The world of modern technology moves so very quickly. It is difficult to keep abreast from week to week as scientists, computer experts and programmers come up with so many new and exciting developments.
Some innovations – such as the useful and fun Google Goggles – have come right out of nowhere in so far as the consciousness of the majority of the public is concerned.
Even mobile telephones with MMS capability, camera integration and web access are something which the public could never have imagined 15 years ago but which have become a necessity now. Other advances such as digital photo frames, mobile phone payments which work with scanners and online gaming with voice chat were hard to predict yet seemed likely with the way in which technology was headed for so long.
Here are just five of the most interesting developments in technology so far – we definitely didn’t see these ones coming!
iPod: The iPod is one of the iconic gadgets of our modern generation. Considering that the predecessor was the personal stereo CD player then this compact little machine really did amaze the general public. The gadget has come a very long way since the original came out and now boasts a touch screen, internet access, video capability, and an incredible amount of storage for games, music and apps.
Reverse image search: The reverse image search sites were a real innovation in themselves. To think that one could upload a photo and that software would find that item and all its relevant details on the internet was incredible.
Google Goggles has taken this technology mobile and through taking a simple photograph with a mobile phone you can find all manner of results on your chosen subject.
Cloud: Cloud computing is something which many in the know could have predicted. However, the way in which it has changed how we work forever is remarkable. By storing information and software on the internet, we now have access to our data in a way like never before.
Touch screens: We now take mobile phones with touch screens for granted and these can be purchased for a reasonable amount of money. However, when these first were introduced they were an incredible innovation.
Google Glass: Google Glass takes us into the realms of science fiction with its “augmented reality”. These streamlined glasses with a small screen above the right eye will give you information on your next appointment, the weather up ahead – and potentially so much more. This is one innovation which – if it caught on – would change the face of the world as we know it.
Sarah Paige is a writer with a keen interest in telecommunications. Sarah currently has her eye on cloud computing companies such as the Macquarie Telecom Group (ASX:MAQ). Follow her on twitter @sarahleepaige.
Business Consulting
IGNITION: Future of Media Conference
This two day conference is coming to New York City November 30th through December 1st, 2011. Exploring the future of media business, IGNITION brings together executives and key stakeholders to discuss what is happening in the here-and-now.
We all understand that the definition of media has begun to expand to include games, local, social, and real-time communications that include sharing and other forms of data exchange. However, this also means that the lines between advice, business, and entertainment, has begun to blur.
Business Insider’s founder and CEO, Henry Blodget, will host IGNITION. One of the goals of IGNITION is to discuss how what is happening now, will affect your business. For this reason, a long list of top-notch speakers covering many media industries will be attending.
- Glenn Beck – Founder and CEO, Mercury Radio Arts
- Deep Nishar – SVP of Products and User Experience, LinkedIn
- Sheryl Sandberg – COO, Facebook
- Eliot Spitzer – Former Governor, New York
- Sarah Bernard – Director of Online Engagement, White House
- Adam Bain – CRO, Twitter
Business Insider designs their conferences the same way they design their media: intriguing and straight to the topic at hand. Discussions are kept short and each moderator or speaker will quickly get to the point. The fast-paced schedule will keep all attendees connecting while learning. IGNITION is expecting an impressive list of 400 to 500 entrepreneurs and executives from all facets of media including print, TV, digital, music, radio, and entertainment.
Attendees should arrive ready to strategize and create new business.
Adam Bain – CRO Twitter
Before he was CRO of Twitter, Adam Bain was the president of Fox Audience Network, or FAN, where he administrated strategies that would help to monetize Fox’s digital properties. He got behind Fox’s largest acquisitions of IGN, Scout Media, Photobucket, and Myspace. Before he held that position, he was the EVP for Product and Technology for Fox Interactive Media.
Bain began at Twitter just as they were gearing up to launch new monetization efforts. Although Twitter has executed minor experiments with advertising, they now want to increase their revenue significantly. With Bain’s proven abilities in that exact area, it seems to be an incredibly good choice for Twitter and for all who use it.
Get Ready for IGNITION: Future of Media
If you plan to attend IGNITION, register now and make sure to input dbmei15 for 15% off the price of admission as a DBMEi subscriber! This IGNITION Discount Code has been created exclusively for dbmei.com readers.
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Professional Spotlight: Robert Basso
On Tuesday, November 15th, a group of everyday entrepreneurs who have proven track records from building their own successes, came together to share how they had achieved those goals on their own terms.
Some attendees included:
- Joe Corcoran, Founder of Joe Corcoran Productions
- Selena Cuffe, President of Heritage Link Brands
- Jeff Hoffman, Co-founder of Priceline.com family of companies
- Steve Davies, President, The Alternative Board – Nassau
- David Becker, President, PhilippeBecker
Robert Basso, the author of The Everyday Entrepreneur, is a well-recognized business leader and advocate. With an entrepreneurs eye for spotting opportunities, Rob has a long list of achievements from founding investor in Empire National Bank to owner of Advantage Payroll Services. Rob frequently contributes on Fox Business as well as other national programming such as Entrepreneur. Rob has also submitted to interviews with USA Today, AP, and CNN Money. Rob also hosts a web program called Basso on Business which features businesses and entrepreneurs.
The Everyday Entrepreneur
The Everyday Entrepreneur is loaded with powerful strategies and important objectives for defining, setting, and achieving goals for your own entrepreneurial success. Revealing how its readers can learn to apply their own ambitions to their desired goals and gain an understanding on how to proceed on their own, this book provides realistic goal setting ideas that can lead to successes that may have eluded you so far.
The Everyday Entrepreneur is unique from other available books on the market in that it supplies palpable entrepreneurial strategies for business owners. The contributions of The Everyday Entrepreneur allows for business owners to build their own wealth, financial freedom, and success regardless of age.
In The Everyday Entrepreneur, Basso explores other innovative entrepreneurs like himself and discovers what encouraged each one of them to push the limits and find their own genuine successes on their own terms.
You can also expect to learn:
- Valuable lessons regarding how to drive business growth
- How to best hone entrepreneurial instincts
- How to reawaken your sense of adventure in your business endeavors
So much more is covered here but we can’t share it all. The Everyday Entrepreneur provides a roadmap allowing readers to follow the success stories of a variety of individuals who all hail from very diverse backgrounds. Take a walk with Basso as he shares the stories of each entrepreneur while they find the answers to achieving their own successes and surpassing goals unimagined.
My Take on Robert Basso
In a room full of professionals this picture speaks but a touch of the moment and what Robert Basso conveyed as an Entrepreneur, Professional and Parent. At the start of the event Robert thanked a few people, something you expect from most at such an event, but the moment to see Robert’s character came forward when he called his children to the front of the room.
“You might not quite understand this yet, but it’s my hope that you will someday” Robert Basso told his two children.
A moment that was so passionately about a father conveying an important message to his children that he had to be instructed and nudged by others to turn so they could get the photos they wanted. One could try and say that this was possibly staged, but if you had seen it first hand, you’d know the sincerity was without question.
My short interaction with Robert leaves little to argue about the long term experience of knowing or doing business with this professional, but if how he cares and treats his family is any indication, then clearly he is a professional worth knowing.
Published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Publication date: October 24, 2011
$24.95; Cloth; 175 pages; ISBN: 978-1-118-10644-0
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Google+ Pages Open the Doors for Brands and Businesses
This past June, immediately after Google launched it’s highly anticipated Google+ social network, internet savvy businesses like Ford, Dell and Mashable.com rushed to create pages for their brands.
Only to have them removed a few days later. Google’s announcement soon followed: “In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. (Christian Oestlien Ads project manager on Google+)
One hundred days later Google delivered on its promise. On November 7, 2011 Google+ announced the grand opening of Google+ Pages worldwide.
Google+ Pages allows businesses, brands, and organizations create their own page and establish a circle of like-minded people who enjoy the brand and want to talk about it. Not only does the page allow having a conversation with brand representatives in a way of personalized customer service, it also allows the group of followers to have a conversation with each other.
As Google+ puts it, when it talks about the customers: “…we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands… this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.” (Google’s blog)
Not only brands and businesses are involved. Google+ wants to enlarge the circle of users to local business, products, corporations, institutions, organizations, arts and entertainment, sports teams and more. They have been working with businesses since the launch in June to understand the needs and requirements of brand names. You can see the pages of these businesses already active:
- Dallas Cowboys
- Macy’s
- Pepsi
- Toyota
- Anderson Copper 360
- X games
- Zen Bikes
- The Muppets
Having pages for brands and businesses is nothing new, but Google+ has a few advantages over the competition:
- People can recommend the brand easily by pressing the +1 button, and start sharing immediately.
- A brand can have more than one page. A car manufacturer, for example, can have a page for each of its models.
- Although Facebook has over 500 million users, and Google+ has, so far, about 50 million, the biggest advantage of Google+ has to do with the billions of queries made every day on the search engine, most of them looking for businesses or services. Google will include Google+ pages in its search results.
- Direct connect – The easiest way to find a band you like to follow or a product has been amended as well. Typing the sign + before the query will take the searcher straight to the brand page. (Try it with + Angry Birds)
The official announcement on Google’s blog ends with these words: “With Google+, we strive to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today’s initial launch of Google+ Pages brings us a little bit closer, but we’ve still got lots of improvements planned, and miles to go before we sleep. So stay tuned.
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Summify Your Social Media Networks
Keeping up with the most vital information in your industry was never made easier than with the inception of so many options in social networking. However, if you, like many others, find reading your Facebook and Twitter feeds to be increasingly more difficult as your network grows, it may be time to consider some of the options in news feed aggregation.
What is Summify?
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/15436623]
Integrated Ease
Instead of actually trying to keep up with lightspeed tweets and Facebook shares, the best thing you can do to save time, energy, and frankly frustration, is to head over to Summify and use their one-click integration options to log in via Twitter, Facebook, or Google. You can choose to use only one network, or you can easily collaborate all three with a few more clicks.
From there you can configure how your summary is generated or you can sit back and wait for it to arrive in your inbox.
Inbox News Updates
Summify will determine by taking notice of your “Likes”, your trending topics, and the information in the industries you have the most influence, and make a daily progress report for you that is sent directly to your inbox. Users can choose to have this sent several times per day if desired.
Top tweets and the most often shared content will also be displayed along with those users names. See others in your fans or followers networks who have showed the same interest and utilize quick one-click buttons to add them to your network instantly.
View it as an email or as a webpage. Using the webpage option will give you far more interactive options.
Benefits of Summify
A very obvious benefit that makes Summify different is that this update will be sent to you per your desired frequency and will require no more effort on your part to configure than your original choices. However, when you receive your emails you are given the chance to further refine your selections. Further benefits include:
- Time Saving
- Filtering Unneeded Info
- Multi-Account Capability
When you receive emails from Summify you should open your articles from there. When you do, you are given the option to select a thumbs-up, or a thumbs-down option. Selecting the negative will prevent this type of content from being aggregated for you in the future.
Who Uses Summify?
Summify has seen a huge jump in user numbers in the last three months. Currently ranked at #5069 in the US, this aggregation option is beginning to be used widely on mobile devices due to its smooth compatibility with most options.
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LinkedIn: Updates on Ads & LinkedIn Today
LinkedIn is a free, business and social network which was built on the idea that personal recommendations in today’s global village is was people really need. Hence, they created a way for people to connect on a professional level, and create a circle of acquaintances, or Connections as they are called. Somewhere, in the people you invite to connect with you, there is a connection to another circle and group of people you might know as well or want to connect with. That is called 2nd degree connections, and from here on, it can grow exponentially.
From this network people can receive personal recommendations, look for employees and search for jobs. LinkedIn has a privacy policy wherein all the connections have to be mutually agreed, so no unwanted connections will be formed.
With over 100 million users, from 200 countries around the world, available in many languages, LinkedIn is a force to be reckoned with.
There are a numerous programs that have been added throughout the years, to make LinkedIn more social and more interactive:
- Paid Accounts offers more possibilities and tools to find people.
- LinkedIn Answers allows users to post business related questions that anyone else can view.
- LinkedIn Ads – LinkedIn has a paid service of ads called LinkedIn Ads, where users can create a small ad to be shown on the side of the prominent pages on the site, in a similar way to Google’s Adwords. The ad directs people to the website of the advertiser. The advertiser specifies which LinkedIn members will be able to view the ad by selecting a target audience. The payment for the ads is done in a CPC (Pay per Click) method or CPM (pay per 1,000 impressions). There is a bid and a maximum price that the advertiser is willing to pay for each click is set. LinkedIn is now testing social recommendation based ads; they are trying to target advertising based on the keywords in a profile and conversations.
- LinkedIn Today – In March 2011 LinkedIn added another service called, LinkedIn Today. It is a social news product for business people. The news is aggregated from different established sources like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, Huffington Post etc. and is customized to match the industries you and your connections work in. The articles in each industry are organized by how popular the story is and how many times it has been shared on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Most of the success stories with LinkedIn Ads come from job seekers and professional services. B2B is also represented in their ads and businesses claim to have success with creating new connections and receiving orders.
Back in January 2011 LinkedIn filed for an IPO, offering the first glimpse into its finances. In the first 9 month of 2010, LinkedIn turned in a profit of 10.1 million on revenue of $161 million. “We do not expect to be profitable on a GAAP basis in 2011” the company said in its filling.
Four months later, in May 2011, LinkedIn became a public traded company. Its shares went for $45 a pop. That means the company is estimated to be worth $4.3 billion. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and former CEO of LinkedIn retained 21.7% of the stock which is worth more than $1.6 billion. (Hoffman is one of the founders of Pay-Pal). The shares soared out of the gate to $87.05, and have reached over $100 for a short period before settling in the high 90’s.
Goldman Sachs, an investor, sold all its shares and quadrupled its investment in 3 years.
Read our article when we did a first look at LinkedIn in Nov 2010 and also our article on the LinkedIn IPO.
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- CMS Wire: LinkedIn Testing Social Recommendation based ad formats
- Crunchbase: LinkedIn
- LinkedIn: Partner Ads
- Quora: Is the ad targeting on LinkedIn worth paying the CPC?
- Solvater: LinkedIn Direct Ads Advertising Techniques
- Techcrunch: LinkedIn Today is Live
- Wall Street Journal (WSJ): The LinkedIn IPO Millionaires Club
What Could Be Better Than a Weekend in Vegas? A Free Weekend in Vegas @Palms
How about a weekend in Vegas that you do not have to pay for? Usually I am a firm believer in ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is,’ but not this time, not at Palms Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. In opposition of those many ideas that were in fact, too good to be true, Palms has determined that tapping out a Tweet or sharing Palms offers with your friends may make this a very legit opportunity to reap huge rewards for very little effort.
Of course, if Facebook sharing or Twitter usage is too much work for you, this may not be the ideal opportunity either, but if it sounds doable, continue on.
Easy Registration
Users simply visit the Palms Social Rewards site and enter their email address, along with a chosen password. The next page offers quick click integration with the users Twitter account, and they are off and running. Once signing into the social rewards page, users will then be able to see their current Klout scores, along with available points, and account profile options. On the right-hand side, there will be many offers and opportunities that can be Tweeted, re-Tweeted, or even Facebook shared.
While users get points for each offer they Tweet or share, they also receive the added benefit of bonus points if their Tweet or Share leads to a purchase of one of the advertised opportunities.
Rewards Vs Effort
Aside from the primitive reward of getting something spectacular for very little effort, are the rewards that Palms generously doles out to those who help spread their word on social media networking sites.
- Free Deluxe Room
- Free Fantasy Tower Room
- 2 Tickets to a Playboy Comedy
- Palms VIP Passes
- Dinner for Two at Simon – Little Buddha
- Free Drinks
These are fairly hefty rewards considering that they entail everything you require for a fun weekend in Vegas, all the way down to your room and drinks. Meanwhile, users are building their Klout score which in the future may help them reap even further rewards once reaching the check-in desk at the Palms.
Maloof just gets it…
The Palms is a Maloof Company, and clearly they get it…
AdrienneMaloof seems to be the one carrying the Klout in the social aspect of the business, but with Klout adding LinkedIn and soon Foursquare, the Klout social influence may have a new look.
The Maloof Companies owns and operates hotels and casinos. It also engages in banking, food and beverage, and transportation businesses in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. In addition, the company operates gaming properties; owns interests in NBA basketball team Sacramento Kings and the WNBA basketball team Sacramento Monarchs, as well as ARCO Arena; and distributes beer and liquor in New Mexico. The company is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Disclosure: I recently was a guest at Palms Casino & Resort in Las Vegas, however I was not paid or compensated for this publication in any form. The research for this article came about as a follow up to a previous set of articles.- Klout Measures You Clout On LinkedIn Social Business Network
- A look at how important Twitter is to customer service: Palms Casino, Las Vegas
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ReferralKey Can Help to Grow Your Business
Tapping into the largest referral network available, ReferralKey has previously been described as a skillful collaboration of Angie’s List and LinkedIn, the social business network.
This system of referring business owners, among business owners and consumers allows users to build a network of contacts while building list of reputable businesses with reliable contractors and other professionals.
ReferralKey focuses on one prime element: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It also relies a bit on depending on others to have as much net etiquette as you do. While users build a network of contacts, they also refer those they know. Hopefully, those who get referrals will be kind enough or happy enough to promote you in your industry in return. In this manner, everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of this simple but valuable exchange.
Sign Up for ReferralKey
Signing up for ReferralKey is easy and requires no more than the basics. Once signed in users are brought swiftly to their dashboard where they can make decisions on elements of ReferralKey such as:
- Profile Creation
- Adding Colleagues
- Setting Rewards for Referrals
When first visiting the dashboard users should select their settings options and choose how to receive alerts, as well as profile and other privacy options.
Users can also advertise their businesses, by location and industry on ReferralKey. Doing so will also register your listing with several search engines. This will also increase the odds of other consumers finding the listing.
Although users can create their own free profiles and accounts, users are only allowed to receive three referrals before they are prompted and required to purchase a paid account. There are different plans depending on user choice.
The light plan, referred to as the Silver Key, is $10 USD per month, the Gold Key plan cost $20 USD per month. Users should study the difference in plans before making an educated decision about which would be best for their small or growing business.
This service can be solid and quite successful if the referrals help a user’s business to generate a lucrative amount of revenue. With the easy-to-navigate and use site, while providing a great deal of helpful information regarding your own contacts and in your industry.
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Social Media For Recruiting
It wasn’t long ago that social media was defined solely as a way to learn how a friend just ate at a great restaurant or who was getting engaged.
However, social media continued its evolution and became particularly useful for companies to locate, recruit, and learn about candidates for open positions. Using social media for recruiting has quickly ignited a hiring fire, lighting the way for many. While sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are still often used for ‘fun’, as well as business, others like LinkedIn have become known as more ‘serious’or ‘professional’ space.
So how does a company effectively search and target potential candidates from such a large pool though?
Recruit from Your Own List of Friends and Followers
Using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can all be useful in recruiting by being able to distribute information about open positions quickly and efficiently to large number of people. Recruiters know they’re distributing information to candidates who will take notice, especially since jobseekers are turned off by sites like CareerBuilder.com which have become filled with spam.
There are a number of free resources available. On most social media profiles, companies can use their status box in order to announce open positions, and of course good old fashioned networking is the best tool of all. On LinkedIn, after building connections of industry peers including co-workers, clients, and local companies, one can browse the profiles of each other’s connections, and then ask for introductions.
Link Up with LinkedIn
Another useful way to recruit on LinkedIn is by joining relevant groups and staying active within them by participating in the group’s discussions and keeping their eyes open for those who are active and knowledgeable.
While similar tools are available on almost all social media sites, LinkedIn gives recruiters the ability to not only view a candidate’s resume, they can also see any recommendations the candidate has received from their peers. The ability to give and receive visible recommendations is a tool that’s not as ‘visible’ and specific on other social media sites. Additionally, recruiting companies on LinkedIn can post available jobs and sign up for LinkedIn Talent Advantage, basically a toolbox for recruiters, both for fees.
There’s no reason to be afraid of approaching candidates. A recent survey on Internships.com found that almost 80 percent% of respondents didn’t mind if a company made contact about potential opportunities, so now is the time to make use of the many tools social media has to offer.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exfA5y4txms]
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LinkedIn IPO: LinkedIn Hits the Stock Market
As I mentioned in a previous post on the social networking site LinkedIn, this business based site allows users to connect to past, present, or future business contacts in effort to exchange ideas, knowledge, or perhaps even new opportunities. It also helps users to build a working portfolio that is supported by the very companies, or the leaders of the companies, that are listed on your LinkedIn profile.
One of the best available sites for career recruiting and networking, increasingly more and more often, it has become less unusual for prospective employers to ask for a link to a LinkedIn account than ever before.
Stock Market Stalled
At an initial public offering of LinkedIn stock, shares were priced at $45 on Wednesday night, by the time the stock market opened this morning, the stocks had risen to $83 per share. Within just a few hours, LinkedIn (LNKD) stocks had risen by 131% to be $104.02. This brings the current value of LinkedIn to over $9 billion dollars.
This offering of 7.84 million shares is hands-down, the biggest net IPO since GOOG, or Google, went public in the summer of 2004. This goes to further show that somewhere lurks an immense group of investors who believe that smart money rest in social networking. One firm reports that LinkedIn may now be the most expensive stock in the country. With a current price that is around 275 times more than its earnings in the last four quarters, this certainly indicates that those groups of investors may, in fact, be right on target.
Sign of the Social Media/Networking Times?
As the LinkedIn IPO is being gauged for effectiveness by other social networking giants such as Facebook, Groupon and other similar social networking sites, others believe the IPO has also been controversial as many on Wall Street as well as those in Silicon Valley believe that some investors have been taken in by an Internet bubble.
Some investors are simply just confused about how we should value any companies that are debuting online. Although others, like IPO analyst like Scott Sweet, say that LinkedIn’s spectacular market debut was a great sign for other social networking companies.
Who Uses LinkedIn?
Alexa gives LinkedIn an impressive global ranking of 17 with around 14% of their referrals coming from search engines. Most users are females between the ages of 25 and 64 who are highly educated and more often than not are browsing from home. The site is listed under the Social Networking category.
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