3 Types Of Partnerships Explained

1. General Partnership: A general partnership is a form of business structure where multiple persons come together and agree on forming an unincorporated business model. A general partnership maintains the following features:

•       A general partnership is formed by two or more individuals

•       A general partnership is created by an agreement and proof of existence

•       The owners of a general partnership are all personally liable for all debts and legal actions that the company may face. 

•       A general partnership features partners who share equal liability and responsibility 

 2. Limited Liability Partnerships: A limited liability partnership is a type of partnership where some or all of the partners possess limited liability. The formation, thus, exhibits elements of corporations and partnerships. Under this formation, one partner is not liable or responsible for another partner’s negligence or gross misconduct. In a limited liability partnership, some partners face a level of liability that is similar to that of a shareholder in a corporation. That being said, unlike a corporate shareholder, a partner has the right to manage the business directly—shareholders elect a board of directors to handle the entity’s day-to-day business. The laws surrounding limited liability partnerships will vary based on a jurisdiction’s distinct laws. For example, some countries require a limited liability partnership to have at least one “general partner” with unlimited liability. A limited liability partnership is distinct from limited partnerships (in some areas) because a limited partnership will require the presence of at least one unlimited partner, as well as, passive and limited liability investors. Because of these regulations, in some countries, a limited liability partnership is better suited for entities where investors which to assume active roles in management.

3. Limited Partnership: A limited partnership is a business formation that is similar to a general partnership, except that in addition general partners, there are one or more limited partners. The limited partnership is therefore a formation where only one partner is required to face all liability (general partner). As is common in a general partnership, the general partners in a limited partnership maintain the authority to act as an agent—this allows them to bind all the other partners in contracts and other ventures. 

Like a shareholder in a corporation, limited partners have limited liability—they are liable on debts incurred by the firm to the extent of their initial investment and possess no management authority. The general partner will pay the limited partners a return on their investment (like a dividend). The extent and nature regarding the distribution of payment is outlined in the partnership agreement. As a result, a general partner will carry more liability, and if the partnership loses money, the general partner is held liable.  

A partnership is an arrangement by which two or more legal persons join together in order to work together for a particular purpose. The primary form of a partnership is a business partnership, which is a partnership between individuals who have agreed to work together for the sake of advancing a business purpose. Partnerships do not have to be business partnerships, as it is possible for organizations to form partnerships with other organizations without any kind of business interest. For example, marriage itself, under certain circumstances, might be understood as a form of partnership between two individuals. The mention of legal entities in terms of partnerships was made specifically because it is possible for corporations to make  partnerships with one another. For example, two large corporations could form a mutually beneficial business partnership with full legality, as corporations are technically legal entities.

The different purposes to which partnerships can be put define the nature of those partnerships. For example, a partnership between two different schools that allows those schools to help students exchange between the two schools, and thus, take a greater variety of classes is entirely different from a business partnership in which two corporations work together in order to earn greater profit. Nonetheless, a business partnership is one of, if not the single, most common forms of partnerships in the world today. This is in part due to the effects of a business partnership upon taxes for the constituent parties of that partnership.

The Partnership Requirements Of A Business

 

 A partnership is a business formation where a relationship exists between multiple persons who come together to carry on a business or trade. Each individual in the partnership will contribute property, money, labour or skill and in turn, share the profits and losses the business generates.  

Partnerships are required to file annual information returns with the Internal Revenue Service to report the income, deductions, losses, gains, etc. from its business operations. This tax obligation, however, does not include income taxes—a partnership does not have to pay federal income tax. Instead, the formation passes its income through; all profits or losses—and their attached tax obligation—are transferred to the individual partners of the formation. 

Each partner, therefore, must include his or her share of the formation’s income or loss in their individual tax return. By formal definition, a partnership is a business entity with multiple owners, who have not filed papers with the state to become a limited liability company or corporation. 

There are two basic types of partnerships: limited partnerships and general partnerships. A partnership is the most basic and cheapest co-owned business structure to establish and maintain. However, there are fundamental facts that you should acknowledge before you form or enter a partnership. 

Liability Issues Concerning Partnerships:

Personal Liability for Owners: Partners in the formation are personally liable for the entity’s debts and obligations, including all court judgments. This responsibility means that if the partnership itself cannot fulfill a payment obligation (i.e. rent, payment for supplies, loan repayments etc.) to their creditors, the individual partner(s) is personally liable to pay-off the debts. 

There are, however, a few exceptions to this personal liability characteristic. For instance, some partners may have limited personal liability if the formation is constructed as a limited partnership. The limited partnership structure places personal liability on the general partner—the individual who wholly runs the business. In this setting, the limited partners are more or less, passive investors—they will lose no more than their original investment in the partnership. Moreover, some states offer special limited liability protection. Entrepreneurs or investors concerned with personal liability issues will typically choose to incorporate their business or operate as a limited liability company.

Joint Authority Issues Concerning Partnerships:

Any individual partner in a partnership can typically bind the whole formation to another business deal or contract. For example, if a partner signs a contract with a supplier at a price the partnership cannot afford, another partners can be held personally responsible for the funds owed under the contract. There are only a few limits regarding a partner’s ability to commit the partnership to a business deal. For example, one partner cannot bind the formation to a sale for the majority of the partnership’s assets. 

The ability for a partner to maneuver and engage in a business deal is affirmed in the formation’s partnership agreement. This document places limits on the partners within the formation. In most partnership formations without a partnership agreement, the individual partners have the ability to bind each other to a business deal.  

Each individual partner can be held accountable—and subsequently sued—for the full amount of the formation’s debt obligations. If this occurs, an individual partner may be able to file a suit against the other partners for their shares of the debts. Because of this combination of personal liability with regards to debt—and the fact that each partners has the authority to bind the formation—it is critical that partners trust one another. 

The Marketing Approach To Profiting From Social Media Networks

When it comes to marketing online "There is always strength in numbers". If you are observant, there is also money and from experience, the bigger the numbers, the bigger the income! In 2020, there were 3.6 billion social media users worldwide! Nigeria alone had more than 25 million of this number. That is a world of possibilities too huge to ignore! Overlooking the potential of social media and its impact on your business in this age might be similar to committing oneself to the noose. Smart businesses understand that the marketplace is ever-evolving and that great content is the differentiator. At the heart of all great contents is remarkable storytelling, a unique art through which an intended message is brought alive. There are more than a billion active users on Facebook alone. Over 900 million active users are willing log on to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter daily; The average Facebook user spends more than 15-25 minutes a day on the Facebook. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world, after India and China.Youtube the Google owned Video website exceeds a billion views per day. If Youtube was Hollywood, they would have enough material to release a number of about 60,000 new films every week. Hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every minute, It's now a free online learning university. 

It is said that the most popular video on YouTube has been viewed over 500 million times. So just Imagine, how valuable is all these web site traffic? Facebook has reported over 2 billion dollars income. Amazing! Farmville, about the most popular games on Facebook, has more than 55 million players. Zynga, the maker of Farmville, Mafia Wars, Candy Crush and Many other Facebook games, generates annual revenue of more than $400 million! There are more than 500,000 developers building applications for Facebook. Can you imagine, why would people spend their precious time and resources doing the Application thing? It’s simply Because they know that Facebook activities is where the money lies, I mean Advertising and Traffic , As when it comes to the internet, a website with traffic has Money! When you see nothing but "millions" and "billions" in the numbers you know there has to be a way to channel some of that money into your own account. You just have to get creative!  The two suggested ways you can approach this type of marketing, simple, yet incredibly ingenious way to make money are Viral Marketing and Direct Marketing. Use one approach individually or use them both. It doesn't matter. Either way you can make money. It’s really that simple! Facebook, the most well-known social networking site, has over 500 Million daily active members and industry experts predict it to still rapidly grow over the next few years. Some other social networks available and also have millions of Users are Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Apsense Ibotoolbox.You can join all of these networks for free. Chances are very good that 95% of the people in your daily life are a part of at least one of these popular networks. Thanks to social network web sites exploding across the web, friends and family are now connected more than ever. Even strangers are connecting through interest groups on these networks. Finding people you know, meeting new people, and communicating with them all has become a very simple process. And YES... You can figure out ways to make profits from these social networks by making entertaining videos, offering needed services, selling products, being an influencer marketer and much more. Wishing you a wonderful day.

A Review Of Journal Article On Search Engine Operations (Part 3)

You are welcome to my blog today. This is the third and final part of the post: A Review Of Journal Article On Search Engine Operations as you can read the previous part here, Enjoy reading and have a wonderful day.. Kumari, Gupta & Dixit (2014) in their research paper discussed the page rank algorithm.The paper highlights the strengths, weaknesses. They explained that the Page Rank algorithm uses link structure to determine the importance of web page. This algorithm is based on random surfer model. According to them, the random surfer model assumes that a user randomly keeps on clicking the links on a page and if she/he get bored of a page then switches to another page randomly. Thus, a user under this model shows no bias towards any page or link. Page Rank (PR) is the probability of a page being visited by such user under this model. Page Rank algorithm assumes that if a page has a link to another page then it votes for that page. Therefore, each in-link to a page raises its importance. Page Rank is a recursive algorithm in which the Page Rank of a page depends upon the Page Rank of the pages linking to it. Thus, not only the number of in-links of a page influences its ranking but also the page ranks of the pages linking to it. A page confers importance to the pages it references to by evenly distributing its Page Rank value among all its  out-links.  Kumari, Gupta & Dixit (2014) gave the working formula that the Page Rank algorithm uses to rank a page. The formula is stated as follows.
PR(P) = 1 – d + d
·        Where N0...Nn are the pages that point to page P.
·        O(Ni) is defined as the number of links going out of page P.
·        The parameter d is a Damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.
They further explained that damping factor, d is the probability of user’s following the direct links and 1- d denotes the rank distribution from non– directly linked web pages. It is usually set to 0.85.
Kumari, Gupta & Dixit (2014) further outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the Page Rank algorithm. The strengths included:
·        Less Time consuming:- As Page Rank is a query independent algorithm i.e. it computes the rank score ahead, so it takes very less time .
·         Feasibility:-This algorithm is more feasible as it computes rank score at indexing time not at query time.
·        Importance: - It returns important pages as Rank is calculated on the basis of the popularity of a page.
·         Less susceptibility to localized links: - For calculating rank value of a page, it consider the entire web graph, rather than a small subset, it is less susceptible to localized link spam.
The weaknesses as highlighted by them include:
·        The main disadvantage is that it favors older pages, because a new page, even a very good one, will not have many links unless it is part of an existing web site.
·        Relevancy of the resultant pages to the user query is very less as it does not consider the content of web page.
·        Dangling link: This occurs when a page contains a link such that the hypertext points to a page with no outgoing links. Such a link is known as Dangling Link.
·        Rank Sinks: The Rank sinks problem occurs when in a network pages get in infinite link cycles.
·        Dead Ends: Dead Ends are simply pages with no outgoing links.
·        Spider Traps: Another problem in Page Rank is Spider Traps. A group of pages is a spider trap if there are no links from within the group to outside the group.
·        Circular References: If you have circle references in your website, then it will reduce your front page’s Page Rank.
Wenpu Xing and Ali Ghorbani projected a Weighted Page Rank (WPR) algorithm which is a modification to the Page Rank algorithm. This algorithm assigns a larger rank values to the more important pages rather than dividing the rank value of a page evenly among its outgoing linked pages. Each outgoing link gets a value proportional to its importance. The importance is assigned in terms of weight values to the incoming and outgoing links.  The strengths of the weighted page rank include:
·        Quality: Quality of the pages returned by this algorithm is high as compared to Page Rank algorithm.
·        Efficiency: It is more efficient than Page Rank because rank value of a page is divided among its out-link pages according to importance of that page.One noticeable weakness about this algorithm is that as this algorithm considers only link structure not the content of the page, it returns less relevant results to the user query. I have these posts series have given you a better understanding of search engine operations. Have a nice time and Thank you for reading.

A Review Of Journal Article On Search Engine Operations (Part 2)

Continued from previous post here, Lewandowski (2012) in his research work on web search engine credibility, he discussed the issue of delivering highly credible search results to search engine users. He further emphasized the criteria by which search engines decide upon including documents in their indices. These criteria include:
·        Text-based matching: matches queries and documents to find documents that fulfill the query.
·        Popularity: which are measured based on clicks, links that lead to the page etc.
·        Freshness: the newness and up-to-date of the document.
·        Locality: knowing the locality of the user is paramount in giving useful results.
·        Personalisation: giving results based on user’s search habits.
He argued that popularity lies at the heart of these systems.
Search engines use a lot of page ranking algorithms to carry out the indexing of web pages.
Chandra, Suaib & Beg (2015) outlined and briefly discussed Google search algorithm updates against web spam some of which include: Page Rank, panda and penguin among a list of many others. According to them, Page Rank counts the number and quality of links to a page to calculate a rough estimate of a website's global importance. They further said that it can be assumed that important websites are more likely to receive high number of links from other websites and that initially, Google's search engine was based on Page Rank and signals like title of page, anchor text and links etc.  Chandra, Suaib & Beg (2015) further stated that currently, Google search engine uses more than 200 signals for ranking of web pages as well as to combat web spam. Google also uses the huge amount of usage data (consisting of query logs, browser logs, ad-click logs etc.) to interpret complex intent of cryptic queries and to provide relevant results to end user.
In their research, they explained that the panda update aimed to lower rank of low quality websites and increased ranking of news and social networking sites. Panda is the filter to down rank sites with thin content, content farms, doorway pages, affiliates websites, sites with high ads-to-content ratio and number of other quality issues. Panda update affects ranking of entire website rather than individual page. It includes new signals like data about the site users blocked via search engine result page directly or via the chrome browser.
Another important algorithm update is the penguin update. This update is purely web spam algorithm update. It adjusts a number of spam factors including keyword stuffing, in-links coming from spam pages, anchor text/link relevance. Penguin detects over optimization of tags and internal links, bad neighborhood, bad ownership etc. Subscribe here for more.

A Review Of Journal Article On Search Engine Operations (Part 1)

This post is a review of journal articles that discuss various subjects on search engine operations.
Lewandowski (2006) discusses Web search engines; mainly the challenges in indexing the World Wide Web, the user behavior, and the ranking factors used by these engines. He divided these ranking factors into query-dependent and query-independent factors, the latter of which have become more and more important within recent years. The possibilities of these factors are limited, mainly of those that are based on the widely used link popularity measures. He concluded his article with an overview of factors that should be considered to determine the quality of Web search engines.  He stated that the challenges in indexing pages in the World Wide Web are firstly, the size of the database of the search engine which is shown by the number of pages indexed after crawling. He further explained that the size does not necessarily portray the overall quality of the engine as an ideal search engine should know all the pages of the Web, but there are contents such as duplicates or spam pages that should not be indexed.
Secondly, another challenge according to him is the being up-to-date of search engines’ databases, where he further explained that the contents on the Web change very fast and therefore, new or updated pages should be indexed as fast as possible. Search engines face problems in keeping up to date with the entire Web, and because of its enormous size and the different update cycles of individual websites, adequate crawling strategies are needed.
Third, is the problem posed by web content. He argued that on the Web, documents are written in many different programming languages, that many different file types are used on the web, and that search engines today not only index documents written in HTML, but also PDF, Word, or other Office files. Each file format provides certain difficulties for the search engines. In the overall ranking, all file formats have to be considered.
Lewandowski (2006) say that “The Invisible Web is defined as the part of the Web that search engines do not index. This may be due to technical reasons or barriers made by website owners, e.g. password protection or robots exclusions.”
Lastly, according to Lewandowski (2006), spam is another major challenge for search engines as the search engines have to filter these spam pages to keep their indexing clean.
The behavior of users of search engines very considerably. Research made by Lewandowski (2006) showed that a greater percentage of search engine users are not sophisticated in their use of search engines. Most users don’t know advance searching techniques and a great percentage of those that know seldom use these advanced searching techniques. He further said that most users don’t go over the first page of indexed results.
Lewandowski (2006) in his article discussed the ranking factors of search engines. He classified all ranking factors into two major categories which are the query-dependent factors and the query-independent factors. According to him, query-dependent factors are factors that are one way or the other related to the user search. They include factors such as word document frequency, search term distance, search term order, position of the query terms, metatags, and position of the search terms within the document, emphasis on terms within the document etc. query-independent factors are used to determine document quality regardless of the query. According to Lewandowski (2006), such factors include link popularity, directory hierarchy, numbers of incoming links, click popularity, how up to date the page is, document length, file format and size of the website.
Lastly, Lewandowski (2006) discussed certain critical factors that determine the quality of a search engine. These factors according to him includes index quality; which is the aggregate of database size, indexing depth, how up to date the indexing is, low indexing bias etc., advanced search features, which is not a commonly used parameter but quite useful in determining the quality of a search engine.
Web search engines apply a variety of ranking signals to achieve user satisfaction, i.e., results pages that provide the best-possible results to the user. Have a nice day.

Search Engine Operations Explained

A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search),  which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler (an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing). Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.
HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES OPERATE?
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN perform four basic tasks. These are as follows: 

1. Search engines use programs called bots or spiders to “crawl” the World Wide Web, looking for pages. 2. When a bot or spider finds and crawls a page, it can then store it in the search engine’s database. This is called indexing. The search engine’s index contains all of the pages and documents the spiders or bots have crawled. 

3. Search engines process queries. For instance, when you go to Google and type “affordable camping gear” into the search box, Google processes your query and returns you results based on what you are looking for. Hundreds of millions of these queries take place every day. 

4. The final function of a search engine is to rank results. When you type in a query like the above, the search engine quickly runs a sorting equation to see which results it feels are most relevant to your query. This sorting equation is called an algorithm, and each search engine has a different algorithm. In other words, they have different priorities regarding what web pages they think are the best match for what the query is. They perform this huge task of picking the best results in seconds. Stay tuned for more updates. Subscribe here and Have a nice day.

A Sample Template For Business Plan

 Executive Summary:

..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Name of business________________________________________

Legal form_____________________________________________

Contact address_________________________________________

Business location………………………………………………………………………………………………

Tel. E-mail______________________________________________

Nature of business_________________________________________

Manufacturer,  Service provider, Trading,  Others, please specify..........

Owner(s)

(Name, Address, Qualification, Function in the business and Relevant experience)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Briefly describe the idea behind your business

_____________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Specify the intended Products or Services

_____________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Describe the intended market ________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

State the total Capital required to  set-up the business___________________________________________________

Show the Working capital required for the first one year _______________________________________________

Total  ___________________________________________________

Specify the Source of obtaining capital

Personal savings __________________________________________________

Partner’s contribution  ______________________________________________________

Loan from Family/friend ___________________________________________________

Bank loan  ____________________________________________________

Sale of Asset………………………………………………………………………………………….

Retirement benefits…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Motivation for Starting a business

Describe why and how you came up with the business idea

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Explain how you think the Business idea will work and grow

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

State how the business will change your life

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Business Concept  

What  value (new or improved)  does your  business seek to provide?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

State the nature of technology to be used in delivering the value

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Specify the type of product (s) to market

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Explain the unique customer experience to be offered by your product

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In what sector is your business? State whether in mining/agriculture, manufacturing, services, education, health etc __________________________________________________________________

Market

Describe your market—stating the nature of your customers and the segment of the market to served

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Explain key factors affecting the market

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _________

Explain how you will reach your target market

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Competition

Who are your main local competitors?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Who are the international competitors that offer similar products?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What makes your products or services better or different from that of the competitors? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Does your business have any unique feature that will be difficult to imitate by competitors?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Supply Links

 What type of inputs do you require for your business?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How and where will you get the inputs for your business (source, price, technology, etc) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Are the key inputs available locally? …………If not how easily will you obtain the supply……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Management

What skills and /or experiences do you have to enable you successfully manage the business?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Who else will work with you to manage your business--partners, co-owners (if any)?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Do you require professionals/people with special skill to run the business?.........if yes are they readily available and affordable? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Business Risks

What risks or challenges do you anticipate that may affect the success of your business (What can stop you from making this business a success)? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How will you mitigate or reduce these risks?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Finance

State the financial requirements for your business __________________________________________________________________

List the key items you will obtain with the funds

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

How do you intend to raise the funds?  __________________________________________________________________

Do you intend to obtain loan?....................................................................................

If yes how much?

……………………………………………………………………………………….

 How long it will take you to repay the loan?

How do you intend to grow the business over the next 5 years?

Illustration of Cash flow and financial statements