Best Smartphones for Business: 2014 Edition | Businessnewsdaily.com

Your smartphone is an indispensable business tool. It lets you stay in contact with employees, colleagues and collaborators. It helps you plan your workday and schedule meetings, and it enables you to stay productive all day long, even when you’re away from the office. That’s why it’s important to pick a good phone — but to do that, you’ll have to navigate through a minefield of mediocre devices, as well as stay up-to-date on all the new devices hitting the market.

Whether you want the biggest screen, the longest battery life or simply the best selection of productivity apps, there’s a solid smartphone for you. Read on for a list of the best business phones money can buy.

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Mini Opener | CoolBusinessideas.com

This invention is a propeller shaped bottle opener that opens mini liquor bottles, beer bottles and aluminum can tabs. The Mini Opener is the very first bottle opener invented to open mini liquor bottles but its also versatile because it will open beer bottles and soda can tabs as well. It’s a great invention because it directly solves a problem that hasn’t been address by any other product on the market.

Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble | WIRED

By now you probably know about the plight of America’s honeybees: the collapsed colonies and dying hives, threatening pollination services to crops and the future of a much-beloved insect.

But it’s not just honeybees that are in trouble. Many wild pollinators—thousands of species of bees and butterflies and moths—are also threatened. Their decline would affect not only our food supply, but our landscapes, too. Most honeybees live in commercially managed agricultural colonies; wild pollinators are caretakers of our everyday surroundings.

“Almost 90 percent of the world’s flowering species require insects or other animals for pollination,” said ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University. “That’s a lot of plants that need these adorable creatures for reproduction. And if we don’t have those plants, we have a pretty impoverished world.”

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How Women Entrepreneurs Can Avoid Being Bulldozed Over in Business | Allbusiness

Women, according to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are the key to economic expansion. And all signs are pointing to that expansion hurtling on well into 2014 and beyond. In 2013, statistics from the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) reported that in the United States alone, 8.6 million firms were owned by women with about 7.8 million people employed and $1.3 trillion generated in sales. Of the 8.6 million women-owned firms, 2.7 percent are majority-owned by women of color and 4.2 percent of all women-owned firms have revenues of $1 million or more.

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3 major challenges waiting for Target’s new CEO | Fortune.Management.cnn.com

FORTUNE — It takes a lot to unseat a chief executive officer who has spent his entire career — 35 years — with his company. But the exposure of 110 million customers’ personal and payment data does the trick, apparently.

Following an attack by hackers who captured customer information this past holiday season, Target Corp. (TGT) CEO Gregg Steinhafel is out after resigning Monday. The retailer’s current chief financial officer John Mulligan will temporarily replace Steinhafel. While the data breach was likely the main impetus for Steinhafel’s ouster, Mulligan and whoever comes in as Target’s permanent CEO have a lot more than cybersecurity issues to worry about.

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Should Your Small Business Offer a 401(k) Plan? | Businessnewsdaily.com

If your business has only a few employees, you may think you’re too small to offer a 401(k) plan. But even entrepreneurs have to retire someday, and there’s no time like the present to start planning for the future.

“Most small businesses don’t offer 401(k) plans, but it’s good for the nation as a whole to start saving for retirement,” said Paul Davidson, director of product management at payroll processing firm Paychex. “It’s not just about the [individual] benefits; there’s a social good that comes from establishing more 401(k) plans.”

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Think The Cassette Tape Is Dead? Then Why Did Sony Just Squeeze 185TB Of Data Onto One? | Forbes

Vinyl is making a comeback, but for all intents and purposes the reign of cassette tapes is long since over, right? Perhaps not, if Sony has anything to say about it. At today’s International Magnetics Conference (Intermag) in Europe, the company is presenting a method of data storage utilizing magnetic tape which is capable of holding a whopping 148GB per inch.

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Stop Losing Employees: 4 Tricks to Beat Turnover | Allbusiness.com

No matter what industry you’re in, turnover is a problem you can’t ignore. If you’re lucky, it’s relatively low compared to industry standards, but if it’s not, it’s time to do something. Because turnover is, in fact, something you can prevent if you’re proactive.

First, Assess the Situation

There’s a reason people are quitting your company. They might not all leave for the same reasons, but if you do some sniffing, you can probably find a few root causes. Maybe one manager is pretty harsh on his staff and they’re running for greener grass. Or maybe other companies are paying more than you are. Whatever the cause, identifying it is the place to start. There are even tools available on the web to assess staff happiness.

Now let’s look at a few tricks to reduce your turnover numbers and keep employees engaged, happy, and in place.

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