Mon.Nov 24, 2014

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Surround Yourself With People Smarter Than You

Startup Professionals Musings

'Helpers do what you say, while good help does what you need, without you saying anything. People who can help you the most are actually smarter than you, at least in their domain. Top entrepreneurs spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on any other components of their job. Some entrepreneurs are so in love with themselves (narcissistic) that they insist on answering every question, and making every decision.

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[Infographic] 5 Tips For Starting A Small Business

YoungUpstarts

'Starting a small business doesn’t have to be a perplexing task – with the right tools and understanding, you can follow your dream all while creating a profitable company. For those individuals just starting out, knowing your audience is key. By understanding your customers and what they want, it is easier to sell not only your product to them, but also your brand.

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How to start making sense of your data

Version One Ventures

'Now more than ever, companies are collecting large amounts of data at a high frequency. This is thanks to cheap storage and a multitude of tools available to automate the process (i.e. Google Analytics, Flurry, Mixpanel, etc.). While collecting data is one thing, finding meaning or actionable insights is another task altogether. Over the past month, I have spent time with some of our portfolio companies talking about how to leverage the power of their data.

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How To Prepare Your Business For Black Friday

YoungUpstarts

'By Carla Freberg, Sales Manager – Vendor Services Group, Balboa Capital. The beginning of the holiday shopping season starts on the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is referred to as Black Friday, and it brings out shoppers in droves who are looking for special promotions, door-buster deals, one-day sales and free giveaways. This year, Black Friday is expected to once again set new sales records.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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What Salary Means

This is going to be BIG.

'When I was coming out of college, working in finance, I used to think a lot about my salary. I wanted the best offer out of my classmates. I wanted the biggest signing bonus. I liked maxing out on raises and I liked the feeling I got getting to a six figure salary. The funny thing was that I didn''t even particularly care about the money itself. It was, in my mind, what the salary meant.

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How Mobile Payment Will Impact The Growth Of Mobile Commerce This Holiday Season

YoungUpstarts

'by Scott Hirsch, f ounder and CEO of Appsbar. The growing consumerism of our society is always a hot topic this time of year. Discussions about whether or not retailers should open on Thanksgiving to the monitoring of ‘Christmas Creep’ by various blogs and websites can be seen everywhere. However what gets lost in the shuffle is the fundamental question involved – what do consumers want?

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Imagining a brighter future

The Equity Kicker

'It’s a pretty common for futurists to lament that public perceptions of the future are generally dystopian. Hollywood often gets much of the blame for providing us with Terminator, The Matrix and many other nightmare visions of the future, but our evolutionary history is perhaps more responsible. Simply put, we are built to be pessimistic. The best way to stay safe on the African savannah was to be super sensitive to anything that might represent a threat, so our brains evolved to be good

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4 Phrases of Amazing Customer Service

Mike Michalowicz

'I’ve grown my companies by focusing on great customer service. We didn’t always have the biggest names in business working at the firm, and we sure couldn’t always afford the flashiest equipment. What we did better than all our competitors was ensure that our customers were thrilled. In fact, superlative customer service can be your very best (and cheapest!

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Want Innovation? Ask.

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

'Not everything about innovation is complicated. I recently gave a creative problem solving workshop to a group of scientists who all worked for the same outfit. It was a lively session. In addition to learning structured creative problem solving (Osborn-Parnes-Basadur framework) we did some short bits of ideation around new business concepts. This was more as a sampler than it was a real session.

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Why We Love Small Business Saturday

crowdSPRING Blog

'Holidays are here. How do we know? Well I have been seeing tons of holiday-themed commercials on television, I am hearing holiday music being piped through the speakers outside my local coffee spot, I am reading about how many retailers are struggling with whether they should be open for business on Thanksgiving day (not to mention making their employees work that day), and I am already getting emails and banner ads about the upcoming cyber Monday offers.

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My smart phone killer app is…

Start Up Blog

'…One which was already installed on my phone when I got it. It isn’t weather. It isn’t the web browser. It isn’t stocks, music, phone, mail or messages. But after paying attention for more than a week to which function I used most often on my phone, it surprised me to find out I use this the most. The clock. Yep, I take the phone out of my pocket to check what the time is.

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HomeAway’s Brian Sharples’ Entrepreneurial Journey

SiliconHills

'By LAURA LOREK Reporter with Silicon Hills News As a serial entrepreneur, Brian Sharples, co-founder of HomeAway, has learned many lessons on his entrepreneurial journey. He recounted several of them with Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas last week. Metcalfe interviewed Sharples, CEO of HomeAway at the Longhorn Startup Demo Day. […] The post HomeAway’s Brian Sharples’ Entrepreneurial Journey appeared first on SiliconHills.

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Independent Artists Need to Think Like Entrepreneurs

The Entrepreneurial Mind

'The Entrepreneurial Mind : Drummer for hire Michael McManus talks with Dr. Cornwall about his numerous experiences, and how the career of a musician is not so dissimilar from that of an entrepreneur. Tweet Facebook LinkedIn Tumblr Stumble Digg Delicious The post Independent Artists Need to Think Like Entrepreneurs appeared first on Dr Jeff Cornwall.

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Transitions are Constant

entrepreMusings

'Change is constant. We are always transitioning from one thing to another and/or from one stage of life to another. I find that when those transition times happen for me, they tend to be good times to sort through and organize stuff I rarely make time to organize. My home office is just a little more organized as of yesterday. I’ve shoved things out of view into closets, file cabinets, and drawers which makes me feel better and helps create space to process the transition.

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Marketplaces are Eating Firms (Unedited)

A Crowded Space

'The following post is the complete, unedited version of a guest column that was recently featured on Techcrunch. . If software is eating the world , then marketplaces are one of the agents of destruction. Marketplaces are eating every type of firm on the planet. Let’s look at where the feasting is happening. . oDesk is killing the outsourcing firm (or web design agency or BPO consultancy).

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[Review] Turning Silver Into Gold

YoungUpstarts

'What is the fastest growing yet often neglected consumer group? One that has contributed to a demographic bulge of about 77 million people in the US ? Yes, I’m talking about the Baby Boomers , i.e. those born from 1946 to 1964. Hitting their silver years over the next decade or so, Baby Boomers represent the largest age-related demographic group in the world today.