TheNumberNews

5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 24 October 2012

2012-10-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

1) Using Big Data to Save Lives

Computer scientists and a doctor are working to mine data from pediatric intensive care units to help doctors treat children and cut health care costs

“This data has the potential to be a gold mine of useful – literally life saving – information,” said Keogh, who specializes in data mining, which involves searching for patterns and irregularities in large data sets.

He is working with: Dr. Randall Wetzel, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Walid Najjar and Vasilis Tsotras, both computer science professors at UC Riverside; and David Kale, one of Keogh’s graduate students.

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2) A Khosla-backed big data energy startup you should know about

Are big data, analytics, and machine learning the answers to reducing the energy consumption of our homes? Yep, according to newly-emerged startup Bidgely that’s backed by Khosla Ventures. In an exclusive interview, Bidgely’s CEO gives GigaOM the details about what it’s been up to.

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3) SAP's Creepy New Retail Software Uses Big Data To Make You Buy More Stuff

Not so long ago, the most advanced piece of technology present at the intersection of consumer and retailer was the cash register. Today, buyers are bringing their own technology on their shopping trips - and trailing a very revealing online data footprint. One big enterprise software company is promising retailers new technology that will let retailers leverage that information to market to those consumers in real-time.

For retailers and tech companies that serve them, billions of dollars are up for grabs. If there were any doubts that there was real money to be made leveraging big data to create custom marketing pitches in real time, those doubts should be shattered by Tuesday's entrance of mega-software corporation SAP into the retail tech frenzy. The move is the equivalent of an elephant walking into a room of working mice and telling everyone, "I've got this."

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4) Gartner: Big Data to Be Big Job Creator

At a conference today in Florida, Gartner Inc. (NYSE: IT) forecast that information technology (IT) spending in 2012 would rise 3.8% in 2013, from $3.6 trillion to $3.7 trillion. But the really big news is in big data. According to the company’s head of global research:

By 2015, 4.4 million IT jobs globally will be created to support big data, generating 1.9 million IT jobs in the United States. In addition, every big data-related role in the U.S. will create employment for three people outside of IT, so over the next four years a total of 6 million jobs in the U.S. will be generated by the information economy.

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5) Big Data: Moving from strategy to tactics

Big Data, which comes into the enterprise unstructured and unorganized, first needs to be “prepped” so that it can be processed by a business analytics program. Here’s what you need to do.

Now that business analytics are here and enterprises are grappling with their own “big data,” it’s time to set some technical strategies in motion to harness these assets. Fortunately, solutions for the data center that can deliver both high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics are becoming increasingly scalable and affordable–even for medium-sized businesses.

The main challenge initially is getting your big data ready for analytics computing. Big Data, which comes into the enterprise unstructured and unorganized, first needs to be “prepped” so that it is able to be processed by a business analytics program. This is no small task, as “cleaning up” big data goes through several phases.

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Category: Big Data News

Tags: Big Data, Gartner, United States, Information technology, Khosla Ventures, Florida, NYSE, $3.7 trillion

10 Top Products Of The Past 4 Decades

2012-10-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

If you feel that the present tech world is rapidly changing, with addition of new iterations to the products every now and then, then think again. Like every trend has some beginning, the tech world had one too, and it was seeded around 45 years back.

These innovations changed the way we live and run our businesses, the way we thought, communicated, bond over, the real and virtual worlds, all changed-- incited a new era in human evolution all together.

Read on to know the 10 best innovations in the past 45 years, compiled by ComputerWorld.

#10 Computers

The invention of computer itself is a big thing, but the show stealer was not PC, not main frame, not even Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine(1849) or Konrad Zuse’s electromechanical Z3(1942). It was the most groundbreaking computer- ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). The device was first electronic general-purpose computer, conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania; unveiled on February 14, 1946. It was capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, and was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. Later other "automatic" computers followed it, relieving actual human calculations on paper, ranging from simple math to artillery trajectories.

#9 Word Processor

Wang Laboratories, a computer company founded by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu Wang in 1951. The company’s first attempt at a word processor was the Wang 1200(1971). Harold Koplow had written the microcode to perform word processing functions instead of number crunching, breaking new ground between typewriters and mainframes. Later WordStar for TRS-80(1979) put word processing onto personal computers. Something which made fingers just type on, than scribing it on paper.

#8 Delete Key

This simple innovation helped us to correct our mistakes without much fuss. It also reduced need for WhiteOuts, erasers, OS reboots and aftermath apologies; just press and undo.

#7 UNIX

UNIX is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system developed by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs in 1969. The OS simplified the execution of computer programs on machines, before which the program had to converted it to punch cards and give them to MIS, which was then fed to the mainframe.

The whole new world of product based software took the roots in IT industry, powering even those with law IT skills to write programs. The programs were line-of-business applications and large-scale ERP, CRM and SCP systems; which eventually moved to the cloud and took the form of Salesforce.com, Facebook and World of Warcraft.

#6 Local Area Network

ARCNET was the first widely available networking system for microcomputers. It was developed by principal development engineer John Murphy at Datapoint Corporation, provided first commercial LAN in 1977. It answered the people’s need to share files, printers and WAN connections at affordable prices, and with greater speeds.

#5 Acoustic Coupler

The external acoustic-coupler modem (1965) is the first device which converted analog signals from ordinary phone to turn huge computers of the time into network interfaces with blazing 300bps. Though it was included in PC World’s “Ugliest Product in Tech History” list, it defiantly paved way for modern ultra fast internet.

#4 Mobile Phones

The mobile phones were active as early as 1983 when commercial cell networks debuted in. Though at that time mobile phones were not sleek to fit into pockets or have multimedia functions, instead are huge and confined to vehicles, nevertheless the purpose of talking on the go was achieved.

#3 America Online

Steve Case founded AOL (American Online) the commercial ISP, introduced millions of people to internet and chat-rooms; the new experience unveiled. In 1989 when speed in kbps was norm, AOL brought in broadband, and started new online era. AOL led to CompuServe, which led to Web, which led to social networks like Facebook.

#2 Apple Newton

Apple’s Newton was first personal digital assistant (or PDA). Debuted in 1992, it changed the way a user managed personal data, and defined how convenient computer automation should be, making available the data whenever we wanted, in a portable user friendly device.

#1 Wi-Fi Home Router

Before the advent of Fastwed, an Italian ISP Wi-Fi in 2001, building networks with cable modems was too complex, and expensive. Now Wi-Fi has turned into a domestic necessity of households like a water heater or cooker.

And also,

The Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, HTML, and the URL in 1991. It was something which changed forever the way the information was exchanged, led to World Wide Web era, something indispensible in today’s personal or business life.

5 Big New Ways Facebook Laid The Groundwork For Making Money During Q3 2012

2012-10-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

You probably won’t see the revenue bump in Facebook’s earnings report today from all its new monetization schemes. But with this quarter’s rollout of Gifts, a mobile ad network, app install ads, FBX, and Sponsored Results, Facebook tried show the world that it has new engines to power profits. Earnings and share price may drag for a while longer, but here’s how they have the potential to kick into high gear eventually.

Facebook VP of corporate development Vaughn Smith said at a conference last week, “It’s funny to reflect back that in the first quarter of this year we had no ads on our mobile product.” Wall Street sure didn’t get the joke. Facebook’s user base is shifting to the small screen, and investors were right to worry the social network might not have a way to squeeze dollars from them there. That’s partly why its share price has stumbled to $19.32 down from $38 where $FB IPO’d.

So Facebook has been pushing itself through a transformation to become a company that thinks mobile first. From a product development standpoint, that shift has been rapid. A year ago it was designing for the web and then porting those designs to mobile. Now Facebook spec’s out products with mobile as the priority. Most teams ship their own mobile code too, instead of relying on a specific “mobile” team like it did last year.

But transforming into a mobile money-maker takes longer and Facebook still has to prove it’s possible. When it builds new commerce channels, it has to raise awareness and then get people actually opening their wallets. When it offers new ways to advertise, it must demonstrate to businesses that the ads deliver return on investment, and then recruit big spenders to buy them. It could take several quarters for the bump from new monetization schemes to appear in the bottom line if they even work.

Facebook’s existing mobile ad formats are performing well and all the ads tech companies saybusinesses are eager to buy them. But Facebook needs whole new ways to make money if it’s going to get to a more reasonable price-to-earnings ratio.

So let’s take a look at the five big revenue drivers Facebook announced or implemented this quarter, and how close they are to actually giving it a revenue boost:

FACEBOOK GIFTS

Launched September 27th, Facebook Gifts is the company’s big entrance into ecommerce that lets users buy presents for friends when it’s their birthday, wedding, engagement, graduation, other special occasion, or just whenever. Users see alerts about these special occasions and a chance to buy Gifts on the top right of the desktop homepage and at the top of the mobile news feed. The gifts range from digital gift cards to physical shipments of flowers, chocolate or toys that Facebook sources from and has delivered by its partners. Facebook earns an undisclosed, varying revenue cut on each gift sold.

Facebook Gifts has big potential because it knows who people are likely to buy gifts for better than anyone else. Whose statuses we like, who we have the most friends in common with, who our family members are, and who we’re tagged in photos with all factor into its affinity rankings. Many people visit daily and spend lots of time on Facebook, so there are plenty of opportunities to get them to purchase.’

Facebook also built the shopping experience around convenience, using profile data to suggest what people should buy friends. Young dude? It’ll say to buy him Bourbon-barrel aged maple syrup. Middle aged woman? A Starbucks card or box of chocolate might be the top recommendations. It could get people to buy gifts when they otherwise might just say “happy birthday”, and could pull dollars away from Amazon, gift card providers, flower delivery services, and brick-and-mortar stores.

Unfortunately, even if a reasonable percentage of US users bought a few Gifts a year, the margins may not be big enough to seriously move the needle. There’s also no international roll out in sight. In any case, that would definitely complicate shipping and many markets don’t have the disposable income to buy Gifts. Facebook may need to find a way to convince people in its key markets to buy as often as once every two months for Gifts.

Status: Gifts is still being slowly rolled out to U.S. users. By the end of next quarter it should have reached most of the U.S. and we may hear if people are actually buying Gifts.

MOBILE AD NETWORK

Announced September 18th, Facebook’s mobile ad network allows advertisers to pay it to improve the targeting of ads they buy within non-Facebook mobile apps and sites. It solves a major problem for both ad buyers and sellers — namely that ads are often inaccurately targeted. That means a buyer’s message doesn’t reach the right audience and they don’t get clicks. Meanwhile, ad hosts like apps and website can’t charge advertisers for clicks and the irrelevant content worsens the experience for their users.

While traditional ad networks make educated guesses about who their visitors are, Facebook knows a ton about its users because they volunteer their data. With Facebook’s bio, social, and app usage data, this new mobile ad network lets marketing messages be pinpointed to appear to 30-year-old engaged women, 26-year-old guys who Like surfing and live in Los Angeles, or 22-year-old recent Harvard alumni who use apps similar to one made by an advertiser.

The mobile ad network is huge for Facebook because it earns the company more money without forcing it put more ads or commerce options in its own apps. That lets it maintain the quality of its user experience, and avoid drowning out organic social content with paid ads. As the Internet is increasingly accessed through apps that need ways to monetize, Facebook could earn a lot of money by getting them to host its ads.

Status: Facebook’s still calling this a test, and only a few trusted partners can use it. Facebook hasn’t released details of the ad network’s partners, design, or performance, and it is unlikely to have produced noticeable revenue yet. But mobile ad spend nearly doubled this year, and Facebook could rollout expand the similar ad network for the web that it’s testing on Zynga.com. By next quarter there should studies available on its performance. It should also be accessible to more advertisers and visible on more apps. In 6 months we’ll see if it’s gained traction.

APP INSTALL ADS

Announced on August 7th, app install ads allow developers to pay to inject “Install Now” ads into the mobile news feed. They show their app’s name, icon, description, Facebook App Center rating, and friends who use them. When clicked they lead straight to the App Store or Google Play market where users can download the apps.

If the mobile web is all about apps, Facebook wants to be the way developers pay to get people to discover and install them. There’s already a huge industry around paid app discovery that Facebook is vying for a cut of. It could succeed by leveraging the amount of time users spend browsing its mobile apps and the knowledge of which apps their friends use.

Mobile app install ads are also Facebook’s first serious foray into showing non-social ads in the news feed, which includes some risk.. Friends don’t have to have Liked a developer or used an app for ads promoting it to show up in someones feed. As showing too many of these pure ads could drive users way, the revenue Facebook could earn on them is constrained.

Status: Last week all developers gained the ability to buy app install ads. Expect studies on their performance to arrive soon and Facebook to highlight the money they’re generating in its Q4 earnings.

FACEBOOK EXCHANGE

Though it was revealed late in the previous quarter on June 13th, we didn’t hear the first results from the Facebook Exchange (FBX) cookie-based retargeted ads program until late August. FBX lets advertisers target their ads on Facebook to users who’ve recently visited specific websites. For example a travel company could target users who viewed but didn’t buy a flight to Hawaii with ads promoting that same flight.

The early rumors said they were working very well, and by September Facebook permitted the demand-side platforms that buy the ads to share performance results, which were extremely promising. For some advertisers, each dollar they spent on FBX ads brought in $16 in sales. And I’ve heard that while DSPs are still learning how to use FBX, they are getting as good of results from it as they get from Google’s retargeted ads that they’ve been buying and optimizing for years.

FBX lets Facebook break into the realm of advertising to people with purchase intent, similar to search ads. Because the return on investment can be linked more directly to ad spend, advertisers may be willing to pay more for FBX ads than the traditional brand advertising seen on Facebook. Many advertisers have specific budgets for retargeted ads that Facebook can now tap into. If it can provide conclusive evidence that FBX works better than Google’s ad exchange, massive spend could pour in.

Status: Over a dozen DSP partners can now buy FBX ads, initial results are strong, and more advertisers are getting excited about the program. They’ll still need time to learn how to master the ad format, but we may see notable revenue from the product on the earnings call. By next quarter spend should ramp up and FBX could become a significant part of Facebook’s business.

IT’S GONNA GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

Until these products gain traction, Facebook’s earnings may not be too impressive. And next month, nearly 1.2 billion additional shares will become eligible for sale by employees and investors when a big part of the company’s stock lock-up expires on November 16th. That means the share price is likely to dip lower.

$FB may rise again once this major post-lockup flood subsides and these new money-makers kick in, but at least until then Facebook will need to sell Wall Street on the future, not the present. It has to communicate that the evolution of advertising and commerce depend on the data only Facebook has.

Tags: Facebook, Starbucks, Wall Street, FBX, Facebook Gifts, Facebook features, Mobile code, Mobile payment

3 Hot Tech Startups Burning Up L.A.'s 'Silicon Beach'

2012-10-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley may be America's most famous nebula of tech startup stars, but it's getting some serious competition a short hop down California's coastline.

With a robust system of incubators and accelerators producing a flurry of new companies -- more than 1,400, according to the AngelList startup community-- Los Angeles is looking to make a name for itself as a prime destination for putting down business roots.

Better weather, more affordable rent and proximity to the entertainment industry are just a few of the factors driving the L.A. startup scene's growth. Many of the ventures in what's been called "Silicon Beach" are tapping into the power of celebrity users and investors to drive awareness.

We spoke with the founders of three hot startups in the area about their success and key lessons they have learned piloting their ventures.

Viddy's Brett O'Brien, Chris Ovitz, and JJ Aguhob

image courtesy of the company

Company: Viddy
Product: iPhone app for sharing 15-second video clips with effects
Founders: Brett O'Brien, JJ Aguhob, Chris Ovitz
Launched: April 2011

What began as an iPhone app for sharing short user-generated video clips has grown into a community of 40 million users. An array of celebrity devotees have signed up for or endorsed Viddy including Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Will Smith, Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

"Fifteen-second Viddys are the '140 characters' of video for people in Hollywood who create, share and consume with an online community," says Viddy co-founder JJ Aguhob.

Viddy has raised $36 million so far in two rounds of funding, from investors including Battery Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, Qualcomm and Jay-Z's Roc Nation. The company's major competitor, Socialcam, was acquired by 3-D design software company Autodesk in July.

The founders say their focus is on attracting more users and improving the product. Strategies for generating revenue -- such as in-app purchases for premium video effects, celebrity-sponsored add-ons, cloud storage and uploads of longer videos -- are still being worked out.

Startup lesson: Put users first.
"To build a business organically, it 110 percent starts with the product and an experience that people can care about and easily engage with," says co-founder Brett O'Brien. "If you treat your venture as your passion, others will take notice and be drawn to your work."

Related: 9 Cities You Wouldn't Think Are Hubs for Tech Startups

Instacanv.as founders Matt Munson, Todd Emaus, Steve Bull and Kevin Fremon

image courtesy of the company

Company: Instacanv.as
Product: Allows Instagram users to sell their photos as physical canvas art
Founders: Matt Munson, Todd Emaus, Steve Bull, Kevin Fremon
Launched: February 2012

Facebook's $1 billion purchase of Instagram has excited more than just that company's options holders. Other startups see the photo-filter and sharing app as a new platform worth building an ecosystem around.

In the case of Instacanv.as, its four founders saw an opportunity to turn pictures taken with Instagram into real artwork. Instagram "artists" can easily set up an online gallery enabling sales of their creative phone photos as physical media. Products include traditional canvases, framed prints, and a unique one-inch thick acrylic glass product dubbed The Prism.

A short six months from launch, the site is powering galleries for more than 100,000 photographers in more than 30 countries, says co-founder and CEO Matt Munson.

The product began as an online education site, operating solely on seed money. The team quickly changed course, based on the founders' interest in Instagram and their desire to buy their own prints. Instacanv.as suddenly grew "way faster and more wildly than we ever anticipated," Munson says.

A graduate of L.A. accelerator MuckerLab, Instacanv.as has raised nearly $2 million from several groups, including FF Angel, First Round Capital and Bullpen Capital. The company says it has been exceeding a $1 million annual revenue rate since launch.

Startup lesson: Iterate quickly.
The Instacanv.as founders stick to the lean startup methodology of Eric Riess and to testing and learning on the fly. "If something's not working, try iterating very quickly to find something that does work," Munson says.

Related: The Next Big Wave in Tech -- And How Young 'Treps Can Surf It

Norm Schifman and James Citron, founders of Mogreet

image courtesy of the company

Company: Mogreet
Product: A mobile text and video messaging platform for marketers
Founders: Norm Schifman, James Citron
Launched: August 2006

Based in Venice, Calif., Mogreet began as a mobile greeting card delivery service. The company eventually pivoted, turning its mobile media platform into a tool for marketers to deliver text and multimedia message campaigns. The company now licenses its mobile marketing services to Fortune 500 companies.

Over the past two years, the company's mobile video messaging volume has grown by 400 percent, and Mogreet expects to increase revenue by the same amount in 2013, "as consumer brands, advertisers and mobile developers look to the mobile phone as the primary screen to engage with their audience," says CEO and co-founder James Citron. The company is profitable, with revenue coming from annual brand contracts in the range of $50,000 to $500,000, monthly messaging fees and third-party developer adoption.

With total venture capital of $14.1 million, Mogreet is supported in more than 175 countries and reaches two billion consumers. Most recently, the company launched an API service that gives developers a way of delivering text and multimedia messages, in-app messaging and more in their own apps.

Startup lesson: Don't be afraid to expose your idea.
Listen to the opinions of friends, customers and others, "and use them to create breakthrough products to evolve your ideas and, ultimately, build great companies," Citron says. "Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything."

Tags: Startups, Silicon Valley, iPhone, Los Angeles, AngelList, Justin Bieber, Jay-Z, Biz Stone, Roc Nation

4 Ways To Woo An Investor: How to Stand Out In The Crowd

2012-10-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

In a world full of great entrepreneurial ideas, how do you get your idea to stand out from the others?

Today I served as a judge for the 2012 Medical Technology “Concept to Company” Competition. As judges, we were asked to select three winners from a group of eight different companies that presented to our panel. Each of these entrepreneurs brought their A-game and each of them had come up with impressive and innovative business ideas. The question for these aspiring business owners to have considered prior to today’s presentations is: When you are surrounded by tough competition, how do you make your business stand out to potential investors?

Each of the eight companies presented a good product or solution; each of them validated a need in the industry that their concept solved; each of them was catering to extremely large markets; and each of them had filed for patents to protect their idea. Therefore, it became necessary for me to look for other things that made one idea stand out from the next in order to determine which companies should receive my vote. While I am not allowed to share which companies I voted for yet, as the winners won’t be announced for a few weeks, hopefully the following four examples will help illustrate how entrepreneurs can help their companies stand out in the crowd when it is their time to shine.

Stand out by having a great story behind how you came up with your innovative product.

Reltus (www.reltus.com) The founder of this company was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30. Through radiation treatments and chemotherapy, he was thankfully able to overcome the cancer, but he was left with an incessant ringing in his ears, a condition medically known as tinnitus. One evening while he was brushing his teeth with his sonic toothbrush, his young child came in the room wanting to be tucked into bed. As he went to answer his child, he inadvertently bit down on his vibrating toothbrush and noticed that for a glorious moment the ringing in his ears had stopped. After tucking his child in bed he returned to his sonic toothbrush and pulled off the brush head, wrapped the device, and held it against his ear. To his amazement he found that it gave him immediate relief from the ringing. He went on to experiment with several prototypes until he was able to create a solution he was happy with and thus, Reltus was born. Hearing the personal story behind any business idea really helps to draw an investor in emotionally, and it helps to illustrate the need your product can solve in a very personal way, thus making stand out from the others.

Stand out by introducing a disruptive, simple idea that will lead to a paradigm shift in the way things are done today.
iTest by 3PDx: This presentation was done by two young men, one being around 21 years old and the other being 25 years old. First I have to say that I love seeing talented young people put themselves out there in the business world, so that stands out all on its own. Young people bring such a great energy to the table, a fantastic ability to understand upcoming trends in the market, and they tend to have an eye for harnessing technology in new and innovative ways. These young men that presented were proof of this. Their idea was born from a group of smart people sitting around a room with a whiteboard, which in my opinion is how many a great idea is born, writing down whatever ideas came to mind.

These students began strategizing on how to couple existing technologies in a new and disruptive way that could create a paradigm shift in the world of diagnostics. From their session, they realized that if they could find a way to leverage one of the most commonly used devices in the marketplace – a smartphone – and combine it with a widespread need for accessible, inexpensive, in-home diagnostic tests for sensitive testing such as HIV and HPV, that they could cause a paradigm shift that would decentralize central laboratory diagnostics and place personalized testing in the hands of the consumer. Their idea was simple yet elegant in that it leveraged two existing technologies, the smartphone and a home diagnostic test, and combined them in order to achieve this easy to use, simple to understand, private test for the consumer. I love that their idea would also have a huge social impact in that it would encourage more people to test for HIV in the privacy of their own home, leading to earlier detection, early treatment and hopefully better prevention of spreading the disease.

This next example was a double whammy: Stand out by being confident, not arrogant AND standout by having a business that can make money while changing the world for the better.
Signal Diagnostics (www.signaldiagnostics.com): The founder of this company really shone on his own because he had the perfect combination of confidence without being arrogant. That is a unique combination in an entrepreneur and one that always stands out to me as “one to watch” for greatness to be achieved. His technology delivers rapid and sensitive disease detection solutions to the masses, with results available in less than an hour.. Typically it takes days or even weeks to get critical lab test results back for a patient, but with his development of a battery operated handheld detection device that is readable by the naked human eye, he can reduce that turnaround to getting results in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. He tested his unit recently in Kenya, Africa, in a remote village where power and clean water were not an option. Just think of the social impact his technology could have across the world toward improving healthcare. Coming up with a concept that will make money and change the world for the better is a true home run in my book.

Aside from these four examples, I want to add a fifth and final thought. Keep your presentation clean and simple! Slide one of any presentation should include the burning questions that every investor in the room is waiting patiently through your entire presentation to hear.

Market Size (ex. $x billion annually, hopefully)
Revenue model and margin (ex. each unit sells for $500 retail, my cost is $20)

Do you have a simple solution for big problem? (ex. Yes)
Is your idea protected? (ex. Patent granted or filed)

By placing these on a single beginning slide, you will allow the investor to get these answers immediately, which will allow them to sit back and genuinely enjoy the rest of your presentation.

There is very little in life as invigorating as watching great ideas be brought to life. There is an energy that exudes from entrepreneurs who are passionate about their idea that can light up an entire room. I only listed a few of the companies that stood out today, but the reality was that each of the eight presenters stood out in their own right. Hopefully these examples will help others stand out when it is their moment to shine.

Tags: HIV, Business, Diagnostic test, Diagnosis, Entrepreneur, Electric toothbrush, Business idea, ITest

10 Reasons Job-Hopping is Your Only Chance

2012-10-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

Gen Y came out of college exploring one job to another (to another). But when the recession hit, many said the days of job-hopping were over.

Yet there’s no reason to be scared into longevity at your current position. Here are 10 reasons to keep job-hopping:

1. Job-hopping allows you to widen your choice of jobs, not narrow it

When you have more experience in a wide range of positions, you’ll be able to increase your skill set. As long as you’re comfortable and adept at describing your transferable skills, you can easily act as a chameleon and morph from your current position to your dream job.

However, if you don’t know what transferable skills are, you may need to stay put.

2. No need to impress people you’ve never met

Many people, primarily HR managers, warn against job-hopping so you can theoretically impress another HR manager in the future—one you haven’t met yet. Besides the fact that you probably won’t be on the same career path a few years from now, let alone in the same industry, there’s no reason to build your career around what HR managers want.

Instead, impress yourself. Keep your own commitments and promises, and you’ll be fine.

3. Loyalty no longer exists

Your company is not loyal. Your boss is not loyal. Employees are never put first. More than ever, every job is unstable. It’s now more secure to build your own unique career from scratch.

So don’t show loyalty to a company that is not loyal to you. Now, that doesn’t mean ignoring your work or being disrespectful to the people who put money in your bank account, but it does mean being realistic in your career planning.

4. Job-hopping is a precursor to the future of careers

Careers are no longer linear. Instead, you will piece together positions and opportunities to fully form your career puzzle. You’ll have six to eight jobs before you’re 30, and you certainly won’t settle into the same company for the rest of your life after that.

As the idea of careers shift toward more contract work and portfolio careers, you can prepare by realizing results quickly and providing massive value.

5. Your network—not your resume—gets you jobs

When you job-hop, you expand your network tenfold. You meet more people: coworkers, managers, partners, influencers, leaders. And it’s your network, not your list of positions, that will get you in the door at the next job.

While you can and should apply with your cover letter and resume, when your network can recommend you for a position, it is much easier to advance your career.

6. Get a substantial raise and title upgrade

It’s better to find a new job that pays well and has a great title than to try and convince your existing company to give you a raise and a promotion. After all, you signed their contract. And it’s cheaper for them to keep you in your place.

When you ask for a raise, you’ll likely only receive a two to three percent increase. When you job-hop, the typical increase in income is 20 to 30 percent. Enough said.

7. You don’t know what you like until you do it

A slim minority of us fall right away into careers that are representative of our dream jobs. Everyone else gets stuck in jobs we hate.

While you can try to journal and vision-board your way into a soul-enriching career, it’s quicker and more effective to try several different positions until you discover what you truly enjoy. Action is quicker than thought—so don’t guess; go out and do.

8. Companies don’t move as fast as results

From startups to large corporations, every organization is fighting against some sort of barrier, whether it’s lack of money or lots of bureaucracy.

You may bring stellar results in the first three to six months, but by the time a year rolls around, your plate is likely devoid of challenge and meaningful work. Job-hopping means you always have relevant tasks to work on and can continually create positive impact.

9. The recession is a great excuse for high-performers

Naysayers warn Gen Y not to job-hop since it supposedly looks bad. But when Negative Nancies hunker down, it’s the perfect opportunity for high-performers to get out and fight. The recession is your excuse, as a high-performer in particular, to take risks and reap big rewards.

If it doesn’t work out, well, it’s been a bumpy ride for everyone. But the odds are in your favor.

10. Your talent is desperately needed

If you love your job, then for goodness sake, hold onto it with all your might.

But the truth is, the majority of Gen Y is disillusioned and dissatisfied with their careers. The longer you stay in a position that doesn’t fulfill you, the longer you cheat the world of your unique talents and gifts.

So whether you love picking out an accent pillow or get pleasure from financial projections, go on: get after it!

Rebecca Thorman’s blog Kontrary offers tips to create the career, bank account and life you love and is a popular destination for young professionals. Her goal is to help you find meaningful work, enjoy the heck out of it and earn more money.

Tags: Employment, Career, Human resources, Generation Y, Business, Cover letter, Jobs, Job Search

5 Steps to Awesome Community: Leaders Go Social

2012-10-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote about employees as brand ambassadors and how they can help – or hurt – an organization’s global and social brand. It depends on how well the lines between personal brand and company brand are drawn.

Once a company and leadership has the brand issue sorted out, it’s time to think more deeply about social community and the actual role of community managers.

Companies which value collaboration, understand the value of social buzz, and see the need to add (or subtract) a step in the sales process are all ripe for social community development. So are brands which have sustained brand damage. So what are the guidelines for establishing a community manager role in your organization?

Here are 5 ways to empower a great community manager (s):

1) Know the boundaries of your existing community. Is there a Facebook page? A corporate Twitter handle? How about G+, LinkedIn, YouTube, wikis, or a customer portal? Good, then you have community. At least the start of one. Now it’s time to show them the love. It’s time to manage it actively (and positively) with a community manager.

2) Build guardrails around your community with a very light touch. Don’t tell your various communities of interest that you’re putting them in a big box – craft a community entity (think brand) by gradually bringing them closer. Try surveys, outreach, and blogs asking people what they’d like to see from your company’s brand, and build from there.

3) Hire carefully. There are lots of self-styled community managers out there. Look at Jono Bacon’s book The Art of Community. Use it as a guide as you build the job description. Or better yet – start “actively listening” in on social channels about what people are saying. And take the time to figure out what you want to accomplish with the community.

4) Don’t forget the importance of process. Communities work best when all understand the ground rules. Craft a community manifesto or a similar guidebook and share it.

5) Empower your communities. Once you have the community manager in place, and the goals, build an action plan. Make the goals both short and long-term; monthly, yearly, five years. Know what you want, and put the plan in place to get there. Make it measureable, and make sure your leadership and the community manager is accountable. This is a team effort.

Communities are critical to building a business which can navigate channels – direct to customer, social, sales, partner and employee. Leaders need to act now to gather community around their brands.

It’s 2012, talented people. Time to climb in the social sandbox. Maybe it’s time to show the community manager some love and respect as an essential and valued role within your organization. Let’s keep talking. This is only the beginning.

Tags: Twitter, LinkedIn, Art of Community, Jono Bacon, YouTube, Community manager, Leadership, Facebook

6 Facebook Advertising Fundamentals for Small-Business Owners

2012-10-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

There are a few fundamentals that you must know before you begin spending your hard-earned cash advertising your business on Facebook. These terms and definitions are so important that you really should understand them comfortably and completely before giving Facebook your credit card and telling them to have at it.

An ad in Facebook is content displayed to Facebook users at an advertiser's specific request. Up to five different ads may show at one time. Where ads are displayed, what they are called, how they work, how they are presented and how many are shown at a time are subject to change at any time.

Here are six terms you'll want to get familiar with before embarking on a Facebook advertising campaign.

1. Impressions. Every time an ad is displayed, a user could potentially read the ad. Facebook calls that an impression; it's an opportunity for someone to see your ad. For example, if an ad has 1.4 million impressions, then the ad had 1.4 million opportunities to be seen.

But that doesn't mean 1.4 million separate people have had the chance to see the ad. The estimated reach for this ad is 200,000, the number of Facebook users who meet the criteria that the advertiser has selected for people the advertiser wants to see the ad.

If an ad has 1.4 million impressions and an estimated reach of 200,000 people, we know that, on average, each of those 200,000 people has had seven opportunities to see the ad.

Most people don't click on an ad on the first impression. As users browse Facebook, moving from page to page, the same ads are displayed multiple times.

If the ad title is good and the ad image is compelling, the ad may capture a Facebook user's attention and they may actually read the ad. If the user clicks on the ad, he is taken to a new destination specified by the advertiser. Facebook captures and reports the number of times all users have clicked on each ad.

One of the first questions everyone asks is "How well is my ad working?" There are many measures, but we'll focus on whether the ad encourages users to click.

2. Click-through rates. Facebook reports how well an ad encourages a user to click, in a statistic called the click-through rate (CTR). This identifies how many impressions it takes, on average, before a user clicks on the ad. CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. If your ad had 1,000 total impressions and users have clicked on the ad 10 times, then your CTR is 1%.

3. Landing pages. The page that is displayed after a user clicks on an ad is called a landing page. The advertiser specifies the landing page when the ad is created in a field called destination URL.

You can send a user who clicks on an ad anywhere that doesn't violate Facebook's landing page policies. You may send users to your own web page or you may send users to other locations within Facebook -- such as a Facebook page, event, application or group.

Related: What Facebook's Page Post Targeting Means to Your Business

4. Cost-per-click. Facebook does not display ads out of the goodness of its heart. It wants cold, hard cash. You have to provide a credit card before Facebook will even think of displaying your ad. Once it has your payment information, it lets you create an ad. During this process it asks if you want to bid for clicks or for impressions.

If you choose to bid for clicks, you will be charged only if a user clicks on the ad. You can specify the amount you are willing to pay for a click, the cost-per-click (CPC), starting at one cent per click. If you say that you are willing to pay a maximum of 45 cents for a click, then that is the most you will be charged for a click.

Technically, you are bidding on the ad space, against other unknown advertisers. Initially, the higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be displayed. After a few thousand impressions, additional factors affect the cost of your ad, including the click-through rate and whether users "like" or complain about your ad. The good new is that Facebook reserves the right to "lower the price" you pay per click, and usually does.

5. CPMs. You may also select to bid on impressions instead of clicks. In the Facebook interface, pay per view is labeled CPM, short for cost per thousand impressions. (Mille means 1,000 in Latin.) You can pay to have your ad displayed 1,000 times whether or not anyone clicks on it.

6. Reach and frequency. Ads display on Facebook multiple times to the same user. The number of individual people who have seen your ad during a specific period is called reach. The average number of times each individual user has seen your ad is frequency. But as the frequency gets high, you face ad fatigue. Even if the ad is excellent, your prospects stop clicking on it because they have grown tired of seeing it.

Tags: Facebook, Advertising, Pay per click, Clickthrough rate, Landing page, Impressions, Google, CPC

5 Reasons Why Good Fitness Makes for Better Entrepreneurial Leadership

2012-10-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Fitness has always been a part of my life. From swimming in high school, playing rugby in college, to the relentless focus on fitness as a Navy SEAL, I have always prioritized health and wellness in order to stay competitive in everything I do. I passionately believe being healthy and physically fit has a direct correlation to happiness and success, whatever your personal definition of that may be.

Before my SEAL training began, I kept hearing that BUD/s (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) is mostly mental. I understand why people said that because generally guys quit early on because of the extreme mental and emotional stress placed on the students, not to mention being constantly cold and wet. So, my philosophy in preparing for the toughest special operations training in the world was to let my fitness level be the last thing I had to worry about. I knew there would be plenty of other challenges to face. After quitting my finance job in Dallas, I moved to Crested Butte, CO. for three months to train at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The extreme training paid off. Fitness was never an issue for me during BUD/s.

The Officers in any SEAL training class are expected to lead from the front, literally. Officers need to motivate their classmates by being in even greater physical condition that the enlisted students. This is not always the case, of course, but I found it generally to be true. Fitness is part of the SEAL culture and an essential ingredient for mission success. Similarly, in a fast paced entrepreneurial organization, I believe a good leader must maintain mental and physical wellness in order to effectively drive the business forward and inspire the team.

I strongly believe that a fit leader is a better leader, and here are the five reasons why:

Energy and Productivity: Maintaining a regular exercise routine will give you more energy throughout the day. Leading a growing company is tough enough. Make sure you have the energy to do so effectively. As a leader when you have more energy, you are more likely to face the challenges of the day aggressively and confidently.
Confidence and Creativity: A fit leader will have more confidence and solve problems more creatively. Studies show that our cognitive ability to be creative increases with even moderate levels of exercise. Whenever I have a speaking engagement or important presentation, I make sure to exercise that day prior to the event.
Facing Challenges: In SEAL training you are constantly pushed beyond your pain threshold, so much so that your “comfort zone” takes on a whole new definition. I follow the same theory when training by always pushing myself beyond my existing comfort zone. Doing so increases your stamina and mental ability to endure physical and mental suffering. As a business leader, you have to be able to face tough challenges every day while maintaining mental focus on priorities.
Mental Wellness: Exercise is one of the best ways to manage stress because it boosts your brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitters called endorphins. Also, by solely focusing on your body’s motions for a period of time, you focus less on the day’s stresses, at least for a while. According to an article by the Mayo Clinic, exercise also reduces symptoms associated with anxiety and depression, while also improving sleeping patterns.
Influence: If all this is true for the leader of an organization, it must be true for the whole team, right? It is widely believed that healthy employees are happier and more productive. A fit workforce is also less likely to get sick; thereby, improving attendance and reducing healthcare costs. In this article, DigiFitprovides some great reasons why a healthy workforce will improve the bottom line. This, of course, takes us back to leading by example. You can’t expect to foster a culture of fitness unless you, as the leader, are physically fit and promote overall wellness. For example, I occaisionally run boot camps for team members and IMI’s Culture Club holds recess every Thursday afternoon. My business partner and I specifically chose our new office building because it has a great gym right downstairs. Our team has even held several “Biggest Loser” contests. Fitness permeates our culture.

My favorite quote from the Navy SEAL Creed is about always being physically and mentally prepared and never quitting. This paragraph is what drove me in combat and what pushes me forward every day in the chaotic environment of a growing business:

“I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight.”

As a business leader what are you currently doing to ensure a happy, healthy, and productive workforce? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Tags: United States Navy SEALs, Mental health, Mayo Clinic, United States Navy SEAL selection and training, Physical fitness, Crested Butte Colorado, Health, Leadership

5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 23 October 2012

2012-10-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

1) Data Is the New Supply Chain: Learn the Current Methods, Risk Management

DAMA International, the global association of professionals in data management, states that “Data Resource Management is the development and execution of architectures, policies, practices and procedures that properly manage the full data lifecycle needs of an enterprise.” In today’s information driven world, the data needs of an enterprise are very important. Some enterprises are built around providing information to external customers, and others have information of value that is used only with internal customers. In either case, the way data is managed is of great importance. While traditionally an internal IT department is responsible for this data management, now there are enterprises looking at external vendors to provide this management via cloud computing.

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2) Cloudyn Launches Free Tool For Making Sense of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Costs

Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them.

Amazon offers Reserved Instances at different rates depending on term of commitment — either one, two or three years. Cloudyn’s Reserved Instance Calculator will use predictions based on usage patterns to recommend optimal purchases. Given that Amazon actually opened its own marketplace for unused Reserved Instances last month, it seems like a tool for planning these purchases could come in pretty handy.

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3) Integration Cloud Services Brokerage: What it is. What it isn’t.

The intent of cloud computing is to extract technical complexity by offering computing as a service, thereby reducing IT costs and freeing IT staff to focus on achieving higher-level business objectives. For many firms, these objectives are increasingly centered on the extended enterprise and a valuable network of customers, suppliers, business partners and cloud providers.

However, using cloud services for both back-office systems and B2B processes requires a high level of coordination and integration due to the inherent interdependencies. It’s one thing for these different services to exist as independent islands that never need to interconnect, or as loosely connected point-to-point interfaces. That’s easy to do. It’s another thing to outsource interdependent business processes to multiple cloud service providers. This becomes very complex, very quickly, and can mean adding staff and resources — whether it’s for writing code or just managing the integration process — either of which can negate many of the cloud computing benefits.

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4) Big Data Case Study: Predicting the Weather with 3TIER

Where would you build a wind-farm? Somewhere windy, obviously. But how would you know how windy that area was a year ago, two years ago, three? How would you know when the windiest time of year was? How would you predict the weather for today, the weather for tomorrow, the weather for next year and beyond? The answer: talk to 3TIER.

3TIER, an industry leading company dealing in renewables risk management, helps businesses decide where to place their wind-farms, solar-farms and hydro-dams by giving them all the information they need to assess the future energy potential of any location. How do they do this? Big data.

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5) Report: Wal-Mart’s Big Data Moves Will Boost Rackspace

Last week while the OpenStack conference was taking place in San Diego William Blair analyst Jim Breen reported that event organizer Rackspace (RAX) will likely win more business from retail giant Wal-Mart (WMT).

Breen noted that Wal-Mart was actively recruiting OpenStack engineers and the fact that Rackspace can gain traction with Wal-Mart for big data analytics reflects the progress of the OpenStack platform. Rackspace and Wal-Mart share a common enemy with Amazon. Wal-mart has opened an office in San Bruno, California office to house @WalmartLabs, an innovation outpost that the brick-and-mortar company hopes will expand its Internet retail business and play ecommerce catchup with Amazon. @WalmartLabs is in the process of consolidating its data analytics systems from EMC and IBM technology into a single global platform.

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Category: Big Data News

Tags: OpenStack, IBM, Wal-Mart, Big data, Cloud computing, Amazon, Rackspace, Walmart

5 Work from Home Jobs for Moms

2012-10-22T11:47:00.001-07:00

Chelsea P. Gladden is the Director of Marketing & PR for FlexJobs, an award-winning service that helps job-seekers find professional opportunities that also offer work flexibility, such as telecommuting, freelance, part-time or alternative schedules. To learn more about Chelsea, visit FlexJobs.com or tweet her @FlexJobsChelsea

A U.S. Census report released this month shows that the number of people who work from has soared by 41% in the past decade. These findings demonstrate that there is hope for moms (and dads!) who prefer the flexibility to work from home while raising children.

Which leads to this question: What kinds of professional job opportunities are there for telecommuting parents? Generally, parents want a job with little to no travel keeps them closer to home in time for after school pick up, and preferably a position that doesn’t involve risking one’s life by jumping from a capsule to break the sound barrier … there have to be easier ways.

And indeed there are. In fact, the following are some of the more popular options that junior’s folks can do from home.

1. Accounting: Some typical positions include: supervisory auditor, bookkeeper and senior tax manager.

2. Marketing: Some typical positions include: product strategy manager, marketing copywriter and social media coordinator.

3. Computer & IT: Some typical positions include: systems analyst, technical support, computer studies instructor, programmer and graphic designer.

4. Education & Training: Some typical positions include: online tutor, virtual K-12 teacher and academic program director.

5. Medical & Health: Some typical positions include: at-home health coach, registered nurse and billing specialist.

Though these fields are only a subset of 50+ career fields that offer the option to work from home, they were chosen for having the most positions available and their ability to work remotely while staying within the home office.

Part-time hours and job sharing are also an option for better life flexibility. Though the Labor Department foundthat 582,000 new part-time jobs were added in September, most of them were in the 16-24 age brackets. However, many companies are offering these types of hours at the professional level as well, including the positions mentioned above.

As for the types of companies that cater to parents, Working Mother releases its list of the Top 100 every year and, in addition to flexibility, factors in perks such as fitness programs. This year’s list included companies from AOL to Yale University.

Specialty positions are often catering to remote staff in order to secure the top experts. Though there are more common jobs and less standard titles, the Census Bureau’s findings indicate the number of employees who work from home will continue to rise, with plenty of ideal jobs for parents — that don’t involve jumping at an altitude of 128,100 feet.

Tags: Telecommuting, Yale University, AOL, Part-time, Employment, United States Census, Working Mother, FlexJobs

5 Big Data Quotes of the Week

2012-10-22T11:39:00.001-07:00

“Predictive analytics can figure out how to land on Mars, but not who will buy a Mars bar…. You should expect big data to have big impact. And you can bet that it will help machines interact more usefully with our unstructured, changing, and sometimes downright confused human ways. But if you’re counting on it to make people much more predictable, you’re expecting too much”–Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

“’Forming a data team is kind of like planning a heist’ [said Hunch.com’s co-founder Matt Gattis]. He meant that you need people with all sorts of skills, and that one person probably can’t do everything by herself. Think Ocean’s Eleven but sexier”–Cathy “Mathbabe” O’Neil

“The data warehouse architecture of the 1980s, to which I was a major contributor, of course, was based largely on the… single-version-of-the-truth simplification. There’s little doubt it has served us well. But, big data and other trends are forcing us to look again at the underlying assumptions. And find them lacking”–Barry Devlin

“Security today is a real-time Big Data challenge”–Steven Mills, IBM

“…big data will once again become ‘just data’ by 2020 and architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this ‘new normal’ will be retired. Organizations resisting this change will suffer severe economic impacts”–Gartner

Tags: Big data, IBM, Gartner, Matt Gattis, Barry Devlin, Cathy, Mars, Data warehouse

5 cloud computing tips for SMBs

2012-10-22T11:31:00.003-07:00

You’ve read countless case studies of how small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have turned to cloud computing to raise productivity, improve customer service and stay ahead of the competition. But is your company ready to jump onto the bandwagon? Here’s what you need to know before moving to the cloud:

1. Define your needs
While cloud computing may seem like hype, it has leveled the playing field for SMBs that would not have been able to afford sophisticated business applications. 87 percent of SMBs surveyed said cloud applications have given them a competitive advantage, while 85 percent agreed that cloud applications have improved employee productivity. However, to realize the full benefits of the cloud, it is important to define what you want to achieve. Are you hoping to improve customer service by allowing your sales team to respond to customer requests quickly? Or, do you want improve collaboration among employees? Articulating those needs clearly will go a long way in choosing the right cloud service provider.

2. Choose the right service provider
Choosing a cloud service provider can be a daunting task. There are several criteria that you can use to evaluate a service provider, including performance, support and security. The Asia Cloud Computing Association has published a useful evaluation matrix that will help you prioritize your requirements. For example, if you have customers that demand strict data security, a potential cloud provider would have to score higher for that criterion over others. A company with limited IT resources may demand the highest level of support, while an engineering firm may place performance as its highest priority.

3. Back up and secure your data
Most cloud service providers will assure you that your data is safe. Bigger cloud players like Salesforce.com will enforce strict data protection policies to protect your data, but when an employee downloads or copies that data, security could go out the window. Consider employing cloud-based data loss protection (DLP) technology that takes digital fingerprints of data in the cloud. So, if someone tries to download, copy and paste, or e-mail confidential data, DLP technology will recognize the fingerprinted data as sensitive, and takes action to prevent misuse. Finally, backing up your data is a no-brainer. Most cloud services will allow you to export a copy of your data which you can restore if things go awry, or when you switch service providers.

4. Data integration services
Do you need to integrate existing data that you are housing on your in-house IT systems with your cloud service? This is especially important if you’re not ready to move all your data to the cloud. Your customer profile data, for example, may be tied closely to a legacy system which may be difficult to decouple. While integration is usually done through APIs, consider tapping on integration services provided by systems integrators to speed up the process.

5. Plan your deployment
Early cloud adopters agree that adequate planning and preparation would have made their implementation efforts easier and more successful. It is thus important for SMBs to develop a clear implementation plan, which should involve a deployment roadmap, as well as identifying key business and IT transformations with measurable benefits. Upfront planning would help you avoid issues like long deployment cycles, limited integration with other applications and lack of proper training.

Tags: Cloud computing, Information technology, Information privacy, Small and medium enterprises, Business, Service provider, Salesforce.com, E-Commerce

12 Cloud Apps To Make Your Business More Productive

2012-10-22T11:26:00.001-07:00

Sick and tired of hearing me bleat on about my favourite apps and services? Sit back and read this guest post originally published back in 2010 by James Adams who outlines his personal choices.

Cloud computing is the latest in the trend to minimize IT costs and increase productivity. Software from the cloud takes the burden of administration off of the local organization, relieving much of the demand for in-house expertise. Cloud based represents higher productivity for in-house and mobile workforces in the form of accessible and secure computing with more up time. Here are 12 cloud apps that will make your business more productive.

Basecamp

An online project management tool that runs through the cloud and provides team collaboration features. Everything you need to manage your projects is found in Basecamp, including file sharing, scheduling, task management and assignment, and feedback. Basecamp interacts with several iPhone apps, and third party computer-based tools to give you maximum accessibility and flexibility wherever you are. Packages available range from 15 projects to unlimited. A 30 day trial lets you see if Basecamp will fit the needs of your business before you buy.

Dropbox

A web-based file sharing service that also provides secure file storage, synchronization, and backup. Files can be accessed from anywhere and changes made to files by the team are automatically synced to user’s local computers. Supports Linux, Mac, and Windows. Dropbox offers 2 GB of storage free so you can see how it works prior to purchasing.

Zoho

A cloud based office software suite, offering powerful document creation management tools for spreadsheets, word processing, invoicing, CRM, and more. You pay for only the apps you use.

Dimdim

Web conferencing software that resides in the cloud and offers a great medium in which you can interface with your mobile workers, customers, and vendors. Rather than having people travel to meetings, why not let everyone stay home, save the earth and attend the meeting online?

Pixlr

Cloud-based image editing services. Three applications, Editor, Express, and Grabber combine to give users amazing power to create and edit images.

Github

Social coding application that runs through the cloud to provide version control and collaborative software development. Several packages are available from the free open source plan to the Giga plan that includes 300 private repositories, private collaborators, and 60 GB of storage. There is also an enterprise version of Github that companies can deploy on their own cloud platform.

FreshBooks

A financial management application that’s hosted in the cloud. This program offers “painless billing” that makes it easy to bill clients, track payments, and perform other bookkeeping. This app is specially designed for teams, freelance workers, and service providers.

Google Docs

A personal repository of documents that can be shared and updated as needed. Google Docs features revision tracking and allows users to save documents locally if necessary. This application is free.

Mojo Helpdesk

Provides online customer relationship management (CRM), including request tracking, ticket assignment, email integration, and on demand help. Eleven users are supported for the $24 monthly fee, with an unlimited option available for $49.

Cloudmark Desktop

Business with real time protection from email spam, phishing, and viruses without loading down the computers on your network.

Appointy

An online scheduling software that provides businesses with appointment and schedule management. The software can be configured to allow customers to make their own appointments and send out text and voice alerts for appointments. Appointy even has tools available to promote your business. Practically any business that schedules appointments over the telephone will appreciate the power Appointy offers to make businesses more efficient and productive.

Gliffy

Provides cloud-based charting and diagramming. This powerful app gives business access to the tools needed to create professional flow charts, floor plans, and technical drawings.

Cloud based applications are perfect for managing business functions from any web browser so employees and managers can be productive wherever they are. With software management and administration performed by the host, businesses can focus on their mission rather than on IT related tasks. Try these applications out and see how powerful web-based applications can transform your business.

This guest post was written by James Adams who is a blogger working for an online storeoffering toner next day for the UK. He is a contributor to their design blog where he posts about technology and design.

Tags: Basecamp, Cloud computing, Project management, Linux, Web conferencing, Office suite, iPhone, Windows

2 Publicity Tips for Your Small Business

2012-10-22T11:11:00.004-07:00

One of the biggest challenges that any owner of a small business faces while trying to publicize the same is the limited budget that they have in their kitty for the exposure and advertisement and spreading of the word regarding their business. In case you are thinking that something on these lines of advertisement is necessary for the big companies alone and you can well do without it thanks to word of mouth, well, you are nothing but extremely mistaken in your ideas.

One of the most important necessities of any small business is to find their footing in a competitive market and this is why marketing, advertising and spreading the word with a moderate budget is extremely necessary. Here are 2 cost effective ways to implement the same:

1. Speak And Write About Yourself

One of the most cost effective yet productive ways of getting across the town spreading word about your business is to talk to people about the same and also write about it. You are encouraged to talk about your venture and the various services that you provide at the many gatherings that you might be attending. This might be a small gathering of friends, a large public gathering, the Sunday mass, or just about anything. This will get people interested in whatever it is that you are selling via your business and rest assured that you will be enjoying a high conversion rate for this. You can also get yourself an answering service in order to help you with these people in case they try and get in touch with you.

In case you think that public speaking is not your forte, you can always fall back on the mighty pen and use your writing skills to promote your business yourself by writing pieces and articles about it on magazines and other business related publications that are available in your area. This will ensure that you are reaching a larger reader base and are thus far better than speaking. Combining these 2 activities optimally will give you amazing results!

2. Sponsor A Local Charity Event

You must have heard about corporate social responsibility, right? Well, you can start off with your own small and local version of the same by sponsoring a local charitable organization or an event in order to gain some goodwill and some much needed publicity for your company.

At the same time in case you think that sponsoring a whole charitable foundation is beyond the financial ability of your business, you can always set up a co-sponsored charitable organization with someone else who is ready to split the burden with you. Remember that a little charity and giving back something to the society which will prosper your business in the future is a very good idea and a winner campaigning move.
These 2 extremely effective but light on the pockets method of publicizing your small business will prove to be extremely helpful in the long run.

Tags: Small business, Business, Charitable organization, Public speaking, Sponsor (commercial), New York City, Fidelity Investments, Small Business Administration

3 Tips for Creating an Effective Work Team

2012-10-22T11:07:00.002-07:00

Have you ever worked in a group or team? How did the team function? What was the demographic makeup of the team, and how did you all get along?

Creating an effective work team is by no means a simple task, and can involve getting the right group of people together, setting appropriate goals, using the right leadership style, and more. Although not a complete solution, the following tips might help spark some ideas on creating your own effective work team.

1) Avoid over-cohesiveness

Naturally, most of us feel more comfortable with people who are similar to us. We tend to get along well with people who have similar preferences and tastes, or those who may be of similar age, race, or other demographics. However in work groups and teams, too much cohesion or lack of diversity can be detrimental and costly to the organization.

A highly cohesive team is great, but oftentimes there is a point where the team is so cohesive it impedes the organization’s performance. Instead of worrying about the company’s goals, team members strive for whatever is in the team’s best interest, which may or may not coincide with organizational goals.

For example, a team might strive to finish work early everyday so they can go out for drinks, or a team might get so caught up socializing with their peers that their work output suffers.

By composing a diverse team with varying demographics that is moderately cohesive, a broader range of ideas can be taken into perspective and quite often can lead to new solutions or ways of thinking.

2) Look at the less obvious demographic categories

Just a few decades ago, diversity in the workplace simply meant working with people of different ethnicities or racial backgrounds. Today there are many different categories that relate to diversity, such as gender, sexual preference, religion, education, ethnicity, and more,

Two of the most important yet often overlooked demographics are differences in age and differences in economic upbringing.

First, it seems that some organizations avoid hiring older individuals, or are finding ways to relieve older workers of their duties because they will likely be exiting the workforce relatively soon, and may be entitled to pensions or retirement plans.

Older individuals might not be so up to date with current trends, but their experience and knowledge can be of paramount importance; their opinions and points of view are definitely worth listening to. Similarly, young people also have unique perspectives, ideas, and ways of thinking, yet organizations are still weary of hiring people with little experience.

Second, a diverse team may also come from varying economic backgrounds. Even if a team is composed of ethnically diverse members, if they were all raised in middle class society, went to high school then directly to college, they will probably think and act similarly.

Having people from both ends of the economic spectrum will definitely provide a broader range of ideas, although there could be some trouble seeing eye to eye. Providing clear goals and leadership can be the best way to help a team reach their targets.

3) Provide clear goals and leadership
Forming or being part of a work team can be difficult, especially if clear goals are not specified. Make sure that every member of the team fully understands the goals and strategies to reach those goals. If clear-cut goals are not defined, the output may be less than expected.

Furthermore, a fitting leadership style is also necessary. Who is the team leader? Is the team going to be self-managed, or will they report to a superior? Depending on the group or team dynamics, a leader may have to be stern, compassionate, empathetic, and more. Lead by example, and let team members take ownership of their tasks and hold each other accountable for their actions.

These are just a few important items to consider when creating or managing an effective work team. Have you had experience in a work team before, or are you part of one now? What has your experience taught you? We’d love to hear your opinions.

Tags: Leadership, Organization, Diversity, Team, Team leader, Business, Management, Work

5 Tips for Winning Business as a Software Services Startup

2012-10-22T11:02:00.002-07:00

When you are a software services startup, business development is your lifeblood. In a country like Pakistan, where the development of intellectual property in the software space is stunted by a variety of factors, including limited investment channels, software houses are often set up around services models.

Business development is key for staying cash flow positive. While project managers can orchestrate the teams of software engineers to assure quality, your company critically must depend upon a dedicated team of business development and sales professionals who work to earn the company sufficient business.

This is a continuous process; while business development professionals often start with a very large number of leads, many fizzle out very early in the process. It’s important to persevere in order to win an acceptable number of projects.

Based on my experiences in this space, I’d like to share a few tips for the many people looking to earn business in software exports from countries like the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom:

1. Develop a Niche.

While you may believe that your engineering team is stellar enough to pick up new technologies and frameworks, the entire industry is gravitating towards more niche specialization. It doesn’t matter if you have the best iPhone engineers on the planet, if they’ve only worked on productivity applications until now, clients in the gaming space will be reluctant to award work to your team. Identifying specific genres, platforms and products in which your team wishes to specialize will make it a lot easier to target the right clients who are often spoiled for choice among the wealth of services setups across Asia and Eastern Europe.

2. Increase Your Offerings.

The truth is that finding new clients is always a low percentage business. You might be making dozens of cold calls over LinkedIn and sending hundreds of emails a month, with less than 10% of the people contacted even responding. The best way to expand business is to extract more work from your existing clients. One way to do this is to transform yourself into a one-stop shop offering all the related services: graphic design, project management, interface design and quality assurance. Another way is to remain proactive in your relationship with your client: hold regular calls to understand the client’s strategy and anticipate when its demand for services will grow. The client will appreciate the strategic role you are playing as a services partner and will always see more value in expanding its relationship with an existing partner than building a fresh relationship with someone else.

3. Nothing Beats Face-Time.

While there are success stories of business development conducted entirely in the virtual domain, it is difficult to develop a long-term relationship with a client without ever meeting it in person. The most successful services setups regularly send their business development and sales people to attend relevant conferences and meet up with foreign clients in person. This is the best way to forge tangible bonds with the client and communicate how serious you are about serving it. The costs of traveling and attending conferences are quite low relative to the value of the business you might win by meeting a potential client in person.

4. Takes More to Tango.

Business Development novices often think that their potential success at winning the project is based on the initial call. The truth is that most contracts are won based on multiple calls between the client and services company, spread out over several weeks. The initial call might just be a chance for the client to put out feelers and understand the credibility of the potential services outfit. The same client would probably expect a follow-up call with a senior technical person on your team to grasp your technical ability as an enterprise, and they might expect a third call with individual engineers working on the project. Sometimes clients are hesitant to suggest so many follow-ups, but they will feel more at ease if the services setup suggests it.

5. Do Your Homework.

Ultimately nothing beats being prepared. When initiating a business development call, you should know that the client expects you to have case studies and references prepared in advance as a matter of principle. Many potential clients ask to see formal corporate presentations and lists of successful projects. It is always worth investing time and money in developing and burnishing this marketing material and having it at your fingertips when needed.

Tags: iPhone, Business development, United States, LinkedIn, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, Project management, Business

6 Practices to Implement Highly Efficient Data Centers

2012-10-22T10:57:00.002-07:00

The world has become more cautious about saving the planet in the recent years and this has shown its impact on the data center operators who are now targeting on projects that boost the energy efficiency while taking in consideration its environmental impacts. Though these changes can be attributed to several attempts from organizations all around the globe defending the terminal impacts on the planet, such measures are being seen as a welcome change among the industry.

With Facebook announcing its environment friendly OpenCompute Project several other companies are now coming out of the dark and sharing information related to their data centers, the latest in this line being Google.

Research company 451 groups published a report on Highly Energy-Efficient Data Centers in Practice that shares six practices that are being adopted by organizations all across the globe to increase the efficiency of their data centers and reducing the operational costs while reducing the harmful effects that it may cause the planet to the minimum.

1. Holistic Approach:

While implementing improvements in the data centers the organizations need to take into consideration various technologies available and handle the project from various angles by taking note of different approaches. The green Grid has been implementing the same approach since the time it was founded.

This approach can be refined by encouraging collaborative approach between various departments and making sure that all the concerned people are on the same page regarding the processes involved in the data center improvements.

With Facebook’s Open Compute Project coming up, the collaboration will need to be extended outside of the organization as well.

2. Smarter Cooling:

The older ways of cooling that made the data center resemble a meat locker have changed now. The organizations have understood that deploying these cooling methods is simply throwing away money. Thus adopting other cost saving methods does make sense. One among them is liquid cooling that comes from Green Revolution Cooling that employs a low cost dielectric fluid that has 1200 times heat retention capacity than air.

3. Generating Self-Power:

The major dent is caused to the maintenance bills by the power bills. And the companies have realized it. Microsoft, Google, Facebook , Yahoo etc have started generating their own energy from the renewable sources. Solar panel comes as a natural contender but Fujitsu’s latest technology using Hydrogen to generate power is also finding wide popularity.

4. Using DC Power:

The data center power conversion methodology is a long process spanned across various sections. The AC power is first converted into DC and then back to AC after which the UPSes distribute that power to respective servers. In this entire process, as much as 50-70 percent of electricity is lost during conversion. The only way to overcome this loss is by setting up DC based power distribution system. It reduces power bills and conversion losses but the only reason organizations have been hesitant in implementing a DC based environment is the huge initial investment. But this investment represents big returns in a longer run.

5. Using IT Equipments Smartly:

There are various trends in the IT industry that have significantly affected the operations of the data centers. On the software’s side there is virtualization that has reduced the number of servers; also organizations these days are using data center infrastructure management software that helps them in positioning the physical and logical assets in a more efficient manner.

On the hardware front, organizations such as Google and Facebook have instigated new trends that have proved significant in the field of data center implementation. They have not only helped in reducing costs but have also declined the power wastage.

6. Adopting a Modular Approach:

The process of deploying a new data center takes a lot of efforts and the most critical aspect of any such successful deployment is proper collaboration between different teams working on the project. Not following these aspects will only lead to wastage of efforts in terms of size, density and redundancy. An approach that includes an improper collaborative environment often leads to such troubles. To overcome these problems the organizations are now implementing a modular approach that divides the project in different modules and proceeds accordingly. This also helps them to add or deduct a module according to the current needs of the project.

Tags: Google, Data center, Facebook, Microsoft, Efficient energy use, Direct current, Holism, Green Grid

8 Never Known Facts About Twitter

2012-10-22T10:49:00.001-07:00

It didn’t took long for Twitter, the microblogging service to win hearts of half a billion people around the world. The ‘140 character limited’ social network has even shown its power by fuelling revolutions in some countries. According to the statistics, the users tweet more than 500million messages a day, whose characteristics define the ‘happenings’ around the world.

But these are just official statistics. Recently, a social media firm Beevolve released the detailed report on “An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Across the World,” which shed light to some never known, surprising factors about the site.

Here are 8 of them, compiled by Huffington Post.

#8 Twitterers love "love"

The most frequently used word in the bios of users’ bios is “love.” “Like” and “Life,” the similar words follow the most used word in numbers.

#7 A full 25 Percent of Users Have Never Tweeted

According to Twitter, the best thing is "You don’t have to build a web page to surf the web, and you don’t have to tweet to enjoy Twitter.” It seems most of the users are following these words as out of the total members, a quarter never tweeted. They use Twitter to get news and enjoy the conversations, without taking part in them.

#6 Twitter Users Want You To Know What They Think, Not Where They Are

Even though Twitter allows you to enable geo-location for your tweets, only 10.3 percent of users have activated it. This essentially signifies one thing- they want the world to know what they think, unlike other social networking users who keeps themselves tagged to locations, every time they log in.

#5 There Are More Women Than Men On Twitter

The notion about Twitter being a boy’s club is no more true. Women slightly outnumber men in the microblogging site as a whole, except in some countries. In India, more than 80 percent of Twitter users are males.

#4 You Can Still Get A Ton Of Followers With A Protected Account

According to the statistics, 11.8 percent of users have private accounts- which means you need the approval from persons to follow them. But according to Beevolve, this doesn’t affect your fan base. The report shows example of an Indonesian tweeter @WIDIKIDIW whose account is set to private, yet had amassed 515,290 followers at one time.

#3 Purple Is The Most Popular Background Color Among Female Users While Blackish Grey Among Men

The gender itself shows the choices.

#2 The Most Prolific Tweeter On Twitter is @InternetRadio, With More Than 2 Million Tweets

The InternetRadio tweets to followers about what the radio stations are playing, as they play them. Lot of tweets go out in an hour, no wonder why these internet radios are a big hit!

#1 It's Shocking: The Average Number Of Tweets Someone Sends Is Directly Related To The Average Number Of Followers They Have

After examining 36 million Twitter profiles and 28 billion tweets, Beevolve got an interesting find- the number of tweets are directly relate to the number of followers. And the reason behind this phenomenon is, unknown!

Bonus: The Least Popular Tweeter With A Verified Account Is @SevenFootWave, Who Earned Just Four Followers In Three Years

The surprise is @SevenFootWave is the official twitter account of the same titled rock band.

Tags: Twitter, Social network, Beevolve, India, Huffington Post, Social media, Microblogging, tweeted

5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 22 October 2012

2012-10-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

1) Why VCs Will Continue To Invest In Big Data Startups For Many Years To Come

This week, Splice Machine raised $4 million to develop its SQL Engine for big data apps. MongoHQ raised $6 million for its database as a service. A third startup, Bloomreach, announced $25 million in funding for its big data applications.

These three companies provide examples for why the investor community will continue to invest in big data startups for many years to come. All reflect a changing dynamic — the rise of the big data app and the need for a new data infrastructure. These two converging trends now drive funding for a widening number of startups that make data functional inside and outside the enterprise.

Read More

2) Gartner, IBM See Big Market for Big Data

Big data is becoming big business, and is a big trending topic in 2012. This week Gartner and IBM release reports studying the true impact and direction of the big data market, while Teradata launched a big data analytics appliance.

Gartner says big data to reach $34 billion. As a prelude to the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 it reported that big data will drive $28 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, and is forecast to drive $34 billion in 2013 spending.

Read More

3) Will Big Data decide the election?

FORTUNE -- There's a powerful vignette in Sasha Issenberg's The Victory Lab in which political consultant Alexander Gage presents his new data targeting system to Mitt Romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign.

Gage has combined consumer records with political voting history to identify potential Romney supporters among nontraditional Republican voting blocks. Gage sees his work as revolutionary -- a first in politics, and potentially a first anywhere. Yet just as he completes his presentation, Romney's deputy campaign manager Alex Dunn raises his hand and deadpans, "You mean you don't do this in politics."

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4) Is More Big Data a Blessing or a Curse for These Giants?

In today's segment, Fool.com analyst Austin Smith interviews acclaimed author and New York Times columnist Charles Duhigg about his recent book The Power of Habit and the iEconomy series he's written for the Times.

Today, Charles looks at whether more big data will help or hurt the companies that have already mastered the art of studying consumer spending habits. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Target have had an edge over other retailers for years with their mountains of data, but with Big Data overflowing now, will that advantage evaporate?

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5) Sharing data a big complicated step for health care system

To those in fully automated industries, like banking, the state's rollout of a new health information network last week must seem sadly behind the times.

Massachusetts officials declared the Health Information Exchange open for business Tuesday by sending Gov. Deval Patrick's medical data from a hospital in Boston to a trauma center in Springfield. The electronic information traveled halfway across the state and, just as importantly, crossed tricky medical provider boundaries.

Read More

Category: Big Data News

Tags: Technology,Business,Big data,big data market,big data apps,big data applications,big data startups,Big Data,Read,new data infrastructure,Gartner,big data analytics appliance,Big Data News,three companies,big trending topic,big complicated step,hand,Wal-Mart,business,new health information network,Target

5 Tips of the Day - 22 October 2012

2012-10-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

1) 5 Ways of Funding A Business: How To Get Your Piece Of The Pie

No shocker here: One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners is finding the funds necessary to launch – and eventually grow – their businesses. If you’re reading this, you’re likely looking right now.

There have never been more funding choices to consider for prospective entrepreneurs.

As a social entrepreneur for more than four decades as well as an angel investor and venture capitalist, I’ve experienced the highs and lows of business funding myself and have learned the hard way what investors are looking for before committing to fund.

Read More

2) 7 Tips To Help Your Startup Enter The U.S. Market

Selling to the U.S. market can be a significant milestone in the life of an international technology startup. The U.S. is the largest market in the world, and a successful foothold here can mean dramatic growth as well as further credibility of your company. But selling to U.S. businesses can be difficult especially if you’re based overseas.

Having successfully introduced international technology companies to the U.S. market, we’ve learned several lessons, listed below, to help companies abroad sell in the U.S.

3) Managing Time And Staying Productive As A Freelancer

Part of the fun of being a freelancer is that you get to manage your own time. You decide when to work (within deadlines, of course), what task you are going to do each day, and how long you’re going to spend on your clients versus building up your own business.

Part of the pain of being a freelancer, of course, is that you have to manage your own time. So how do you do it? Well, there are lots of ways you can manage your time properly – I’m going to show you three that worked wonders for me.

4) Recipe for Startup Success: Patience, Persistence, Relationship Building and Responsiveness

Founding a startup is a journey where the end destination is not always apparent or obvious. Ravi Mitaal, CEO of Vuukle, advocates for patience and persistence as strategies every startup founder should use when approaching their ideas. Vuukle emerged from the misfires of two other startups: SplaTT and Blobin.com.

Without pivoting ideas from both of those startups Vuukle would not be here today. Ravi’s innovative attitude and openness to change creates a platform for startup success. Relationship building and readiness to respond are key in the Vuukle story, -which is by no means simple-, and started in a London subway.

5) Zuck’s Advice To Startups: Explore Before You Commit, Listen, Build Something Fundamental, Don’t Copy

So Facebook built out photo sharing, it exploded with popularity, and proved that sometimes the data can reveal what users want before they even know it.

That wasn’t the last time Facebook would put turn this practice into product. Hundreds of thousands protested the news feed, but engagement was up, Facebook stuck it out, and news feed became one of the site’s most popular features.

Tags: Tip of the Day

5 Startup Stories of the Day - 22 October 2012

2012-10-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

1) Survival of the fittest: Failure in the startup world

Remember eToys, the online toy retailer that was predicted to out-sell Toys R Us stock? Google Labs was the technology titan’s ‘playground’ venture that never truly even let go of the monkey bars? Or how about Zune, the portable music player aimed at breaking down sales of Apple’s now-ubiquitous iPod? (Author’s note: I had a Zune. It broke in two months.)

These startup companies, along with billions of other would-be game changers in the technology and retail industries, became flops within the span of five years — and faster than you can say ‘stock valuation’. Ideas for launching new companies, and the overly optimistic founders behind them, are a dime a dozen in this era of fast-growing knowledge. As the ability to share on social networks becomes second nature, so do small teams hoping to strike the kind of landmine Mark Zuckerberg first unearthed – or at least tap into it. More on that later.

Read More

2) Zuck’s Advice To Startups: Explore Before You Commit, Listen, Build Something Fundamental, Don’t Copy

Facebook didn’t guess that users wanted to share photos. It learned it, Mark Zuckerberg explained in his talk at Y Combinator Startup School. “We really listened to what our users wanted, both qualitatively listening to the words they say, and quantitatively looking at behavior that they take.” Users didn’t necessarily say they wanted photos, but were uploading new profile pics every day.

So Facebook built out photo sharing, it exploded with popularity, and proved that sometimes the data can reveal what users want before they even know it.

That wasn’t the last time Facebook would put turn this practice into product. Hundreds of thousands protested the news feed, but engagement was up, Facebook stuck it out, and news feed became one of the site’s most popular features.

3) 10 common UX mistakes startups make... and how to avoid them

A positive user experience can transform your business. Here Laurence McCahill, co-founder of Spook Studio, comes up with 10 essential tips to put you on the right track for a better customer experience

‘How can I improve the user experience of my website/app?’ A frequently asked question and one that doesn’t have a standard response. Thankfully there are some steps you can follow to ensure that a customer’s experience of your product is a positive one. Here I’ll be highlighting some common mistakes we regularly come across that can easily be avoided.

Read More

4) 5 Ways of Funding A Business: How To Get Your Piece Of The Pie

No shocker here: One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners is finding the funds necessary to launch – and eventually grow – their businesses. If you’re reading this, you’re likely looking right now.

There have never been more funding choices to consider for prospective entrepreneurs.

As a social entrepreneur for more than four decades as well as an angel investor and venture capitalist, I’ve experienced the highs and lows of business funding myself and have learned the hard way what investors are looking for before committing to fund.

5) Replacing Work/Life Balance with Work/Life Harmony.

My friend’s Jon Crawford and Matt Galligan both wrote about the topic of Work/Life balance this week and I thought I would continue their conversation with my perspective.

To call it a balance implies two sides of a scale where too much weight on one side, tips the other. To struggle for balance is to struggle for equal attention to things at odds with each other. How I choose to run my life is to strive not for balance, but for harmony. I embrace that my personal and work lives coexist in the same 24 hours of each day. My founder brain doesn’t shut off and neither does my personal brain. When two things vibrate at opposing frequencies, their forces can be devastating. When they vibrate together, it’s peaceful. When in harmony, both my personal and work lives are vibrating vigorously, but without fighting each other.

Tags: Startup Stories

5 Tips of the Day - 20 October 2012

2012-10-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

1) 3 Tips for Creating an Effective Work Team

Have you ever worked in a group or team? How did the team function? What was the demographic makeup of the team, and how did you all get along?

Creating an effective work team is by no means a simple task, and can involve getting the right group of people together, setting appropriate goals, using the right leadership style, and more. Although not a complete solution, the following tips might help spark some ideas on creating your own effective work team.

2) 2 Publicity Tips for Your Small Business

3) 3 Tips for Building a Successful Online Community from the Offline World

They are an executive’s worst social business nightmares.

You launch an online community for customers, partners, or employees, then two things happen.
1) Nobody contributes to the community.
2) New members join the community, are not engaged, and then never return.

These two scenarios create a spiral of fear that prevents many organizations from launching their social business strategy, even though all indications point to customer communities playing a central role in the future of customer relationship management.

4) 12 Tips To Kickstart Your Content Marketing Strategy

Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.

Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.

5) 5 Tips Before You Go Global

If your business is healthy enough for you to be thinking about international expansion, kudos! The prospect of doing business beyond U.S. borders is an exciting one for any entrepreneur--how often do you get to enter a whole new market with a huge, untapped pool of customers and revenue?

But it's not just about changing the language on your website and accepting payments in a foreign currency. It's about a whole different mindset for the way you do business. You need to go through every aspect of your company with a fine-tooth comb (ideally with an attorney and financial adviser on hand) to make sure everything is set up to successfully handle doing business in a foreign country.

Tags: Tip of the Day

5 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Monitoring

2012-10-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

There are hundreds of social media and web metrics that you could look at everyday if there was enough time and context to understand each of them. But without overwhelming you with data and drowning out what is important, there are a few key metrics that you should be monitoring at all times. Today we’ll cover the 5 metrics social media metrics that you should be aware of and monitoring for a pulse on your social business.

Let’s jump in, and happy monitoring!

1. Engagement – Engagement is one of the most critical areas of social to measure. Are conversations happening with your brand when you release content? Are fans liking or commenting on your Facebook page? Are users pinning images, or retweeting tweets? There are a slew of different ways to look at engagement depending on the social outposts your are participating on, but the key is that people see your message and interact with your brand.

If you notice a particular set of messages is not working, dont give up but try changing the messaging and measure the type of response that you achieve. Look at what and how your competitors are doing across their social outposts, are they achieving a level of engagement? If so what are they posting that’s different? Evaluate their outreach and share information that makes your brand unique, that will likely bring the most engagement of all.

Tip: Make it fun to interact with your brand. You dont have to post your latest press release on Facebook all the time, try some humor (if your audience will react well to it) and different variations of content to get fans involved.

2. Reach – What size is the audience seeing your content over all of the social networks that you participate in? Is this audience growing or shrinking and at what rate? These are key questions to consider when looking at your total social reach think of it as the number of potential people that have potential to see your content.

Reach by itself does not tell the whole story but should be used in conjunction with other metrics to calculate the specific metrics that you are looking for. For example, if we wanted to find out the percentage of people that were engaged with your page this week and tallied up all our ‘likes’ (let’s assume 609,750), then we would use the following formula:

Weekly Total Engagement Rate = 609,750/ 12,449,380 or 4.898%.

The point is that you can use total reach for a number of different metrics that are important to you and your business and simply calculate them by switching out the formula. Try it out on your own metrics.

3. Referral Traffic - Getting fans to interact with your brand at various social outposts is great, but the real goal should ideally be to drive more sustainable and repeat traffic to your website. To determine if you are accomplishing this look in your web analytics tool at referral traffic to see specifically where traffic is coming from. For Google Analytics users, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

Once in this dashboard take a look at your top performing referral source, and the respective time on site and bounce rate for each. If one particular source is producing a number of visitors but they are only staying on your page for minimal time and driving your bounce rate up – then it is likely not the right source for that particular piece of content.

Diving one level deeper, you can click on any content referrer to see which specific content is driving traffic or switch the primary dimension to landing page and then viewing the referring source that is driving traffic to that content. This is important as if you have different series of blog posts and your first series is generating great traffic through Facebook, and your second through Pinterest than you now know where to target these different segments of posts for sharing. On the whole that is simplifying the concept a lot but you should understand that if sharing content on a network is driving down your time on site, and your bounce rate up then it’s worth re-evaluating that as a real traffic source.

4. Share of Voice - Share of Voice (SOV) is basically a measure of how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison with your competitors. If your competitors are being mentioned far more often share of voice is an easy measure of showing you this. Ensure that you are participating in all of the relevant conversations for your brand regardless of where they occur, but most importantly wherever your key customers are. There is a free tool to help determine your SOV Socialmention or if you have a budget it’s worth looking into a tool like Radian6 (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud).

5. Influence - There are a number of different influence startups emerging like Klout, PeerIndex, andKred. Influence is an important metric to monitor because even if the people talking about your brand have large followings, whether they can influence others to take action is critical. It’s also a great quick snapshot at how your brand is participating in social media against some competitors.

Tags: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social media, Social network

5 SEO Articles You Should Read Today - 20 October 2012

2012-10-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

1. Is Your SEO Agency Any Good?

Within organizations, some very smart people want to understand enough to know whether their SEO agency is doing a good job. While good results are pretty easy to define, what's more concerning to these folks is that it's unclear how their agency is achieving results; and that carries risk.

Why should it matter about the quality of the work when you’re getting results?

2. How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

Well-optimized, effective websites aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies and tech companies anymore. Now more than ever, it’s important for small business owners to fully understand just how beneficial a successfully executed website can be for them as well.

In order to make your website successful, you need to make sure it’s fully search engine optimized and unless you’re an SEO expert yourself, you’ll no doubt want to hire a team of experts to help you get the job done right. Here’s how to make sure the experience goes as pleasantly as possible.

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3. 5 Basic SEO Tips For Beginners

Most people tend to start their own blog or website for different reasons. Some of them might want to sell stuff, earn some money blogging, build their online portfolio and others just want to share their personal thoughts. In order for their sites to be successful they need to have visitors or readers. These readers can be anyone looking for interesting things. Visitors can come from word of mouth like when your friend tells his other friends to visit your site, others from article directories or in most cases from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

SEO or search engine optimization is the most important thing your site needs to have. This will drive a lot of traffic to your site and more visitors mean more earnings. So how do you optimize your site for search engines? Here are the basic things you can do to optimize your site.

4. Advantage of Doing SEO for your Website

Today Online marketing is tremendously rises on internet. Everyone wants to attract more customers to increase their business online. Doing SEO for your company’s website is the best way to increase more visitors and customers online. Search engine optimization provides a huge exposure to your website on the search engines, where already so many websites are available and helps your site for online promotion.

There is lot of benefits of doing SEO for your website. If your website is not properly optimized than your customers will not find your website and goes to your competitors, which lead down your online business. Many users still not aware about the advantages and benefits of SEO, but it play a great role to rank your website on the top of the search engines. Here are some advantages of SEO, which surely make your mind for doing SEO of your own website:

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5. Effective Tips And Strategies To Make The Most Of Your SEO Techniques

If you have the right background information, you can use this powerful set of tools to increase your site’s traffic and improve your business. The following article offers great search optimization tips.

You should research what keywords are going to best fit your business. Before building your website, know which keywords should be included in the titles. Your keywords research will help you ascertain what search words and phrases are being entered by your prospective customers as they look online for products or services like yours. By using relevant keywords, you can help increase your rank on search engines.

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Tags: SEO Articles

TheNumberNews

5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 24 October 2012

10 Top Products Of The Past 4 Decades

5 Big New Ways Facebook Laid The Groundwork For Making Money During Q3 2012

FACEBOOK GIFTS

MOBILE AD NETWORK

APP INSTALL ADS

FACEBOOK EXCHANGE

SPONSORED RESULTS

IT’S GONNA GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

3 Hot Tech Startups Burning Up L.A.'s 'Silicon Beach'

4 Ways To Woo An Investor: How to Stand Out In The Crowd

10 Reasons Job-Hopping is Your Only Chance

1. Job-hopping allows you to widen your choice of jobs, not narrow it

2. No need to impress people you’ve never met

3. Loyalty no longer exists

4. Job-hopping is a precursor to the future of careers

5. Your network—not your resume—gets you jobs

6. Get a substantial raise and title upgrade

7. You don’t know what you like until you do it

8. Companies don’t move as fast as results

9. The recession is a great excuse for high-performers

10. Your talent is desperately needed

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