Many of you may have been around when I announced the launch of Vurta Web Hosting, some 1 year 5 months and 24 days ago. Now I’m proud to announce the online launch of another venture I’ve been working on (amazingly, with pen and paper, until now!) – Vurta Clothing.

In a nutshell, Vurta Clothing is a company that offers a huge range of clothing garments and specialises in customised clothing. That is, if you want a bunch of t-shirts with your team’s name and slogan on it, Vurta Clothing is the place to get it.

Don’t have enough time to do everything? Don’t worry, we will handle it for you. Just send us what you want, for example, designs, and we’ll do everything from processing payments from your clients, to production, quality control, and delivery to your clients. Yes, that means no more chasing people to keep on top of their orders (well, we’ll do the chasing for you!).

Want to start up your own clothing company? Fantastic, we support entrepreneurs and we’d loved to help you set up your business. We’ll set you up with everything, from a white labelled online storefront to stock management and delivery. You can then focus all your energy on marketing and driving your business. And our team will always be around to guide you, should you need help!

Please visit our website (http://www.vurtaclothing.com) to find out more, or contact us.

Everyone around me wants to start a new business. Everyone wants to be the next greatest entrepreneur. But 99.9% of them seem to lack the understanding that a business plan is not just important, but vital.

When launching a new venture or expanding on an existing one, the most important step will be the construction of a business plan. The plan must include your short and long-term goals for the enterprise, details on the products or services you wish to offer, and the market opportunities you have anticipated for them, as well as specifics on resources you require, and how you plan to utilise them to reach your goal in the face of competition.

Preparing an ample business plan is no easy task. Spending hundreds of man hours on it is not far-fetched, depending on how much data you have already gathered. Such an effort is necessary if you are to crystallise and focus your ideas, and test your resolve about entering or expanding your business. When finished, your business plan will act like any map, and help guide the user from start to destination.

There are several key benefits for preparing a business plan:

• This systematic approach to planning enables you to make mistakes on paper as opposed to in a real-life market place. One potential entrepreneur found that the local competitor he believed was a one-man band was in fact the pilot operation for a nation-wide chan of franchised outlets. This indeed caused an overwhelming effect on his market entry strategy! Another entrepreneur found that at the price he proposed, he would never recover his overheads, or break even.
• Once the business plan has been completed, it should make you feel much more confident about your ability to set up and operate the venture. It may even compensate for lack of experience and / or capital, provided you have other factors in your favour, such as a strong market gap for you to fill.
• Your business plan will allow you to see what resources you require, more specifically how much money is required, what and when it is needed, as well as how long it is needed for. Under-capitalisation and early cash-flow problems are two major reasons as to why new businesses fail, hence a strongly prepared business plan can help reduce such risks. Whilst researching, one can experiment with a range of alternative strategies, and thus pick out the ones that make best use of scare financial resources.
• It would be an exaggeration to say your business plan is the key to sources of finance. It will however, help you display your entrepreneurial ability and managerial talent to the full, aiding in communicating your ideas to others in a way that is easy for them to understand – including the reasoning behind your decisions and ideas. These ‘others’ could be bankers, potential investors, partners or advisory agencies. The better they know what you are trying to do, the better they will be able to help you.
• Putting together a business plan gives you an insight into the planning process. It is this process that is vital to the long-term health of a business, and not simply the plan that comes out of it. Businesses are dynamic, as are the commercial and competitive environments they operate in. You cannot expect every event recorded on a business plan to occur as written, but the knowledge and understanding created by the process of business planning will prepare the business for any changes that may occur, and so enable it to adjust quickly.

Despite these many valuable benefits, thousands of would-be entrepreneurs still try to start a venture without a business plan. The most common among such are businesses that appear to either not require any or much capital at the beginning, or whose founders have funds of their own; in both cases it is unnecessary to expose the project to harsh financial appraisal.

There is an overused thought that customers will pay all cash immediately, and suppliers will wait indefinitely to be paid, during which the business can use such funds to finance itself. Such model customers and suppliers are much harder to find if ever than optimistic entrepreneurs think. Regardless, two important market rules apply: either the product or service on offer fails to sell like hot cakes, and mountains of unpaid stockpile builds up (all of which need to be financed); or it does sell like mad and more financially strong entrepreneurs are attracted to the business. Without the staying power that adequate financing provides, you and your new venture is dead.

Those would-be entrepreneurs with funds of their own, or worse still with funds borrowed from ‘innocent’ friends and relatives, tend to think that the time spent on preparing a business plan could more usefully and enjoyably be spent looking for a new office, buying a new car, or setting up a new computer. In essence, anything that inhibits them from immediate action is considered time wasting.

Because most people’s view of their business venture is flawed in some important respect, it follows that jumping in at the deep end is risky. However, with a business plan, flaws can be discovered cheaply and far in advance; whenever such flaws are found in the marketplace, they are almost always found at a much higher and fatal cost.

There was a common myth at the start of the Internet boom that the pace of development in the sector was far too fast for business planning. The first generation of dot.com businesses and their backers seemed happy to pump money into what they called a ‘business’ or a ‘revenue’ model. These ‘models’ were little more than brief statements followed by wishful thinking. A few months into the new millennium, and a sense of realism came to the Internet sector. Now, only ventures with well-prepared business plans have any chance of getting off the ground, or being supported in later-stage financing rounds. If you can’t put together a proper business plan, you can’t start a new venture. Simple.

Starbucks opened its first coffee shop in Russia on Thursday, two years after it won a legal battle to protect the right to its brand in the fast-growing Russian market.

“This is an important step for the company, and we are looking forward to being a part of every day life for Russians,” said Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks Europe, Middle East and Africa, as he opened the cafe.

The newest Starbucks in the worldwide chain of around 10,000 outlets is in the Mega shopping mall in Khimki, just north of Moscow.

In 2005 the company won a trademark fight over the Starbucks name. A “squatter” had registered to himself the right to use the name in Russia, and was asking $600,000 from Starbucks to relinquish it.

The company successfully proved in Russia courts that it was the rightful owner of the name.

Alyona Mikhailova, 34, placed Russia’s first official Starbucks order, for a venti, or medium, cappuccino.

“In all of the countries I’ve been to I always definitely go to Starbucks, so I was really waiting for this opening,” she said.

Burrows told Reuters this week the company plans to open a second store on Moscow’s historic Stary Arbat street before the end of the year, but on Thursday would not answer questions on further expansion plans in Russia.

Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of sh*t Americans will buy.”

“Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ’salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these,’” Chen said during his lunch break in an open-air courtyard. “One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless sh*t?”

Chen, 23, who has worked as an injection-mold operator at the factory since it opened in 1996, said he frequently asks himself these questions during his workweek, which exceeds 60 hours and earns him the equivalent of $21.

“I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

Among the items that Chen has helped create are plastic-bag dispensers, microwave omelet cookers, glow-in-the-dark page magnifiers, Christmas-themed file baskets, animal-shaped contact-lens cases, and adhesive-backed wall hooks.

“Sometimes, an item the factory produces resembles nothing I’ve ever seen,” Chen said. “One time, we made something that looked like a ladle, but it had holes in its cup and a handle that bent down 90 degrees. The foreman told us that it was a soda-can holder for an automobile. If you are lucky enough to own a car, sit back and enjoy the journey. Save the soda beverage for later.”

Chen added: “A cup holder is not a necessary thing to own.”

Chen expressed similar confusion over the tens of thousands of pineapple corers, plastic eyeshades, toothpick dispensers, and dog pull-toys that he has helped manufacture.

“Why the demand for so many kitchen gadgets?” Chen said. “I can understand having a good wok, a rice cooker, a tea kettle, a hot plate, some utensils, good china, a teapot with a strainer, and maybe a thermos. But all these extra things—where do the Americans put them? How many times will you use a taco-shell holder? ‘Oh, I really need this silverware-drawer sorter or I will have fits.’ Shut up, stupid American.”

Chen added that many of the items break after only a few uses.

“None are built to last very long,” Chen said. “That is probably so the Americans can return to buy more. Not even the badly translated assembly instructions deter them. If I bought a kitchen item that came with such poor Mandarin instructions, I would return the item immediately.”

May Gao of the Hong Kong-based labor-advocacy group China Labour Bulletin said complaints like Chen’s are common among workers in China’s bustling industrial cities.

“Last week, I took testimony from several young female workers from Shenzhen who said they were locked in a work room for 18 straight hours making inflatable Frisbees,” Gao said. “Finally, the girls joined hands on the factory floor and began to chant, ‘No more insane flying toys for Western pigs!’ They quickly lost their jobs and were ostracized by their families, but the incident was a testament to China’s growing disillusionment with producing needless crap for fat-ass foreigners.”

Continued Gao: “As Chinese manufacturing and foreign investment continue to grow, and more silly novelty products are invented, we can expect to see more of these protests.”

In the meantime, Chen continues to stew in bitterness. Though he dislikes his work, competition for manufacturing jobs in Fenghua is stiff and he must support his wife, mother, and 2-year-old son.

“My cousin Yuen is self-employed,” Chen said. “He disassembles old computers that are acquired from overseas and extracts the traces of valuable gold and silver from the circuit boards. He asked me to join him. The work is very toxic, but at least I would not be looking at suction-cup razor holders and jumbo-dice keychains all day.”

Chen added: “For now, I must refuse the job. Somehow, the only thing more depressing than making plastic sh*t for Americans is destroying the plastic sh*t they send back.”

YouTube has secured an agreement with the UK societies that collect royalties for 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers to legitimise the use of recorded music on Google’s popular video-sharing website.

The agreement to license 10m pieces of music to YouTube – in return for a flat fee which has not been disclosed – is the first of its kind, said Steve Porter, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. “This is the first fully formed agreement,” he said, although some US collecting societies had reached interim arrangements with YouTube.

The agreement marks another milestone in YouTube’s attempts to win over owners of media content, who have expressed alarm at the amount of material available on the site that is either pirated or that generates no revenue for the companies that created it.

Check out the new MSN.com website here

I think this is a fantastic advertising idea, and finally demonstrates that Microsoft does have some creative minds at work. When I first saw the website, and I’m sure some of you experienced the same, I actually froze for a second and thought “what is going on?”. I’m an Office 2007 user myself, and for that second, I actually thought I had Microsoft Word 2007, and the Ribbon Interface I really love open. And then it took me another second to realise that I could actually still click the search box and type something in, and wasn’t really stuck in Word or some other dream world.

There will certainly be 100’s of copycats around; it would be interesting to see how long this advertising technique will last, not only on MSN.com, but on the Internet as a whole. How willing will Webmasters be to allow entire homepage(s) to turn into an advertisment for a product? Or should I be saying - how much will companies be willing to pay to advertise products in such a way on high-traffic websites, compared to simple banners? On the other hand, will this technique simply remain used within company websites?

Before turning this blog entry into a mini-review (actually, maybe I should write one!), I highly recommend users upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. It a fantastic new product with loads of (added) functionality - e.g. I can now save directly to PDF files - and the advertising team definitely deserves some credit for their work.

The Official Microsoft Office 2007 Website
Download a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007

Soon enough, Google really is going to control all information on the Internet. $1.65B also doesn’t seem that much in comparison to other business buyouts, takeovers and purchases.

Google, the Internet’s leading search engine, announced Monday that it is buying popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

YouTube, which was founded in February 2005, has quickly become the most well-known of several online video sites. More than 100 million videos, many of which are short videos created by the site’s users, are downloaded a day on the site.

According to Internet research firm Hitwise, YouTube has about a 46 percent share of the online video market.

For Google (Charts), the purchase of YouTube gives the company the ability to tap into the potentially lucrative online video and social networking markets. Some analysts have criticized Google for relying too much on advertising tied to keyword searches.

The combination of Google and YouTube could further strengthen Google’s dominance in online advertising, giving it an edge over rivals such as Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN and News Corp., which owns the social networking site MySpace. Some analysts said Monday that Yahoo, Microsoft and News Corp. also had probably expressed interest in buying YouTube.

In a statement, Google said that YouTube will operate as an independent unit of Google once the deal closes and will retain the YouTube brand name. The companies added that no YouTube workers will lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition and that Google will maintain its own online video business.

Vurta has been up for a while now, our datacenter is the core to our business. Without it, there would be no Vurta. Our servers power our business. Because of this, we have strict guidelines on how our systems are setup, managed, and kept. As always, safety is a priority too. Take a look:

Actually, the above pictures have nothing to do with Vurta. You’ll be glad to know that we’re located in the NAC datacenter; a much safer, trustable and reliable place. Let me repeat, the above pictures are not related to Vurta! So what does Vurta and its services sit on top of? Look below:

No actually’s. Vurta is serious.
Visit Vurta

Alright. I’ve been extremely busy with the launch of Vurta, hence a long time since my last update. Firstly, thanks to everyone for visiting, even if it has only been for a free Moola or Google Analytics invite.

Vurta is a web hosting company set up by a bunch of people including myself. Since the launch (4 days ago), we’ve received an overwhelming number of sales enquiries, as well as completed and pending sales. I’d love to give you exact figures, but I’m actually not allowed (rules are rules). Nevertheless, it’s looking great; and we haven’t even started mass-marketing yet!

We’re also finalising our Affiliate Programme, which means we’ll pay you for each person you bring to us. To make it even better, you’ll earn extra, a percentage of every sale your affiliates bring. Again, this is still in its finishing stages so more details will be posted here later.

All you timw.com readers rock, so here’s something for you:
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I’m sure we’ve all been to YouTube.com, a place where honestly, you can pretty much find videos on just about anything and everything. In fact, I’ve seen people manage to spend an entire day on sites like YouTube; watching video after video.

Here’s an interesting extract about YouTube from eWEEK:

YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said on Sunday viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its “snack-sized” video fare. Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, YouTube has come to hold the leading position in online video with 29 percent of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market, according to the latest weekly data from Web measurement site Hitwise. YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online, the company said. Videos are delivered free on YouTube and the company is still working on developing advertising and other means of generating revenue to support the business.

The site specializes in short—typically 2-minute—homemade, comic videos created by users. YouTube serves as a quick entertainment break or viewers with broadband computer connections at work or home.

In June, 2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube, which is based in San Mateo, California and has just over 30 employees. More than 65,000 videos are now uploaded daily to YouTube, up from around 50,000 in May, the company said.

YouTube boasts nearly 20 million unique users per month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, another Internet audience measurement firm.

Damn, imagine the money involved with a site like this in advertising itself! And my last entry feature two YouTube videos