As membership numbers approach the 100,000 mark, Bplans.com has launched a poll and Twitter contest to celebrate!

Bplans is inviting participants to take a brief, five-question poll, then head over to Twitter.com to  for a chance to win a free subscription to business-planning product, LivePlan.

Results of the poll, and winners will be announced early next week.

QBE Insurance Group has been placed in a trading halt with reports suggesting the halt is due to an investigation by US authorities into one of the company’s subsidiaries, Balboa.

The halt will remain in place until either an announcement from the company is made, or trading resumes on January 16.

Reports indicate that the investigation will focus on excessive fees for policies that include some of the largest banks in the United States.

QBE has said it will make an announcement today “regarding topics such as preliminary 2011 results and 2012 worldwide reinsurance protections”.

Shares open flat after weak overseas leads

The Australian sharemarket has opened flat this morning after weak results from international markets, which have been subdued over renewed fears over the European debt crisis.

The benchmark S&P/ASX200 index was up 3.3 points or 0.1% to 4190.8 at 12.00 AEST, while the Australian dollar rose slightly to $US1.02c.

ANZ shares rose 0.33% to $21.15 as Commonwealth Bank shares rose 0.24% to $50.06. Westp

Get full info…

Loan is really important for people who want to do something but limited by the number of money those they have in the pocket or bank account. You know how to use information for this purpose and get the solution immediately. If you want to take important loan, you should know how to use the Asset Based Lending because the personal loan is not enough for you to get the lot number of money and so we need to know how to find other way of refinancing our business. There are many people who get success by taking the loan to expand their business but some others do not know how to get this facility in the modern way. Get full info…

You may or may not have read our previous post about black hat SEO techniques and how you shouldn’t go onto the dark side if you want to have a good ranking on Google. And just to show that we weren’t kidding, in an extraordinary development last week, Google has actually downgraded the pagerank for its own Google Chrome download page. It’s not entirely clear how they got themselves into this pickle, but it seems that they had contracted with an agency, Unruly Media who set up a campaign with various bloggers to get the word out to small business owners about the benefits of Chrome.

Get full info…

The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that Ontario hospitals are scrambling to eliminate executive perks, in the face of new rules stating that compensation practices must be made public. Ontarios hospitals are funded by tax dollars, and clearly they dont want to be seen spending those dollars on things the public is likely to find dubious.

A few quick thoughts:

1. To a certain extent, transparency is an alternative to good governance: we the public want access to the details if we worry that the people who are supposed to be taking care of those details arent doing a good job of it. Yet the Globe story makes no mention of governance.

Get full info…