An Inside Look At Car Marketplace Shift And Its Plans For Major Growth, Starting With D.C. | TechCrunch

If you’ve ever tried to sell a used car you know it’s a process. You either haggle low-ball offers at the dealership or wade through Craigslist emails with the hope that a possible buyer actually shows up, wants your car and has cash.

Startups such as Beepi and Carvana attempt to take the pain out of the process by cutting out the dealer and helping you list online. Ebay motors originally started with this same idea, but dealers now utilize the service quite heavily.

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Peach: WTF is this app everyone’s talking about? | Mashable

If you spent any time on Twitter Friday, you probably heard about a new app called Peach.

Created by Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann, the app is “a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself,” that everyone is now obsessed with because it’s Friday, and we needed this.

The app is a sort of a mix between Twitter and Slack. After you create an account and a handle and add some friends, you view a stream of updates from the people you’re connected with. From the home screen updates look a bit like tweets or status updates, though tapping into a friend’s post reveals much more.

You see, the app is centered around something its creators call “magic words” — trigger words that allow you to add a GIF, doodle, location and other content to your stream. Typing “here,” for example, adds your current location while “draw,” lets you add a quick doodle.

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Hiring Vets: How to Leverage a Valuable Resource | Payroll Link

Research has found that the skills and traits found in people with a successful military employment track record make for particularly good civilian employees. A compilation of studies assembled by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University suggest that veterans generally:

Are entrepreneurial. They have a high need for achievement, are comfortable with autonomy and uncertainty, and make effective decisions in dynamic environments.

Assume high levels of trust. Often a military career gives rise to a strong propensity to trust coworkers as well as a tendency to exhibit confidence in the organizational leadership.

Are adept at transferring their skills across contexts and tasks. Research has attributed this to the fact that military teaching strategies include contingency and scenario-based training.

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Walmart, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestle Donate 6.5M Bottles Of Water To Flint, Mich. Students | Forbes

World’s largest retailer Walmart is joining forces with the three biggest bottled water suppliers in the U.S. to provide enough water to last 10,000 public schoolkids in Flint, Mich. the remainder of the calendar year.

In partnership with Pepsi , Coca-Cola KO and Nestle , the big-box giant will deliver 6.5 million bottles of water, or 176 truckloads a day, to the crisis-stricken city, where all children under the age of 6 were exposed to toxic, lead-tainted water that may cause life-long damage.

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Amazon and Apple Want to Save Your Sleep by Tweaking Screen Colors | WIRED

IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT future, your personal tech will behave like the sun. It will rise and shine brightly in the morning, and set and dim its lights as the day winds down. In a recent preview for iOS 9.3, Apple teased a new feature called Night Shift that does exactly this, automatically altering the color of your screen display to make it orange-colored in the evening. Last month, Amazon released a similar feature, called Blue Shade, in an OS update for its Kindle Fire reading tablets. The new feature lets nighttime users dim the amount of blue light that comes off the Fire’s screen, in favor of a mellow, amber glow.

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Tesla shares are getting crushed in 2016 |Business Insider

Tesla shares are getting clobbered: they’re down almost 20% this year after dropping another 3% Tuesday to $191. That’s a far cry from their 2014 peak of nearly $300.

The latest dip is being chalked up to a research note from JP Morgan’s Ryan Brinkman, in which his team reduced its expectations for Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings. (Compared with the rest of Wall Street JP Morgan is relatively bearish on Tesla: Brinkman’s target price is $180)

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Second in a series) | Peter Mehit

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2. Nobody With A Job Can Help You Become An Entrepreneur

If you spend two seconds thinking about that statement, the truth of it becomes evident.  Unfortunately, if you want to become an entrepreneur, the most visible sources of help are the least helpful.

It doesn’t matter how much information you have about how businesses are launched, the missing element is the courage to actually take risks.  The entrepreneur, while reducing risk, must embrace it to make their goal a reality. If you need a steady paycheck, you are not an entrepreneur.  So why would you get direction from someone who does?

Continue reading “Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Second in a series) | Peter Mehit”

How a chef shortage could change your dining experience | CNN Money

Everyone knows too many cooks in the kitchen is a recipe for disaster. But what if there aren’t enough?

Restaurants across the country are having a hard time filling kitchen worker positions, and with no relief in sight, the shortage is likely to change the dining out experience.

“Everyone is opening a restaurant, yet the painful reality is there isn’t enough talent to go around,” said Andrew Freeman, president of restaurant consulting firm AF&Co.

At Dirt Candy, a well-known vegetarian restaurant in New York City, owner Amanda Cohen remembers when she would receive 30-40 resumes for a kitchen job. Sometimes, cooks submitted résumés when there wasn’t an opening.

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Powerhive Is Bringing Clean Energy To The Developing World–With Prepaid Solar | Co.Exist 

The remote village of Monomoni, Kenya, is too far from cities and too sparsely populated to be part of the national grid. Now, however, it’s possible to for a family of cow herders or a small business to buy prepaid solar power through a mobile phone.

Powerhive, a startup that builds solar, mobile-connected microgrids—small utilities that are usually built to power around 200 homes—started testing their system in Monomoni in 2012, and began expanding to 100 more rural villages around the country last year, along with others in the rest of the underpowered world. The company raised $11 million in December, and just raised another $20 million to expand even more.

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9 Smart Reasons You Need to Be Using Facebook Ads Now | Inc.com

Social media is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales.

Spoiler alert: Facebook remains King Social Network. It is the social media platform of choice for the majority of marketers–and for good reason.

It’s never been cheaper to build your brand and create new demand for your products and services.

If you aren’t already advertising on Facebook, you’d be crazy not to. Especially if you want to grow like crazy in 2016.

Here are nine reasons Facebook ads will help make your business super successful in 2016, starting right now.

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