Like most trainers, I frequently engage participants in interactive activities that hopefully shift their paradigms. With one such activity, I give participants a list of like-hotels in a location they’ve never been to, and then have them each place... Doug Kennedy http://www.kennedytrainingnetwork.com/

Amazon may be sprinting to get a strategic advantage when E-Commerce sales taxes finally kick in, but it’s still in no hurry to pay up. Last week, in its annual 10-K report to the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), Amazon said Arizona has billed it for “approximately $53 million, including tax and interest, for uncollected tax for the periods March 1, 2006, through December 31, 2010.” The “transaction privilege tax” bill was dated November 2011; apparently, the state’s revenue department just realized those four Amazon distribution centers in Arizona belong to that company in Washington.

Yes, Amazon has to keep pretending its warehouses belong to a company completely separate from its online business. And the state has to do this little dance to start negotiations that will end up in an agreement that Amazon will start collecting Arizona sales tax on some future date or once a federal law kicks in. But wouldn’t it be nice if, for once, both sides could just skip the inevitable lawsuit, lobbying and legislation and go straight to the back-room deal? Arizona is already so late to this game it’ll be lucky just to get through one of those three Ls before Congress finally acts.

When it comes to loyalty, many retailers are stuck in the 1990s. Does anyone else find it funny that in a world where you can very easily have a video conference with your kids from a $500 tablet over free Wi-Fi from a random hotel, we're expected to keep a 3.3- x 2.2-inch piece of plastic in our wallets to get benefits from some of our favorite retailers? All of this, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer's top and bottom lines.

How do you know the right questions to ask to screen prospective speakers? Since you are essentially trusting your credibility with the speaker you put in front of your franchisees, pre-qualifying prospective speakers is imperative. To help you make... Katrina Mitchell http://www.franchisespeakers.com/#

A study estimates that small companies have cut 725.3 million annual employee hours by using mobile apps, equaling $17.6 billion in savings

Technovation Challenge is a contest for high school students run by Iridescent, which uses online software called App Inventor

When you go to your next trade convention show, you will want to network with as many people as you can - which means you have to leave many conversations. How do you do this gracefully? Here is an... Arden Clise http://www.cliseetiquette.com/

For certain small companies going public, the change would delay some requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley that have to do with internal controls

President Barack Obama sent Congress a package of small business measures today that he said would expand tax relief and unlock capital to boost the economy and create jobs.

More companies are assessing the true cost of outsourcing

Republican Governor Rick Snyder wants to attract talented foreigners he sees as crucial to the economy

A TSA inspection helped Julie Macklowe switch careers from hedge fund manager to entrepreneur, selling luxury, travel-friendly toiletry kits

Small companies have increased their share of goods sold abroad in the two years since President Obama set a goal to double exports by 2015

Integrity is what you do when nobody is watching! Some franchisors appear to believe that when a person asks for the franchisor's FDD they need not give it. Why? Here is, slightly edited a franchisor's broker's answer,  which appeared on... Paul Segreto http://franchisessentials.wordpress.com

Why are small problems sometimes the biggest pains? Sometimes because they're the hardest to spot. On January 25, Neiman Marcus' Web site was inaccessible only to customers using Internet Explorer versions 6 and 8 on Windows 7—everyone else was apparently able to get in without difficulty. This sort-of outage should have been easy to fix, but it lasted more than nine hours.

That suggests the Dallas-based high-end retailer made a change in the wee hours—exactly when you'd expect—but then accidentally left test code in the homepage. The result: a Web site that probably worked fine for everyone in IT, just not for all customers.

MasterCard's Monday (Jan. 30) rollout of its roadmap for EMV in the U.S. set it on the opposite side of payment security from Visa, with MasterCard pushing for EMV with PIN and Visa arguing that PIN isn't necessary. MasterCard is backing up its preference with some serious fraud-dollar forgiveness. Oddly enough, the much-smaller MasterCard has trumped—or, more precisely, nullified—Visa's position, at least as far as retailers are concerned.

Given that greater-than-99-percent of Visa retailers in the U.S. also accept MasterCard, chains must go along with whichever brand has the more strict requirements. Typically, that's been Visa, but not this time. On EMV-related PCI relaxations, however, the two brands opted to adopt identical policies.

Home Depot took its Web site offline on Wednesday (Feb. 1) to upgrade its version of IBM WebSphere from version 6 to 7. (Exactly why the planned outage began at noon on Wednesday seems a little mysterious, but Home Depot knows its traffic patterns better than we do.) However, in what was apparently an effort to give visitors something to read, the “Pardon Our Dust” default page included a link to Home Depot’s company blog, which even had a new post for do-it-yourselfers on Wednesday.

Only one problem: The new blog post had a link to where customers could buy that product on the site—which, naturally, took the customer to the only page working on the regular site, the “Pardon Our Dust” page. In fact, all the blog’s links went either to that page or to a grim-looking error page headed “Moved Permanently: The document has moved here”—and “here” turned out to be a link to the “Pardon Our Dust” page (from which they could, of course, click on “Blog” again). Enticing customers with products you can’t sell them—and then running them in circles? Sometimes the best thing to do really is to just close the store for the day.

For quite a few years now, the contactless payment world has enjoyed an endless-loop of defend-and-repel games when dealing with contactless security. The game starts with bank assurances that the data being transmitted wirelessly couldn't possibly be enough for a thief to perform a transaction. Next is some public demo of a security researcher wirelessly grabbing data and completing a transaction. This is followed by industry refutations that the system demoed was either out-of-date or some part of the test was unrealistic.

Interestingly enough, there's truth on both sides. But the dance of demo-and-explanation seems to never slow.