Gain a Competitive Edge in E-Commerce by Optimizing Your Mobile Site

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With mobile transactions gaining an increasingly large share of the e-commerce pie, small business owners need to start asking themselves: how can I best accommodate mobile shoppers?

Mobile’s global average share of e-commerce is 34% and in countries like Japan and South Korea that share is over 50%. While US conversion rates from mobile shoppers are still around 2.46% compared to Japan’s 9.35%, it is still important to note that one can gain a significant competitive advantage from optimizing their mobile e-commerce suite.

Here are a few common shortcomings of small business and easy solutions:

  • Use Mobile Solutions that Make Sense: Opt for all-in-one desktop and mobile e-commerce solution with write-once-publish-everywhere capabilities that will streamline your online presence into a cohesive entity.
  • Ensure Your Site is Mobile Accessible: Avoid large images or too much information in a single page as most mobile users are still running off of the slower 3G network. 40% of users will abandon a site if doesn’t load within 3 seconds so ensure your site will load quickly to avoid losing potential customers.
  • Use Everything that Mobile Has to Offer: Mobile users give your site a lot of information when they go onto your website. Take advantage of this data by adding elements that personalize the user experience for the customer.

Recently, Google has started to give an overwhelming priority in its search engine rankings to websites that are optimized for mobile. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly will sharpen your competitive edge and vastly improve your online presence. Don’t let your business fall behind – optimize your e-commerce site today!

Click here for the full article on GetElastic

The Satisfaction of Being Your Own Boss

With the advent of e-commerce and a recovering US economy, startups seem to be popping up everywhere. For those entrepreneurs, success is often measured in money generated or people employed, but which entrepreneurs are the ones happiest with their work? The Wall Street Journal dove in and figured out which factors most impact an entrepreneurs’ happiness:

  • Independence Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness: Just because you work for yourself doesn’t mean that you will find all of your work to be rewarding. One reason may be because your work may feel repetitive. To remedy that, you can break up your work by pursuing similar-yet-different opportunities or adding new tasks to the same job.
  • Higher Education Leads to Higher Expectations: Ivy League entrepreneurs are often less satisfied with work due to the high expectations for themselves. Be it a matter of personal performance or income, Ivy-Leaguers often expect high amounts of both which may lead them to feel disappointed in themselves.
  • Treat Every New Venture as Your First: Often times serial entrepreneurs who have had successful business believe they can repeat what they did for a previous venture and instantly be met with success. This is often not the case as markets are dynamic and as such will always be changing.
  • Why Did You Choose to be an Entrepreneur: Studies show that why you decided to become an entrepreneur will affect your happiness. Regardless of success, entrepreneurs that chose to start a business because they saw an opportunity were much happier than people that started a business out of necessity.

Starting a business can be the most exciting and life changing decision that someone can make. Being happy with your work means being more productive and leading a more fulfilling life. Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, and is certainly not a fast track for happiness.

Read the full article here on The Wall Street Journal

Properly Extracting Value from Data

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Is big data overrated? In a world ruled where metrics are king, raw data is being used to assess the quality of subjective things. We use big data to quantify the quality of teachers, students, and our fitness, but what insights are we drawing from that data?

In the mid-nineties, websites like Facebook were using human judgement to help discern quality insights over mindless data. Asking people how they felt about what was presented to them in their newsfeed granted them insight on what was an absent-minded click and what was an actual engagement.

Big data often fails to consider human factors that are often left unaccounted for. In the case of teachers, big data may determine that a certain teacher is doing poorly, but small data will tell us why that is. Conversely, it can tell us what a teacher is doing right to yield better results amongst children. Big data does a great job of explaining results, but a poor job of explaining how or why you got there. There is no replacement for human inspection and expertise, as much as companies try to avoid doing so.

As optimistic as we’d like to be about using big data to improve our lives and save us money, we can’t let it replace traditional decision making. Instead, we should use it as a tool to make more educated decisions.

To read the full article on The New York Times, click here.

Is Aaron Levie Really Thinking Outside the Box?

box-blog427Silicon Valley CEO Aaron Levie dropped out of college ten years ago to start his company, Box. Providing cloud computing services, Levie’s company is currently worth $2.1 billion and services over 40,000 paying customers which includes about half of the Fortune 500. However, it is not meeting growth projections and is counting on creating an ecosystem just as Apple and Microsoft have with their products. Levie argues it can be the center of a new industry “by helping other companies and third-party consultants create applications that can quickly draw off Box’s cloud-based collaboration technology.”

Despite these ambitions, Box has lost $167 million on revenue of $216 million which is still an improvement from the year before. This year, revenue is expected to grow by another 30 percent, “a marked slowdown that Mr. Levie hopes the new developer strategy may also turn around.” These losses scare not only Box, but also the generations of young tech ventures that never experienced the massive downturn that took place between 2000-2001.

Seasoned investors worry that newcomers may not take the risks as seriously. Ultimately, the losses faced by Box and newer tech companies as they rapidly grow are starting to catch up with them, and may be the beginning of a new downward trend in Silicon Valley.

Read the article here on The New York Times

The Upside of Being Replaceable

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Kristin Muhlner is the chief executive of New Brand Analytics , a social-media-monitoring company used to improve brand loyalty and acquire new customers. Adam Bryant from the New York Times recently sat down with Muhlner and discussed what she learned from being a C.E.O, what to look for when hiring employees, and what culture means to her. Here are some great points from the article:

  • Developing personal connections with your employees can be emotionally draining: “You always want to be one of those leaders who care deeply about their staff and look after them, but at some point you have to make the shift and say you’re going to do the right thing for the business
  • Don’t always assume that people know everything“But people just have this incredible thirst to be connected, and they need multiple reinforcing points of communication. I have to remind myself over and over not to assume that everyone knows something.”
  • Seek out a meritocracy: “If you find a meritocracy and you’re highly ambitious and you want to drive your career forward, then nothing’s going to get in your way”
  • Don’t wear “busy” as a badge of honor: “We’ve become crazy about being crazy, and I’m stunned at how many people are absolutely exhausting themselves. It’s important to figure out how to be ruthlessly efficient and disciplined with your time, and do only those hings that matter”

To read the article in it’s entirely, click here.

Wear Your Failures on Your Sleeve

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Cassandra Phillips, founder of FailCon, holds one-day conferences for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers, and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success. Every October, 500 tech start-up websites gather with industry veterans who talk about their biggest downfalls and fails while providing constructive criticism. Failure is emerging as a badge of honor among Silicon Valley start-ups, and companies publicly dissect their own entrepreneurial failures on multiple blogs.

Of course nobody wants to fail with their business, but failing intelligently is an important skill when it comes to improving. Sometimes you have to fail first in order to succeed. In entrepreneurial circles, a start-up flop is now something to proclaim, not hide.

To read the article in it’s entirety, click here.

Picking Up and Running With Your Dreams

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Alastair Mitchell is the chief executive of Huddle, a cloud-based collaboration software company co-headquartered in London and San Francisco. In a recent interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, Mitchell spoke about his early management lessons, how to handle tough situations, and advice for college students. Here are some of the key points from the interview:

  • Learn how to empower people and give positive feedback: “knowing when to let them take risks and when not to criticize them too hard if things go wrong. You have to back them up and then say, That didn’t work, so how are we going to improve it next time?”
  • When faced with difficult decisions, what would we regret not doing in life?: “What would happen if I were to walk out across from your building and cross the street, and a big red bus is coming the other way and I don’t see it. In that brief moment before it hits me, what would be the thing that I would regret not doing? Whenever I’m faced with difficult decisions, I always apply the big red bus test. Instinctively, people know the right answer, but it can be buried under so many layers of doubt and questions. Starting my own business came from one of those moments. ”
  • Motivate yourself and think outside of the box: “I look for people who think big, who are motivated and who have the entrepreneurial instinct. In my questioning, I’m looking for almost the rough edges — the things on their résumé that look different or reveal an inner drive.”
  • Trust who you are and listen to your gut: “Go big or go home. And just trust yourself. Whatever your gut instinct is, you’ll probably be right seven or eight times out of 10. So just go with your gut. What you’ll regret more is the fact that you haven’t gone with your gut. ”

Click here to view the full article from the New York Times.

A Job Description is Just the Beginning

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Susan Story is the chief executive of American Water, a public utility company operating in the United States and Canada. In a recent interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, Story opened up about her work philosophies that helped her achieve corporate success:

  • Every person deserves respect: “[N]o matter how bad things get, it’s about working hard and taking personal responsibility, because nobody owes you anything.”
  • In life and in work: “It’s not what happens to you; it’s how you react to it.”
  • A job description is just the beginning: “It’s about doing the job but also looking around for what’s not getting done that would bring value. When I would raise my hand, it was appreciated.”
  • Listening is key: “Listening on the front lines is one of the most important things I can do… If you really want to know what’s going on, you get out there and you listen to folks on the front lines.”
  • Focus on doing the best job you can where you are: “One thing I’ve done in my career is to never look at what the next job is going to be. I go in thinking this could be my last job, and I’m going to be the best I can at it.”

Click here to view the full article from the New York Times.

“Is it the cards, or how you play them?”

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Narinder Singh is the president of “Topcoder,” a company that administers computer-programming competitions. In a recent interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, Singh spoke about his early management experiences, leadership lessons, and hiring processes.

Here are some points we took away from the interview:

  • Don’t underestimate the power of stereotypes: Try to understand when you could use stereotypes and when it’s important to break and challenge them. “I started looking hard at the assumptions I was making about people, and what assumptions they were making about me.”
  • Ask “Was it the hand, or how you played it?”: If you stumble because of the cards you’re dealt, “you should get better cards… But if you played them badly, you need to think about how to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
  • Admire leaders that aren’t afraid to be challenged: People have to feel that the best idea wins. “If I have somebody working for me who’s really good, I should lose 80% of the arguments I have with them because they should know their area better than I do.”
  • Ask how a candidate travels: “Are you a get-there-early-for-the-flight person, or a barely-make-it-in-time person?” Then find out WHY! You want to understand how a candidate looks at the world.
  • Everyone has a unique perspective: “When you meet somebody, pull every piece of insight you can out of them.” You never know what you’ll learn!

Click here to view the full article in The New York Times.

How an Entrepreneur’s Passion Can Destroy a Startup

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Passion can function as a double-edged sword. Often the very thing it takes to ignite a business can be responsible for ruining it. Even the most promising startups can be destroyed by too much passion. It blinds entrepreneurs, leading to overconfidence and bad decision-making at the worst possible times. Entrepreneurs within this category of over-zealous, blind-sighted optimism are often so impatient to move forward with their new ideas that they lose perspective on how would-be customers and investors will view their product.

Noam Wasserman, a professor at Harvard Business School, identifies three major areas prospective founders need to take into account when they’re thinking about kick-starting their new business:

1)   Market Circumstances: A founder who is passionate about an area is more likely to misread whether a large potential customer base for their venture exists.

2)   Career Circumstances: Passion often blinds founders into thinking they already possess the full skill set they need to build their business when in fact they’re poorly prepared. Many entrepreneurs eventually realize they don’t have the connections or resources necessary to find co-founders, investors, or even employees.

3)   Personal Circumstances: Many aspiring entrepreneurs discount the toll a start-up will take on their family, and they are more likely to sugar-coat scenarios to a spouse in an attempt to attain their support.

While passion and optimism are great when building a business, founders should be encouraged to find effective ways of tempering their passion with a hefty dose of realism. As Steve Jobs famously warned: “[f]ollow your heart, but check with your head.” We couldn’t agree more!

Click here to view the related article in The Wall Street Journal (8.25.14)