Starting a business is never as simple as you think. Businesses are increasingly diverse and countless metrics and variables need to come into effect for channels to work for the long term. Entrepreneurs and startups have to be smart and they need to be open to endless solutions. In fact, if you don’t think ahead, you can be buried in the success your business creates or possibly wrapped up in an endless supply of unforeseen work that can lead to dwindling profits.
I’ve been there. Four different credit card bills came in the mail each month: Visa, American Express, Best Buy (because they gave me a 10% discount when I bought 3 CDs), and Sears. Their balances only added up to a couple of thousand dollars each, and making the minimum payment wasn’t so bad. Then the transmission blew in my car and I had no emergency fund to pay for it.
So I put that on the credit card. I was lazy so I would routinely pay late and then get dinged with a $35 late fee. Then the card companies would jack up my interest rate. Somewhere the invisible elves that kept track of my credit score were shaking the heads and “tsk-tsk-ing” as my chances of ever getting a mortgage in the future were plummeting. Soon I was paying more each month on interest, late fees, annual charges, and ATM cash advance fees than I was for my rent.
So just like the former high-school quarterback who looks down and notices that his belly fat is obscuring the nether half of his torso, I knew it was time to do something. It was time to get back in shape.
“If only I knew then,” I sometimes think. If only I knew the following 10 things about money when I was 18, I could have avoided that whole mess.
You come in, sit down, and log in. Your morning coffee steams while you peruse the dozens of emails that await you. Some are important. Some are even urgent. But most are destined for the trash. You grind through your inbox, replying to some and flagging others for later. And by the time your real work starts, your coffee is cold and you can’t find that one important email your client sent yesterday.
Should the federal minimum wage be raised? It’s a tough question, even for business magnate Warren Buffett.
“I thought about it for 50 years and I just don’t know the answer on it,” Buffett told CNN Wednesday. “In economics you always have to say ‘and then what?’ And the real question is are more people going to be better off if it is raised,” he said.
Buffett also said that the current federal minimum of $7.25 is not a living wage. If raising it didn’t hurt employment he’d want it up significantly higher. “You do lose some employment as you increase the minimum wage, if you didn’t I would be for having it $15 an hour,” he said.
Many states and cities have recently raised their minimum wage rate above the federal minimum and President Obama is pushing for Congress to raise the nationwide rate to $10.10 an hour.
When Amazon (AMZN) released Fire TV earlier this month, it was easy to be underwhelmed. Physically, it didn’t look much different than Apple TV (AAPL) or Roku, and it lacked one of their best features: the ability to watch HBO (TWX). While the device still looks a lot like its competitors, Amazon has just leapfrogged the field on the HBO front. The company said on Wednesday that it will offer not only the HBO Go app on Fire TV, but also give Amazon Prime subscribers the ability to watch some HBO shows free.
Don’t get too excited, True Detective fans. Shows will be added to Prime’s free streaming service about three years after they air. For now, viewers can re-live the joys of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Six Feet Under, with more shows to come over the course of the partnership. The first batch will be made available on May 21st. In addition, HBO will have an app ready for Fire TV by the end of the year.
Bitcoin vault Xapo made news in March after launching an insured, secure repository for big BTC investors. The service, which has gone so far as to bury paper bitcoin keys in underground vaults, has become a big finance darling. Now it’s going after the average user by offering credit cards directly linked to a Xapo bitcoin wallet.
“Most of our customers keep 90% of their bitcoin in our vault and 10% in their wallet,” said Wences Casares. The addition of card access to these wallets will allow that 10 percent to be instantly transferred to cash.
“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct,” Sigmund Freud said.
There’s always a tension between how much we should follow our instincts and how much we should yield to social conventions. But at times like ours, the tendency is to tilt too far toward our instincts, since the conventions are changing fast and there’s no consensus about them anyway. There’s a risk in that. You don’t know whom you might be offending or how you might be sabotaging your own success.
The original etiquette manuals of Western civilization were in fact success manuals. As author Steven Pinker notes, they taught knights and nobles how to conduct themselves in the court of the king—which is where we get the concepts of “courtly” and “courtesy.”
I asked some tasteful and civilized friends and colleagues what an updated manual for 2014 would look like. Here are 27 rules to help you, whether at an office lunch, the company gym or the birthday party of your child’s schoolmate.
You’ll notice a common denominator in all of them: Think about other people’s feelings first because it’s not all about maximizing your personal convenience.
PayPal is best known for its payment-processing solutions for online merchants and shoppers. But did you know that the company also has a processing solution for in-store and mobile merchants?
Introduced in 2012, PayPal Here is a credit card reader and accompanying app that allows businesses and individuals to accept a wide range of payments — from credit cards to checks— on iOS and Android devices.
Here’s a breakdown of what reviewers are saying about Paypal Here.
What’s most interesting about KnowRoaming’s offering is the SIM “sticker” concept. Your starter kit includes a sticker and an applicator, which you use to literally stick KnowRoaming’s device directly on top of the SIM that came with your phone. The sticker is incredibly thin — it’s designed to permanently sit atop your existing card, with enough clearance to fit into your phone. Of course, as with any fresh-off-the-line product, I experienced some hiccups (folded or bunched-up stickers) when trying to squeeze prototype stickers into certain smartphones (more on that below), but once you’ve successfully installed the device in your phone, you’re good to go.
KnowRoaming is designed to minimize hassle when it’s time to switch networks. While you’re in your home country, the sticker sits dormant. It’s more or less invisible to your phone, and all calls and data will be handled exclusively by your original SIM. When you leave the country, though, the device should switch to the new network automatically. You’ll receive a text message detailing local rates; your incoming calls will be forwarded to your roaming number (outgoing calls appear with your home number); and after you add “knowroaming” as your APN, you’ll be ready to surf at 3G speeds anywhere you go.
via CoolBusinessIdeas.com | KnowRoaming Helps Save The Overseas Roaming Bill.
For a young industrial engineer, Shubhendu Sharma couldn’t have landed a gig much sweeter than Toyota. As the originator of “just-in-time production,” Toyota pioneered the lean manufacturing movement that helped make it a dominant global automaker. But when a venerable Japanese forestry expert visited the company’s Bangalore factory to plant some greenery, Sharma was captivated by the idea of engineering a new kind of efficiency.
He wondered if Toyota’s wildly successful strategy for quickly and efficiently making cars could be applied to growing trees. The result is a startup called Afforestt.
In pitching his company, Sharma says the world loses about 36 football fields of forest in any given minute
