Category: News and Views

Five Signs You Need to Hire an Assistant | AllBusiness.com

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busy peopleMany small business owners and entrepreneurs pride themselves on being able to wear several different hats and juggle many different balls at the same time. But is this really something to brag about?

Identifying the Signs

As the leader of your organization, it may not be wise to spend your time micromanaging all the details that go into running your business. Your time could likely be better spent on big-picture strategy such as casting vision and direction for the company. Here are five signs that you need to hire an assistant so you can spend more time on tasks that add value to your business:

Read the Signs.

Five Trends Driving Traditional Retail Towards Extinction | Forbes

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The e-commerce behemoth is coming, but that’s no longer news. Amazon is nearly 20 years old now, eBay just a year younger.

What is news? The behemoth is arming itself. New tactics, new friends and a hefty war chest mean that the old defenses insulating traditional retailers are no longer enough. Venture funds dished out $242 million to online retail startups in the last quarter alone, more than any other period since 2000. E-commerce, meanwhile, is now a $200 billion-plus industry in the U.S., set to ratchet up 15% a year as consumers realize there’s no reason to trek out to the local strip mall anymore.

In the retail arms race, e-commerce is winning. Here are five trends driving traditional retail towards the grave:

Read the Trends.

Big Data, Small Bets | Forbes.com

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Big data and small experiments—what could appear more seemingly incongruous?  Yet the truth is: these two trends, one from the world of analytics, the other from the world of innovation and change, can be powerfully combined to drive sustainable success in a highly uncertain world.

Big data is a product of the technology revolution that is now well into its third decade. Thirty years ago, sophisticated analytical techniques promising extraordinary insights were lacking but one thing: the data to inform them.  The promise was clear: if you simply start measuring and tracking everything, from minutely segmented sales and resource usage metrics to every conceivable macroeconomic variable of remote interest, we will be able to identify all manner of relationships, correlations and insights, the net result of which will be the capacity to much more effectively and efficiently allocate resources to take advantage of opportunity and drive results.

The message was received, loud and clear.  In fact, perhaps too loudly and clearly.

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Are Women Outearning Their Husbands? | ELLE.com

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What percentage of American wives out earn their husbands? The number just might astonish you, as would an inevitable “men’s liberation” movement. (Ladies, you’re gonna get the corner office.)

If you’ve been hanging around the United States over the past 20 years or so, you’ve bumped up against the notion, in the media and maybe in real life, that wives are increasingly earning more than their husbands—and what a fiasco it is! Men feel emasculated and resent their wives’ incessant harangues about helping more around the house; women seethe as they continue to take on more than their fair share of the domestic duties and find themselves losing sexual desire for the unambitious lummoxes in their midst. Certainly you can think of a few couples in which this is not the case, in which he and she seem to have reached some graceful accommodation or are even, by all appearances, thriving: The guy is happily pushing the kids on the swings, while the gal is digging her high-powered job (and/or paycheck). But regardless of all the cultural noise, the overall proportion of wives whose salaries eclipse their husband’s is, while not insignificant, nothing like the norm—right?

Wrong.

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Deal Volumes Slow Q3 2012 | Cooley LLP

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Deal volumeOther deal trends continued to point to investor caution and negotiating leverage. The percentage of deals with participating preferred provisions  increased from the prior quarter across all deal stages. The data also saw an increase in the utilization of pay-to-play provisions in Q3. In another signal of investor caution, we witnessed the percentage of tranched transactions reaching 20.5% of deals in the quarter, a marked increase from the prior quarter.

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House Explodes With Audio-Visual Holiday Spectacular | Adrants

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Previously published in 2005 but worth another look every year around this time.

This has absolutely nothing to do with advertising unless, of course, this person starts stringing lights for marketers (which he ultimately did…so we guess it does now). You have to marvel at the relentless dedication and months of preparation something like this requires.

This isn’t just your average Holiday house lighting. It’s a full blown light and audio spectacular. The music is Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Wizards in Winter” and the lighting spectacular was created by Carson Williams, an electrical engineer for Cincinnati Bell Technology. Give it a watch. It’s a classic. And a viral sensation.

You have got to see this!.

Facebook and Yahoo! NOT forming strategic alliance | VentureBeat.com

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[Update] Rumor has it the rumors are wrong. While Facebook and Yahoo! may work together on certain projects and collaborations, a search alliance is not likely to be one of them in the near future.

Female executive powerhouses Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandburg may be forging an alliance between their two companies.

UK newspaper The Sunday Telegraph reported that Mayer, who is the CEO of Yahoo! and Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, are discussing ways the they can work together to conquer the internet. There is already some overlap between Yahoo! and Facebook, but according to unnamed sources, “board members expect the talks to lead to much more substantial collaboration based around web-based search.”

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Is bracing for impact really helpful in an airline crash? | Air & Space Magazine

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Or is it just meant to make us feel like we’re doing something?

Spending weeks (if not months) reading about Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s heroic landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January 2009 led the Air & Space copy chief to wonder: “When an airplane is about to make a bad landing and the pilot tells passengers ‘Brace for impact,’ does that instruction really help? Could it actually hurt? Is it just a placebo to make the passengers feel like they’re doing something?”

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4 things marketers can learn from the Papa John’s spam lawsuit | Econsultancy

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How much does it cost to send a text message?

It’s often less than a cent if you’re a marketer sending in bulk, but U.S. pizza chain Papa John’s could be forced to pay $1,500 a pop for 500,000 text messages its franchisees sent in 2010.

A class action lawsuit alleges that the chain’s franchisees, though a third party text messaging service, sent promotional ads to consumers without their permission in violation of a 1991 law. The attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case are asking for $250m in damages, but a jury could award triple that amount if it decides that Papa John’s willfully violated the law.

While it remains to be seen just how likely an eight-figure verdict is, and it would seem that there’s a decent chance the class action will be settled before the matter is put in the hands of a jury, Papa John’s plight provides several good lessons for other marketers using SMS to reach consumers.

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