From VCs crying “bubble” to Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca crossfire, we did a retrospective on the year by digging up our favorite Tweets.
Business Scan | LAEDC
Kyser Center for Economic Research is pleased to provide the December 2015 issue of Business Scan, a compilation of Los Angeles County economic indicators and business trends, including employment, trade, housing, tourism and entertainment.
Corporate Innovation Theatre | CB Insights
Many corporations strive to stay on top of innovation by creating buzzwordy accelerator programs. The goal is to support and learn from startups.
But here’s the problem: if you’re a giant, slow-moving company not known for being particularly innovative, the startups attracted to your accelerator are going to be second or third tier.
Please Don’t Shut Down the Internet, Donald Trump | The New Yorker
So shutting down the Internet, or slowing it, is possible. But it’s also a terrible strategy. One of the ideas that has been central to American foreign policy for the past seventy years is that totalitarianism and oppression are best foiled by giving people more information, not less.
Marriott is removing desks from hotel rooms in a strange bid to please millennials | Yahoo Finance
What Just Happened to Solar and Wind is a Really Big Deal | Bloomberg Business
The clean-energy boom is about to be transformed. In a surprise move, U.S. lawmakers agreed to extend tax credits for solar and wind for another five years.
This will give an unprecedented boost to the industry and change the course of deployment in the U.S. The extension will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power—more than every panel ever installed in the U.S. prior to 2015, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). The U.S. was already one of the world’s biggest clean-energy investors. This deal is like adding another America of solar power into the mix.
The wind credit will contribute another 19 gigawatts over five years. Combined, the extensions will spur more than $73 billion of investment and supply enough electricity to power 8 million U.S. homes, according to BNEF.
“This is massive,” said Ethan Zindler, head of U.S. policy analysis at BNEF. In the short term, the deal will speed up the shift from fossil fuels more than the global climate deal struck this month in Paris and more than Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan that regulates coal plants, Zindler said.
4 Mistakes That Ruin Business Meetings | Business News Daily
Business meetings have a longstanding reputation for being unexciting. Sitcoms, films and even stock photo collections are filled with scenes of employees looking at the clock, rolling their eyes and falling asleep while the presenter seems to drone on interminably.
Though these staged “boring meetings” may be slightly exaggerated on camera, they’re not too far from the truth: A recent survey by enterprise intranet company Igloo Software found that about half of all employees find meetings to be unproductive. The most common meeting pet peeves reflect this sentiment, with unnecessary meetings (76 percent), meetings going off-topic (59 percent) and people repeating one another (58 percent) topping the list.
British man attempts to avoid parking ticket by leaving cheekiest note | Mashable
LONDON — Getting angry with traffic wardens might not always be the best approach — sometimes, it pays to charm them instead.
One chancer in Liverpool recently went for this approach when he was unable to move his car in time due to having had “a Christmas pint with the lads.”
Operator! Operator! The UberRush Logistics Layer Has Arrived | TechCrunch
The real goldmine for Uber is in becoming the transportation backend for tons of other services, not just its own apps. Now this logistics layer strategy is coming to fruition through a partnership with Operator, the chat-based shopping assistant backed by Uber co-founder Garret Camp.
Together, Uber and Operator they could compete with Amazon’s massive warehouses by aggregating inventory for instant delivery from local shops that are closer nearby.
Today, UberRush begins powering 1-hour delivery for Operator in San Francisco. At first, over 100 of the most popular gifts from the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall and Saks Fifth Avenue will be available for immediate arrival.
3 Ways to Use CRM to Ramp Up Your Sales | All Business
As a female entrepreneur, I, like so many others, have to juggle my time carefully. I’m always looking for strategies to use one thing in many ways. One tool I’ve discovered that can do more than meets the eye is customer relationship management software (or CRM).
A lot of people mistakenly think CRM is only something marketers use, or it’s just a place to throw all your contact information. That’s simply not the case; it’s also a fantastic tool to increase sales for your business. And hey, I’m all about using it for as much as I can, especially if it helps me grow my business!
Today’s CRM solutions are much more sophisticated—not to mention more useful—than their predecessors. Here are three effective ways to use CRM as a sales tool:
Dispatches From The Front 