Over the past one and half year, more than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe are infected by Zeus Trojan, which is designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems.

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74K PCs in 2.5K firms infected by Zeus Trojan

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Although the incorporated share of self-employment declined slightly last year, the trend over the past two decades has been towards increased incorporation. With all due credit to Steve King, who looked at this topic about a year ago in his blog , I’m offering my own take on it today. In the figure below, I’ve plotted the incorporated share of self-employment since 1989 using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Since 1989, the share of non-agricultural self-employment that is incorporated has increased almost ten percentage points from 27.8 percent to 37.1 percent.  The pattern is pretty similar when the agricultural sector is included. This trend is about as close to a true linear trend as one gets with real economic data.  For self-employment in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors combined (the thick red line in the graph), the fit of a straight line to the data is 0.97 (it would be 1.00 if the increase in the actual data over time was a perfectly straight line). So why are more self-employed people incorporating? Several possibilities come to mind (some of which were highlighted by Steve King and other authors in their posts): Limited liability might be more important today than it was two decades ago given the greater legal exposure that people running their own businesses face. Lower costs and greater ease of incorporating might be motivating more people to do it. The rising cost of health insurance might be driving some people to incorporate to deduct the costs of medical coverage. Groups of people who are more likely to incorporate their businesses – those older and more highly educated, for instance – might be becoming self-employed at higher rates than other groups. Self-employment might be shifting to industries in which incorporating is more valuable. The tax benefits of incorporated self-employment might be rising. Unfortunately, these possibilities are only speculation on my part. While the trend towards greater incorporation of self-employment is clear from the data, researchers haven’t yet identified the causes. And that might not be so easy to do. Despite a clear linear trend toward greater incorporation of self-employment over the past two decades, the vast majority of self-employed people still don’t incorporate. Therefore, any explanation for this upward trend needs to account for why the increase is very gradual and remains confined to a minority of those in business for themselves. From Small Business Trends More of the Self Employed Incorporate

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More of the Self Employed Incorporate

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Open innovation has been hyped in the media and by some consulting firms over the past few years as the next new thing and is just giving a term to an activity that has been underway in business for a long time. Simply put, open innovation is partnering to gain leverage and build barriers to competition.

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Is open innovation over-hyped?

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Many small businesses continue to experience cash flow problems – the majority, in fact, according to a survey by the Discover Small Business Watch. That cash flow is an issue right now for small businesses might sound obvious to most of you that run your own businesses, but a worsening trend might not be. So here’s a chart that shows what has been going on with small business cash flow over the past three years. The figure plots the percentage of respondents to the Discover Small Business Watch monthly survey of a random sample of 750 small business owners who answered “yes,” they are experiencing temporary cash flow issues. Although there has been a slight down tick over the past two months, the chart shows a (noisy) trend towards an increasing share of small business owners experiencing these problems. (The thick blue line is the actual data; the thin black line is the linear trend plotted from it.) I tried to see whether other patterns fit the data better than the upward linear trend. Unfortunately, they don’t. An increasing share of businesses experiencing temporary cash flow problems is closest to what has actually happened over the past three years. Many economists believe that the Great Recession has ended and the economy is now growing again. While that might be true, it doesn’t appear that the recovery is strong enough or broad enough to have fixed the cash flow problems in the small business sector, at least not yet. From Small Business Trends Small Business Cash Flow Problems Still Not Declining

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Small Business Cash Flow Problems Still Not Declining

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Of the SMBs that view IT as critical, 60 percent saw revenues grow over the past 12 months. In contrast, among SMBs that stated IT is not important, less than 29 percent saw revenue increase.

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SMBs using hosted services have better financial performance

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Of the SMBs that view IT as critical, 60 percent saw revenues grow over the past 12 months. In contrast, among SMBs that stated IT is not important, less than 29 percent saw revenue increase.

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SMBs using hosted services have better financial performance: Microsoft

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As utilities around the world have initiated major smart grid infrastructure upgrades over the past several years, cyber security has become a critical priority.

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Firms to spend $21 Billion on smart-grid cyber security

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Most IT leaders feel that cost-cutting in the IT department over the past two years has killed business innovation and resulted in loss of customers.

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IT cuts harm innovation and business growth: IT leaders

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Microsoft has done more to popularize graphical programming than any other vendor. The company’s development tools, led by Visual Basic and Visual Studio, have been used by millions of software developers over the past two decades.

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Top Microsoft developers prefer old-school coding methods

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Two thirds of the UK’s 600 biggest brands have either increased their carbon emissions over the past year, failed to report on emissions levels, or set targets below the government’s Copenhagen carbon-cutting goal.

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Major brands fail to cut carbon emissions

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