Category: News and Views

What Startups Need to Know About Regulation A+ | Business News Daily

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After a lengthy holdup in Congress, it’s official: Nation-wide policies allowing any interested person to invest in a business through equity crowdfunding will go into effect this summer.

On March 25, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced its final set of new rules that will make it easier for smaller companies to access investor capital through crowdfunding, and provide investors with more investment choices. These rules, known as “Regulation A+,” update and expand the existing Regulation A, and are mandated by Title IV of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act passed in 2012.

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How Online And Offline Communities Are Changing The Way That Businesses Succeed | Forbes

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download (1)The word “community” has grown a great deal in the last decade thanks to the advent of social media. While we’ve always had local communities where we live, we now have online communities large, like the San Francisco Giants’ 2.8 million Facebook fans) and small, like scrappy groups of gamers trying to restore an incomplete game. However, the perspective on what an online and offline community is has grown exponentially.

For example, Assembly is a former YCombinator graduate that has created an online community (even a social network) that can easily turn into a software company. Products as early as a simple idea to fully-established projects can join Assembly and members of the community can follow and even join the company, eventually become owners of the company through any skill they have, including coding, design and product strategy. While it’s become common for social networks to include pages dedicated to companies to follow their projects, Assembly takes it a step further by integrating “followers” into projects so intimately that they’re effectively co-founders.  This has led to random followers (as diverse as you’d find on Twitter TWTR -1.96% or Facebook) from all over the world helping them create a diverse portfolio of software projects.

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Tony Hsieh self-management memo to Zappos employees | Business Insider

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The online shoe-seller Zappos has been experimenting with a self-management organizational structure known as Holacracy for nearly two years.

But on April 30 the company plans to be fully manager-free, according to a company-wide memo CEO Tony Hsieh emailed late last month.

“Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization,” he wrote.

Employees who don’t like the new structure will be offered severance packages if they resign by April 30. To get their severance, however, they must either read the management book “Reinventing Organizations” or just email a statement that they are not reading it.

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EU accuses Google Shopping of search ‘abuse’ – BBC News

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The European Union has filed a complaint against Google over its alleged anti-competitive behaviour.

The competition commissioner said she had issued a “statement of objections”, stating that the firm’s promotion of its own shopping links amounted to an abuse of its dominance in search.

Margrethe Vestager said Google now had 10 weeks to respond.

The firm said it “strongly disagreed” with the allegations and looked forward to making its case.

Ms Vestager also revealed that she had launched an investigation into whether the way Google bundled apps and services for its Android operating system was unfair.

And the commissioner said the EU would continue to monitor other activities by Google that its rivals had complained about.

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A Business Owner’s Act of Kindness Inspires the Internet, Sparks Larger Campaign | Entrepreneur

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In Oklahoma City, a sandwich shop called P.B. Jams is serving up some kindness — and it’s being noticed in a big way.

Last week, owner Ashley Jiron saw signs that someone had been going through the dumpster for a meal — closed bags had holes ripped in them and food looked like it had been removed. Rather than put out mousetraps or call the authorities, she posted a sign on the door reminding whoever was doing this that they are a human being that is worthy of eating food that wasn’t tossed in the garbage. She offered them a free peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a side of veggies and a glass of water for free, no questions asked.

A snap of the message quickly went viral.

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15 Companies That Paid Zero Income Tax Last Year (Despite $23 Billion In Profits) | Co.Exist

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downloadOnly small businesses pay taxes. Big companies often pay nothing at all.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Look at a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C. group. It finds that some of nation’s most famous brands have paid remarkably little to the government over the last five years. In fact, many actually enjoyed a negative tax rate: They received a nice rebate check from the U.S. Treasury.

The 15 giants highlighted by CTJ were chosen to represent a wide range of industries among Fortune 500 companies. They include CBS, Mattel, Prudential, and the California utility PG&E. Together, they paid no federal income tax in 2014, despite profits totaling $23 billion. CTJ’s point is that these companies are not anomalies, they are examples.

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The Middle Class Is Worse Off Than You Think | Bloomberg View

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If you worry about the declining fortunes of the U.S. middle class, take heed: It might be worse than you realized.

Tracking the middle class can be difficult, because the group is hard to define. Typically, researchers look at households with incomes or net worth in the middle of the entire population. This approach, though, might provide a falsely rosy picture. It doesn’t, for example, capture the fates of families that start out in the middle and — due to a job loss or other setback — end up in the bottom.

Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — William Emmons and Bryan Noeth — sought to address this shortcoming by focusing on households’ demographic characteristics, rather than income or wealth. Specifically, they looked at families whose breadwinner was at least 40 years old and had achieved a level of education that would typically allow a middle-class standard of living. Whites and Asians needed exactly a high-school diploma to qualify. For blacks and Hispanics, it took a two-year or four-year college degree — a stark recognition of persistent racial inequality.

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Why the middle class is still getting snared by the ‘wealth tax’ | Money Cnn

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You may vaguely recall that in 2012 Congress “fixed” the Alternative Minimum Tax — or what the Tax Policy Center dubbed “the epitome of pointless complexity.”

But that doesn’t mean the so-called “wealth tax” was simplified or eliminated.

The AMT is still alive and complicated. What lawmakers did was permanently tie the amount of income exempted from the AMT to inflation.

Those income levels, however, are still fairly low ($52,800 for singles this year; $82,100 for married couples filing jointly).

And the set of rules that governs what can and can’t be deducted under the AMT means it’s still hitting a fair number of people for whom it was never intended — those in the middle class and upper middle class.

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