Business Feeds

EVANSVILLE — The current debate over the nation’s debt ceiling has sparked some questions and concerns about how the issue may affect individual investors, local professionals say.

“The concerns started coming in about a week ago, and they are coming from people who are either retired or very near retired,” said Mark Pettinga, president of Evansville firm Pettinga Financial Advisors.

“They just don’t want to revisit a situation like 2008/2009 again.”

The situation is uncertain and unprecedented, the advisers say, but their advice is a familiar investment refrain: Stay the course and don’t panic.

“Don’t be knee-jerking and trying to do some timing maneuvers,” advised Ken Sendelweck, president of private banking and wealth management at Jasper, Ind.-based German American Bank.

Most of German American’s customers, Sendelweck said, have confidence the situation will be resolved before the Aug. 2

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IBM has launched new cloud services that enable clients to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data in minutes versus days in the event of a disaster.

Disasters can cause significant damage to businesses in the loss of crucial data and revenue. Analyst estimates state that the loss of revenue during downtime is tens of thousands of dollars for every hour. Businesses need to assess threat risks and create a resilience strategy that helps ensure uninterrupted business operations and enables speed and agility when an unforeseen event strikes.

The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services allow customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could before within a traditional data center environment. IBM SmartCloud offers companies of various sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service that continuously replicates their applications and all associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. Th Read more…

InformationWeek Analytics, the service for peer-based IT research and analysis, announced the release of its latest research report; Promises, Promises: A Not-So-New SLA Model encompasses analysis of our latest SLA survey results and guides readers in determining how to make the most of external service-level agreements as many IT functions move to the cloud. More than 560 IT service consumers and providers responded to this poll. The report author, Frederick Rose, is the service assurance practice director at Fusion PPT.

46% of service consumers agree it’s difficult to monitor SLAs for public cloud.

SLAs have long been tough to negotiate and tougher to enforce, especially for small companies that lack the resources to push for the best terms and monitor for compliance. But Read more…

EVANSVILLE — Evansville Councilman John Friend on Tuesday urged the Evansville Redevelopment Commission to adopt a process that would better check bids for the Downtown hotel.

Although city officials had said their current vetting process is what led to the termination of their contract with Woodruff Hospitality, Friend said more should be done.

“I think there are a lot of moving parts there,” Friend, D-5th Ward, said. “I think going forward is great, but there’s a lot of money here.”

Friend spoke to the Redevelopment Commission just after it announced having received proposals from the Kunkel Hotel Group and Prime Lodging were identified to build a Hyatt Place hotel. The two gro Read more…

Google seems to have its hands in everything lately, and in what could come as interesting news for small business, the company is now getting into the credit card business.

World Financial Capital Bank is issuing a no-annual-fee card with an 8.99 percent interest rate. Google will co-brand the card with MasterCard and it will be available for small businesses to help them buy search-based advertising.

American Bankers website said that this “narrow-use” credit card may not be the best approach to appeal to small businesses looking for new advertising. The website quotes Brian Riley, a senior research director with TowerGroup, who said the card adds extra steps for Google and potential advertisers.

“A small business that wants to buy search advertising now has to apply for a card, then wait to get card-qualified, and go through those approval steps.

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Google announced on Monday it has bought the g.co domain, a URL shortcut that will link to official Google products and services. This way, Google will make its URLs easier to share and simpler to remember for users. The search company said the only downside to short URLs is that users can’t always tell what web page they are going to be redirected to.

“We’ll only use g.co to send you to web pages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts,” Gary Briggs, Google’s VP of consumer marketing, said in a blog post. “That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.”

Google launched goo.gl its public URL shortener in 2009 and the service will remain active for general URL shortening. “There’s no need

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In 2009, Jay Goltz was decreasing his inventory. Now, the owner of five Chicago businesses, and writer of The New York Times small business blog Youre the Boss, said he is re-investing in his businesses.

This may come as surprising news for small businesses, many of which have been saving money and holding their own. But Goltz said businesses who remain stable should try to push forward.

“[If] you can afford to take some calculated risks, this might be the time to get out of the bunker and try to get ahead of the pack,” Goltz said, adding that he is revamping the business for one of his shops and purchasing a bigger warehouse so he can buy in larger quantities to save money.

Goltz said many businesses need to focus on moving forward, taking some chances and building their company up instead of standing still.

If more business owners take the initiative to invest in their company, there could be a slight improvement in the economy by virtue of more jobs for small businesses.

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Yelp has reached an important milestone announcing that the social reviews and local search service now has more than 20 million reviews. To mark the big accomplishment, the company has created an infographic presenting various interesting stats.

The heatmap of reviews or as Yelp calls it “The United States of Yelp” outlined the most reviewed businesses, zip codes with most check-ins and other interesting facts, and proclaimed Chicago, IL as the “Third Yelpiest City in the World.”

The infographic also shows the growth path of the company since its inception in 2004. Yelp had hit its first million reviews in 2007 and climbed to 10 million in three years time. In little over a year, Yelp doubled that number. The com

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A council leader has pledged to listen to the views of the business community. Brighton and Hove City Council leader Bill Randall said the new Green administration needs a new, coherent and robust economic strategy to take the city forward.

He said: “To achieve this we will need to sit down with the local business community and listen to their views.

“The city council must do everything it can to help new ventures, retain and develop existing businesses and create more jobs and prosperity, and it must work in partnership with the local business community and other stakeholders.”

But the Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce said the economic strategy for Brighton and Hove is creaking with old age. Chamb Read more…