Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Business on the home front - planning a home-based business
Q I am a 35-year-old African American female interested in starting a home-based business. I don't have a lot of capital to start with, but I do have office and [computer] equipment. My interest are music and books, so I'd like to concentrate on this field. Your guidance would be appreciated.
A You've already made a commendable decision in aspiring to become an entrepreneur and having control of your economic future. But understand that such an undertaking requires discipline and often self-sacrifice in the way of family and time.
The fact that you are aware of your interests and want to conduct business in that realm is a plus. However, according to Rudy Lewis, president of the National Association of Home Based Business (NAHBB) (www.usahomebusiness.com), you must go even further in determining and focusing on the actual business within those interests that you wish to set up.
Defining your goals and how you are going to achieve them is crucial. "The financial aspect of any business must be understood and acknowledged up front," says Lewis.
The NAHBB offers a courtesy interview to entrepreneurs and makes recommendations based on the information provided. SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and the American Association of HomeBased Businesses are additional organizations dedicated to guiding you and providing links to valuable resources designed to support the self-employed and home-based entrepreneur.
Businesses switch on to videoconferencing; although videoconferencing in the home looks a far-off prospect, the business market is showing signs of ac
Interactive video communications is a technology that captures our imagination. The idea of being able to connect to anyone face-to-face at a moment's notice has been the promise of science fiction movies for decades. Since its introduction at the 1967 World's Fair, companies have tried to deliver a solution, but fundamental technology barriers stood in the way, mainly the broad availability of affordable bandwidth.
Fast forward to the mid-1990s and the internet boom. The internet held the promise of changing the way we work and delivering the world to our doorstep. Companies popped up like spring weeds to try and capitalise on this market, and carriers invested heavily in the high-speed infrastructure necessary to deliver internet capabilities to businesses and consumers. When the bubble burst and the dust settled, an IP bandwidth-glut remained.
For technologies that require a lot of high-speed bandwidth, like interactive video communications, this created a great opportunity to deliver solutions to a broader market at lower costs than traditional ISDN (H.320) lines. As IP communications technology has continued to develop and improve, additional real-time communication solutions have emerged and are taking hold, like voice over IP.
IP: the promise and the reality
IP is widely regarded as the eventual standard for real-time communications. It is cheaper to provide than ISDN, it is nearly ubiquitous in most developed areas, and the technology is flexible and can support different types of applications in a converged, integrated environment, delivering new levels of functionality and manageability. However, the reality of the technology today is much different between the business and consumer environments.
In the business environment, IP communications has already taken a strong hold in regions like North America and Asia Pacific. Today, Polycom--a provider of videoconferencing systems--claims that approximately 75 percent of customer inquiries for videoconferencing products are related to IP. The Polycom User Group, an independent organisation of global conferencing users, also recently polled its users at an annual meeting and found that more than 50 percent were already leveraging IP for their videoconferencing needs with more planning to migrate to IP in the next few years.
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