In this post by Sarah Needleman of the Wall Street Journal, she points out a new tax credit that may be available to small business owners who pay for health insurance for their employees:

Uncle Sam wants small-business owners to take notice of a new health-care tax credit — one of the first provisions of the recently enacted health-reform law to go into effect.

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service announced that it’s sending postcards to more than four million small businesses urging them to check if they qualify for the tax break. It’s being offered in two phases, with the first worth up to 35% of qualifying businesses’ premium health-care costs for tax years 2010 through 2013. The rate increases to 50% in 2014. The maximum length of potential coverage for qualifying employers is six taxable years: four years under the first phase and two years under the second.

In general, to be eligible for the tax credit, businesses must cover at least 50% of the cost of health-care coverage for some of their workers, employ fewer than the equivalent of 25 full-time workers and pay average annual wages below $50,000. The IRS says the tax break is designed to encourage smaller businesses – which are not mandated by 2014 to provide health care, unlike companies with more than 50 employees – to offer health coverage to their low- and moderate-income workers.

Tammy Rostov, owner of Rostov’s Coffee & Tea in Richmond, Va., says she received the IRS’s postcard and expects her small retail business to be eligible for the credit. She offers health coverage to her five full-time employees and pays 100% of the premium, an amount that she says has increased by more than 200% over the past six years. She describes the tax credit as a welcome relief. “It’s a step in the right direction,” she says.

But other qualifying business owners are less enthusiastic, arguing that the tax break won’t make a significant impact on their bottom lines.

Pascal Helou, owner of Globotron LLC, a technology-consulting company in New York, says affording health insurance for his three employees is a non-issue given that he’s struggling these days just to stay in business. Since 2007, he says sales have declined 30% every year and his firm now has four clients, down from 15.

“For my business, this type of tax credit will not make a difference,” says Mr. Helou, adding that he has yet to receive the IRS’s postcard about it. “The real issue is the amount of business we’re getting. Nobody’s willing to spend money” on technology-consulting services.

Meanwhile, there are also some entrepreneurs who don’t believe the government should provide financial incentives for small businesses to offer health coverage to workers in the first place.

Jim Fab, owner of Fab Electric Inc., an electrical contractor business in Gaithersburg, Md., falls into this camp. Providing health insurance and other benefits to his 18 employees, he says, is “hopefully what separates me from the electrical contractor that doesn’t.”

Some small businesses appear to be left without any government aide under the new piece of health-reform legislation. These include organizations with between 25 and 50 employees and ones with less than 25 employees but payrolls that average $50,000 or more.

Tracy Betts, says her Springfield, Va., Web-design business, Balance Technology Group Inc., doesn’t qualify for the credit. While she employs the equivalent of eight full-time workers, their salaries’ average $71,000. “For me, it’s all about the programmers, and I can’t hire anyone for less than $90,000 (in annual pay),” she says.

Ms. Betts says a year and half ago she told her staff she could only afford to offer them either health-care coverage or a retirement-savings plan with a matching contribution from the company. All but one chose the latter benefit, she says.

This Smart Money article by Diana Ransom posted at the Wall Street Journal web page discusses several future growth industries.

Much has been said about the Obama administration pushing through new regulations on everything from health-care companies to banks — not to mention the impact these changes will have on the overall economy. But less attention has been paid to the way the new regulations will play out for entrepreneurs: Will stepped-up regulation stifle or stimulate growth? SmartMoney spoke with business owners, venture capitalists and analysts for a snapshot of six industries poised for growth.

Telecommunications

Even though shares of telecom giant Verizon Communications and its Finnish counterpart Nokia fell last week after reporting lackluster first-quarter results, there may be wind in their sails yet, says Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM’s Venture Capital Group in San Mateo, Calif. One boost may come from the president’s National Broadband Plan, a program that aims to increase access to mobile broadband and support a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network. These firms, along with others, will likely benefit, says Clark. Per the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus package, the government plans to spend $7.2 billion on the nation’s broadband projects.

Hosted Services

Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the president’s broadband agenda are the small companies that will have better access to faster web channels. FlexiSphere, a Hawthorne, N.Y., firm, offers financial services firms so-called cloud computing — technology that allows firms to share the server of a larger company via the Internet. As the nation’s infrastructure improves, so will access to the company’s products and services, says Tom Saleh, the company’s founder and CEO. “Cloud computing is all about better, faster, cheaper,” he says, adding that this is just a first step. “Cloud computing is doing for computing what the Internet did for communications,” Saleh says.

Information Technology

So far, the government hasn’t suggested the need to further regulate the information technology field, giving these firms a distinct advantage. That’s because the uncertainty surrounding regulatory reforms can both stymie a small company’s ability to make decisions and trigger a pullback in investment. In the first quarter of 2010, the IT industry raised $1.5 billion for 192 deals — the most of any other industry tracked by Dow Jones VentureSource, a research firm owned by News Corp., which also publishes SmartMoney.com and The Wall Street Journal.

Further, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for technology, says Karl Mills, the president and chief investment officer for Jurika Mills & Keifer, an independent investment advisory firm in Oakland, Calif. “Old inventory of technology gets written off quick when it becomes obsolete. However, during the downturn, many consumers and businesses put off buying new equipment,” he says. Plus, many of the larger companies in this arena, which often scoop up their smaller brethren, are well capitalized. “Microsoft could write a check and bail out Greece,” Mills says.

Media, Content Production

With that enhanced infrastructure, other beneficiaries include media companies and other content providers, which have struggled in recent years thanks to a precipitous drop in advertising revenues, says Sal Tirabassi, a partner at M/C Venture Partners in Boston. Between downloading movies and watching TV online at home or on a web-enabled mobile device, consumers’ appetites for content will likely expand, as will advertising opportunities. “Advertisers are increasing their budgets slightly again,” he says. “There will be a bit of a rebound there.”

Health Care

Thanks to federal and state stimulus dollars, the health-care infrastructure in the U.S. is about to get a triple bypass. Not only does the government plan to plow $20 billion into computerizing health records, the angel investment community has taken an interest in the sector. In 2009, health-care services, medical devices and equipment attracted 17% of total angel investment dollars, or nearly $3 billion, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. “We’re seeing a lot of companies come through here with technology solutions for innovating medical records,” says Michelle Murcia, the chief financial officer of TechColumbus, a business incubator and venture firm in Columbus, Ohio. “Health care IT is a huge growth area.”

Clean Energy

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that global energy consumption will jump 33% between 2010 and 2030. This added demand, combined with a mix of venture-capital investment and $43 billion in federal stimulus spending bodes well for businesses that make everything from solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids and batteries, says Clark from IBM.

In addition, the government recently sweetened the tax incentives and subsidies for homeowners and businesses to install solar and other forms of energy-saving equipment. “Despite the fact that we’ve been in one of the worst recessions in decades, business in the industry has grown,” says David Kaltsas, president of SunWize Technologies’ systems group, a solar-panel installation and sales firm in Kingston, N.Y., which recently launched an installation franchise program. “Last year was tough, but we’ve since grown double-digits in our direct-installation business.”

Justin Scheck of the Wall St. Journal writes that “for years, Dell Inc. has relied on sales to small businesses for a big chunk of its revenue. It sells more personal computers to small companies than any tech supplier. Now, it is offering more credit to spur small business purchases.”

He goes on to note that “The financing strategy is showing promise. Its small-and-medium-business division posted a 10% gain in revenue in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter ended Jan. 29 from the same period last year, versus an 11% gain for the company as a whole. Operating-profit rose 17% from the same quarter last year to $282 million, surpassing the $281 million in operating profit from Dell’s large-business unit, which posted an 8.4% rise from last year.”

You can read the entire article here, and check out Dell’s page to see if anything interests you! A market snapshot on Dell here.

To keep things interesting in between my legal updates, Justin Nassiri has contributed again with this guest post.  This time, Justin discusses ways to gain expertise during time you might usually waste.  Enjoy!

3 Ways to Develop a Relative Expertise Using Only Dead Time

I went to school with some of the brightest people I’ve ever met, with exceptionally deep and diverse backgrounds. However, I’m continuously surprised at how quickly, even amidst such impressive company, one can develop a relative expertise that can be useful to others.

For any of you that have worked with a startup, you know how many various tasks you’ll do in a given day. You also know how helpful a network of knowledgeable fellow entrepreneurs can be to save you both time and money on everything from SEO to low cost distribution.

I’ve found that it takes only a slight emphasis on any one area to start developing a relative expertise – far from an expansive knowledge, but still of great benefit to those with no knowledge about a subject. I’ve relied on many friends, classmates, and former coworkers who had relative expertise in all sorts of areas – best ways to reach out to bloggers, how to draft a press release, how to get free wifi from Starbucks – and their pockets of knowledge have been invaluable to me.

I’ve found three practices to be extremely helpful in building up an array of practical knowledge that can help out others who have yet to grapple with a certain problem. So, here are three quick tips that can help you start to build and record an area of relative expertise with virtually no time except dead time.

(1)    Setup a Podcast download: services like PodBean will collect and download your favorite Podcasts for you. I prefer The WallStreet Journal This Morning, NPR: Shuffle Podcast, The Economist, and GSB’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. Download these to your mp3 player in the morning – you’d be surprised how much content you can get through during traditional dead time – waiting in line, walking through parking lots, etc.

(2)    Keep track of your research – whenever you’re doing cost comparison (which goes along with just about everything with startups), take the extra second to keep track of the points of differentiation for the options you consider. I find spreadsheets are the best for this, and have been asked for my recommendations on server space, business card manufacturers, and other cost saving analysis spreadsheets more times than I can remember. (Not to mention the hundreds of similar spreadsheets friends have shared with me in the last two years).

(3)    Setup a RSS Reader: I use Google, but there are plenty of great programs out there. Take 10 minutes to find 3-5 blogs on topics that interest you, and subscribe to their RSS. It’s like having all of your industry reports delivered to your front door every morning, and you can skim through when there’s downtime during the day.

I know I wouldn’t be where I’m out without the help and advice of others, so it feels good to be able to give back to others that have not yet delved deeply into a particular area of an industry or entrepreneurship.

The following is a guest post by Justin Nassiri, Stanford MBA Grad and Internet Start-Up entrepreneur.  He makes some great points. Mr. Nassiri’s internet company will be launching in a few days, you can follow it here, and see Mr. Nassiri’s profile here:

If you’re anything like me, the thought of posting anything on Twitter for the world to see is as unappealing as it comes. However, I’ve come to view Twitter as the best free marketing tool available to any company of any size. So for those of you still on the fence, here’s a quick run down on why you should join Twitter and how you can use it.

Twitter is great for 3 things:
(1) hearing what your customers are saying about you and your competitors,
(2) learning about trending topics in your industry,
(3) providing information in a Facebook newsfeed-esque way in a (potentially more) professional manner than FB

For both (1) and (2) very little is required:

• Download “TweetDeck” – it will allow you to set up searches for up to 12 categories (examples: BlueTree, Design, Outsourced Help, 99Designs)
• Any time anyone (regardless of whether you know them) mentions these words on twitter, they will show up in individual search feeds
• You can respond to them privately (if they are “following you”) or publicly
• You don’t HAVE to be that active on Twitter to assist with (1) or (2), but there is a certain amount of credibility you can develop by growing a following of users (more about this below)

For (3) you will need to gain “followers”, which are similar to Facebook friends but are not necessarily people you know. Here’s a few tips on how to get started:

• When you join Twitter it’ll pull info from your address book that’ll get you started. As you search around you can start following more people you know, who will follow you back (out of common courtesy)
• The best way to gain “followers” is by posting useful information on Twitter (people are more likely to “Retweet” what you say, and thus boost your exposure, if you share an interesting article on a relevant topic rather than if you Tweet what you had for lunch)
• Since Twitter allows a max of 140 characters, people use URL shortening websites to save space. I use www.shorturl.com to create a unique url. (An advantage here is that most sites like this have URL counters so you can track how many people view the unique URL you post – this is a good way to see what type of information your followers ReTweet and find interesting)

There’s a lot of different analysis of the most effective way to gain followers…you’d be surprised at how much research goes into this. In general, I’d recommend:

• Tweet 3 times a day at different times
• Websites like www.twuffer.com are great, as you can queue tweets to go out at certain times. The best advice I’ve gotten here is to spend about an hour on Monday morning queueing up Tweets for the rest of the week, and then don’t worry about it after that.
• Put your best/most important Tweets between 11am-1pm ( The number of RTs at this time are the highest, probably since people are checking at lunch)
• The highest ReTweet topics I see are Top 10 style topics on increasing your efficiency, best online marketing practices, best [insert entrepreneur topic] practices, etc

It may not fit your ideal for personal privacy or socializing, but when it comes to online marketing you’re missing a big opportunity if you don’t use it.

Great points, thanks for the information Justin.