I saw a story on Warren B and Goldman S creating a 500$ million pool for small business owners.
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The program will contribute $200 million to community colleges, universities and other institutions to provide small- business owners with practical business education.
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Goldman Sachs repaid the $10 billion it was given last year under the taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus dividends. The firm continues to benefit from federal guarantees on about $21 billion of long-term debt.
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Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his investing prowess, is the second-richest American. Berkshire, which invests in companies ranging from retailers to insurers, paid $5 billion in September 2008 to acquire preferred stock in Goldman Sachs that pays a 10 percent dividend. Berkshire, based in Omaha, Nebraska, also gained five-year warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 per share.
- ( NOTE Curent Price of GS shares is 172$ – thats a 50% profit on 5 Billion~ 2.5 Billion for Mr Buffett but he is probably waiting for long term capital gains ax rates to kick in before encashing his patriotic “Buy American. I am” warrants (see NYT op ed by him http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html )
- A better analysis of the above Bloomberg story was given on Bloomberg itself at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=asjp51YPDwJU
- A small thought- could smaller businesses gain from efficiencies of programs like SPSS, SAS and R. Or would they be better off with customized GUI’s linked to their POS data.
Anyways a need for analytics for small businesses in inventory management, and sales planning could help. Joe the Plumber could do with some ETS and Regression Models as well.
However apart for Salesforce.com applications this field seems to be totally vacant for analytics. What are IBM SPSS, SAS, or even other stats packages doing for small businesses. or even developing Salesforce.com applications for their own equivalent software
The market could be an interesting one to atleast do a test in. Unless you don’t believe in test and control.
See below the IBM Cognos by IBM itself and the third party app by Pervasive for SAP Integration-
Citation-
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016YGYEA2
and
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016am1EAA
DECISION STATS 
Hi Ajay!
I work at ziglaconsultores.com a small consulting firm that, among other services, tries to help organizations in measurring social impact. The main barrier that these organizations face is the lack of any kind of database with their own statistics. So, I guess that a sort of salesforce, adapated for small businesses, will do better than using SAS or SPSS in analyzing what they do not have: an own databse.
Great Web!
Agustina