Future Startups Will Succeed Only If They Acknowledge These Harsh Realities
There were a lot of things about that time that failed.
It’s the emerging dotcloud boom that will dominate the next 10 years, and its scope will run far greater with a disruption much deeper than the dotcom era.
The dotcloud will form the heart of small companies with global ecosystems that will not be stopped by isolationist politics and trade barriers.
Automation and robotization will reduce the number of people it takes to complete any given process, and the lower-skilled manufacturing jobs that created the great American post-war middle class in the 1950s and 1960s will decline.
The Post-War Anomaly People, and especially politicians, will point the finger of blame at technology.
Those times are gone and they are not coming back.
It can only be accomplished in today’s global environment if, by making America great, we make the global community great.
That post-war boom between about 1946 and 1975 was an anomaly, driven by the fact that the rest of the world was rebuilding after World War Two.
It means acknowledging that the jobs of the post-war boom don’t exist any more.
Success in this era means acknowledging that we are not an economy that is driven by manufacturing things because manufacturing today is really an extension of the technology industry.
MuleSoft Files for Its Initial Public Offering (IPO)
MuleSoft Files for Its Initial Public Offering (IPO).
MuleSoft, a company which provides platforms for selling APIs (Application Programming Interface), has filed for an Initial Public Offering or IPO worth $100 million.
It plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol MULE.
In an official release, the company has stated that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States.
The number of shares, however, has not been specified.
The company is presently in a situation where it can go public and had recently raised a funding in 2015.
The majority of the revenue of MuleSoft comes from support and subscription.
In 2016, the company had faced losses on its revenue.
The annual loss, however, narrowed down as the revenue rose, most of which came from outside the US.
MuleSoft depends on Amazon Web Services for hosting its API.
Why I’m Staying Away From The Snapchat IPO
Why I’m Staying Away From The Snapchat IPO.
Slowing user growth and retention could also signal a shift in Snapchat’s popularity.
Don’t Make Snap Decisions Estimates suggest this offering to value the company between $20 billion and $22 billion, according to MarketWatch.
Notably, that figure surpassed the company’s own target range of $300 million to $350 million.
In 2016 Snapchat said it recorded a loss from operations of $520.4 million, which grew from a loss of $381.7 million in 2015.
While the company does boast 158 million daily active users, which Snapchat called a “critical measure” of user engagement, growth was flat in the fourth quarter.
And this was preceded by only 7% user growth between the second and third quarters of 2016.
As such, the fact that Snapchat is burning through cash hand-over-fist, while user growth has slowed is too reminiscent of Twitter for me to get excited about its prospects.
Risks To Consider: The strong popularity in Snapchat has already generated tons of excitement in SNAP’s IPO.
I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Government Agencies and Hospitals Face Increasing Risk of IoT-Powered Cyberattacks
Unless manufacturers and users of connected devices get serious about security, we will see these attacks evolve this year.
I believe that there’s a significant chance these attacks could extend to major government institutions and hospitals.
Let’s say that in the next three years the number of secure IoT devices doubles, which means that only 40 percent will be insecure.
Companies aren’t doing much to stop this or other potential sources of breaches.
A study showed over 90 percent of corporate executives said they cannot read a cybersecurity report and are not prepared to handle a major attack and a stunning 98 percent of the most vulnerable executives have little confidence that their firms constantly monitor devices and users on their systems.
This organization will be ill-prepared and vulnerable; it is also likely that the attack won’t originate on IoT devices owned by the government but instead will come from the outside.
I also predict that a major hospital will face a HIPAA violation for using an unsecured smart medical device.
How will hospitals fight back?
Change your culture, build your defenses My advice for entrepreneurs and startups is to make IoT security a serious and valued part of company culture.
He has 11 granted and several pending patents and specializes in developing and advancing innovative technologies.
How to Revolutionize Your Small Business by Writing a Book
How to Revolutionize Your Small Business by Writing a Book.
You don’t have time to not write a book.
But with all that a business book can do for you and your company, it’s in your best interest to start now.
And while it’s absolutely critical to focus on how your potential clients find you (social media, advertising etc.
Your business book will be a key component of this education strategy, and from there you can host workshops, offer consultations, build your speaking platform and even develop secondary products like YouTube tutorials.
It’s well worth the money if it makes the difference of writing and publishing your business book or not.
Want to get more business?
All of these are great goals, but it’s important to know up front what you want so you can start building a book that will help transform your vision into reality.
Then you’ll be all ready to publish!
When you write a business book, it helps you present yourself — and your business — as a key resource, which will allow you to continue realizing your long-term strategies and goals, whatever they are.
Valve unveils a ‘cheaper, smaller, lighter’ VR base station prototype
Valve unveils a ‘cheaper, smaller, lighter’ VR base station prototype.
We’ve already seen Valve tease the next generation of SteamVR controllers, now the company has offered a peak at a new base station.
Base stations use Valve’s Lighthouse tracking system to find the positions of a VR headset and controllers in a tracked area, and relay that information into a VR experience, giving the user positional tracking and, in a big enough space, room scale VR experiences.
Valve noted that it now has 500 of these licensees, working on everything from headsets to controllers.
The Vive may not be the only major SteamVR headset for much longer.
Obviously these new base stations are big news for the future of SteamVR tracking, a technology that could be the most important to the VR industry in 2017.
Cheaper tracking means that VR systems can come down in price, opening up the technology to a wider audience, and better tracking will give everyone more solid experiences.
GDC is just around the corner; is the company planning some big announcements?
This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com.
Copyright 2017
Congressman calls for investigation of Trump’s insecure Android phone
California Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu on Friday asked the House Oversight Committee to launch an investigation into President Donald Trump’s use of an insecure Android smartphone.
Trump’s well-documented attachment to the device is, Lieu says, a threat to national security.
But that phone reportedly lacks many basic functions.
Trump was open about his resistance to ditching his preferred device, by some accounts a highly vulnerable Samsung Galaxy S3.
Reports since the inauguration have had Trump giving up the phone—or, then again, maybe not.
By most accounts Trump does not use email, reducing the likelihood of sensitive or classified information being leaked through a hack of the phone.
But it could be used for eavesdropping, to track the President’s location, or to spread malware to other devices in the administration.
But most novel—and chilling—security threat comes from the President’s reliance on Twitter to communicate with the public.
The President’s often strongly-worded pronouncements have the proven ability to trigger stock moves, and his frequent baiting of foreign leaders has been described as “diplomacy by tweet.” Trump’s Twitter account falling into the wrong hands, then, could have swift, possibly serious consequences for the global economy and worldwide diplomacy.
A malicious actor with the creativity to antagonize the world more effectively than Trump himself could wreak plenty of havoc in just a few minutes.
U.S. inquiries into Russian election hacking include three FBI probes
U.S. inquiries into Russian election hacking include three FBI probes.
(Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is pursuing at least three separate probes relating to alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential elections, according to five current and former government officials with direct knowledge of the situation.
The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which runs many cyber security investigations, is trying to identify the people behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, the officials said.
The Pittsburgh case has progressed furthest, but Justice Department officials in Washington believe there is not enough clear evidence yet for an indictment, two of the sources said.
Meanwhile the bureau’s San Francisco office is trying to identify the people who called themselves “Guccifer 2” and posted emails stolen from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account, the sources said.
This counterintelligence inquiry includes but is not limited to examination of financial transactions by Russian individuals and companies who are believed to have links to Trump associates.
The transactions under scrutiny involve investments by Russians in overseas entities that appear to have been undertaken through middlemen and front companies, two people briefed on the probe said.
The White House had no comment on Friday on the Russian hacking investigations.
The people who spoke to Reuters also corroborated a Tuesday New York Times report that Americans with ties to Trump or his campaign had repeated contacts with current and former Russian intelligence officers before the November election.
Those alleged contacts are among the topics of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.
Everything you need to know about bots at SXSW 2017
Everything you need to know about bots at SXSW 2017.
One of the biggest tech trends shaping up at this year’s SXSW is bots.
The sheer range of bot conversations this year emphasizes not only their potential, but also the challenges we face in crafting bot strategies and building bots on a growing number of platforms.
Brands and customer engagement It’s no surprise that brands and agencies have been at the forefront of experimenting with bots, looking for new ways to engage with customers and take advantage of social networks and messaging.
A look at lessons learned in developing Facebook Messenger bots over the past year, with participants from Facebook and developer partners.
This panel will discuss the potential implications and methods of a B2A marketing and the industries most likely to see an impact.” Accenture’s Rob Harles will look at how brands are investing in conversation as a sales and customer engagement strategy and how this is giving rise to a new “conversational economy.” He’ll also dive into some specific examples of how bots are being deployed across a number of industries.
There will be several sessions and workshops specifically focused on building bots.
Even more importantly though, we’ll begin to see a lot of discussion around how companies and developers can start thinking more strategically about bots and syndicating them across platforms, as well as lessons learned from the past year of the bot rush.
They’ll focus on how developers can build better bots without reinventing the wheel, and, on the other side, how companies can work better with bot developers.
Whether it’s activists and journalists using automation to break down barriers to information or academics using them for research or artists beginning to experiment with them as a medium, bots are breaking out of their box and are showing up in some fascinating projects.
Data-driven versus intuition-driven game design
Understanding game design and how people interact with it, that’s data as well.
A lot of times you don’t have enough players to optimize certain features based on data.
Data is good, but you need to make the first steps into a game as a game designer.
I can understand that they want to make sure what they put out makes money.
Only design can go against that.
I’ve worked with great game designers that are way better than me at analyzing data, and it’s made them better at design.
We know what they see in the game and what they don’t.
When you’re doing that, think about what you want to do with the game.
If you want to design something that appeals to people who like short sessions and then you see that people are playing your game for a long time, that might not be a good thing.
The data can help make those decisions.
The 5 Best Payroll Options for Small Businesses
The 5 Best Payroll Options for Small Businesses.
Here are five of the best payroll options for small businesses: 1.
Or do you want a fully-automated, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink payroll service instead?
And finally, their Full Service option will run payroll entirely, transfer data from other payroll services, and guarantee its accuracy — for just $79/month.
And if you’re in need of other human resources services, too, Intuit also offers workers’ compensation and compliance assistance.
OnPay OnPay doesn’t have all the tools and add-ons that Intuit offers, but in exchange, it provides a simple pricing model with the straightforward payroll necessities that especially small small businesses need.
For $47.95 per month, you get up to 10 employees’ worth of unlimited pay runs, tax filings and deposits in one state (with additional states running you extra), and check printing.
That includes benefits planning, direct deposit and check services, and more.
Sage Like Intuit, Sage also offers different payroll packages depending on how big your small business is.
The full service comes with a dedicated payroll agent, a check delivery service, unlimited deductions, custom report-building, and additional benefits administration.
Marketing Startups: Right-Size your Funding
Marketing Startups: Right-Size your Funding.
For years, many investors have advised all startups to take all the money they can get.
The last 12 months have been tougher for all startups, including marketing technology companies.
The darling among marketing technology companies and IPO candidate – Snapchat – raised a more-or-less flat round last year despite a growing advertising business and Foursquare raised a down round (a round with a lower valuation than its previous fund raising round).
Raising Money and Valuation For the Seed and A Round, a startup needs to think strategically regarding its needs for the coming two – three years before embarking on the fund raising round.
And for the A Round and beyond, startups that raise a lot of money based on strong sales targets use the funding money to ramp up sales and marketing expenses in order to achieve those targets.
One of the potential challenges that can be associated with a large round (at a high valuation or even after smaller rounds in today’s funding market) is that if the startup fails to achieve the promised growth, it runs the risk that the next funding round is a down round at a lower valuation.
This is why management of a company’s valuation alongside the funding is critical for the entrepreneur CEO.
For most marketing technology companies, an exit will come either via an IPO OR an acquisition, and both have their challenges.
Most of the marketing technology IPOs over the last few years have seen their stock prices plummet.
Why Some Startups Succeed (and Why Most Fail)
Over the last two decades of building and running businesses, and the last couple of years working full time with dozens of startup founders and CEOs on their strategies and funding plans in my consultancy business, I have observed that there are a common set of reasons that startups struggle and fail, and a consistent set of factors that make startup companies successful.
This study also asked company leadership the reason for business failure, giving a list of four main reasons for failure with sub-categories below those.
I bracketed these 14 indicators into nine key factors for success: Founders are driven by impact, resulting in passion and commitment Commitment to stay the course and stick with a chosen path Willingness to adjust, but not constantly adjusting Patience and persistence due to the timing mismatch of expectations and reality Willingness to observe, listen and learn Develop the right mentoring relationships Leadership with general and domain specific business knowledge Implementing “Lean Startup” principles: Raising just enough money in a funding round to hit the next set of key milestones Balance of technical and business knowledge, with necessary technical expertise in product development Are the reasons for success the opposite of those for failure?
There are things that you must possess to be a successful entrepreneur, but they won’t guarantee success.
If you look at both the reasons for failure and the factors for success, it is clear that commitment to a plan is key.
This is why the most successful companies have one or two pivots.
Successful startups are businesses.
However, both the success and failure studies show that you need leadership in the company with general and domain-specific business knowledge to be successful.
Does this mean that a technical founder cannot be successful as a CEO?
There are many other examples of this success formula, but there are far more where there is a seasoned businessperson who has domain expertise leading the company, and a strong technical team driving product development.
9 Ways You Can Build a Strong Franchise Community
Related: The 8 Things You Need to Know If You Think You’re Ready to Turn Your Business Into a Franchise Creating your franchise support systems and team Your franchise support team will be the core of your community.
Be sure your support team can “play all the positions” that your franchise owners play.
Using technology for support and training Support and training have become much more robust in today’s world.
The primary reason for making your franchisees responsible for site selection is not only to make the franchisee thoroughly familiar with the pros and cons of each potential site location, but also to help alleviate any liability you may face if you’re the sole selector of the site and the franchisee subsequently fails.
To ensure that the franchisee has picked an appropriate site, you should have a qualified broker or other expert evaluate the suitability of the chosen site.
Hiring a professional, full-time site selector could be expensive, depending upon your location.
Becoming a great event coordinator Creating and hosting great franchise events can become the source of inspiration and growth for your overall franchise community.
Apply the following strategies as you develop your company events: Be organized.
Creating and hosting discovery/decision day events Even though you may be starting small, you’ll want to create your standard discovery/decision day event.
This is a professional step for your franchise company.
The Surprising Artistic Beauty Still to Be Found in Muslim Countries
The Surprising Artistic Beauty Still to Be Found in Muslim Countries.
When most of us think of Muslim-majority countries, certain images dominate our thoughts, and they aren’t pretty.
Some of us will go immediately to the tragedy in Syria, for instance: tiny bombing victims, covered in ashes and blood; destroyed buildings.
Others will picture horrifying terrorists doing unimaginable things.
Entrepreneurs are still very much alive and well in Muslim countries around the world.
Stunning, besparkled couture dresses with silhouettes at once classic and ultra-modern, architectural and softly feminine.
Just ten years later, his studio, Focus Photography, is a successful business well known for breathtaking wedding cinematography.
She became the first woman ever to design a mosque.
Painting a canvas highlighting the dichotomy of the Muslim world Mixed-media interdisciplinary artist and Anglophone poet Shurooq Amin is the daughter of a Kuwaiti father and Syrian mother.
Modern, well-dressed women, silenced, perhaps, by their culture?
6 Tips For Leaders to Set Smart Sales Goals
6 Tips For Leaders to Set Smart Sales Goals.
Sales leaders around the world will have already made plans to set more effective goals for 2017.
But this year, instead of going through the motions again and later expressing frustration when things don’t go as planned, here’s a thought: Perhaps those sales leaders — maybe you, too — should devote some time to thinking about your team’s 2017 goals in earnest, and learn how to use them to improve performance and increase engagement.
Yet they haven’t thought seriously about what that means psychologically.
Yet knowing why goals are important helps you set more effective milestones.
And sales goals are no different, which is why it’s important to think about these principles when you’re planning your goals, in order to keep your process on track.
Focus on what you and your team can control.
What you can control are the actions that typically encourage buying behavior.
We all know that taking the time to create goals is useless unless you also invest the effort in tracking those goals’ progress.
Instead, try giving your sales professionals the responsibility of tracking their own goal progress, and sending the results to you at specified times.
3 Strategies to Nail Before You Launch Your Social-Media Campaign
3 Strategies to Nail Before You Launch Your Social-Media Campaign.
They haven’t truly defined a social-media marketing campaign for their brand and company.
Generals who are serious about the stakes wage campaigns with clearly defined goals.
Common social-media campaign goals include attracting more followers, creating interest in a specific product or service, heightening brand awareness and increasing the amount of shared content.
So long as your goals aren’t mutually exclusive, you can wage more than one effort at a time.
Related: 7 Popular Goal Setting Strategies That Will Help You Achieve Great Things on Social Media Plan the schedule.
If you’re connecting this natural phenomenon with your marketing theme, think about how much lead time you’ll need to build in to the campaign.
If your goal is garnering interest in a specific product or service, you might measure the amount of traffic you drive to your webpage.
If you believe you have enough followers but they aren’t sharing your posts as much as you’d like, you could use various analytics tools to rank your shared posts and see which content types performs best.
Or you could build your 2017 campaign around a theme you capture in a hashtag or celebrate with a contest to fuel its launch.
5 Lessons in Entrepreneurship From Starbucks and Philz Coffee
Let’s learn what two pioneering coffee brands, Starbucks and Philz Coffee, can teach us about entrepreneurship: 1.
Starbucks has done this by offering one of the most successful rewards programs of all time and introducing an ingenious mobile payment system with the Mobile Order and Pay feature in their app.
These two coffee titans have tapped into that by focusing on creating a community and positive experiences between people as a foundational piece of their businesses.
Starbucks is known for customer engagement, especially in the social media space.
The coffee giant is also succeeding at influencer marketing.
Create an emotional connection.
This emotional connection accounts for a large part of Philz’s commercial success.
Each customer has a personal connection to Philz — which brand they like, which is their favorite blend, and so on.
Starbucks also succeeds at fostering an emotional connection with customers, due in large part to the emotional connection most people have with coffee — drinking it with friends, cozying up to a hot drink in the winter time and enjoying the inherent social nature of ‘going out for coffee.’ Coffee imitates life.
Starbucks and Philz, two creative and pioneering coffee brands, teach us a lot about the core of entrepreneurship — how to create real and genuine experiences, introduce something valuable to your customers and imbue an emotional connection to your brand.