By Oregon Small Business Association

Washington-based Donuts Inc. paid almost $56.8 million to apply for 307 top-level Website domain names, the most of any company, more than Google (99) or Amazon (76). The domain name registrar startup paid $185,000 per application.

The company that manages the Internet’s address system, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), published a list of applied-for domains on June 13. It will decide on which names to approve. In mid-2013, ICANN plans to auction 1,400 new suffixes for Website domain names, expanding way beyond .net, .com, and .org. The last expansion occurred in 2004.

Owning a domain name can be highly profitable. Bloomberg reports that Clover Holdings paid $13 million for the rights to sex.com.

Backed by more than $100 million in venture capital, Donuts applied for names including .blog, .inc, .love, .baby, and .toys. Most are in English, but some are in other languages, including Spanish, French, German, and four in Chinese. Donuts won’t sell domain names directly to consumers but will act as a wholesaler, brokering names to registrars like GoDaddy.

Donuts, based in Bellevue, was started in November 2010 by four men with vast experience in Internet domain management. The company is led by co-founder Paul Stahura, a veteran tech entrepreneur who founded domain registrar eNom and sold it to Demand Media in 2006.

Some worry that Donuts will license websites to cybersquatters. Donuts has already arranged to sell 107 of its top-level domain names to Demand Media, which has been involved in more than two dozen cases involving cybersquatting.

For more, see http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-21/donuts-tries-a-domain-grab

By Oregon Small Business Association

eBay expanding

eBay is enlarging its footprint in downtown Portland, where it established a mobile development operation when it bought Critical Path Software in 2010. It has added dozens of employees since then and lists additional jobs on its website. eBay will occupy a third floor of its building near Portland State University, increasing its office space by 50 percent to make room for more software developers.

The Portland office is in charge of eBay’s mobile software development, building apps and websites tailored for smartphones and iPads. eBay’s mobile suite includes fashion apps, an app that finds parts for your car, and an iPad app that finds merchandise from the show you’re watching. This year, mobile transactions, the company’s fastest-growing audience, will be 17 times what they were just three years ago.

Ebay is one of a handful of big technology companies that have bought into Oregon in the past two years, seeking people rather than products. “Talent acquisitions,” sometimes called “acqui-hires,” are a way of life in the Silicon Valley, where the competition for skilled software engineers is so fierce that sometimes the best way to acquire a skilled team is to buy a whole company.
Google, Dell and Walmart Labs all established Portland offices through similar deals.

Cisco buys ClearAccess

Earlier this year, telecommunications equipment giant Cisco Systems bought Vancouver-based ClearAccess. Twenty-two employees, including ClearAccess founders Ken Hood and Joel Pennington, moved to a Cisco office in Lake Oswego and integrated their software into Cisco products. The ClearAccess hardware team formed a new company, SmartRG, in Vancouver.

Founded seven years ago, ClearAccess created software to help Internet service providers manage residential users’ Web access. It designed technology to accommodate the increasingly complex wireless networks inside homes. Cisco said that ClearAccess’ software will improve the equipment that Cisco provides to large telecommunications clients. When an Internet subscriber runs into network trouble, the software is designed to give the telecom company the tools to offer a faster, cheaper fix remotely.
SmartRG, the new Vancouver hardware company emerging from the deal, will license ClearAccess’ software for its home gateways.

Rumors of Salesforce.com location in Portland area

San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, a customer management software firm, said it will establish a Portland-area office and plans to hire hundreds of people in coming years. They’re likely to be relatively high-paid jobs across an array of corporate specialties including software design, information technology, finance, customer support and human resources. It has not indicated exactly where that office would be, but the lack of specifics hasn’t curbed speculation and rumors.
Colliers International, in its third quarter office report for 2012, suggested Salesforce.com is reportedly in negotiations to lease 80,000 square feet in Lake Oswego’s Kruse Way submarket. If the Kruse Way rumor proves true, it would be a sign that one of the region’s most-battered submarkets is on the mend.

As one of the area’s busiest office markets, vacancies jumped to about 30 percent due to the recession’s impact on the mortgage brokers, title companies and other real estate-related firms that called it home.
Salesforce.com could be the tenant to finally activate Kruse Oaks III, a long-vacant building that has become a suburban poster child for the recession’s impact on commercial real estate. It is the only building where Shorenstein Properties, which controls 2.3 million square feet in the Kruse Way area, could easily accommodate a tenant that large.

Facebook taps Portland firm Weiden &  Kennedy

The Portland-based advertising agency of Widen+Kennedy was named as Facebook’s agency of record. One billion people are now actively using Facebook each month, and to celebrate, Facebook hired Widen+Kennedy to produce a brand campaign, a 90-second video titled, “The Things That Connect Us.”

See ad here.

By Oregon Small Business Association

Giant retailers are offering same-day delivery in selected cities to try to gain a competitive edge. Amazon started same-day delivery several years ago, filling orders from its own warehouses.

“Amazon created this monster and everyone has had to jump on board to compete,” expert analyst Kerry Rice told the Wall Street Journal.

Walmart announced it would test same-day delivery in October in several key cities. They charge a flat $10 delivery fee, no minimum purchase required. Orders are filled from local Walmart stores and delivered by UPS. Orders must be placed before noon for same-day delivery. Most US residents live within close driving distance of at least one of Walmart’s nearly 3,100 Supercenters, giving Walmart a strategic advantage over Amazon, at least until Amazon can build more distribution centers.

E-Bay Now has also jumped on board, offering service in San Francisco and New York City. Their goal is to become a national platform for local commerce, getting goods to customers faster than any other retailer. Minimum order is $25; delivery fee is $5. When an order is placed, E-Bay Now sends a courier to shop for the item, using software that does comparison shopping in local store inventories. From the time the order is placed to the time the courier is handing the order to the customer: less than one hour.

No same-day delivery service at this time is making a profit. The point is to attract customers and get them into the habit of using a particular company’s online service. The profit will theoretically be made later.

So far, the clear leader in same-day service is Amazon, according to Time Business & Money. Amazon is willing to withstand the loss because of gains it hopes to achieve in the future.

By Oregon Small Business Association

Nike Surfing was launched in 2005 to manufacture and market surfing gear, but after seven years, Nike has decided to roll over its surfing business to its Hurley brand. Nike plans to double its investment in surfing, but it will do so by channeling funds and efforts through Hurley, which it acquired in 2002 for an estimated $100 million to $140 million.

All of Nike’s surf athletes, including Kolohe Andino, Carissa Moore, and Julian Wilson, will join the Hurley team in January. This means that Hurley will be the top sponsor for eight of the world’s top 34 surfers. Nike has already announced that it is pulling out as the main sponsor of the US Open of Surfing, an event attended by close to a million people in 2012.

“Hurley is a well-known brand among surfers, but Nike Surfing isn’t,” said Marie Case, managing director of a marketing and research firm specializing in the action sports industry.

“Nike’s decision is a smart move because it’s likely a consolidation of resources,” Case said.

Peter “PT” Townend, surfing’s first world champion, agrees. He told the Orange County Register, “Instead of waging the war on two brand fronts, they made a decision that they are going to put all their horses into Hurley, at least when it comes to surfing.”

Bob Hurley, Hurley’s CEO and founder, is happy about the change. “I could not be more excited and energized at the next phase of our adventure,” he wrote in an email.

By Oregon Small Business Association,

Biometric scans may become more available as replacements for ATM’s, PIN’s and other personal ID while increasing security and speeding up check-ins and online transactions.

Biometric Technology

Biometric scanners use personal characteristics and traits to identify a person. Palm prints, used widely by Japanese ATM’s and Australian police, show a relief map of the palm. New palm print technology tracks veins and bone structure. Iris scans, although expensive, are considered among the most accurate and acceptable to customers. Facial recognition, which scans the iris and measures distance between the eyes and between the nose and mouth, is being used on some smartphones and laptops. Reuters reported Intel has developed a prototype tablet and software which recognizes the unique pattern of veins on a person’s palm. The tablet will then securely communicate the user’s identity to online accounts.
Banks, Business and Travel

“Biometrics has a real opportunity to take off,” Alphonse Pascual, a security, risk and fraud analyst for Javelin Strategy & Research told MarketWatch. “When they are done well, they are a great solution (to secure identification). Unfortunately, there are still limitations to it.”

Drawbacks include privacy issues and accuracy. But a growing number of businesses, hospitals and financial institutions are investing in the technology. Disney World has employed finger scans at entrances for years.  CLEAR biometrics claims a speedy 5-minute airport identity screening process using iris and fingerprint identification currently in use at five airports.

Customers are growing more comfortable with biometric identification. In fact, a Javelin report on banking authentication claimed that “business customers crave biometrics.” Seven in 10 banking customers told Javelin researchers they were interested in biometrics with 35% saying they preferred using fingerprints. The researchers found technology-driven people liked card issuers and banks that embraced biometrics.

FBI

The FBI is completing a $1 Billion project called Next Generation Identification which will employ a multimodal system in the largest worldwide person-centric biometric database.

Hospitals

Time Health and Family reports New York University’s Langone Medical Center uses palm scans for expedited intake of patients who have their information and palm scan, in numeric code, on file. It makes registration quicker, avoids misidentification and helps when a patient is unconscious. An article in Becker’s Hospital Review reports the advantages of iris scans to help solve patient ID problems.

Privacy Concerns

However, there are objections. The Baltimore Sun reports the use of the PalmSecure system in Maryland schools to pay for lunches has upset some parents who consider it a violation of privacy. Students palms were scanned before the parents were given the choice to opt-out. Parents in other areas of the country also have privacy and cost concerns.

By Oregon Small Business Association

When Nike’s shirt deal with the London club Arsenal expires in 2013-4, the German manufacturer Adidas is hoping to lure Arsenal away with a kit-supply bid that will at least double Arsenal’s $21 million annual profits. According to the Telegraph, Arsenal fans buy 800,000 shirts every year, which makes them Nike’s third-largest European soccer customer after Manchester United and Barcelona.

Arsenal has worn Nike kits since 1994. Before that, they had an 8-year contract with Adidas.

Nike also has a 13-year contract with Manchester United that will expire in 2015. Last month, United announced that when its contract expires, it will seek a more favorable contract or take its business elsewhere. Last year, United reported retail sales of $54.7 million.

“We continue to believe that there will be an opportunity to reset our existing deal with Nike to market rates,” United’s executive vice chairman Ed Woodward said on a conference call with analysts, according to Bloomberg. “There have been many changes to the world of football since this deal was negotiated in 2001.”

One of those changes is the emergence of new soccer-apparel manufacturing companies such as Kitbag Ltd., Warrior, and Under Armour. “The clubs now have more options and can drive up the sports marketing fee they are getting from the brands,” Andy Anson, United’s former commercial director, told Bloomberg.

In June, Nike announced that for the first time, its soccer-related sales hit $2 billion.

Though Arsenal and United are expected to look for better deals with Nike, the Portland Business Journal says, “The chance of Nike losing either is still remote.”

By Oregon Tax News

The watchdog taxpayer group, Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS), has included the Columbia River Crossing Bridge in its list of what it terms “common sense cuts to avoid the fiscal cliff.” The cuts total $2.0 trillion, which is more than enough to avoid sequestration, the across-the-board budget cuts mandated by law that will automatically go into effect January 2, 2013, if the budget is not otherwise cut. Sequestration will hit defense and non-defense budgets equally.

“Sequestration is bad. It would cut the good along with the bad, the effective and the wasteful. It is irresponsible,” states the TCS October 2012 report.

Instead, the report suggests dozens of projects that should be cut, including the Columbia River Crossing Bridge, which would save $1.25 billion. The report argues that the proposed highway-transit bridge over the Columbia River would only reduce morning commute times by 60 seconds. It also argues that the state transportation department’s justification for the project is based on faulty traffic projections. “Congress should deny state requests for one-third of the project’s billion dollar price tag and require more cost-effective alternatives,” concludes the report.

It also recommends cutting the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project (saving $1.2-$4.6 billion) and the Yakima River Basin Water Enhancement Project (saving $1.4 billion).

The entire TCS report can be found here.

By Oregon Small Business Association

Analysts at IDC and Gartner Inc. said PC shipments in this year’s third quarter were down by 87.5 million, or 8% lower than a year ago. A report from IHS iSuppli projected that overall sales would decline this year for the first time in 11 years.

“This is definitively a crossroads” for the computer industry, IDC analyst David Daoud told the Wall Street Journal. “It could be a make or break moment.”

Sales of personal computers are in sharp decline, fueled by the weak economy, falling PC sales in emerging countries, and the rising popularity of smartphones and tablet computers such as the iPad and the Galaxy Tab

Todd Bradley, the head of Hewlett-Packard’s PC business, said he thinks the core PC market will stay flat “potentially through 2015.” Bradley thinks one area of the market that will grow is the all-in-one desktops, systems that have the monitor and computer in the same case.

The Chinese PC maker Lenovo reported their net profit in the three months through September was up 13% from a year ago in spite of the general PC slump. However, this profit was the smallest in more than two years, down 30% from the previous quarter.

Gene Marks of Forbes sees the decline all differently, he says “The PC industry is not dead. And it’s not dying. There’s a secret to the declining PC sales. Today’s PCs, and the operating systems that run them, just last longer”.

Reform needed over wood product certification 
By Oregon Small Business Association

Oregon’s federal lawmakers have taken a strong stand against China’s unfair and manipulative trade practices that have made its government-subsidized wood and paper products artificially cheap in the U.S. market. Chinese firms are also reaping huge profits from illegal logging.

“American manufacturers can’t compete when the deck is unfairly stacked against them,” Congressman Peter DeFazio said, in support of a Congressional investigation of Chinese plywood manufacturers. “We cannot afford to allow China to get away with manipulative trade practices that hurt American companies and cost us jobs.” Read more »

By Oregon Small Business Association

Ordering a double-shot latte is easier and faster these days using Starbucks’ mobile payment program. Even before its recent $25 million investment in Square, the San Francisco mobile payments startup, Starbucks had been processing a million mobile-phone transactions per week.

The Seattle-based coffee chain released its first mobile app in September 2009 which helped customers find stores, learn about coffee, and get nutrition information. In January 2011 the chain released a more powerful Starbucks Card mobile app, which also let consumers pay at the register by waving a bar code on their phone’s screen in front of a scanner. Customers have been able to load Starbucks’ digital prepaid card with an existing credit card. Read more »