Sat.Sep 19, 2015 - Fri.Sep 25, 2015

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Four Tips For Retaining And Motivating Your Staff

YoungUpstarts

by Jason O’Brien, Chief Operating Officer of TollFreeForwarding.com. No matter what stage your business is currently at, it can cause significant difficulties when employees move on to find new employment. The time and energy it takes to look for new recruits, the loss of productivity whilst new staff learn the ropes – not to mention the financial repercussions, which can often run into the tens of thousands – are all going to have a drain on your business.

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11 Tips for Focused, Effective (and Inexpensive) Startup Marketing

Up and Running

How can you market your startup more effectively? Offering a free trial of your product or service in exchange for a review on a well-trafficked blog is one creative way. In a recent article, Palo Alto Software founder Tim Berry equates startup marketing to throwing darts at a dartboard. While existing companies can get away with throwing their “marketing darts” a little aimlessly, a startup has to be more careful and precise.

Marketing 113
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The most successful Bitcoin / Blockchain company won’t look like any we have today

Version One Ventures

The Blockchain is such an innovative and fundamentally transformative technology, but Bitcoin and Blockchain apps have not yet scaled as much as I would have liked. This slow traction is likely due to two things. First, Bitcoin startups that focus on commerce/payment solutions in North America are competing with existing products with strong network effects.

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Mattermark’s Clever Origin Story and Why Their CEO Loves Arguing with VCs [Traction #11]

View from Seed

The NextView podcast Traction explores all the clever, creative, and atypical things entrepreneurs do to make initial progress against the odds. If startups should do things that “don’t scale,” then this podcast asks a simple question: What ARE those things? Past episodes include stories from founders of LinkedIn , DraftKings , General Assembly , The Muse , Behance , InsightSquared , and more.

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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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Misconceptions About Mobile Websites

YoungUpstarts

It is a shame to see the fact that most site owners do not actually understand much about mobile websites and about the importance of having a site that is perfectly optimized for mobile browsing. This is due to the fact that many site owners do not have much knowledge about webs development. It is normal. After all, it is why people tend to hire other professionals to get the work done for them.

Mobile 149
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How to Choose a Business Location

Up and Running

If you’ve been thinking about starting a business for a while, chances are you’ve got an idea of what your business location is going to look like. That’s great, but it’s not enough. Choosing the right location is about so much more than finding the place that looks closest to the one you’ve envisioned. It’s about being somewhere your customers will see you, about being in a competitive location, about staying within budget, and about meeting local and state regulations and laws.

More Trending

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6 Tools To Assess Your Potential As An Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

Too many people, young and older, let their career and their lifestyle happen to them, rather than proactively making things happen based on their personal passions, skills, and interests. Others make decisions based on someone else’s interests, such as the father who wants his son to take over the family business, or dreams openly of having a doctor in the family.

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The No-Nonsense Approach To Cutting Your Small Business Expenses

YoungUpstarts

by Tony Campbell, founder and managing partner at WhichVoIP.com. Setting up your own business involves a lot of start-up costs, many of which you may not have even been aware of when you first launched. If you go into business without fully preparing for these costs, you may find that they take you by surprise, which can cause you unexpected problems.

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How to Start an Ebay Business

Up and Running

What is eBay and how does it work? eBay is an online shopping and auction website that allows people to buy and sell used or new products, either as a business, or as way to clear out clutter and make a bit of extra cash doing so. While the site is free to use, eBay does charge a per-item insertion fee and a final value fee, as well as fees for any additional but optional features used.

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Verticalization is paying off

deal architect

I tend to gloss over most press releases where vendors announce new customers, but have been noticing several industry trends. Unit4 is starting to show momentum in the N. American local government market – several recent wins. It mirrors their.

Vertical 199
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10 Keys To Transforming Your Dream Into A Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Business dreams are fun, but they don’t change the world or make you any money if you can’t turn them into a reality. Many aspiring entrepreneurs are stuck in the idea stage, and only a few have the discipline and the insight to move on to the execution phase. There is no magic formula for building a good business, but I’ve seen enough successful ventures to pick out some common elements.

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Focus, Fire, Fortitude: 3 Traits You Need For Your Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Daniel Evans , founder and CEO of Garbshare. When I was in high school, our football coach told us about the three F’s of life: “Faith, family, and football — and not necessarily in that order.” In those days, it was just a funny phrase that was good for a laugh, but today, it serves as a reminder of how phrases stick with you. While telling a few friends about my old coach, I came up with an updated version of the three F’s for the startup world: “Focus, fire, and fortitude — and not neces

St. Louis 160
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How Does Branding Impact Consumer Purchase Decisions?

Brandanew

Branding is immensely important for any business. Among aspects such as instant recognition, it can truly tilt the consumer decision firmly in favor of a product. This is a complex topic that combines elements of consumer psychology with the tenets of marketing. In trying to invest in the branding for your Startup and small business, let us help you answer, how does branding impact consumer purchase decisions!

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SAP Academy for Early Talent

deal architect

Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Mark Crofton alerted me to opportunities for young professionals who may be interested in starting or building their career in Sales or Presales at SAP. The Sales program (which Mark leads globally) is an 8 month program.

Global 197
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7 Ways That Entrepreneurs Must Lead To Succeed

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the realities of being an entrepreneur is that you have to keep learning and changing to survive. Everyone on the startup team knows there is no buffer, and no personal isolation from impact based on your job description that can save you. Thus everyone has to make sure they are focusing on what is important, and making leadership decisions to save the business.

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Contact Centers Use Callback Technology To Reduce Customer Frustration

YoungUpstarts

Have you ever called a company’s call center to get assistance with a product, make a reservation, or get information, only to be put on hold, and then been so frustrated you move on to another company? A Company with Callback Technology… It happened to me recently with a major computer company, where the mechanical voice said, “due to customer calls, your wait will be approximately 15 minutes.”.

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How Does Storytelling Affect Our Brains?

Brandanew

How do we learn about our early ancestors, the early Homo Sapiens, who were yet to develop writing skills? Yes, the most vivid evidence of their times are the cave paintings they left behind. The earlier known cave paintings are thousands of years old and they tell the story of those societies, how they lived, hunted or gathered. We are a species that has been telling stories from the very start.

Audience 162
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Postmodern ERP strategies: Multiple Hubs

deal architect

Gartner has been talking about "postmodern ERP" for a couple of years now: "Businesses looking to improve administration today can take advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premises applications in.

Cloud 188
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7 Reasons Smart Startups Establish 'Coopetition'

Startup Professionals Musings

As a startup advisor, when I suggest cooperating with competitors, most entrepreneurs initially think I'm crazy or suggesting something illegal. But trust me, I’m not talking about anything sinister here, just a concept known in smart business circles as "coopetition," recognized as one of the best and fastest ways to grow a company. And growth is the lifeblood of every startup.

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How Philanthropy Can Make You A Better Entrepreneur

YoungUpstarts

by Kevin Xu , CEO of MEBO International. For many, becoming an entrepreneur represents the chance to not only break free from becoming a corporate drone, but also to become significant. It’s a chance to make a mark on the world and to be “somebody” rather than just “something.”. However, what often gets overlooked in the constant hustle and bustle of being a successful entrepreneur is that becoming significant and making your mark can be accomplished through philanthropy as well.

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7 Ethical (And Simple) Ways To Grow Your Twitter Following

Brandanew

Each social platform has its own little quirks. Today, we’ll focus on Twitter- which many professionals use for industry related updates and gaining a strong loyal community following. It does come with its own difficulties though. Standing out and reaching your target audience may become a herculean task in itself – apart from engagement.

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SAP Nation 2.0: Customer coping strategies

deal architect

As with previous books, I have been excerpting 10% of the contents. You can buy the book at several stores (online in paperback at CreateSpace and ebook at Amazon). 2.0 looks at the prospects of S/4HANA which SAP launched in.

Customer 163
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When Anxiety Strikes

Feld Thoughts

Three weeks ago, Mardy Fish wrote an amazing article on The Players’ Tribute site titled The Weight. I stopped halfway through the article and took a deep breath. “This is a story about how a mental health problem took my job away from me. And about how, three years later, I am doing that job again — and doing it well. I am playing in the U.S.

Asia 135
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Connectivity’s Essential Guide To Online Reviews

YoungUpstarts

For any business, one of the greatest fears is the dreaded online customer review. In fact, studies show that such reviews have a direct correlation with purchase intent – a positive review can boost purchase intent by 10% among potential customers while negative reviews lower intent by 11%, which goes to show that online customer reviews can impact the bottomline.

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3 Brands To Inspire Your Next Social Contest!

Brandanew

Many businesses have tried running contests and quizzes on their social profiles, and most of them failed miserably. The reason? Launching a contest isn’t all that challenging, but targeting the right audience, keeping things fun and simple most definitely can be hard. You need to plan ahead , gauge all your options and only then go online. Use this tips and brands to inspire your next social contest!

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Why I cut my income in half and stopped freelancing

The Next Web

This post originally appeared on the Crew blog. There’s a lot of stories of freelancing success out there and to most people looking from the outside I could be one of them too. I’m not going to shy away from the facts here. I’m going to be brutally honest. I’m not gloating. I’ve screwed up more than most. This is simply my story. I’m not shaming the freelance lifestyle, and I’m not saying ‘everyone should build something bigger’.

Web 131
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The mindset of a good investor

The Equity Kicker

There were two articles on my Twitter list today about the mindset of good investors. The first was a Techrunch article explicitly about bias in VC decision making. They identified six cognitive biases investors suffer from (similarity bias, local bias, anchoring, information overload, and gender bias) and offer some tips for making bias free decisions.

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Supply Chain Strategy Tips For Technology Startups

YoungUpstarts

by Andrew Armstrong. It is important to understand that as a technology startup, having a strong supply chain strategy in place can help an organization reduce costs and reduce certain risks. The ability to manage the various aspects of the supply chain, from development, manufacturing, inventory and logistics are critical to achieve success. This is especially important to startup hardware technology firms as the connections made early on in the supply chain process become increasingly importan

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Chaos Alert: A day in the Life of a Content Marketer

Brandanew

If you’re reading this or landed here because of your ‘search’ – congratulations! This is now your insight in the life of a Content Marketer. You’re officially a part of the content marketing world – the one that will nudge (sometimes, push) you to write creative copies every day, create editorial calendars, manage social media platforms, look into the inbound/ outbound marketing campaigns, make sure everything is set for SEO.and well, you get the drift. .

B2C 143
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This guy made his million selling his last name. Now he wants to sell you his future

The Next Web

Jason Zook (née Sadler) makes a living writing books, designing Web products and attending speaking engagements, but you might know him best as the man who sold his last name as a billboard. Owner of IWearYourShirt.com, Zook originally began his project by getting companies to pay him to wear their T-shirts while he records UStream or YouTube videos, or engage with his thousands of social media followers.

Naming 131
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Who Just Raised A $225 Million Financing in North Carolina?

Feld Thoughts

Last Tuesday, while I was enjoying a week off the grid, AvidXchange announced they had raised a $225 million financing led by Bain Capital Ventures. I’m psyched to be joining the board of a company co-founded and run by Mike Praeger, a friend of mine for over 20 years. It was big news in Charlotte, North Carolina where AvidXchange announced the groundbreaking on a new headquarters complex in the N.C.

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[Infographic] The Eureka Moment

YoungUpstarts

Eureka, that declaration someone exclaims when they discover something special, is a word that originated as sεὕρηκα ( heúrēka) , an ancient Greek word which means “I’ve found it!” It is attributed to Archimedes, who uttered it when he first discovered the Archimedes principle. Today we call Eureka the special instances when a significant discovery is made, those brilliant moments of absolutely certainty that something special has taken place.

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So, You Want To Be A Life Coach? The Reality May Shock You

YFS Magazine

Life coaches often claim they make a ton of money. Some certainly do, but I can relate to the fact that those who do a) spend the money and b) invest the time.

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Mattermark’s Clever Origin Story & Why Their CEO Loves Arguing with VCs [Traction #11]

View from Seed

The NextView podcast Traction explores all the clever, creative, and atypical things entrepreneurs do to make initial progress against the odds. If startups should do things that “don’t scale,” then this podcast asks a simple question: What ARE those things? Past episodes include stories from founders of LinkedIn , DraftKings , General Assembly , The Muse , Behance , InsightSquared , and more.

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Glowforge Pre-order With 50% Discount

Feld Thoughts

Glowforge has started taking pre-orders with an expected ship date of the pre-orders of before the end of the year. It’s one of the most magical products I’ve ever been involved with. It’s in the “show, don’t tell” category, so spend three minutes of your life and see what you can do with it. For the next 29 days, Glowforge 3D laser printers are available for 50% off the retail price.

Product 122
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The Top Three Smartphones For Business Owners

YoungUpstarts

As a business owner, a smartphone no longer is a luxury personal item, but rather an essential piece of kit that’s crucial to the successful running and maintenance of your business. A smartphone is essential for accessing business documents and emails on the go, keeping in touch with partners, staff, suppliers, and even customers. If you’re a business owner who’s considering purchasing a new smartphone for business use, we’ve put together a list of the top makes of smartphones that work well fo