If you’re the owner of a small business, one of your biggest hurdles is competing with larger, established companies. So what’s an SMB to do? Many SMBs are actually doing what the big guys are doing, at least when it comes to the cloud. SaaS, PaaS and other cloud services are leveling the playing field for SMBs, and also opening the door for niche services to emerge around various industries…

Consistency isn’t a word often associated with today’s mobile scene. With fiery mobile OS wars, a battle for the very soul of every consumer and an emerging string of marketplaces designed to store your personal media, the mobile realm is one seemingly reeling with constant change. But Daren Tsui, CEO of mSpot, anticipated much of the volatility we see in mobility, and created a platform that acts as a constant bridge between rivaling OS’s and disparate devices…

You can bet there will always be a million pigeonholes people can’t wait to stuff you inside. As a black woman in the punk music scene, Noah Sow of Noiseaux, flips the bird to each and every one. When asked how it feels to be black, German and doing punk music, Noah replied: “I’m educated enough to know that “Black music” is [many things]…you bet whenever I open my mouth to sing, what comes out is Black music by definition.” Noiseaux has even created their own music genre, Afropunk Chanson, which they’ll have people headbanging to on their upcoming tour with 24-7 Spyz, one of the most influential black bands in the punk scene…

There’s a budding career for professionals who are passionate about numbers-–that of the data scientist. In order to make the best out of the surge of data that plagues the world every day, we need these people to analyze it all. A study by McKinsey Global Institute confirms that United States will need 140,000 to 190,000 mavens in analytics, and 1.5 million data-literate managers to make sense of the insane influx of data that doubles every two years. Google’s chief economist Hal Varian said that “the sexiest job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.” But do we have enough people with the right skills to meet the growing demand?

Today HP announced a new line of ProLiant servers dubbed ProLiant Generation 8, or Gen8 for short. The new line bakes in automation and monitoring tools and comes equipped with a sensor array for optimizing energy use. The idea is to create a new line of idiot-proof servers that “virtually manage themselves.” HP is calling this “Integrated Lifecycle Automation.”

Roasted beet salad with citrus vinaigrette.

It’s always interesting to see what press people come up with when they try to change their own industry. There’s often an element of self-serving product pushing that’s borne of a long-standing need for change. And as an observer and participant of the press industry, I have my own qualms with the way things currently work. So I was happy to see an old friend and colleague set out to make this industry better. Josh Dilworth, who left Porter-Novelli to launch his own PR firm Jones-Dilworth a couple years back, is starting a new project aimed at revamping the way the press machine runs. Opening in public beta today is Totem, a service for building press pages that address many issues and annoyances of the industry. Totem is a multi-faceted service that can be a useful resource for PR agents, reporters and startups alike. It centralizes pertinent information about a company so that anyone has access to the information they need. Information like the company’s mission, their latest coverage, logo and press contact. Totem lets you package the press release with the images, contacts with the company history–everything you need to learn about a given company. And the beauty of Totem is that it’s self-serve for every aspect of press these days, whether it’s social media-driven or more traditional…

We can argue all day long about whether your business plan should be 3 pages or 30 pages, but one thing is certain:  You aren’t finished with the plan until you can describe the 5 critical aspects of your company: The idea, the product, the market, the team, and the money.

As you write your plan (with help from enloop.com I hope!) be sure that you add detailed descriptions to each of these 5 sections:

(1) Business Idea:  What are you building? 

Watch out! This is harder than it sounds.  Being able to tell your friends “I’m starting an internet business” is one thing.  Describing the business in a meaningful way is something else. How about “My business will be a subscription-only website where independent music labels can find, organize, qualify and coordinate the musicians, engineers and marketing experts they need to publish successful CDs.” 

This month I tracked the influencers in Big Data. And again this list will change regularly. What’s interesting about this for me is that Big Data is an area I know comparatively little about. Many of the names on the list are new to me. That means, I think, that I have a research tool here that can quickly allow me to become more knowledgeable in new areas. This is vitally important in the age of knowledge flow – we need to be able to take snapshots, and we need to frame a subject area in an instant…

SiliconAngle and Wikibon made 4 of the top 10 spots on this list. Go team!