Mon.Apr 21, 2014

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Is Employee Cynicism Killing Your Culture? Ten Strategic Ways To Re-Configure It Around Trust.

YoungUpstarts

'by Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard and author of “ The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success “ In an age of cynicism and irony, Northwestern Mutual is a throwback to a more innocent time. The company is the antithesis of “cool.” It has the kind of culture in which people embrace plain suits and sincere handshakes, take pride in wearing achievement ribbons, kick off conferences with patriotic music.

Employee 167
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How to Accept Payments From Your Customers

Up and Running

'We all know how challenging it is to take a great idea and turn it into a real business. You need funding, a business plan, a website, a business model—the list goes on and on. But have you thought about the little things, like how you’re actually going to take payments from your customers? You have options, and choices to make. And regarding credit card payments, you probably haven’t thought farther than, “Of course I’ll take credit and debit cards!

Customer 104
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Some Tips On Effective Networking

YoungUpstarts

'by Roger Smith, Technology Marketing Specialist at Hypersoft. Effective networking is one of the most powerful entrepreneurial skills you need to master to advance in your personal and professional life. Lately, I’ve been using a particular networking shortcut before I attend networking events or industry mixers that I sign up for through Meetup.com.

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Training is an Innovation Accelerant

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

'Creativity and innovation training is a highly effective accelerant for business results. When I step into a room to facilitate an innovation, strategy, or idea generation session I nearly always find a great deal of energy. What I also often find is inexperience — in the kind of thinking necessary to innovate. Successful managers and leaders are promoted up the ladder because of their great analytical thinking skills.

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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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How To Find Your Business Leadership Blind Spots

Startup Professionals Musings

'Every business leader has blind spots which limit their effectiveness and success, but due to ego, over-confidence, or deferential subordinates, many live totally in the dark. Some are smart and humble enough to assume that they don’t know what they don’t know, but lack an effective process for shining a light on their blind spots. Both are equally surprised by their every setback.

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Metro Ethernet Networking And How It Can Improve Your Business

YoungUpstarts

'Today’s businesses significantly rely on information technology. For effectual business operations, information transmission has to be efficient, fast, and robust. That’s why businesses are increasingly adapting new technologies to boost the efficacy of their entire networks and information transmission systems. Metro Ethernet is a popular technology being used today.

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Why you should build your product in public

The Next Web

'Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt and EIR at Tradecraft. Visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Last week I created mockups of an improved comment system for Product Hunt. The design certainly wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even complete. But I shared them anyway and am glad I did. Within 24 hours I received over 50 annotated pieces of feedback from the community.

Product 140
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The Great Internet Stock Correction of 1997, or 1999, or …

Feld Thoughts

'Yesterday I read Kara Swisher’s post What Does the Recent Tech Stock Downturn Mean? The Truth Is Nobody Knows. It’s great. Go read it – I’ll wait for you. In the last two weeks there’s been a flurry of articles about the implications of a 25% decline in the public market value of a bunch of Internet stocks. They range from “the sky is falling” to “the IPO market window is closing” to “there will be more stupid television shows about

Stock 140
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What to do when things aren't working at your startup

This is going to be BIG.

'I''ve been there. You come in day after day, work long and hard hours pushing that rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down again overnight. Traffic isn''t moving. Sales aren''t closing. Investors aren''t biting. The writing is on the wall. This ship is going down, sinking ever so slowly--one day''s payroll at a time. There''s still some cash in the bank, but not really enough to do much of anything.

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The New Entrepreneurship Way

Mike Michalowicz

'Entrepreneurship has changed forever. The old way is imploding. And it is a good thing. Scary. But a good thing, nonetheless. Just like a star in its final stage of life, OWE (Old Way Entrepreneurship) started a rapid, insatiable burn after 9/11 and in this new decade it collapsed into a black hole. But along with the death of OWE, is the birth of a NEW (New Entrepreneurship Way).

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Does Your Value Proposition Effectively Communicate How You’re Different?

ConversionXL

'Your product is so similar to 2 or 3 major competitors in the market that you wonder why people even chose you in the first place. Maybe it’s because you’re priced competitively. Maybe it’s because you’ve got better testimonials & referrals from your existing customers. Maybe your UX is a better fit for your customers ?

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AT&T Plans to Expand its GigaPower Fiber Internet to San Antonio

SiliconHills

'AT&T announced Monday plans to roll out its ultra-fast fiber network and AT&T U-Verse TV service to San Antonio and 20 other major metropolitan areas. The company already delivers its 1 Gigabit per second broadband Internet network to Austin. It began to offer service there after Google announced plans for a 1 Gigabit network in […] The post AT&T Plans to Expand its GigaPower Fiber Internet to San Antonio appeared first on SiliconHills.

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10 Free Tickets to SaaS and Cloud Apps University

Austin Startup

'Softletter’s SaaS and Cloud Applications University is the leading event for companies looking to succeed in SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud Applications.

Cloud 67
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Geekdom Moves Into its New Headquarters at the Rand

SiliconHills

'The post Geekdom Moves Into its New Headquarters at the Rand appeared first on SiliconHills.

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How to Social Surround Your Customers and Prospects

Duct Tape Marketing

'How to Social Surround Your Customers and Prospects written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. photo credit: aenimation via photopin cc. While the title of this post could sound a little stalkerish, the fact is you can better serve your customers and attract new ones when you use social media to create a more complete picture of your ideal customer’s world.

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Robots Love…Arby’s!

Jeff Hilimire

'Having spent the last 15 years working with brands (Coke, Home Depot, UPS, etc) on their digital marketing efforts, it was only natural for me to explore ways to work with brands at Dragon Army. So Ryan and I started thinking about a unique brand integration with Robots Love Ice Cream – now available on Android btw! – and we approached Arby’s to see if they were interested.

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Counter intuition, deal cutting and commissions

Start Up Blog

'I really like sharing my ideas with groups of people – so much so that I often get up on stage in front of large groups of people to to do this. After doing it for the best part of 10 years (usually in local startup events & for friend who work at large corporates) I started to get offered money to speak at events. Which is quite exciting.

Revenue 48
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Dear Avinash: Your Digital Marketing + Analytics Challenges Answered

Occam's Razor

'Every once in a while I take a pause and answer your questions, your burning questions (!), about digital marketing and analytics. I'd requested you to submit questions on my Facebook or Google+ pages and am always delighted at the wide range of challenges you share. For some answers, What is Avinash's typical day like? Hour-by-hour report please. :)?

Analytics 131
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Look at the worst bit and find a way to make it better

The Startup Toolkit

'I’m using location as an example in this post, but I think the same principles apply to improving the rest of your life and business. Given how extreme the lifestyle of digital nomadism is, I’m always surprised by how many people cite it as a goal. You can earn enough food and board to travel indefinitely through any major European city by working 4 hours a day at the local hostel.

Lean 42