AeroFarms has developed a vertical farming system that can grow organic baby leafy greens in urban settings. They’re doing it using aeroponics — the process of growing plants in mist without any soil — and plan to launch a branded product from a new 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. AeroFarms CEO and Co-Founder David Rosenberg talks to Bloomberg’s Sam Grobart about how the company is bringing their produce mainstream for Bloomberg’s “The Year Ahead: 2015” series.
Author: knjohn
Why a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email Usually | Entrepreneur
This isn’t going to be about efficiency. Sometimes the phone is a more efficient way to communicate than e-mail, and sometimes it isn’t. If two people leave a dozen messages on each other’s voice mail, that’s a lot less efficient than sending a single e-mail and reading a reply to it.
No, this isn’t going to be about how telephonic communication helps you work faster. This is about how the phone makes you work better. Because unlike e-mail, the phone forces you to be more emphatic, more accurate, more honest.
Amazon Vows to Run on 100 Percent Renewable Energy | WIRED
Apple made the pledge. So did Google and Facebook. But Amazon stayed silent.
Over the past few years, Apple, Google, and Facebook pledged to run their online empires on renewable energy, and considering how large these empires have become—how many data centers and machines are now required to keep them going—this was a vital thing. But despite pressure from the likes of Greenpeace, the environmental activism organization, the other big internet name, Amazon, didn’t budge.
That all changed on Wednesday. With a post on its website, Amazon’s cloud computing division—Amazon Web Services—said it has a “long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint.”
Weekly Economic Update | LAEDC
v.18 n. 45 – Released November 19, 2014
This Week’s Headlines:
Fatburger: How One Burger Chain Profits From Turmoil Abroad | Businessweek
Political protests, disease outbreaks, terrorist campaigns—U.S. business owners considering expanding internationally would be forgiven for deciding to stay at home. But name a tumultuous spot abroad—Hong Kong, Iraq, Egypt—and Andy Wiederhorn has probably opened a burger shop there in the past seven years.
Wiederhorn has taken his Los Angeles-based franchise, Fatburger, from a struggling also-ran to a $125 million company by opening in 32 countries since 2007. He has 200 international locations now and an additional 350 in development, including in places rocked by unrest, such as Tunisia and Libya. Despite the advances of Islamic State, a second store in Iraq is also in the works.
10 Steps to Learning Your Customers’ Behaviors | Inc.com
In many endeavors, let alone product development, there’s a gap between knowing what’s best and actually doing it.
Gaining behavioral insights about your potential customers usually falls into one of these gaps. The reason? It can be awkward and exceedingly time-consuming observing and recording the behavior of people you’ve never met as they use or struggle to use your product.
“A conversation with a stranger can be a little, well, strange,” writes Jon Kolko, Vice President of Consumer Design at Blackboard and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, in his new book.
But founders, even shy ones, should take heart. For one thing, there are ways to overcome the social challenge of ethnographic research. For another, the insights you’ll gain about your customers’ behaviors will drastically supercede anything you’d learn from focus groups or online surveys.
To Franchise or Not to Franchise | Lydia Mehit
So, you want to start a business and you’ve decided a franchise is for you. There are a number of advantages to selecting a franchise. Here are several of them.
- It is a proven business model.
- You have a pre-defined target market.
- You have brand recognition because the product or service is already known.
- The business methods and systems are already in place, all you have to do is follow them.
- Training is provided for you and your management team.
- Operations manual that details all of the job descriptions, processes, procedures, rules and requirements for operating the business is provided.
- You receive on-the-job training at a working franchise.
- The franchise team helps you open the business and gets you started on the right foot.
Continue reading “To Franchise or Not to Franchise | Lydia Mehit”
5 Intangibles Your Ecommerce Business Should Be Focusing On, But Isn’t | Getentrepreneurial.com
At any given time, there are thousands of small business entrepreneurs looking to create a meaningful presence on the web. As you read this, some traditional businesses are finding a new home online, some “purely online” ecommerce businesses are taking birth, and the mad rush for every website out there to go mobile is only intensifying.
If you are an entrepreneur just starting out, you’ll eventually face what is called “information paralysis” – the sheer weight of information that threatens to freeze you. You aren’t responsible for this information overload, but your best bet is to absorb what matters to you and stay committed to make your ecommerce business work.
Pulling out your new ecommerce site from the hidden corners of the web and taking to stupendous popularity and profits is sweat-inducing, scary hard work. Slap focus together with assiduousness and your ecommerce business will see new light.
Smartlation Smart Translation Services | Cool Business Ideas
Using a patent-pending algorithm that analyses translator data from a vast pool of registered translators, Smartlation promises to give users the freedom to select the translation services that best meet their requirements and budget.
What does this mean for users? Let’s say you need a legal document translated from English into Farsi and Portuguese. Smartlation lets you specify not only languages but also specific areas of expertise so you find translators who are experienced and knowledgeable. The platform also makes the procedure simple by managing both jobs i.e. Farsi and Portuguese in one place. Transactions also go through the platform simplifying the payment process.
How to improve your mailing list before everyone unsubscribes | Mashable
Reply-all disasters are so common, they have their own Wikipedia page.They’re so ubiquitous, even, that the bad manners of reply-all offenders overshadow the bad manners of those who make and distribute mailing lists in the first place. While the listservs that dominated the 2000s may not be as common anymore, mailing lists are still central to the operation and social functioning of companies, universities and other associations. For the record, “listserv” refers to a software used to send mass emails; “mailing list” is the colloquial term.
We’ve compiled 11 tips that will help you improve your mailing list etiquette — and maximize effectiveness, while you’re at it.
1. Repeat to yourself: Listservs are public.
Think about what you’re sending before you send it — if it belongs in a private email or makes more sense to send to an individual, you shouldn’t send it through a mailing list. Also check the recipient of the email before you send it. This year, the University of Virginia’s top-ranked law school sent admissions stats of more than 100 people who applied for clerkships to a listserv of all those applicants, and then sent another email with subject line “PLEAE DELETE IMMEDIATELY.” But we all know email doesn’t work like that.
Dispatches From The Front 