With more than 5,800 locations in 34 countries, Baskin-Robbins is a powerhouse in the retail industry (the company is now part of Dunkin' Brands). But like many great businesses, the early days were fairly humble.

Last week, the co-founder of Baskin-Robbins -- Irvine (Irv) Robbins – passed away. He was 90-years old.

To Robbins, business was about some simple principles; one of his mottos was: "We sell fun, not just ice cream."

In 1945, Robbins set up an ice cream store, starting with 21 flavors. It certainly was good timing. After a World War and a massive economic depression, the US economy was poised for economic growth. And there would be a new mega-trend: suburbia.

By 1953, the store renamed itself to Baskin-Robbins, and yes, there were 31 flavors (one for each day of the month). Yet, Robbins wanted to supercharge growth. As a result, he helped to pioneer the concept of franchising.

Then, by the late 1960s, Baskin-Robbins sold out to United Fruit for $12 million.

However, I think it was Robbins' fun that was a big factor in the company's success. Some of the neat flavors included Baseball Nut (when the Dodgers came to LA in 1958) and Lunar Cheesecake (when we landed on the Moon in 1969).

True, there were some bad ideas – like Ketchup flavored ice cream (sounds awful, huh?) -- but when having fun, there's a pretty good chance you'll ultimately stumble on some innovative ideas.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

With the slowing economy, there's much fear that businesses will cut back on marketing dollars. Well, so far, this doesn't seem to be a problem for Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), which provides email marketing services to small businesses.

According to the company's Q1 report, revenues shot up 87% to $18.2 million and GAAP net income came to $338,000. The total customer base now stands at 185,948, up 78% over the past year. In fact, the monthly customer retention is about 97.8%. In other words, customers seem to be happy with the web service.

To capitalize on things, Constant Contact is now expanding its offerings as the company is getting traction from its survey product. There is also a new tool to integrate with Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU)'s QuickBooks.

While vigilant and cautious, Constant Contact doesn't see any problems from the macroeconomic environment. Actually, the company boosted its full-year 2008 revenue guidance to $82.5-$84.5 million from $81-$83.5 million. The adjusted EBITDA is expected to range from $3.2-$3.6 million.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

This week, I looked over the financials of a struggling business (essentially, the slowing economy is taking a toll). I was seeing if I could find some ways to cut costs.

Looking through the line items, I noticed some large legal bills. And, digging some more, I learned that the company was using a big-time law firm.

"You really don't need this kind of level of legal services," I said. "Besides, you can shop around for an attorney."

I also had some other suggestions:

DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Legal: You can gather your own legal advice for free. Just doing a routine Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search, you'll notice many legal websites. However, you need to be wary. Do you know the quality of the content?

I think a better approach is to focus on well-established sources like:

• AllBusiness.com: The site is chock full of helpful content and is backed by Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB).
• U.S. Legal Forms: You'll find thousands of vetted legal forms (at affordable prices).
• Nolo: Founded in the early 1970s, this company is now the premier publisher of self-help legal guides (and I've bought quite a few books from them).

Affordable Service Providers: If a DIY approach seems scary, there is a middle ground. There are online services that help with such things as incorporations, trademarks, copyrights, and even patents.

The top player in the sector is LegalZoom. Actually, I recently had a chance to visit the headquarters, which has an impressive setup. In a way, it's an efficient supply chain – with a call center, experts, proofreaders and so on that process legal documents.

More importantly, you'll only be spending a fraction of what a big-time attorney will charge you.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook (www.mergerbook.com) and is also a principal in Averiware, which provides an ERP system to small and midsize businesses.

No doubt, small businesses are a powerful force in the U.S. economy in terms of job creation and innovation. And, according to a recent study from the Kauffman Foundation, it looks like things are still going strong, despite the slowing economy. For example, every month, about 500,000 new businesses are started (of course, there are certainly a good number that fail as well).

So, what are some of the key trends? Well, interestingly enough, there is quite a bit of growth from immigrants. In fact, they are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.

Something else: men are twice as likely to start a business then women. Actually, I think this is unfortunate because diversity certainly allows for stronger growth.

However, looking at the next decade or so, I suspect we'll see much more entrepreneurial activity. Why? It's when the Baby Boomers will reach their prime years for new business formation. They will have the wisdom and resources to take a flier. What's more, a new business may actually became an interesting way for Baby Boomers to essentially change the definition of "retirement" -- that is, leaving the rat race and doing what they really want.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook (www.mergerbook.com) and is also a principal in Averiware, which provides an ERP system to small and mid-size businesses.

Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL), insurer of specialty properties and real estate, recently acquired Specialized Insurance Inc., which focuses on insurance for service garages at car dealers and gas stations. The move is said to be in keeping with Markel's intentions to grow this sector of it's business. Specialized Insurance Inc. already acted as agent for Markel. Financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed.

Markel has been in the business of insuring specialty properties and other niche markets since 1930. The company issues policies covering everything from archery ranges and railroads to pollution liabilities and paintball tournaments. The company has net annual cash flow from operating activities in excess of 500 million, but that figure has been in annual decline since 2004.

Over the past few weeks, I've talked to a variety of players in the open source world, including people at EnterpriseDB. No doubt, it's a powerful force -- and that's attracting a good amount of venture capital. What's more, companies like Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) have shown that there's money to be made.

But is it possible for a mainstream software company to offer open source? Well, there's no clear-cut answer yet. After all, it's tough to sell a customer expensive software but at the same time offer a free version.

Yet, as history has shown, the software industry can be nimble.

Take Day Software. Based in Switzerland, the company has built a franchise in the content management space. Revenues are growing nicely and the company drops a lot of cash flow.

With the popularity of Facebook, bebo and MySpace, companies are trying to find ways to leverage social networking. However, it can be expensive to build out a strong platform.

Well, things are getting easier; that is, Ringside Networks has launched an open source server to build social networks (it's in the beta mode).

True, there are other systems on the market. However, in the case with Ringside, it allows for seamless integration with other sites, such as Facebook. In other words, it will help companies migrate users to their own platform.

What's more, Ringside allows companies to keep their own branding and the look-and-feel of their own websites.

Oh, and some of the co-founders of Ringside -- Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman and Mark Lugert -- were instrumental in the development of JBoss, which turned out to be one of the most successful open source projects in tech history.

To get some perspective on this, I talked to David DePaolo, who operates WorkCompCentral.com. He has known about Ringside for some time. His take: "It makes sense that someone would start this up as they have with other technologies, and just in time. As technology progresses, we find that it is not all about the technology and patents, it's the application of that technology to a specific market."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

Retrevo calls itself a "matchmaking service," although it's not another place for dating. Rather, the site allows consumers to deal with something that is perhaps tougher than dating – trying to understand consumer electronics products.

As a sign of Retrevo's opportunity, the company has raised $8 million. The investors include Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

The core of Retrevo is its Product Advisor. Basically, it's an amalgam of things like community reviews, feature comparisons and pricing information. In fact, Retrevo helps you with the best timing for buying a product (for example, if a product has recently launched, it might be smart to hold off for awhile).

The general sentiment is that online advertising is immune from the travails of the economy (obviously, this ignores the depression for the category in the wake of the dot-com bust). The argument is that the consumers' "eyeballs" are moving more to Web-based media.

No doubt, this is true. But, this doesn't mean advertisers won't still get skittish.

As a result, eMarketer is toning down its forecast for online ad spending in 2008. Instead of coming to $27.5 billion, the revised figure is now $25.8 billion.

OK, that doesn't sound like much. However, it could be brutal for many companies (especially small ones that rely heavily on ad spending).

Oh, and social networking sites may come under pressure too. Simply put, these sites are having a tough time getting people to click on ads (even though there are many "eyeballs").

Something else: eMarketer's revision shows how fragile the economy has become. In other words, things can certainly get worse -- and quickly.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

There's lots of buzz about so-called widgets. Essentially, a widget is a small amount of code that's put on a blog or other website to allow for some cool functions (such as news, updates, friends and so on).

And venture capital money is pouring in. One of the latest deals is the $15 million funding for ShareThis.com. The investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Reservoir Venture Partners, RPM Ventures, and Blue Chip Venture

Actually, ShareThis' widget is fairly simple – but useful. That is, it helps web users to send content to others (such as through email, SMS, IM and so on). It's pretty neat stuff and also has some interesting analytics (to keep track of user patterns).

It certainly helps that ShareThis has snagged key deals with large blogs (for example, Wordpress). Keep in mind that the widget gets more than 100 million page views per month.

Now, the company will need to formulate a business model. But, thankfully, the company has enough cash to think about it.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

A recent report published by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) gives indications that although American small businesses are certainly tightening their game plans a bit, they are by no means going down for the count. The report reviews a number of important indicators, testing everything from optimism to inventories. A casual read of the complete survey provided in PDF format, provides proof that while small businesses are actively adjusting to current economic trends, in many ways they're simply applying some timely critical thinking within a "business as usual" format.

Some statistical highlights that I picked out from the report really gave me pause to wonder. For instance, 46% of the business owners responding reported that when attempting to hire new employees, they were faced with a lack of qualified applicants for the jobs they wished to fill. Overall the survey indicates that current and pending employment opportunities are steady to strong for 2008, while the available labor pool remains tight. We could speculate that depressed entry level wage scales have some bearing on this situation.

A few days ago, I wrote a little post about Saks (NYSE: SKS) and Neiman Marcus, in which I suggested that stores that focus on high-end luxury items were likely to be the first victims in a recession. The reasoning for this is simple: when consumers have less money to spend, they are unlikely to waste it on expensive prestige purchases. As Sharper Image sorts out the details of its closure, and luxury retailers try to figure out how to deal with the evaporation of their consumer base, small stores are starting to experience major problems.

On February 16, Wilson's Leather announced that it intends to close 160 of its 260 mall stores. Having worked at Wilson's for a brief period in the early 1990's, I can attest that this is definitely not the first time that the retailer has had problems; in fact, store closings are practically a stock-in-trade for the company. However, Wilson's is merely highlighting what many analysts believe is going to become a trend among American businesses: the closure of small retailers.

Wilson's, of course, has always been particularly vulnerable. As a specialty leather retailer, they only sell one type of item, and the popularity of that item is closely tied to the seasons. With the exception of motorcyclists and fetishists, most people aren't particularly interested in buying a leather jacket in July. Moreover, Wilson's stock is specifically targeted to middle-income consumers: sturdily constructed and priced at a discount, Wilson's jackets are also somewhat boxy and not particularly sleek. Unfortunately, middle-income consumers are among those most directly affected by the rising costs of gas, food, and consumer products.

While Wilson's might be among the first companies to feel the crunch of the recession (or, if you prefer, "reduced consumer confidence and, incidentally, reduced spending"), it will probably not be the last. Specialty stores and boutiques are probably looking at a tough year. "Mall" stores like Ann Taylor (NYSE: ANN), American Eagle (NYSE: AEO), Sephora, The Gap (NYSE: GPS), and PacSun (NASDAQ: PSUN) tend to pay premium prices for their spaces, have a rather limited range of stock, and charge more money for their products. All of this adds up to a vulnerable position when it comes to reduced consumer spending. Add in the fact that, ever since the late 1990's, malls have been declining as centers of commerce, and you've got a recipe for disaster. In fact, some analysts are predicting that retail bankruptcies this year could reach the highest level since 1991.

As for the next domino, if the current trends in mall shopping and small business problems continue, I'd watch out for a major downturn among Mall property management companies.

LinkedIn has become a great tool to help improve your business. For example, Brant Bukowsky, the founder of LakeRentals.com, used the online service to locate a prospect for a management buyout. Or take MyBlogLog. The company found its CEO with LinkedIn and a year later, the company sold to Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO);

So, how can you use LinkedIn for your business?

Well, I recently had a chance to meet up with Allen Blue, the Vice President of Product Strategy of LinkedIn and the company's co-founder.

In fact, he provided a framework on how to use LinkedIn. Let's take a look:

The concept of "collaborative filtering" has been around for a long time. The pioneer is Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), which built the system that does things like "if you like this book, you might also like the following titles." Essentially, this is based on a variety of data sources, such as your purchase history as well as the behavior of similar users.

Well, a startup company, Outbrain, is providing its own flavor of collaborative filtering. In fact, the company has announced a venture capital round of $5 million. The investors include Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and GlenRock Israel.

The thinking behind Outbrain is that people want to read news stories and articles that those who have similar interests also read and liked. So, through a widget, a news site or blogger can allow users to rank content (using a five-start system).

With all the buzz, it's actually not easy to define Web 2.0. But, interestingly enough, we are now hearing about Web 3.0.

What does it mean? Well, I'm not sure.

Despite this, get ready for it. In fact, a new entrant will soon hit the market: Twine.

To get things going, the company's parent – Radar Networks – has snagged $13 million in venture capital. The investors include: Velocity Interactive Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vulcan Capital.

Twine calls Web 3.0 the "Semantic Web."

Huh?

Think of it as a place to store, discover and share information – along with many others who have similar interests. Essentially, Twine has a super-smart artificial intelligence that helps with the process (basically, it learns from user behavior).

The company plans to have both free and premium versions (the latter will allow for tons of storage). I think it will take time for people to get comfortable with such a new approach, but as the Web increasingly becomes an unmanageable sea of data, services like Twine should be big beneficiaries.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.