterday, Tungle , the calendar application, released a Tungle.me app for Notes users. Tungle allows users to view other people's calendards and availability. With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background. The news follows a number of applications that have been introduced for Notes users. Those include services like TripIt and Gist . Tripit is a travel planning service. Gist allows Lotus Notes users to add dynamic profiles for people in an inbox, calendar and contacts list. Gist for Notes allows a users to have news, blogs, and tweets all in one place, find related people, emails, links, and attachments. It connects to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Discuss
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Lotus Notes Adds Tungle, Tripit and Gist
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May 7th, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: the ReadWriteWeb crew is hosting some of the smartest people building the future of the mobile world and you to come together for a wonderful day of brainstorming, conversation and innovation in action at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . Who's speaking? You are. ReadWriteWeb events are facilitated in the increasingly popular unconference style, in which smart people are convened and take it upon themselves to pack a day full of value from start to finish. We've got an awesome group of people signing up to attend and you should add your name to that list. If you're going to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco May 4th-6th, stick around one extra day for a power-house mobile event immediately following. There's a whole lot to talk about. Sponsor Who's Coming to the Summit? Featured participants include.... Don Dodge, Google Scott Kveton, Urban Airship Dion Almaer, Palm And people from... SimpleGeo Intuit Flickr Rhomobile And many more... Generously Sponsored By... CallFire WorldMate Alcatel-Lucent IPEVO Media Sponsors... MIT/Stanford Venture Lab EComm The One Club How Unconferences Work What's an Unconference all about? Here's the idea: convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion, ask big important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize the value of the event and minimize hot air. That's the recipe we're following, with the capable guidance of professional unconference facilitator Kaliya Hamlin. Kaliya has been facilitating events like this all around the world for almost 10 years. Martin Källström, CEO of real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly brought his team over from Sweden for our last event (we had 10 international companies represented that day). "Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin's unconference events," he told us. "We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen, it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples' minds to 'this is about whatever we want it to be about', they look at how they can create value." Or, as Google's Brett Slatkin said in referencing the format of the elite FooCamp events to explain unconferences: "Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks." You will not want to miss this event. Our last event in October got rave reviews from participants and if your work is related to mobile - you should make sure you participate in the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss
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Why You Should Come to the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th
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The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing that is clear is that there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media. In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is feat by itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated in it. Sponsor For those coming up to speed on the issues surrounding OAuth 2.0, here is a brief summary of the state of the union: The OAuth Working Group in IETF generated a first draft of OAuth 2.0 . This group that is credited with this document consists of active leaders of both the Twitter API team as well as Facebook community standards team. A robust number of daily discussions are happening in the working group hosted at IETF include topics such as the default use of JSON that show the opportunity and challenge of growing the standard from a web-based to a broader set of devices and scenarios. One of the stated goals of the IETF OAuth working group is to maintain backwards compatibility with OAuth 1.0. From our sampling of the depth of change in scope and conceptualization of the standard, this may be a big deal for the group, especially if key members decide to legacy their support for the first versions. As part of the evolution of OAuth, there is the case of the OAuth WRAP Google Group . This group has forged ahead to develop profiles for scenarios seen as extensions to the profile OAuth 1.0A. This includes new ways to gain tokens bringing the use cases of Javascript or RIA applications. WRAP also redefines the dependency on SSL and provides a simpler way to get started using tools easily accessible to the web resource. With some changes noted, this work has been brought forward in the OAuth 2.0 public draft. David Recordon, a chief thought leader in the open web (also employee at Facebook) recently offered this summary " What's going on with OAuth ?" to help align the understanding of the evolution of the standard. Here we show one of the better known descriptions of the OAuth flow as provided by Yahoo. The annotations show a few of the areas that are under consideration for changes in OAuth 2.0 and/or in the work done in the OAuth WRAP group. Last week, at Twitter's Chirp '10 the Twitter API team gave this presentation, " Too many secrets, but never enough: OAuth at Twitter ". This document contains overview of the basic process of Twitter, commitment to the movement to OAuth 2.0, and discussion of Twitter's xAuth and OAuth Echos projects. Twitter Likes to Optimize Twitter is deeply intertwined with the inception and direction of OAuth. The company is both involved in the specifications but also is a lightening rod for discussion in the development community. In the Twitter blogs and developer groups, OAuth is being considered deeply in the trade-offs in implementation, design, and risk in the Twitter ecosystem. A few areas under discussion is how to remove the re-direction from the process, and also how to keep a running log of all account client accesses available to the user as a way to make sure users are aware and signaling proper account use. The Twitter API team has been willing to make change happen in the community by deprecating legacy processes, such as basic auth. With the changes coming in OAuth 2.0 the company may be in the best position to bootstrap developer adoption of the new standards. In this way, OAuth 2.0 need to adapt to the speed and need of the Twitter use cases, to avoid becoming like XML. XML is a good thing, of course, but when push comes to shove, JSON is lighter weight and more compact. This is helping it become the preference for data attribute exchange in APIs like Twitters that support OAuth. With the rise of the social ecosystem as the hub for authorization, it is becoming clear that the IETF efforts need Twitter as much as Twitter needs the IETF. This seems like a good balance that will guide use cases along the way to practical standards formalization. There are a lot of questions out there about OAuth 2.0. Top of mind is whether this technology release will see the effective join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? Or, will the practical matters of business and strategy keep the standards intact, and the implementations as islands? What is your prediction for OAuth 2.0 and web resource authorization? Discuss
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First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0
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"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands , his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee. Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person. Sponsor Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha . He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company's own service providers to select new hires in the future as well. Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites , due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo . Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully. Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done." Social search Aardvark started out as a lot of manual human effort behind public facing technology, then became a search-sorting algorithmic people-connector that Google bought for millions. Fancy Hands is half human and half-machine, too. It connects your emailed task requests with the right staff members to fill them. In that way it's a little reminiscent of Aardvark , the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars . At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work. The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work. This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity. He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business. These Hands Are Fancy People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of. These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience. There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that. For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds. Photo by Justin Ouellette . Discuss
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Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style
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