After nearly a week of speculation, Salesforce confirmed its intent to acquire popular workforce chat platform Slack in a deal valued at $27.7 billion on Tuesday, marking the enterprise cloud giant’s largest-ever acquisition and positioning it to compete more forcefully with the nation’s second-largest tech firm by market capitalization, Microsoft.
Author: knjohn
6 Things Startups Need to Know About Cybersecurity | AllBusiness.com
Companies will lose $400 billion to hackers this year.
On top of the financial costs, companies can lose intellectual property, personal data, hours of productivity, and consumer trust. What’s worse, companies often don’t even think about cybersecurity until it’s too late.
Not taking a proactive and thorough approach to securing your data and systems early in your startup journey could cause you to lose contracts and stall your growth. If you want to scale a B2B SaaS company quickly, you can’t afford to trip over data security issues. Otherwise, you’re preventing growth and leaving money on the table when big prospects dismiss you as “too risky.”
Data Surveillance During Remote Work Leaves Businesses Vulnerable | Small Business Trends
Remote work has enabled businesses to weather the storm of the pandemic and adapt to new work environments while keeping business going. Yet, with employees now working remotely, the line between personal and professional data has been blurred and that comes with significant risk.
While companies focus on matching productivity and collaboration to that of office times, they can lose focus on the growing concern of data surveillance and misuse. Thanks to GDPR and CCPA regulations, businesses are now held to more stringent standards when it comes to collecting and handling data. However with the pandemic to distract focus, the number of data breaches continues to grow and businesses continue to ignore potential vulnerabilities.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Campaign | business.com
Social media marketing is key to a modern business’s success. This guide explains how to create a successful social media marketing campaign.
Everyone is on social media, including your competitors, your customers and your target audience. Many large companies have invested significant sums of money to create social media departments and establish their presence across multiple platforms. Fortunately, unlike other forms of advertising, you don’t need a large budget to create a successful social media campaign.
Brain-reading Headset Galea May Make Keyboards Obsolete | Digital Trends
Conor Russomanno is working on some pretty lofty stuff: He’s building a headset that will be able to noninvasively read people’s thoughts and use them to control the computer interfaces of tomorrow. But right now, his big worry is whether or not he chose the right name for his startup.
“You know,” said Russomanno, the co-founder and CEO of a brain-computer interface startup called OpenBCI, “sometimes I wish that we had named our company OpenMCI — like, mind computer interface or something like that.”
5 Franchise Problems To Avoid | The Startup Magazine
The US Small Business Administration notes that fast-food franchises make up the most popular business type for new entrepreneurs. Franchises are an easy way to trade on the popularity of an established name. From medspa franchise opportunities to retail businesses, there’s no shortage of supply. However, getting into a franchise relies on understanding what the company expects back from you. There are significant hurdles for new entrepreneurs when negotiating contracts and establishing rules between them and the franchisor. Here, we examine a handful of franchise problems that entrepreneurs should try their best to avoid.
A Terrible Sales Process
Many new franchisees are eager to get people in the door, regardless of how successful those people are likely to be. When you’re selling a franchise, whether it’s fast food or retail, the operator needs to understand how to make it work. While established franchises have massive training programs, these smaller, newer franchises don’t. They’re a lot cheaper to buy into as a result, and the low cost attracts a short of new entrepreneurs. The downside is that these new business owners end up biting off more than they can chew. Restaurant Business Online underlines this problem in their case study of Quiznos’ collapse.
Smart doorbells ‘easy target for hackers’ study finds | BBC News
Major security flaws in popular smart doorbells are putting consumers at risk of being targeted by hackers inside their homes, according to Which.
The consumer group says devices being sold on marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, could easily be hacked or switched off by criminals.
It is asking the government for new legislation to safeguard consumers.
Amazon has removed at least seven product listings in response to the findings.
‘He used our smart doorbell camera to track me’
Ring logs every doorbell press and app action
The watchdog tested 11 devices which were purchased from popular online marketplaces in the UK. Brands included Qihoo, Ctronics and Victure.
It found that among the most common flaws were weak password policies, and a lack of data encryption.
It’s the Strangest Thanksgiving Ever for Businesses Trying to Put Turkey on Your Table | Inc.com
This year is different. The Chatham Berry Farm sold out of turkeys on November 13, almost two weeks before Thanksgiving, and the phone continues to ring off the hook with orders the farm can’t fulfill. “The staff here now, we’re kind of calloused over from the steady, revolving door of customers coming through,” says Alexia Baker, a greenhouse manager and longtime jack-of-all-trades staffer.”
The Berry Farm isn’t alone in its newfound turkey fame. As Covid-19 infection rates spike across the country, more Americans are eschewing traditional family gatherings and staying home on Thanksgiving. But they’re still cooking, and their need for provisions–albeit on a smaller scale–has escalated, sending the businesses that cater to the holiday scrambling to adjust to rapidly changing levels of food supply and consumer demand. How they’ve adjusted is instructive for any entrepreneur, especially those eyeing upcoming e-commerce bonanzas like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Netflix commits $1 billion to make New Mexico home to one of the world’s largest studios | TechCrunch
Netflix is committing $1 billion in production spend at its ABQ Studios in Albuquerque, New Mexico, along with plans to expand those studios, the company said.
In an announcement alongside New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, Netflix’s chief executive Ted Sarandos said the company would add 300 acres to its existing space in ABQ Studios, creating one of the largest film production facilities in North America.
That means roughly 1,000 new production jobs in New Mexico over the next 10 years, the company predicted, and an additional 1,467 construction jobs to complete the expansion.
Google Is Testing End-to-End Encryption in Android Messages | WIRED
GOOGLE HAS BEGUN rolling out end-to-end encryption for Rich Communication Service, the text-messaging standard the industry giant is pushing as an alternative to SMS.
Abbreviated as RCS, Rich Communication Service provides a, well, richer user experience than the ancient SMS standard. Typing indicators, presence information, location sharing, longer messages, and better media support are key selling points. They lead to things like better-quality photos and videos, chat over Wi-Fi, knowing when a message is read, sharing reactions, and better capabilities for group chats. As Ars reviews editor Ron Amadeo noted last year, RCS interest from carriers has been tepid, so Google has been rolling it out with limited support.
Dispatches From The Front 