GOOGLE ANNOUNCES NEW DOMAIN REGISTRATION SERVICE, CURRENTLY INVITE-ONLY

Original Story: 9to5google.com

Google this afternoon announced that it is launching a new Google Domains service. In an effort to continue its reach to small businesses, the company has announced that it is, for the first time, offering a domain registration service. Google says that its small business-focused division decided to create Google Domains because, according to its research, 55 percent of small businesses still do not have a website.

Google Domains is still in an early, invite only beta, but the company says that it hopes to launch to all consumers soon. Currently, website creation tools Wix, Weebly, Shopify, and Squarespace have all signed up as partners. In addition to being able to register a new web address with Google Domains, you’ll also have the ability to transfer for names from other services into Google’s offering.

One big advantage to Google Domains is that it won’t charge extra for setting an address private. Google will offer 100 email addresses on the domain for free, in addition as many as 100 sub-domains. Google Domains will also use the company’s own DNS servers, which should make for fast response times.

Starting to test Google Domains

It’s 2014 and it seems obvious, but across laptops, tablets and mobile devices, a website is one of the first places people go to find information about a business. But amazingly, our research shows that 55% of small businesses still don’t have one.

So as we explore ways to help small businesses succeed online (through tools like Google My Business), we thought it made sense to look more closely at the starting point of every business’s online presence – a website. And that starts with a domain name.

We’re beginning to invite a small number of people to kick the tires on Google Domains, a domain registration service we’re in the process of building. Businesses will be able to search, find, purchase and transfer the best domain for their business – whether it’s .com, .biz, .org, or any of the wide range of new domains that are being released to the Web.

Google Domains isn’t fully-featured yet, but we’re giving a small group of people the ability to buy and transfer domains through it and send feedback on their experience. (You currently need an invitation code to do so, sorry!) We want input on all the ways we can help make finding, buying, transferring and managing a domain a simple and transparent experience. We also want to make sure our customer support and infrastructure works flawlessly, and that we have the right additional services (like mobile website creation tools and hosting services from a range of providers, as well as domain management support). We’re working with some of the top website building providers like +Shopify, +Squarespace, +Weebly, and +Wix.com to help make that happen.

While we’re still building out all of the features, our goal is to make Google Domains more widely available soon. You can check out the first cut of what we’re working on at http://www.google.com/domains.

Lessons Learned from Google

Story first appeared in USA Today.

When people talk about Google and its organizational culture, they are equally fascinated and hopeless, believing that the magic behind Google lies in the deep revenue streams that make it possible to feed its employees three meals a day. Small businesses, especially, tend to dismiss Google as a wholly unattainable model for running a business.

However, there were core lessons learned at Google that transformed the way people look at problem solving and strategic thinking. There were statements that were heard early and often that guided decision-making at every level of the organization. These mantras are at the core of innovation for Google but translate readily to any business to create agility, employee engagement and ultimately, stronger business results. Google's success owes far more to these mantras than the food in the cafes, and even better, they cost no money to implement.

1. Launch and iterate. Even the smartest of the hyper-educated Google leaders cannot predict which products and features will attract a sizable user base. Instead, they urge teams to launch quickly and iterate — in other words, stick with, and perfect, what's working — based on what they learn from their users. Rather than spending time perfecting a product that might not work, get it out there, and let the feedback guide future development.

For a small business, this means trying out a lot of services, products, marketing, sales and other tactics in really small ways, gauging the success and then building on the ideas that work in reality. Resist the urge to perfect — if your customers understand that you truly want their feedback to shape products and services, they will enthusiastically share their opinions.

2. Fail fast. If you try a lot of stuff by launching early and iterating, you'll fail at most attempts. This is the secret to innovation. Failure is not a bad thing, but slow failure in the market is. Launch, iterate and declare the failures as quickly as you can. Most importantly, learn from those failures to help guide future efforts.

Do a weekly retrospective for your operations, lasting no more than 30 minutes. Ask your teams to answer three simple questions: What worked well? What did we learn? What can we do differently? Then, pick the one change that will make the most difference and put it in to play.

3. Focus on the user. Your customers or users should be your singular focus, always. A question asked incessantly to maintain this focus is: "What problem are we trying to solve for our customers?" Every product or service must be linked to a problem or challenge that will make their lives easier.

4. Ask forgiveness, not permission. This mantra was important to mobilize every Google employee in the company to do the things they felt were right without worrying about what approvals they needed to do it. The idea is to remove barriers and to empower employees to act quickly.

Reward employees for taking initiative, and treat their missteps as any other failure — something to learn from, but not to dwell on. What is most important is they become stewards of your company to make the best decisions without seeking 100 approvals to do so.

5. If you see a void, fill it. This is a favorite lesson from Google. It gives explicit permission to employees and the expectation that, if something is broken, everyone is empowered and responsible to fix it. If there is a spill in the kitchen, clean it up. If the copy machine is broken, file a ticket. And if you see a void in the market for an application you believe users will love, then build it.

This creates an environment in which every employee is 100% responsible for making your company better every day in little (or big) ways.
Put together, these five mantras create a responsible organization fiercely devoted to making the lives of customers better, one tiny step at a time. Free bagels are optional.

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JOBS Act Helps Small Businesses

Story first appeared in The New York Times.

The JOBS Act passed by Congress last week and being signed by the president on Thursday helps smaller public companies avoid for a few years the internal controls reporting and audit requirements put in place in 2002 in the wake of prominent accounting scandals.

But just a few days after the bill was passed, Groupon disclosed that it had to restate its results from the fourth quarter of 2011 and that its outside auditor had found weaknesses in its internal controls.

There are always trade-offs when it comes to enforcing rules for proper financial reporting. The question is whether this exemption is a benefit to investors who purchase shares in these companies, whether they are well-known brands like Groupon or promising start-ups just getting their bearings.  Startup companies should consider employing a New York Business Entity Formation Lawyer to confirm that they are following proper legal protocol.

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was adopted in response to the accounting scandals that enveloped companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia Communications, where significant accounting frauds went undetected by outside auditors, sometimes for years.

To prevent a repeat of the scandals that cost investors billions, companies are now required in annual reports to have chief executives and chief financial officers attest to the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures of the issuer for financial reporting. The outside auditors also have to test the internal controls and give an opinion on their effectiveness.  Austin Business Lawyers are interested in the outcome of such tests.

The initial costs of developing the required internal controls can run as high as $5 million to $10 million for a small company once it goes public because private firms do not have to have the same accounting and compliance structures in place as larger corporations. In addition to the expense of putting in place the program for the first time, the annual review by a company’s accountants adds to the costs of the audit.

There was no more reviled provision in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act than Section 404 because of the significant costs it imposed on corporations of every size, especially smaller companies that do not have a large accounting and compliance staff already in place. The law takes a one size fits all approach to internal controls, so the burden on small firms can be much more significant.

That’s where the JOBS Act (an acronym for Jumpstart Our Business Startups) steps in to help some companies avoid those costs, at least temporarily. The law exempts an emerging growth company from the requirements with Section 404. The statute defines such a firm as one with less than $1 billion in annual gross revenue or a $700 million market capitalization, and the exemption can last for up to five years if the company does not grow too large within that period.

The new law is a boon to small companies because it will lower costs by allowing them to avoid the attestation and outside auditor review requirements for internal controls. All publicly traded companies have to make accurate financial reports, but now an emerging growth company can limit its compliance and auditing costs for up to five years.  Keeping and providing accurate financial reports are an absolute must, say Washington DC Corporate Lawyers.

Compliance programs do not generate revenue for companies, and they can lead to significant costs as a company grows and has to spend increasing amounts on internal controls. The act may allow smaller companies to skimp on this part of the business when there is no requirement to comply with Section 404.

Groupon is an example of the almost inevitable problems that can arise when a company develops a popular new market. Emerging growth companies in the technology and social media fields are the type of firms that can quickly outgrow the internal controls needed to comply with the accounting rules.

Though it does not technically qualify as an emerging growth company because its rapid growth has taken it well over the $1 billion revenue limit, in many ways, Groupon is the epitome of an early stage company. Groupon is less than four years old and already has moved from annual revenue of $14.5 million in 2009 to over $1.6 billion in 2011.

(Because it just had its I.P.O., Groupon is not yet covered by Section 404, but it will have to comply with the requirements when it files its next annual report in March 2013.)
Groupon stated that it had begun taking steps and plans to take additional measures to remediate the underlying causes of the material weakness, primarily through the continued development and implementation of formal policies, improved processes and documented procedures, as well as the continued hiring of additional finance personnel. There are no assurances that it will be successful, or that other accounting issues will come to the surface, according to Washington DC Business Lawyers.

Even before its initial public offering last year, Groupon had problems with how it presented its financial results. In one filing, it used a metric called adjusted consolidated segment operating income that gave a highly favorable view of its revenue, even though it was not sanctioned as an appropriate accounting method. Groupon later dropped that approach in favor of more traditional measures that ended up showing a much lower revenue figure. The Deal Professor called the company’s approach to its accounting “Grouponomics.”

Another provision of the act exempts emerging growth companies from putting in place new accounting rules, so there is also the potential for disparate financial reporting between newer companies and more established ones. That could present problems for investors trying to evaluate a company’s financial performance as it moves beyond the early stage and will be subject to all the applicable accounting and internal controls requirements.

The act does not encourage fraud at small companies, and emerging growth companies that hope to survive more than five years will have to plan on meeting the stringent requirements of Section 404. From one point of view, the law gives newer companies a chance to grow the internal controls environment they will have to implement at some point in time.

But they are also the firms that can face the greatest risk of internal controls issues. The new law means investors in start-ups will have to be especially vigilant because the protection afforded by Section 404 will be missing.

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