Get Serious! Get a Team. | Peter Mehit

June 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Entrepreneurship is a process and not a goal; a journey, not a destination. Being a successful owner requires you to think about the future and manage the present at the same time. It means you need to take concrete steps to secure that future as early as possible while being willing to change your plans as opportunity dictates.

One of the first things you need is a plan. You should take the time to develop a formal business plan with realistic financial projections, but any plan that maps out your objectives and gives you a way to measure your progress toward them is better than no plan. Just as it’s difficult to build a house without blueprints, it’s even harder jumping into business without an idea of where you want to end up. The beautiful thing about plans is you can fix them if they’re not working. Without a plan, you’ll be left wondering what happened.

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Why Do Americans and Brits Have Different Accents? | Live Science

June 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. What’s surprising, though, is that Hollywood costume dramas get it all wrong: The Patriots and the Redcoats spoke with accents that were much closer to the contemporary American accent than to the Queen’s English.

It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly.

Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely “rhotic.” Rhotic speakers pronounce the “R” sound in such words as “hard” and “winter,” while non-rhotic speakers do not. Today, however, non-rhotic speech is common throughout most of Britain. For example, most modern Brits would tell you it’s been a “hahd wintuh.”

8 Advantages of Being a Small Business Owner Now | Small Biz Trends

June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The past few years have seen an opportunistic and favorable business environment and it looks like thankfully it is poised to continue.

Here are the advantages of being a small business owner … now.

Technology Tools

In no other time has technology made it easier for us to do business, communicate and grow on such an efficient and far reaching scale. The Web, email marketing, social media, plug-ins and apps allow us to organize and focus communication. and to help people in ways that save us time and energy and improve efficiency.

The cloud offers front end management of tasks, while many small service companies still juggle paper spreadsheets and calendars to stay organized.

What These 4 Data Breaches Can Tell Us About Security | All Business

June 26, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and anyone can fail — especially in the business world.

IBM’s “2015 Cost of Data Breach Study” shows that the average total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, representing a 23 percent increase since 2013. The cost for each lost or stolen record increased 6 percent, from a consolidated average of $145 to $154.

Several companies also have been sued for their negligence in preventing these attacks. Data breaches are huge failures, but taking a look at these four big ones can teach us a thing or two about how to better secure our data.

Google and Red Robin Made a Terminator Banner Ad That’s Cool | Adweek

June 26, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Banner ads are pretty much the bane of every digital consumer’s existence. So, it’s no small measure that Red Robin just launched—through a partnership with Google—an interactive display campaign that could actually turn sci-fi fans into patrons of the fast-casual burger chain.

The brand worked with Google and its digital agency, Vitro, to create immersive video promos for Red Robin’s Terminator Genisys campaign, which also includes TV spots and signage in the company’s restaurants. The ads let viewers see Red Robin pitchwoman “Melanie” as a Terminator character would. They can use their smartphones to add another digital layer to the experience or watch on their desktops for a simpler view.

Check out the demo below to better understand the marketer’s take on Terminator:

Twitter MoPub senior director Janae McDonough interview | Business Insider

June 26, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Twitter acquired MoPub, a mobile app ad network, ad server, and real-time bidding exchange, for $350 million in stock back in 2013.

MoPub has around 5,000 apps on its platform, and it works with publishers and developers to help sell ads within their apps, by plugging into a network of around 150 demand-side platforms (DSPs,) one of which is Twitter. Last year one analyst predicted MoPub will bring in more than $500 million in annual revenue by 2017, up from an estimated $56 million in 2014.

Yet MoPub is still one of Twitter’s best-kept secrets. The company doesn’t break out revenues from MoPub in its earnings report (it sits in the “data licensing and other category,” which generated revenues of $147 million in 2014,) and it rarely releases news from the division, beyond quarterly marketplace reports about trends within the mobile app ecosystem, and a few other updates.

French Anti-Uber Protest Turns To Guerrilla Warfare As Cabbies Burn Cars, Attack Uber Drivers | TechCrunch

June 25, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

Today’s taxi driver protest is getting out of hand. According to the police, 2,800 taxi drivers are protesting today against UberPOP, the European equivalent of UberX. With UberPOP, everybody can become an Uber driver — taxi drivers see the service as unfair competition as they have to get a special license. Yet, this doesn’t really explain why cabbies are now attacking Uber drivers, burning and breaking their cars.

The police have already arrested a taxi driver and an Uber driver. The cabbie was throwing projectiles toward the police, while the latter was attacking a cabbie. It is currently very difficult to go to Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly airports as taxi drivers are blocking the roads. Taxis are also controlling many parts of Paris, looking for Uber drivers.

There are other protests happening right now in Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and Lille. It’s the biggest protest so far against the urban transportation company in France as UberPOP has been expanding to new French cities.

Trivia Tuesday: Which came first? Apple or Microsoft? | Neowin.net

June 25, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

This is perhaps one of the biggest tech rivalries in the world, but the question I’m exploring today is which company came first? Which was the first to release an operating system? The first to release a tablet PC or smartphone? The first to create a billionaire?

The question of when the companies were founded is a pretty easy one. Microsoft came first, founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1975. Apple followed nearly exactly a year later on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California.

The interesting thing, though, is Apple was technically the first company out of the two to release an operating system that used a graphical user interface (GUI). On January 24, 1984, the guys behind Apple released “Mac System Software 1.0” on their original Macintosh commercial computer. This was almost two years before Microsoft released their extension of MS-DOS on November 20, 1985: Windows 1.0. It also wasn’t particularly successful.

Humans Are Tech’s Next Big Thing—And That Could Be Risky | WIRED

June 24, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

INTERNET COMPANIES MAKE billions of dollars by capturing one of the world’s most precious commodities: your attention. They need to amuse, amaze, entice, and intrigue you—and millions of users like you—to stay afloat and profit.

But figuring out what you want to read, watch, and see is harder than it looks. At Facebook, serving your wants and needs comes down to algorithms—click on something, and you’ll see more of that thing, and things like it. At Twitter, your desires are met via your choices—follow certain people, you’ll see updates from them. But, when it comes to channeling the most attention-grabbing content, it turns out that automation, or users left to their own devices, might not be enough.