Monthly Archives: March 2019

Importance of Finance to Your Business | The Startup Magazine

Posted on March 22, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Finance is one of the very subtle sectors of a business that can make or break entrepreneurs. Ideally, all companies need finances for daily operations. This is what makes the concept of finance very important as an area for all organizations to cover. In South Africa especially, there is an underlying need to keep a business well financed and managed, in alignment with the economic development goals of the country. Below are some of the reasons finance matters to business organizations:

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Tagged business cash flow, cash flow, Finances, Importance of Finance to Your Business

Acclaimed Chef Michael Solomonov Didn’t Hit His Stride Until He Embraced Something He Had Long Hoped to Forget: Where He’s From | Inc.com

Posted on March 22, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Michael Solomonov is co-founder, with Steve Cook, of CookNSolo, a 300-employee Philadelphia company comprising 11 restaurants. He has won four James Beard awards, including Outstanding Chef in 2017 for the Israeli restaurant Zahav. With the introduction of Federal Donuts, now in five locations around the city, CookNSolo ignited the national trend of coffee-doughnuts-fried chicken restaurants. Solomonov’s success required both exercising his culinary imagination and vanquishing his personal demons. –As told to Leigh Buchanan

My mother’s father was a pediatrician: the Jewish doctor in this little town in Ohio. They traveled to Israel a lot. That’s where she met my father, who had moved to Israel from Bulgaria in 1948. After I was born they came back to the United States. My father took over a jewelry store that was a family business on my mother’s side.

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Tagged Chef Michael Solomonov, CookNSolo, Federal Donuts

Zeus raises $24M to make you a living-as-a-service landlord | TechCrunch

Posted on March 20, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Cookie-cutter corporate housing turns people into worker drones. When an employee needs to move to a new city for a few months, they’re either stuck in bland, giant apartment complexes or Airbnbs meant for shorter stays. But Zeus lets any homeowner get paid to host white-collar transient labor. Through its managed ownership model, Zeus takes on all the furnishing, upkeep, and risk of filling the home while its landlords sit back earning cash.

Zeus has quietly risen to a $45 million revenue run rate from renting out 900 homes in 23 cities. That’s up 5X in a year thanks to Zeus’ 150 employees. With a 90 percent occupancy rate, it’s proven employers and their talent want more unique, trustworthy, well-equipped multi-month residences that actually make them feel at home.

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Posted in News and Views

Tagged Airbnb, corporate housing, white-collar labor, Zeus

Fighting Debt With Debt: America’s Penchant for Personal Loans | The Simple Dollar

Posted on March 20, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Taking out a personal loan to consolidate or pay off mounting debts is not exactly a new development.

However, according to a recent Lending Tree study, it has grown to be the overwhelming reason Americans access personal loans these days. In fact, the study revealed that managing existing debt represented 61% of personal loan requests in 2018. The next closest category was home repairs, at a meager 7.7%. That’s a significant gap.

What’s more, consumers seeking a personal loan to pay off debt requested the highest origination amounts: $14,107 on average for credit card refinancing, and $12,670 for debt consolidation.

But is this growing penchant for using personal loans to tackle debt the wisest approach? Is it smart to fight debt with more debt? Here’s what the experts had to say.

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Tagged consolidate debt, pay off mounting debts, personal loans

A Duke Athlete Invented a Simple App. Now the NCAA Can’t Run March Madness Without It | Inc.com

Posted on March 19, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Sixty-eight teams. Thirteen cities. Buzzer-beaters and surprising winners. The same things that make March Madness one of the most spectacular events in sports also make it a logistical nightmare.

Enter Teamworks. In 2005, Zach Maurides was an offensive lineman on the Duke University football team, struggling to juggle his class and practice schedules–plus meetings with coaches, advisors, trainers, nutritionists, and team doctors. “There were about 10 or 15 distinct parts of our program that were all trying to develop me in a different area,” he says. “They didn’t work together very cohesively, and they didn’t communicate with me in any kind of streamlined fashion.”

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Tagged athlete scheduling app, March Madness, student athletes, Zach Maurides

Toyota doubles down on Nvidia tech for self-driving cars | TechCrunch

Posted on March 19, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Toyota is deepening its relationship with Nvidia as the automaker, and its research arms in Japan and the U.S., ramps up its autonomous vehicle development program.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Monday during his keynote at the 2019 GPU Technology Conference that Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development — the automaker’s Japan-based research arm — is using the chipmaker’s full end-to-end development and production to develop, train and validate its autonomous vehicle technology. The partnership builds on an ongoing collaboration with Toyota and is based on development between engineering teams from Nvidia, TRI-AD in Japan and Toyota Research Institute in the United States.

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Posted in News and Views

Tagged Nvidia, self driving cars, toyota

Third Brexit vote must be different – Speaker | BBC News

Posted on March 18, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Speaker John Bercow has thrown the UK’s Brexit plans into further confusion by ruling out another vote on the PM’s deal unless MPs are given a new motion.

In a surprise ruling, he said he would not allow a third “meaningful vote” in the coming days on “substantially the same” motion as MPs rejected last week.

With 11 days to go before the UK is due to leave the EU, ministers have warned of a looming “constitutional crisis”.

The UK is currently due to leave the EU on 29 March.

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Posted in News and Views

Tagged Brexit, eu, Europe Union, UK, UK leaving the EU

The People Trying to Make Internet Recommendations Less Toxic | WIRED

Posted on March 18, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

THE INTERNET IS an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own.

New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system. He sold a music analytics startup called The Echo Nest to Spotify in 2014, bolstering the streaming music service’s ability to recommend new songs from a person’s past listening. Whitman says he saw clear evidence of algorithms’ value at Spotify. But he founded his current startup, Canopy, after becoming fearful of their downsides.

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Posted in New Business ideas, News and Views

Tagged Brian Whitman, Canopy, Internet Recommendations, The Echo Nest

4 Lucrative Careers You Can Move Into Without Getting Another Degree | Entrepreneur

Posted on March 15, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Switching careers can feel intimidating, but you’ve got to make some moves if you’re spinning your wheels at your current job. Tech industry jobs are hot right now, and you can make great money once you’ve got the know-how to compete with other tech candidates. Here’s a breakdown of the fields with the best opportunities.

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Tagged Lucrative Careers, Switching careers, Tech industry jobs

Best Promotional Events For Businesses: 4 Marketing Ideas | Getentrepreneurial.com

Posted on March 15, 2019 by knjohn | Leave a comment

A significant proportion of marketing advice for small businesses focuses on digital marketing – using your blog, targeted advertising, or social media – and this approach makes it seem as though digital advertising is the only kind that matters. In doing so, this advice overlooks the power of in-person contact and any exciting and affordable ways to reach your community. Build deeper connections with these classic strategies, standbys from a brick-and-mortar era, that never stopped working.

Join Your Chamber Of Commerce

Your local Chamber of Commerce may seem like a minor organization, especially if you’ve been in business for a few years, but joining forces with your area branch can yield a number of benefits. In particular, the Chamber of Commerce tends to promote new members and can increase the visibility of area businesses through their events, social media activity, and community outreach events. Your Chamber of Commerce also offers valuable networking opportunities, which can create connections and foster cross-promotion with other local businesses.