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HIRE Act for Small Businesses
On March 18th, President Obama signed into law the Hiring Incentive to Restore Employment Act (HIRE). HIRE provides tax breaks for small businesses that hire and retain qualified unemployed workers. Provisions of the law include:
Tax Holiday. Employers receive a tax Holiday for their portion of the FICA tax for certain workers hired after February 3, 2010 and before January 1, 2011. An employer is excused from paying its share of the 6.2% of the first $106,800 of wages for the qualified employees during the calendar year. The maximum value for each qualified employee is $6,621. This tax Holiday does not include the Medicare Hospital Insurance contribution (1.45% on all wages), the federal unemployment or state unemployment taxes, and other state employment tax.
Enabling a Virtual Office
By Randy BargerPublished: October 1, 2009
Posted in: 2009 Fall, Technology, Expand Omaha Magazine
In today’s economy, companies want to cut costs while maintaining current productivity levels with possibly fewer employees. That’s a tall task, but new technologies are allowing companies to create virtual, online working environments that are secure and easy to use while providing better performance and functionality than a traditional computing environment.
In a traditional computing environment, all employees physically come to an office to work on computers purchased, configured and managed by the company“s IT staff.
NBDC Offers Free Research Services
If you need high quality industry research and market data, Nebraska Business Development Center in the College of Business and Technology will provide it to you at no cost. A typical report provided to business clients would cost almost $1,000 if bought separately from other providers.
The licensed resources can provide timely financial data by sales or organizational structure within an industry sector, detailed GIS demographic and economic data for a geographical region, company market penetration by industry and geographical area, and detailed national industry reports with trends and projections. Compare your own business performance to the industry. Get a better look at the market and coming trends. See how demographic and economic characteristics are forecast to change.
Contact Odee Ingersoll, Director, Nebraska Business Development Center, College of Business & Technology, University of Nebraska Kearney. Phone: 308.865.8429
Blogging: More Than Idle Chatter
By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy | Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine
With 100 million blogs now online, you may feel as though the last thing your website or the world needs is another one. But if you don’t have a blog, you might want to reconsider. That’s because Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), the great arbiter of Web success, has a particular love for blogs. When compiling its vaunted rankings, the search engine appears to favor websites that are updated frequently and are linked to by other webpages. Given these criteria, blogs have an outsize influence on the results. And blogs are more than a way to game Google. A surprising 66 percent of North American consumers trust blogs as a source of product information, according to a 2007 survey by Nielsen. The trick, say experts and longtime bloggers, is restraint. “For marketers, it’s about being more authentic, which is so ironic,” says Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research.