Etsy

The site has gone through several changes in the last few years. It now offers advanced tools for sellers, that allow them to advertise their shops, there are versions of the site in French and German, and in the mobile spirit – an iPhone app. Last year, Etsy had the biggest holiday sales in its history.

On Wednesday, the company announced it was raising a $40 million Series F round in venture financing. Investors include Index Ventures, Accel Partners and Union Square Ventures among others.

Etsy has 875,000 sellers who are actively selling art and other goods on the site. The site has about 15 million users worldwide.

Is Etsy really worth that much money? Business Insider think it does, and explains why.

WordPress is a great platform for corporate sites, but when it comes to business, you really need to choose your design wisely. Generally speaking, business owners and corporations should hire a professional WordPress developer, but if the budget’s tight, and you want to do it all by yourself, choosing a free business theme for your WordPress sites is a way to go.

Also, don’t forget – a good, cheap hosting is also necessary when you build your own WordPress site.

Here are some good looking, high quality, free business themes for your WordPress site.

Free WordPress Business Themes

Academia

A very clean and elegant free WordPress theme. Designed originally for academic institutions, this theme can easily be used by businesses and companies.

Live Demo

Download Academia

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BizWatch

A high quality free Business WordPress theme. This theme is equipped with an easy to use options page. You can upload your logo and favicon. The homepage features a built-in posts slider.

Live Demo

Download BizWatch

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YourBusiness

Clean and with warm colors, YourBusiness is a great free WordPress theme for a small business or a corporate blog.

Live Demo

Download YourBusiness

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RealEstate XL

This WordPress theme presents a professional design, light colors and theme options. It’s ideal for real-estate businesses, but you can put it to use for other niches, as well.

Live Demo

Download RealEstate XL

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WebPro

Leaning more towards the traditional design, and with stronger colors, this free WordPress theme can be used for a corporate site or a blog.

Live Demo

Download WebPro

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SimplifyBiz

A sophisticated, strong WordPress theme. Although the maker claims the theme is no longer supported in the free version, you can still download and use it for free. This theme has navigation supports dropdown features as well as adding short description to parents menu, a portfolio slider, 3 services panel page, featured video on sidebar and a lot more.

Live Demo

Download SimplifyBiz

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Heliumfied

Super-sleek and impressive, this free WordPress theme has has 5 color schemes to choose from and the Featured Content section is easily manageable via the admin panel.

Live Demo

Download Heliumfied

That’s right, shoppers. You spent over 1,000,000,000 USD online during the passing Monday. During the first 29 days of November, consumers spent $13.55 billion online. Cyber Monday reached $1.028 billion in online spending, up 16 percent versus year ago, representing the heaviest online spending day in history and the first to surpass the billion-dollar threshold.

So, is the recession finally over? Are people starting to spend more because they have more to spend? The online holiday shopping season has clearly gotten off to a very strong start – but does that mean we are heading for a better financial future? According to comScore, “it’s important to note that some of the early strength in consumer spending is almost certainly the result of retailers’ heavier-than-normal promotional and discounting activity at this early point in the season”.

The average transaction on Cyber Monday was about $60, which is 10% higher than last year.

Another interesting figure, is that nearly half of the money spent online at U.S. Web sites during Cyber Monday originated from work computers (48.9%). This doesn’t mean that people don’t have computers at home, but rather that they prefer the higher-speed connections at home, and maybe they are also trying to hide their shopping from their loved ones, in order to keep it a surprise. Plus, it’s a well known fact, that people don’t really WORK while at work, so shopping is just another way to Farmville.

(source)

Personally, I wouldn’t touch an HP product with a 10 foot stick, but many people succumb to the cheap prices. Still, when you buy a cheap ink-jet printer, the printer’s cost itself is misleading. Why? Because as we all know, pretty soon you’d have spent much more on ink cartridges. There are some ridiculous cases in which it’s actually cheaper to buy a new printer!

Trying to justify the unreasonable prices of ink cartridges, HP released this campaign that blabs about the cost of research, quality of ink and reliability. They have even tested a focus group made out of 17 (!!!) people, and most of them said they are not happy with replacement ink.

When talking about regular, cheap, home-use printers, the claims about ink quality are pointless. It doesn’t make any sense to pay $25 for an ink cartridge, just to print some recipes and simple documents. Professional and business users might be a different story, but small businesses also need to mind their expenses, and ink prices are simply too high.

(This graph has been around the net for a while. It’s probably not 100% accurate, but it goes to show a point)

The fact remains that replacement or recycled ink cartridges cost about half as much as original ink cartridges. HP and other companies also won’t disclose the actual amount of printer ink that we get in each cartridge. Why is that, do you think? HP says: “Each system has a different way it uses ink or the drop size is different. If you looked strictly at volume you wouldn’t see those differences and it would be confusing to the customers.” Sure. The customers are stupid, so let’s not confuse them with DATA.

Have you ever opened an “empty” ink cartridge? It’s amazing to see that even when the printer reports that the cartridge is empty, it still has many milliliters of ink left inside, yet all that ink is unusable. All that money spent on research, and HP and the other companies can’t produce better ink delivery systems?

Plus, all the bullshit about cost-per-page is calculated in weird ways, that no one but the companies themselves understands.

The prices of printers and other electronic products are constantly dropping, so the companies need to make a buck in other ways. And they do make that buck: HP spends $1 billion a year on ink research and development, while the total revenue for the printing division alone was $24 billion last year. It’s not about quality, research or technology. It’s about greed.

Apple has increased its mobile phone market share from 0.3% in 2007 to 2% in 2009, while RIM mobile phone market share increased from 1% to about 3% during the same period.  We expect Apple’s market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period.  We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sale…

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