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President
Tony Livoti
MBITA

Vice President
Shay Adams
AIM Medical Sales

Members

Dr. Edward Valeau
Els Group LLC
Hartnell College
President Emeritus

Marcelo Siero
IdeasSiero

Jim Faith
Jim Faith & Associates

Cristina Polesel
MBITA
General Manager

This newsletter has been created by MBITA's editor
Cristina Polesel
cristina@mbita.org

New Corporate Sponsor

A New Free and Easy Way to Grow International Sales

Connecting with customers and selling products globally will become easier for many California businesses in 2012. That’s because these companies will adopt something called “social commerce” to improve the way they communicate, promote deals, and sell and source products across their customer, supplier and partner networks.

Social commerce is not just another set of buzzwords. Just check out a new, FREE web site called gotradelive.com. You’ll find that social commerce will help you grow and maximize your customer relationships worldwide, market and close deals faster, and get better pricing, particularly for slow moving and excess inventory.

A new sponsor of MBITA and TradePort.org, gotradelive has just launched its free service in the United States, beginning with a major push to bring California businesses onto the platform. It is already being used very successfully elsewhere around the world, including Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia.     

You can learn more at gotradelive.com, or you can register at this special TradePort.org and MBITA sign up page and receive additional privileges beyond free use of the service: REGISTER NOW.

gotradelive combines many elements of Facebook, eBay and Groupon. However, unlike Facebook, it’s designed as a platform for business and commerce. And unlike eBay and Groupon, users don’t pay exorbitant fees and commissions. In fact, the basic service is completely free to use, no matter how many customers are in your network, where they are located around the world, or how much product they sell using gotradelive.

Tools of the Trader

gotradelive’s easy-to-use tools and features bring new efficiencies and speed to the way companies do business both domestically and internationally. Some of its features include:

• Social networking and communications tools that make it easy to upload sales and marketing content, promote deals and offers, find interested buyers, and stay in touch with extended customer networks.
• Forward bidding and selling tools that allow invited customers to bid on private deals and offers and sellers to get the best price on merchandise.
  
• Downward bidding and procurement management tools that allow businesses to easily communicate with multiple suppliers and quickly find the best terms and prices from the right vendor.
  
• Customer and supplier network creation tools that make growing your private network as easy as securely downloading your contact database and adding new contacts whenever you want .
  
• Currency translation to make it easy to bid, buy and sell globally.
  

Please contact the MBITA office or gotradelive directly if you have any questions about gotradelive. Better yet just register on the site and start moving product more freely around the world!

 Contact:

Dave Murray
gotradelive
Tel. 650-433-4141
Web: www.gotradelive.com

Watch Technologies' components perform wonderfully on their own or link together seamlessly to create large and small-scale systems virtually eliminating the need for system integration. 

All Watch Technologies' products are manufactured in the US. Visit their website for details or call 541-472-8095 and talk with a Watch Technologies specialist.

New Member

Since 2005, Wasson Idea Farming has a history of consulting with a range of clients to promote and raise awareness for their products.

Rodger Wasson has managed agricultural associations, including state and national check-offs and membership organizations for beef, pork, lamb, wool, almonds, berries and processed tomatoes. He and Alec Wasson have a consulting business, together with a network of associates, based in Aptos, CA from where they assist food and agriculture organizations through "Idea Farming--the planting, cultivation and harvesting of ideas for profitable transitions".

Alec has worked with the California Grown Campaign, The Wine Institute, The Chilean Fresh Fruit Association as well as a stint in the global high tech world in San Francisco before joining Wasson Idea Farming in 2010. His strength and passion lies in working within the Ag and Wine industries and connecting people and campaigns to big ideas through video, social media or events.

New Member

Business Weather Forecast: “Cloudy” With Promise

MBITA welcomes new member SPKA and Associates.

In short, the Cloud is the next step in the evolution of software. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility… (From Wikipedia)



How does it help SMB’s? It allows you to access expensive, sophisticated hardware and software without the huge expense. It lets you put effective applications and procedures to work in your business with very little start-up cost and time, and with minimal ongoing maintenance. This translates into more productivity, more quickly, and more revenue.

SPK and Associates, LLC has been helping Engineering and Manufacturing companies design and build products better and faster for over 15 years. Their engineers specialize in the applications, systems, and networks required to design, develop, test, and release products to market. Recently, they have incorporated the best Cloud offerings into their suite of products.

Visit their website to find out more, and visit their blog to download detailed, technical how-to documents. Then drop a line or call to schedule a free consultation over the phone. They can provide specific ways to help you be more productive, more economically.

U.S. Exports Hit More Than $180 Billion in January

"The Brookings Institute yesterday released the report, “Export Nation 2012,” and it confirmed that exports are leading the way toward economic recovery,” said Fred P. Hochberg, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank).



The Brookings report also found sales grew by more than 11 percent in 2010, the fastest growth since 1997. In terms of job creation, the number of U.S. total export-supported jobs increased by almost 6 percent in 2010, even as the overall economy was still losing jobs. Further, large metropolitan areas powered the nation’s export growth – the largest metro areas produced almost 65 percent of the U.S. export sales in 2010.

Over the last twelve months, the major export markets with the largest annualized increase in U.S. goods purchases were Turkey (40.7 percent), Panama (37.9 percent), Argentina (34.0 percent), Honduras (32.9 percent), Chile (30.2 percent), Hong Kong (30.2 percent), Peru (29.0 percent), South Africa (27.6 percent), Brazil (26.7 percent), and Guatemala (25.6 percent).

In the first quarter of fiscal year 2012, Ex-Im Bank approved $4.26 billion in authorizations, supporting approximately 37,000 American jobs. Over $789 million in export financing was authorized for small businesses, and the number of small business customers increased by 10% over the same quarter in 2011.

This press release was published by Ex-Im Bank. For more information about Ex-Im Bank visit www.exim.gov

Press release source article

##########
The National Export Strategy is available also at
http://trade.gov/NEI and http://export.gov.
International Trade Update at
http://www.trade.gov/publications/ita-newsletter/
United States Department of Commerce
Office of Public Affairs - Tel. 202-482-4883
##########

US and EU Sign Historic Agreement on Organic Foods

The Monterey Bay Region
A Jewel of Activity in the Global Marketplace

On April 12th in Monterey, Ca, the MBITA annual seminar/luncheon with Congressman Sam Farr entitled ‘Global Destination for Wine and Tourism’, took place where representatives from the wine and tourism industries presented the Monterey Bay region as one of the premiere spots in the world for wine and tourism.

Congressman Sam Farr trumpeted the region of not only being leaders in wine and tourism, but also being the ‘Language and Marine Biology centers of the world. “We have so much potential”, Farr said at the event, “ but we have to think regionally. Nobody can compete with us, nobody in the United States or the world”.

You can see all the PPs for this event at
www.mbita.org/events/samfarrluncheon2012-agenda.html

• The four countries currently account for more than a quarter of the world’s land area and more than 40% of the world’s population.
• Mr. Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs economist, predicted that the group’s combined economies - now worth $13 trillion - would double in the coming decade, eventually surpassing the size of the economies of both the U.S. and the European Union.
  
• The BRICS countries are responsible for over 50% of global economic growth in the last decade.

On June 16, 2009, the leaders of the BRIC countries held their first official Summit in Yekaterinburg and issued a declaration calling for the establishment of a multi-polar world order. In the recent New Delhi summit, the Group’s representatives discussed topics such as changes in the monetary system, including an alternate global reserve currency to reduce the dominance of the dollar.

The BRICS nations indicated they are empowering their finance ministers to create a Development Bank that will not use U.S. dollars, but will rival the U.S.-dominated World Bank. Such a mega bank will be instrumental to pooling resources of the BRIC nations and providing resources for growth-oriented infrastructure improvements within the Group.

The leaders of the Group see intra-trade as an important component of their economic growth, along with reducing dependency on exports to the economically-challenged Europe and the U.S. The current Intra-BRICS trade is in the neighborhood of $230 billion and expected to reach $500 billion by 2015.

Despite the Group’s differences on tensions caused by territorial disputes between China and India, and Beijing’s substantial trade surplus with New Delhi, they have managed to focus their efforts in becoming economic powerhouses and to express their resentment against Western-dominated financial institutions.

Only time will prove whether the BRICS nations will become a powerful, cohesive group or just end up being a fragmented organization that lacks strong vision, or what the French call a bricolage, an assembly of available objects brought together despite their diversity.

Ayse Oge is President of Ultimate Trade, International Trade Consulting, Speaking and Training. Her work has been featured by Fox Business Online, Bloomberg Business Week Online and she was quoted by Investor's Business Daily and American Express Open Business Online. She is the author of “Global Business Guide” and a new book, “World Wise Children,” which helps children develop international skills and qualities needed to create future opportunities and realize their dreams. She is Counselor at SCORE, conducting export seminars and webinars for entrepreneurs and small businesses. She can be reached at oge@earthlink.net