Author: golf Page 2 of 22

We all know how important trust is.

Some guy in a clean uniform and a firm handshake approaches you, you feel pretty good. Some creep in a sloppy uniform, tangled hair and blood dripping from a meat knife makes you cringe.

Your web site is no different. (See Ramon’s – 10WebSiteMusts.com )

When customers or prospective customers visit your web site they want to feel that they can trust what they are buying (or even just reading) from your web site. The more information you have online about your business the more comfortable shoppers will feel in buying from you. If you’re not a brand (an already trusted brand) like Amazon.com, WalMart or some other retailer – you’ll need to do a LOT to build trust, with each mouse click, with new visitors.

KikScore , a service which provides a reputation score to web sites, in a recent survey, found the following insight from the survey:

With the substantial increase over the last few years in online shopping, consumers have become aware of the constant threat of hackers, scammers, and identity thieves that operate online. Now consumers are increasingly searching for and hiring local service businesses such as contractors, lawyers, plumbers and landscapers. These shoppers and consumers that perform local searches raise growing concerns about the trustworthiness of the businesses that they find online. Increasingly, if shoppers and browsers visit a website and feel that it is not trustworthy, consumers will simply leave and go to another website. According to findings from the KikScore survey, the fear of being defrauded or being a victim of an online scam has led more than 90% of consumers that shop online not to complete a transaction.

via www.businessinsider.com

I founded buySAFE, the world's leading ecommerce trust and safety company, and so I have a deep appreciation for the high correlation between trust perceptions / conversion rates. KikScore's research illustrates this crucial ecommerce concept.

Well done guys.

A driver in the next lane is moving his lips. Is he on a hands-free cellphone? Talking to someone in the car? To himself? Singing along to the radio?

If lawmakers follow the advice of a federal board, police officers will have to start figuring that out — somehow.

The National Transportation Safety Board said this week that drivers should not only be barred from using hand-held cellphones, as they are in several states, but also from using hands-free devices. No more “Sorry, I’m stuck in traffic” calls, or virtually any other cellphone chatter behind the wheel.

Though no state has yet implemented such restrictive rules, the NTSB’s recommendations carry weight that could place such language into future laws, or motivate the federal government to cut funding to states that don’t follow suit.

Many of the men and women patrolling the nation’s streets and highways wonder how they would sort the criminally chatty from the legally chatty.

“It would be almost impossible to determine if someone was talking on a phone or exercising their vocal cords,” said Capt. Donald Melanson of the West Hartford, Conn., police department, which took part in a national pilot program aimed at cracking down on drivers’ cellphone use. “That would be much more difficult to enforce, almost to the point where it would be impossible.”

via www.washingtonpost.com

I am obviously not a fan of distracted driving, but the idea of banning all phone use in a car seems like a dramatic overreach and a bit ridiculous. It will be unenforceable, and in a short time, technology will eliminate many of the distracting aspects of car calls… like dialing a phone with your fingers versus with your voice.

Talking to someone hands-free is no different or worse than dealing with two distracting kids in the back seat. I don't see how you can make this illegal unless you want to also making talking in a car illegal in general. Obviously, that would be a stupid idea. Thus, this is a stupid idea.

We’ve come to accept that millennials adopt technology at a faster rate than other generations. And we’ve come to accept that millennial moms are uber-digital — not only the mommy-bloggers gathering in San Diego this week for the annual BlogHer conference. What we don’t often talk about is how that’s going to shape the generation coming up after the millennials — the iGen. Technology isn’t going to skip this generation, it’s being handed down right from mother to child.

via adage.com

Amazing stats. Kids know how to use a phone before they can tie their shoes. Very interesting.

Do you know your children's friends? Sure, you may meet some of them when they come over to play Dead Rising 2 or work on homework with your kid, but a huge amount of a modern kid's social interaction happens online. uKnowKids ($9.95/month or $99.95/year) aims to help you get familiar with your child's circle of online friends and warn you of any risky or inappropriate online interactions. It doesn't attempt to impose parental control on the kids; it's strictly an informational tool.

via www.pcmag.com

PC Magazine rated uKnowKids 4 stars (Very Good).

Not bad for a product and company that has been financed on a dime, not a dollar to date.

Congratulations to the entire uKnow.com team. Well done!

While Facebook and Twitter are popular sites for making friends, teens have also seen social media’s unfriendly side — 88 percent of them report having witnessed mean or cruel behavior, according to a new study.

About 12 percent of the teenagers said they saw this type of behavior online “frequently,” while 29 percent said they observed it “sometimes,” said the report by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 799 teens between the ages of 12 and 17.

At the same time, 69 percent of the teens said their peers are mostly kind on social-networking sites, the research said. About 95 percent of all American teens between the ages of 12 and 17 use the Internet, with 80 percent of them using social- media sites, the report said.

via www.businessweek.com

This is an amazing study by Pew. 9 in 10 kids have witnessed bullying occur on the major social networks.

Mom and Dads need to get engaged… NOW!

My recommendation is that if you are a parent, you should immediately go to uKnowKids.com and take advantage of their free parental intelligence tools.

If you are a grandparent, aunt, uncle, etc…, share uKnowKids.com with those you love. Again, they have free tools you can start using today!

Scalable pricing is a powerful tool to grow revenue in a SaaS or software business. It allows you to capture more of the revenue that your customers are willing to pay, without putting off smaller customers that are not able to pay high prices. It also provides a great way to continue to grow revenue from your existing customers. This post looks at how to create scalable pricing using multiple pricing axes, and discusses the different types of axes that can be used.

via www.forentrepreneurs.com

This is a great article for those entrepreneurs thinking about how to optimize the profitability of their consumer or enterprise SAAS business models. This includes freemium.

At the beginning of August, Betabeat began talking about a coming crunch for seed stage companies in New York. We believe that the bubble in early stage financing had peaked, and that in the coming months, many young startups would find it hard to raise follow-on cash.

At the time, local investors like Chris Dixon and Shai Goldman argued that this wasn’t some dire turn of events, but simply the natural cycle of venture capital funding playing out. But the drumbeat of seed stage slaughter now seems to have made its way to the mainstream press.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday, “Web Startups Hit Cash Crunch,” which claimed that valuations for these early stage companies had fallen by as much as half in recent months and the venture capital funding was at an all time low. AngelList’s Naval Ravikant said that startup financing is getting weaker by the week and that the survival rate for young companies is dropping fast.

But new data from CB Insights, a venture capital database here in New York, disputes that outlook. Their quarterly report shows a record number of seed stage deals over the last quarter and a steady growth in overall venture deal flow and funding since 2009.

via www.betabeat.com

This is another article disputing the WSJ's suggestion that the financing market is quickly going south for startups. Again, a good read.

When you ask a successful entrepreneur how they did it, you are almost guaranteed to hear them cite “luck” as a prominent factor. Why? Because most major decisions in a startup are "life or death," and to succeed you need to make the correct call on many of these decisions. In such a context, survival and success appear lucky. Well, it's not.

With startups, being fast is actually better than being right. A founder needs to make hundreds of critical decisions, and any indecision can literally grind all progress to a halt. Hesitating, over-analyzing, or 'waiting to see what happens' are all forms of indecision, and when you are indecisive you let the world decide the outcome for you. Indecision leaves the outcome to chance, and your chances as a startup are bad to begin with.

Making decisions that are both fast and correct is no small feat, and is a skill that will develop over time, but here is a simple decision-making framework that I use to make decisions quickly. Indecision is death for a startup, so here's how you can avoid it;

via www.thefunded.com

A great post about startup decision-making on one of my favorites sites on the Web, The Funded (http://www.thefunded.com).

If you are an entrepreneur, a) read the article, and b) register with The Funded.

It's rare to see someone get worked up about plywood. Much less a four-star general.

But plywood, yes, those simple sheets of pressed-together timber used to cover floorboards and broken windows, is a particular topic of passion for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the retired U.S. Army general who served as commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

What gives?

"I'll let you in on the secret of plywood," McChrystal said to an audience of about 400 at the 2011 Inc. 500|5000 conference in Washington, D.C. "I lived in a room of it for more than four years. What we did in Afghanistan was we used our spaces to shape our culture."

via www.inc.com

The best quote of the day by General Stanley McChrystal… "Plywood is a state of mind!"

What? Read the article to get his thoughts. I am sure you will agree with him.

Good stuff.

There are roughly 265,000 active individual angel investors. If you want to go the route of tapping an angel network — a group made up of up to 150 individual investors who pool their finances and share the due diligence work — there are more than 300 of those. In short, there are lots to choose from and they’re ready to invest. The challenge is finding the right angel investor for you and your business.

What a lot of founders don’t realize is that not all angels invest for the same reasons. Backing a startup is a bit like shopping for a car: Do you want a sports car that does zero to 60 in four seconds? A dependable sedan? A Prius that appeals to your environmentally friendly side? Keep in mind that monetary gain may be a secondary reason for some investors.

Here are three of the most common types of angels and what motivates them:

via www.bnet.com

A good article on the subject of Angel investors. If you are a tech startup CEO, you probably already know how important angels are to your entrepreneurial ventures.

My advice… spend some time getting to know your local angel investors before you need $$ from them. Folks invest in folks they know, like and trust!