[How IoT is changing prototyping]

In 1995, a New York Times article by James Gleick offered a glimpse at the future of the Internet of Things by focusing on a hot tub located in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Paul Haas, a pioneer in connecting machines and systems to the burgeoning internet, ran 50 feet of Ethernet cable to a set of sensors that returned the temperature of his hot tub.

Connecting vending machines, CD players and other devices to the internet so that users could check on their status or even manipulate was an early 1990s trend that would eventually develop into the IoT. These days, device manufacturers are constantly thinking about connectivity and the potential for interoperability. When computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University connected a Coke vending machine to the internet, they mostly focused on user-to-machine communication. By 1999, the concept of device-to-device communications was introduced at the World Economic Forum to great interest; from this point on, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications would later become a protocol along with machine-to-infrastructure.

IoT applications are not limited to telematics, smart wearables, or home automation; this tech space is being tapped by virtually all industries, from healthcare to factories, farms and whole cities, particularly those engaged in device manufacturing.

Why IoT Brings Big Changes

It is not easy to determine whether Big Data or the IoT came first; what is clear, however, is that connected devices are able to provide massive amounts of useful data that can be monitored and analyzed for the purpose of improving the prototyping and product development processes. The insight that can be gleaned from IoT devices is something that 20th century manufacturers could have only dreamed about; these days, designers can actually see how their products are performing in real-time.

How IoT Affects Product Prototyping

Original equipment manufacturers thrive on empirical data to advance their product development lifecycle. As a product designer, you would undoubtedly want to possess the intuition of Steve Jobs or Yuko Shimizu, the creator of Hello Kitty, but reality prompts you to rely on data to see how your creations, particularly your prototypes, are performing.

What the IoT offers with regard to prototyping is access to empirical data collected by means of sensors, cameras and interfaces. The IoT is not a silver bullet for the very first stage of prototyping, which will always require research, development, engineering, design, and fabrication; however, once the product is ready for testing, real-time data acquisition will make all the difference.

Similar to the historic Coke machine connected by Carnegie Mellon University students, Coca-Cola put its Freestyle vending machines on the IoT during the testing phase; these days, however, the soft drink giant continues to collect valuable data that goes far beyond the functionality of these machines. Coca-Cola has been able to see that Freestyle machines on college campuses are quite busy just before certain television programming comes on the air.

The days of expensive testing, intensive focus groups, a and learning from trial and error are being eliminated from prototyping thanks to IoT, and the decisions that need to be made before products hit the market can be formulated a lot faster.

How IoT Changes Research and Development

When Nabisco developed the curious “cheese in a spray can” product known as Easy Cheese in the 1970s, the label included a toll-free along with an invitation for consumers to call and report issues or to simply provide their thoughts about the product. Most of the calls received by Nabisco were complaints about the cheese spread failing to flow out of the can, and this is pretty much what the company expected since it needed to follow up on the product lifecycle management of Easy Cheese.

It is easy to imagine that the prototyping of Easy Cheese may have involved various kitchen and picnic mishaps of cheese flying all over the place or cans succumbing to excessive pressurization. Calls from customers to the 800-number provided by Nabisco were probably tedious and expensive to manage since they also required the mailing of certificates to replace the faulty cans, not to mention enticing consumers to send in their cans to figure out what may have happened, but this was all necessary R&D for the company.

The IoT makes it easier for manufacturers to monitor performance of their products in the field; any issues can be detected on the spot and solutions can be formulated before they become major issues. Moreover, the data gathered from products that are launched along with marketing campaigns can also be very valuable R&D information for future endeavors.

Switch from Product to Service Delivery

One of the new tenets of business created by the IoT and Big Data is that the information gathered from customer-product interactions is more valuable than the profits realized from the sales of products themselves.

The prospect of gathering valuable data is what has enabled social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to remain free services. Products connected to the IoT can be offered at lower prices and even for free if the data they are able to collect is more valuable for manufacturers.

With the above in mind, the business world is entering a paradigm shift whereby products are becoming instruments to deliver value through services. Microsoft Office 365 is a good example in this regard; this has been the profit leader for the software giant in recent years, and the company was able to acquire quite a few paid subscribers through free Windows 10 upgrades. The data that Microsoft has gleaned from the free Windows 10 product has allowed the company to fine-tune its Office 365 targeting efforts.

In the future, we may even see HVAC-as-a-service; in this case, companies will sell temperature control to be achieved with devices installed based on the flow of IoT data received and on the decisions made to maximize profits.

Final Word

The data flow created by the IoT should be a win-win situation not only for manufacturers but also for consumers and all stakeholders involved. Comprehensive real-time information should always be analyzed with the intention of improving products, services and overall experience. The goal is not to slow down the pace of engineering; the goal should be to make the right engineering decisions based on valuable empirical data. Instead of going through the arduous and expensive process of trial-and-error, manufacturers should embrace the IoT starting at the prototype stage and throughout the product lifecycle management process.

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[What’s the safest way to pay online?]

If you have ever bought anything online, and chances are that you have, you undoubtedly had to use some type of payment option. There are many different kinds, with varying levels of functionality, security, flexibility and compatibility. You can usually just use a credit card to pay for nearly anything online, and if you use a modern service and a decent bank to back your card, you should have the extra protection of 3-D Secure, such as MasterCard SecureCode or Verified by Visa. These technologies make it virtually impossible to spy on your information.

But what if you don’t want to input any of your sensitive information on certain websites? Or, if you simply don’t want to give it to multiple sites? There are other options, some of which are offered by many payment receivers, while some are only useful in certain places. Even huge retailers like Amazon.com do not accept every method of payment. Certain business offer as many options as possible, in order to make it easy for people to pay – and thus more likely that they will.

Online casinos, such as InstaCasino.com, offer multiple payment options, including e-wallets, prepaid cards, bank transfers, debit or credit card payments and even mobile payments. But what is the safest option when shopping online? As previously stated, credit cards are very safe these days, but what if you don’t want your transactions to be traceable by your bank?

You can opt to go with an online wallet, also known as an e-wallet, which acts as a middleman between the payer and the payee. The most famous one worldwide is probably PayPal, but there are plenty of other reputable services, including Skrill, Neteller, ePay, Euteller and ecoPayz – just install the app and sign up. The advantage is that it makes your payments at least slightly more secure and anonymous – but the e-wallet itself still holds and tracks your payments.

This is one of the reasons people like to use one of the many cryptocurrencies, which can be made virtually traceless. The big downside is that very few retailers accept them so far. A good compromise are the prepaid paycards, which work just like a gift card – you load it up with a certain amount, after which it works just like any regular debit card. You can buy it with cash and make card payments anywhere they accept the type of card (such as MasterCard, Amex or Visa).

Other are not connected to the major players, but are still accepted in thousands of online stores, casinos and other websites. One such service is paysafecard, which can be bought in regular shops, at gas stations and in convenience stores. Lastly, we have mobile payment, such as Zimpler. It allows you to make and confirm payments through your mobile, after which you get a regular invoice sent to you. This is very safe if your mobile is.

Simply put, the safest option for mobile payments online is most likely the pre-paid cards, since they cannot be traced to you and cannot be overcharged. However, if you use an e-wallet or your regular credit card(s) responsibly, you should be very safe as well.

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[The ultimate financial management strategy for tech startups]

For a tech startup, the first few years are critical to its growth. You need to do your research, target the right customers, create a product that meets the needs of the market, and develop a solid marketing strategy. Most importantly, to stay relevant, you need to keep pace with the ever-changing IT trends and adapt your product to them.

But, no matter how important all those steps are, none of them are possible if you don’t establish a solid financial management strategy first. Of course, managing finances is not only about getting your startup funded. This is just the beginning of your journey. It also means setting your goals realistically, exercising caution when making your decisions, and monitoring your cash flow regularly.

In other words, financial management intertwines with other segments of your business’ growth, enabling them to run smoothly and uninterruptedly.

Automate your Financial Management Efforts

Hiring an in-house accountant to handle your finances is always a great option, but it may cost you a penny. That’s exactly why many startups decide to take care of their finances on their own. However, this is easier said than done.

To do so properly, you first need to be familiar with the basics of accounting. For example, if you don’t know how to read your financial statements, including a cash flow statement, an income statement, a balance sheet, and a statement of shareholder’s equity, it’s time to learn how to do so.

Most importantly, you need to keep track of every single dollar your business spends or earns. This means handling mountains of receipts, taxes, invoices, bills, and of course, salaries. Some store them in a shoe box, while others enter all their transactions to Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

However, in today’s era of sophisticated IT solutions, most of startups and small businesses decide to automate their accounting efforts. For example, there is a plethora of cloud-based accounting platforms, such as FreshBooks or Xero that will do all the hard work for you and help you monitor and manage your cash flow and outflow instantly, regardless of your location.

Also, by automating your recurring payment system, you won’t have to collect and process your payments manually ever again. Tools like these help you create payment plans tailored to your startup’s needs and let you choose the frequency of payments, amounts to be collected, and payment methods on your own.

Choose the Right Funding Method

Have you ever watched the HBO’s Silicon Valley? If you have, then you then you certainly know that securing funds is one of the most common problems startups come across. Every decision you make can either help you take your business to the next level or distract you from attaining your long-term goals.

In other words, choosing a funding option may make or break your startup’s future. According to the recent CB Insights report, 13% of startups fail due to the disharmony between their management and investors, while 8% of them cannot find investors interested in funding their product.

What you need to know is that, when it comes to choosing your funding methods, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. To do so, you need to do your research and go with the one that meets your business’ needs.

• Take out a bank loan.
• Apply for a government or private sector grant.
• Take advantage of startup incubators and accelerators that have become extremely popular in Silicon Valley over the past few years.
• Participate in a tech startup contest, such as including TechCrunch Disrupt, Web Summit, Slush, Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge, etc.

Allocate your Resources Judiciously

Every Silicon Valley startup dreams of becoming the next Apple, Google, or Microsoft. They book a fancy office in the heart of the city, throw numerous expensive parties, and invest in the state-of-the-art equipment. They set the bar too high and, consequently, most of them will run out of cash and sink. The CB Insights’ report mentioned above points out that 29% of startups fail because they don’t allocate their time and money judiciously.

To stay competitive, you need to grow gradually and keep all your unnecessary expenses low. Even though this means scaling down your ideas a bit, this is the only way to stay competitive. For example, instead of buying new equipment, use the existing one. Also, you don’t really need that huge office right now. To save your money, you could consider outsourcing your workflow.

With a bunch of affordable IM apps, cloud storage providers, and workplace collaboration platforms, your employees will be able to work together on important projects and communicate in real-time, regardless of their time zone and location. You will benefit from this option, as well. Namely, studies show that remote working programs help companies save up to $11,000 per year.

Monitor and Measure your Financial Health

To stay on top of your resources, you need to keep an eye out for their fluctuations. For instance, to see whether your business is performing at an expected level, you could start with analyzing your current financial statements and comparing them to the previous ones.

And, with the accounting platforms mentioned above, this has never been simpler. They will provide you with a detailed list of all your transactions, helping you analyze your company’s progress and plan ahead. Most importantly, they will give you an invaluable insight into your past inflow and outflow patterns. They will help you see what works for your business, set achievable milestones, and make data-oriented decisions.

For example, you’re not satisfied with your sales and you want to increase them by selling 30% more products than last year. All you need to do is analyze your last year’s sales, see how they rise or drop due to various factors. Based on the facts you collect, develop a new sales plan that will help you reach your goals.

Back to You

Handling your startup’s finances is an extremely complex and time-consuming process. And, if not done properly, it may jeopardize your startup’s bottom line.

So, use cloud-based platforms to automate your financial management efforts and monitor your performance.

Choose the funding method that gives your startup a chance to grow faster.

Set your goals realistically and cut all unnecessary expenses.

This way, you will manage to stay competitive, make reasonable decisions, and maybe one day grow your startup into a tech giant.

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[How influencer marketing for small business can be effective]

Most of us are familiar with the Clorox ad campaign that shows David Hasselhoff (Baywatch) visiting random people’s house and cleaning up for them with the help of Clorox supplies. The ad campaign shows that cleaning doesn’t have to be a hassle and was well-promoted through a series of Vine videos, Twitter posts and the trending hashtag of #HassleOffDay. A few lucky families also got a chance to have their house cleaned by the Hoff through a lucky draw contest. As a result, the campaign’s videos received more than one million views while the hashtag was tweeted 12,595 times on Twitter. Above all, the program secured 146 million impressions on various media channels including Huffington Post, CBS News, Fox News, Yahoo!, ABC News, and more.

In the business industry, there is a lot of hype around influencer marketing. In fact, we have all seen influencers marketing huge brands such as Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola, etc. However, as a small business owner, you may be skeptical about the role of influencers in your niche. Let’s face it, a small business owner wouldn’t have the budget to pay Cristiano Ronaldo for the promotion of their product. Then how can the small business industry make use of influencer marketing and enhance their brand image?

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is the practice of connecting your brand with influential people who have a sizable amount of followers on social media. The marketing campaign works even better if the influential person is related to your niche industry.

A 2015 survey by the Tomoson indicates that businesses are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. No wonder 59% of marketers intend to increase their influencer marketing budget in the coming years.

Simply put, there are many perks of influencer marketing for a business, regardless of its size. But how to apply the techniques correctly?

1. Finding influencers

Contrary to the myth, influencer marketing does not have to be a celebrity endorsement. In fact, you can use anyone in your particular niche who has managed to build up a solid reputation on social media. These influencers can be anyone from bloggers to social media activist and even loyal fans of your brand. The key is to find someone the audience looks up to and admires.

Take the example of Glossier – a skincare retailer. The company, instead of using big names for their influencer marketing campaign, decided to collaborate with Cecilia Gorgon, who has about 8,500 Instagram followers. The University of Michigan student reviewed several Glossier products on her Instagram page and recommended them to her followers. As a result, the followers of influencer also started to trust Glossier product which resulted in more engagement and profits for the company. Statistics also show that 72% of consumers make a purchase decision after reading a positive review about the particular product/service.

Hashtags are one of the best ways to find relevant topic and influencers related to your niche. Online tracking tools such as Buzzsomo can also help you find influential leaders on all major social media sites.

2. Select your social media channel

Firstly, consider your audience. Who are they? Where do they spend their time? For instance, Snapchat is especially popular with the youth and boasts 150 million users. On the other hand, Instagram is considered to be the most influential channel by 59% of influencers. To get your message to the right demographics, make sure you choose a social media for small business that is popular with your target audience.

Take the example of Lynda – the popular e-learning platform. To increase members enrolled in their virtual academy, they decided to use YouTube as it is the second most visited website in the world. Rooster Teeth, The Fine Brothers, and Jack Douglass were some of the renowned personalities that promoted Lynda.com on their YouTube channels. Jack Douglass even challenged his viewers to learn new skills from the online platform and share their creation with him. The videos were well-acknowledged and received high engagement from the audience boosting Lynda.com’s sales.

3. Define your goals

Every marketing campaign has a plan. Are you promoting your product for more revenue? Or, are you looking for an influencer to advertise your blog/website? Perhaps you want to engage more with your consumer? Before initiating your influencer campaign, make sure you draft out goals for your motive.

For instance, retailer Lord & Taylor collaborated with 50 fashionistas on Instagram and had them each pose wearing the same dress. As a result – the particular dress sold out within a week.

Becca cosmetics also applied the same strategy. They enlisted Chrissy Teigen to endorse their product on her Instagram page. Since Chrissy Teigen’s list of followers comprises of people who like makeup, the post led to 140,000 likes and of course more profit for the company.

4. Be consistent

Success rarely happens overnight. To achieve the goals of your influencer marketing campaign, be patient and continue to be persistent through different means. Holding contests is one of the best ways to engage with your viewers.

Adidas followed similar tactics recently. Although the company is a household name, it decided to get ahead of its competitors and launched a contest on Instagram. The sporting brand partnered with Selena Gomez who encouraged her fans to share their portraits and get a chance to model for the company. The campaign, led by the hashtag #MyNeoShoot, managed to accumulate more than 71,000 mentions while the contest received 12,000 entries. Moreover, their Instagram page grew with 41,000 new followers. The key takeaway for small business owners from the Adidas campaign is how the brand involved their fans and encouraged them to interact with their page.

Wolf Gourmet also engaged with their audience by hosting a giveaway, an expensive blender, from their lineup. The company known for high-end kitchen appliances worked with blogger Natasha who showcased several recipes created using the mixer. She also listed several reasons for using the Wolf Blender, which led more than 14,000 fans to send in their entrees.

Conclusion

Using influencer marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of targeting the relevant audience and building brand awareness. The results of such marketing campaigns are better than those of traditional methods and have proven to increase the ROI of brands substantially. Apply the these tips in your marketing campaign and do let us know how they work out for you!

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[Uncommon magically connects qualified job seekers to employers]

As someone who is currently looking for new job opportunities I pounced at the chance to learn more about a new startup that’s tackling hiring called Uncommon. The company was founded by Amir Ashkenazi and Teg Grenager, two veteran entrepreneurs with extensive experience building B2B products and who had previously worked together to start the programmatic video advertising startup Adap.tv, which was acquired by AOL for $405 million. Ashkenazi also founded Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay for $634 million.

Having built successful companies in the past the two of them realized how difficult hiring people actually was for many organizations and decided to take on the challenge. “When I was hiring for my previous companies, I was stunned at how finding talent was based on a ‘needle in a haystack’ approach,” said Teg Grenager, CEO of Uncommon. “Now, we’re creating what I wish I had then: a simple and effective way to connect with only qualified applicants who are ready to be interviewed, allowing recruiters to spend less time sourcing and more time hiring great talent.”

According to Amir, the job market has not changed much since the classified ads era. He argues that it’s basically a black box for those on both sides of the hiring equation. And you know what–I agree. Having hired people myself and as someone who’s been (and is currently) on the other end of the equation, he’s absolutely right. The overall process hasn’t changed much, for the most part it’s still a very manual and antiquated process of sourcing and screening talent. In addition to that, because its become easier to apply to jobs thanks to the internet, most companies are forced to compromise between interested candidates that aren’t qualified and qualified candidates that aren’t interested — rarely getting both.

This is exactly where Uncommon comes into play. Uncommon will ensure that only qualified and interested candidates get in front of employers.

How does Uncommon work?

Companies that use Uncommon can configure specific parameters and qualifications for their technology to look for in every application. You can fine tune your job posting to include factors like education level, career tenure, industry experience, and any mix of hard and soft skills, then set a budget for finding that ideal candidate

More specifically, Uncommon’s AI analyzes each resume to deliver guaranteed qualified applicants in a transparent way. Unlike ‘black box’ AI hiring systems that provide little insight into the decision-making process, Uncommon IQ shows exactly why an applicant is (or is not) qualified for a given position with a side by side comparison of the job requirements and the applicant’s resume. The tech is right 50 percent of the time which actually translate better than just posting a job on a job board and praying you’ll be able to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The company’s AI technology has already been trained with millions of resumes being passed through it and of course, its accuracy will only improve as more applicants submit job applications. During my call with Amir and Teg I decided to throw them a curveball and requested they run my resume through their AI so I could see firsthand what it thought of me. After all, I am currently in the job market and if Uncommon becomes a widely used product (which seems likely) I’d love to make sure it actually works, right?

Fortunately both Amir and Teg thought that was a great idea and we tested Uncommon’s tech with my resume right then and there. The Uncommon parsing technology read my through resume and identified my places of employment and my various skills and areas of expertise. There was one very small issue I noticed, it listed my work experience at BestTechie twice and omitted my work experience at another startup–but that’s really a very small issue as the technology gives you the option to modify the field and correct it on the spot before submitting the actual application. What I was really surprised about was how spot on the Uncommon technology was at spotting and grading my skills–it even included skills that aren’t on my resume but that I do actually have.

Benefits for employers

Aside from the benefits I outlined above, using Uncommon will help your company partake in bias-resistant recruiting. Recruiters typically spend only six seconds evaluating any given candidate and are prone to favoring particular schools, names, ethnicities, and places of birth over objective qualifications. Uncommon IQ reduces human bias and levels the playing field for anyone with the right skills to get the job by using a neutral mechanism for evaluating talent — aiming to increase diversity in hiring as a result.

Uncommon is also trying to price itself aggressively to offer employers the best bang for their buck. The company offers a 14-day no commitment free trial that you can cancel at any time. Pricing is $9.95 per qualified candidate using Uncommon IQ’s first-of-its-kind Cost Per Interested & Qualified (CPIQ) pricing model, customers are only charged when a fully qualified and interested candidate applies for a specified open position, and companies can even challenge irrelevant resumes for an immediate refund.

Benefits for job seekers

After we submitted my job application for a job at Uncommon, something really interesting happened. On the page acknowledging my application was successfully sent, there were two recommendations to me (the job seeker) for additional places to consider applying where I would be considered a qualified candidate. One was at Twitter for a data/measurement position and one was for another company which I hadn’t heard of but definitely need to look up now. I think this feature of Uncommon is truly valuable for job seekers–gone will be the days of applying blindly to different jobs where you may think you’re qualified but the recruiter/hiring manager is looking for something else and there’s no way for you to know.

While the job recommendation feature is currently limited to showing two positions Uncommon has deemed you qualified for after applying to another job listed on the platform, I’m told by Amir and Teg that they have big plans to expand on this functionality and offer job seekers many more tools and features to help improve their job search. No word just yet when to expect these updates to the product but I’ll let you know once I know. In the mean time, I need to go apply for that Twitter job.

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[Engagement or Lead Generation: What should be my PPC goal?]

So you’ve decided to add PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns to your marketing mix. Most likely, you’ve engaged several firms and received a few elaborate proposals, all offering competing strategies.

I’ll bet there are firms telling you awareness and engagement are your goals. Their campaigns will get you in front of people’s eyes and build your brand. They say awareness and engagement are less expensive than lead generation and can enhance your other marketing and sales efforts. It takes five to seven touches (times a person comes into contact with your brand) to close a deal.

I’ll bet there’s another set of proposals that tell you lead generation is the only way to go. Focus on the buyers with their wallets out, and get as many of them as possible. They say awareness is expensive and a waste of money.

Both proposals make perfect sense.

And both are incomplete.

In reality, engagement campaigns and lead generation campaigns WORK TOGETHER to deliver the best ROI. Many media buyers miss a critical step: They fail to understand the process your prospects go through to become buyers.

The Key to PPC Success – Understanding Your Buyers

Any buyer of any product goes through a process. They start with a feeling of need or want and move to making a purchase. In the marketing world, we refer to that as the marketing funnel. Here’s what it looks like:

Let’s use a new vehicle purchase as an example. If you’re ready to replace that clunker with a sleek, new sports car, you’re probably going to the web to start your search. What kinds of cars are available? What features do they have? What do they cost? Who sells these cars in your area? How reputable are the dealers? Which dealers have the car you want? How do you set up a test-drive?

You’re starting to catch my drift: Buyers follow a process of discovery and learning before finally making a buying decision.

If you jump to the end of the process and try to sell a product to someone with whom you haven’t first established a relationship, it’s like asking them to marry you on the first date.

The odds of success aren’t good.

Using the car analogy, here’s how the marketing funnel stages play out:

• Awareness – You’re shown image ads on car-research sites like Edmunds.com. You see promoted blog posts on Facebook that describe options for similar cars. Social media posts
• Interest – You’re shown promoted events, like end-of-month sales and family events at the dealership. You research specific details about your potential car, like MPG and horsepower.
• Decision – You take a test-drive and get an e-price. You actually buy the car.
• Action – You leave a reviews and refer friends to the resources and dealership you used to make your decision.

Engagement campaigns target Awareness and Interest. Lead-generation campaigns target Decision and Action.

By coupling engagement and lead generation, you have the best chance for success.

Now let’s dive into how these two goals work within your PPC campaigns.

Examples of Engagement Campaigns and Their Metrics

Engagement PPC campaigns have one primary goal: driving interested people to your content. They’re usually ran on display networks, such as YouTube and Google Display Network, or on social platforms, like Facebook and Pinterest. Since these platforms show advertisements to prospects viewing other websites, rich image and video ads that stand out tend to perform very well.

The success of an engagement campaign is usually measured with these metrics:

Average Session Duration: How long did the user stay on your website?

Pages Per Session: How many different pages did the user look at during their visit?

Bounce Rate: What was the percentage of users that left after visiting only one page?

Click Thru Rate: What percentage of people saw your ad vs. clicked on it?

Views: For video, how many people actually watched it?

Comments: For video and social campaigns, how any people left comments?

Shares: For video and social campaigns, how many people shared with their friends?

These criteria reflect the interest of your audience in your ads and how effectively you’re getting prospects to experience your brand.

If you need more people to know who you are and what you do, engagement campaigns can be an essential tool.

What Is a Lead-Generation Campaign?

Lead-generation campaigns typically target users who are ready to buy, and therefore convert. Most search-based ads (the ones you see when you type keywords into search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) are part of lead-generation campaigns. Display ads CAN be used for generating leads, but the targeting has to be very good.

Many platforms, such as Google, have an interest target called “In-Market.” This is a collection of Google users deemed “in-the-market” for a particular product or service. You can target people looking to buy homes, cars (down to make and model), jewelry, travel, and your product or service.

The goal of a lead-generation campaign is conversions, AKA the name and email address and/or phone number of someone who wants something from you, like to set up an appointment or have more information sent to them. These are people you can have your sales force engage with. With engagement campaigns, your prospects are still anonymous.

The Secret Weapon of Top of the Funnel Advertising – Remarketing

By targeting people at the top of the funnel with image ads, video ads, and even ads on social media, you can identify prospects that are likely to want what you’re selling. But most engagement campaigns only get views of your content, not the names and email addresses your sales team needs to close sales.

That’s where the beauty of remarketing comes in.

Ever been to Amazon, looking a particular item, and then see an ad for that item on a website you’re browsing, enticing you to come back to buy it? That’s remarketing.

Remarketing is a type of advertising campaign that tags each viewer of your website with a browser cookie. That cookie stores basic information such as the page they viewed on your website and the date and timestamp of the last time they visited.

Remarketing ads show ads again to visitors to your website, and those ads can display or discuss exactly what the user was originally interested in.

Why is this good for your bottom line? Remarketing allows you to focus your ad dollars on an audience that’s already interested in your products and already knows who you are. It’s an extremely effective way to get leads or online sales at a fantastic ROI.

True PPC Success = Engagement + Lead Generation

By creating campaigns to funnel interested prospects into highly motivated buyers using a multi-campaign strategy, you can achieve massive efficiencies with your PPC marketing spend.

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[10 strategies to effectively curate content in 2018 and grow your audience]

Each and every business has the same primary goal – to gain as many customers as possible and to turn over a profit at the end of each year. Whether or not a business is able to reach this particular goal is completely dependent on what they offer their customers and how they offer these products or services to their customers. Another important factor that has a significant effect on how successful a business can truly be is their marketing strategy. When a business spends time, effort and usual money on promotional strategies, then they are able to win over customers and grow – but only when these strategies are done in an effective way. The problem, however, is that there are simply too many strategies in the modern world that can be utilized to promote a business on the internet; thus creating a confusion as to what platforms and strategies should be utilized, and which should be skipped.

A lot of business owners tend to make a point of utilizing multiple marketing channels on the internet to help them reach their target audience, but this can quickly add up in time and cost. There is no use in spending more money on advertising campaigns that what would be gained in return from the results provided by such campaigns. For this reason, business owners should not only focus on utilizing new methods, but also consider how they can save money and perhaps even re-use older content, as well as third-party content, to their advantage.

In this article, we are going to explore a topic that is most definitely not something new. However, it does seem like companies are only now starting to realize just how powerful of a method this particular strategy is when it comes to saving them time, effort and money, while still driving quality traffic back to their online properties. The strategy we are referring to is commonly known as content curation. We are going to discuss what this is and how you, the business owner, can utilize content curation to help your business succeed in growing this coming year.

Content marketing has become one of the most vital parts of promoting a business on the internet. There are numerous benefits that can be expected of such a campaign, but the time and money that needs to be spent on the creation of new content that should be shared with an existing audience, as well as potentially new customers, can become the downfall of a business. Since frequent sharing of information, data and other digital objects are needed for a content marketing strategy to be effective, it would also mean a business owner will have to spend a lot of time and often also a lot of money to get new blog posts created, new images designed and new videos recorded.

This is where content creation comes into play, offering business owners an opportunity to share a lot of content with their audience without necessarily having to create each and every piece themselves. This does not only save a considerable amount of money, but also a lot of time – which means the business owner can spend more time on other aspects of their business that will help them grow even more.

Content curation is a process of utilizing content created by another company, person or brand, in such a way to benefit your own business. At first, it may seem like an unethical approach, but there are many ways to use content curation without overstepping any copyright boundaries.

Strategies For Content Curation In 2018

While it may not be considered legal or ethical to outright copy content created by someone else and claim it as your own, content curation offers an alternative solution to help your business benefit from work done by someone else, but without taking credit for the work. Hootsuite explains that content curation offers a business new networking opportunities, as well as reduces the amount of pressure placed on the business owner regarding new content that constantly needs to be created. Furthermore, they continue to explain that this particular content marketing strategy helps to grow a business considerably and also helps a business become a recognized figure in its industry.

Let’s take a look at some effective strategies that your business or brand can utilize in order to make the most out of content curation for the upcoming year. These strategies will help your business grow in multiple ways – from improving Google ranking to ensuring your business is the first to give your audience a scoop of the latest news in your industry.

1. Use Social Media Networks To Source Sharable Content

When it comes to content curation, one of the most effective ways to utilize this particular strategy is to share popular content on your social media profiles – the good news here is that you do not have to only share your own content. Utilize the search features offered by social networks to look for content that is creating a buzz in your industry, then share this content on your company’s profile page. This is sure to drive some buzz and even help to increase your page’s exposure.

2. Share Industry-Related Videos

According to WordStream, as much as 92% of people who watch videos on their mobile devices tend to share the videos they watch on their social profiles at a frequent basis. For this reason, including videos in your content curation strategy for 2018 is essential. Try to find videos that are already driving a lot of engagement and share them on your company’s profile pages. If you reach the right target audience, you’ll surely gain a lot of exposure for your company’s social media profiles – this means more likes, shares, follows and, of course, website clicks.

3. Turn An Existing Blog Post Into A Video

With video becoming the new way people are obtaining information on the internet, it is important that you catch up to this particular trend. You probably already have hundreds of blog posts on your blog, but only a few (if any) videos. Try to go back to your older blog posts and see if there are any posts that might be worth turning into a video. There is no need to go “all out” – simply create a presentation video with some voice and post it on YouTube, Facebook and other social networks you are active on.

4. Turn Existing Blog Posts Into Infographics

Apart from video content, images, especially infographics, are also extremely popular on the internet. An infographic offers readers an easy way to obtain information without having to watch through a five or ten-minute video, and without having to read through an extremely long article. Similar to the previous strategy, see if you have any older blog posts with important facts and information that you can turn into an infographic – then share this infographic on your social profiles.

5. Blog About The Latest News In Your Industry

This may not be a direct type of curation strategy, but is surely an effective way of creating some buzz for your brand and website. Look up the latest news in your industry, then see what may interest your particular target audience. Decide on a topic written by an authority in your industry, then write a small post about this particular topic. Post this content on your blog and link back to the original source – then share the post on your social media channels.

6. Don’t Limit Yourself To Social Media Networks

The majority of publications that describe effective strategies that can be utilized for content curation tend to focus on social media sharing. This, however, is not the only way in which a business owner can utilize content curation for their own benefit. As we described previously, make use of your blog, as well as other channels where you are active in order to curate content to drive more engagement to your website.

7. Utilize Content Curation Tools

For those who find it somewhat difficult to effectively utilize content curation for their business, there are a large variety of tools that can be utilized to assist with making the process easier. According to Forbes, the most effective tools that can be used for this particular purpose include Curata, Pocket, Scoop.It and Feed.ly. Some of these tools do tend to cost some money, but there are services that are free to use or offer affordable monthly plans.

8. Personalize Your Curations

Content curation tremendously speeds up the process of creating and sharing content for your audience, but it is important to still add a personal touch to the content you share. When you share a post on your company’s Facebook profile page, for example, do not only hit the share button but also add a short message to your audience that tells them why you are sharing the particular content and why they may be interested. This will help to establish you as an authority in your niche.

9. Use A Good Mix Of Curated Content

When business owners and marketers start out with content curation, they may not be sure what exactly they should curate. This often leads them to share random pieces of content on their pages and blogs. Unfortunately, this may also lead to content that is too persistent. Try to mix things up by sharing a video one day, perhaps an infographic the next day and a news-related article the following day. This will help to keep things interesting.

10. Schedule Ahead

Finally, we want our readers to note that they do not have to actively browse their social media profiles for potential content they can curate and share. Set out some time once a week to look upon content that can be shared, then utilize social media management tools to help you create a schedule that will automatically post your content for you. Buffer Social recommends utilizing Buffer, HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Agora Pulse for effective results.

Conclusion

A content marketing strategy is important for every business in the modern day, but content marketing is only effective when a brand or company ensures they are fully utilizing their opportunities. When it comes to creating content, a lot of time can often be saved by utilizing content curation as part of a content marketing campaign. Content curation is not only an effective way of saving money and time but also has numerous other benefits that a business can benefit from – even when simply trying to improve Google ranking.

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[AI is growing quicker than we can manage it]

Due to the tone of many news articles from major sources, people would quickly conclude artificial intelligence (AI) is an extremely promising technology that could help humans reach the places they need to go by car, buy items with greater efficiency and much more. Some analysts even say AI will change the world as we know it.

Add machine learning — which is a specific type of technology under the AI umbrella — into the mix, and it’s easy to see how formerly arduous or repetitive tasks such as legal research or maintaining a tidy inbox become significantly more manageable.

Most people would agree it sounds convenient to use technologies that learn their habits and respond accordingly.

Being aware of the potential downsides of the rapidly emerging capabilities associated with it allows for having a well-balanced view of the technology and what it offers.

As excited as I am about all the neat AI devices and apps available to consumers, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit afraid of how quickly this technology has grown.

AI Can Learn Bad Behavior From Humans

Whenever people spend more than a few minutes in public or go on social media, it’s not hard to recognize some members of the human race don’t embody desirable behavior traits. Racial slurs and inappropriate sexual comments abound.

Researchers discovered AI tends to pick up on the excessive characteristics people display, taking most of what they know from those behavior-based features. Individuals caution it wouldn’t be hard for AI technology to start showcasing the same things it sees in humans who engage in online “trolling.”

One of the most well-documented examples of this phenomenon is a Microsoft-created Twitter bot named Tay. Developers gave her a female gender identity and unleashed her on the world in March 2016. Within hours, Tay’s interactions with humans taught her to approve of Adolf Hitler and call Barack Obama a “monkey.”

The Tay experiment suggests tech specialists cannot assume AI will learn the proper things. Some people are too badly mannered for that to happen reliably. What might happen if AI becomes a tool to promote racism, sexism and other factors that lead to divided societies? Would people who build them get punished? Will guidelines spell out responsible uses for AI? It’s too soon to tell.

AI Could Potentially Go Outside Its Programming Framework

Science-fiction plotlines feature countless incidences of robots that run amok and don’t operate according to programming. Alphabet Labs, Google’s parent company, believes it’s worth exploring whether AI technology could break the boundaries of what it learned from humans and do things not present within its programming.

Ongoing tests by Alphabet aim to determine how to turn off AI technology if things go wrong, what to do if real-world conditions vary from a training environment and how to prevent unintentional side effects. People might argue it’s comforting to know researchers are taking a proactive stance in case AI becomes disobedient.

However, they could also become worried about the tests. They could quickly wonder, “What happens if the AI becomes smarter than humans before researchers can figure out solutions?” Since that outcome is still restricted to the pages of fictional novels, wary individuals may become understandably fearful of the future.

People Are Concerned About the Privacy of Sensitive Information

The smarter and more ubiquitous AI becomes, the more people raise the alarm about whether sensitive data will stay protected and how it’ll be used or stored. For example, Facebook recently created an AI-driven application that could help detect site users who are suicide risks. It scans posts and gives alerts about people who may want to end their lives.

The social media site already has functionality allowing people to report posts made by individuals who seem troubled, but it requires moderator review. Plus, content from people in distress often gets skipped over. Due to privacy laws in the European Union, though, Facebook does not have permission to launch this tool in EU countries.

Now that AI is increasingly cemented in our technology landscape, people are speaking up and asserting they don’t think their respective governments take AI and privacy concerns into account. Although most countries have general privacy laws, leaders have not yet established specific rules related to artificial intelligence.

Results from a recent survey conducted by Genpact indicate the public is more than ready for such regulations. The poll of more than 5,000 people from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia found 59 percent of participants thought governments should do more to protect personal data from AI.

These examples are compelling, and they merely scratch the surface of AI’s capabilities. It’s clear, though — particularly from Facebook’s suicide detector algorithm — even functionality that seems fantastic may cause concerns and have an understandably adverse effect on society’s willingness to adapt to it.

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[How to disable autoplay videos in Google Chrome for every site]

It was reported late last year that Google would be offering various improvements in Chrome 64 to help quell user concerns over website’s that autoplay videos–especially those that do with the sound enabled. I know first hand that I’ve been nearly scared out of my chair one too many times because of autoplay videos with the sound on. The new improvements in Chrome 64 are supposed to allow users to mute specific websites from being able to play sound on their computer. There’s just one problem: the feature only works on a site by site basis.

In other words, while the setting to have autoplay content automatically muted in Chrome 64 does exist (right click on a tab and click “Mute Site,”) unfortunately, it isn’t a one-and-done setting — it has to be done for every website you want it applied to — but it will mute sound for any content that is navigated to under the parent domain. That wasn’t good enough for me so I started trekking through Chrome 64’s internal settings and found something that appears to do exactly what we all want: disable autoplay videos on every site. Here’s how to enable it.

In the Chrome Omnibar (URL/Search bar) type the following:

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

You will be brought to a page where you’ll see something called Autoplay policy and to the right of the description will be a drop down menu which will likely say “Default” click on that and select the following option from the drop down menu: “Document user activation is required.”

This means that videos should only play if you explicitly click on them.

What the setting should look like when changing it.

You will now see a message towards the bottom of Chrome tell you to restart the browser for the changes to take affect–don’t restart Chrome just yet as there’s one other setting I’m going to have you change here.

In the Chrome Omnibar type the following:

chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting

You will now be brought to another setting called Tab audio muting UI control. This setting makes the little sound icon that appears inside a site’s tab clickable, allowing you to quickly mute or unmute any audio coming from a site if for some reason it starts playing when you load up a website. This will be the fastest way to mute any audio. I don’t know why it isn’t enabled by default. Regardless, where it says “Disabled,” in the drop down menu click on that and select “Enabled.”

What the Tab audio muting UI control should look like when changed.

Now restart Google Chrome.

And that’s it, you should be autoplay video free on every site you visit.

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[How to avoid getting penalized by Google in 2018]

Google is a digital titan and you don’t want to mess around with it. The company established a full set of rules that you must respect in order to keep your online business alive. Following these standards, you get the opportunity to compete with other companies in a cyber market. But if you don’t, Google will penalize your website.

It is not necessary to explain too extensively the consequences of Google’s discipline measures. They will immediately hurt your project and you will have to invest a lot of time (and money) to get back where you once were, while competitors will be a long way ahead.

For this reason, it is not the question whether you should play the way Google tells you to. The question is how to do it precisely and continuously. Our suggestions will help you learn how to avoid getting penalized by Google in 2018.

You Cannot Buy Links

Buying links is one of the most harmful SEO practices. It doesn’t matter whether you do it from private blogging networks (PBN) or regular websites, Google will penalize you just the same. Its purpose is to increase your ranking artificially, which is not approved by the biggest search engine. Google has been investing a lot recently in technology that prevents link buying, so you will probably be discovered. But the solution is simple – don’t buy links.

Avoid Keyword Overuse

You’ve probably heard many times that digital content is supposed to be keyword rich, which indeed is true. However, it doesn’t mean that you should exercise the so-called keyword-stuffing in order to skyrocket webpage ranking. Google disapproves such behavior and stimulates the production of high-quality content. The search engine uses advanced algorithms to detect and penalize keyword abusers. Therefore, create a habit of making valuable, not keyword-stuffed, posts.

Don’t Steal Content

As the Internet giant, Google is constantly growing and improving capabilities. Today, it is relatively easy for this system to recognize content theft and label you as digital thief. Mark Coleman, an SEO specialist at Best Essays, explained it briefly: “In terms of plagiarism, Google functions pretty much like the real world – you don’t have the right to do it and you will be punished as soon as you get caught. The only difference is that you can get caught stealing online much easier, so make sure to create your own content.”

Stop Intrusive Advertising

Pop-ups and similar types of advertising methods used to be a cool thing in the early stages of online marketing. But the fairytale was over soon and now more than 600 million surfers use ad blockers enjoy content peacefully. The reason is simple – people want to focus on posts they were searching for and don’t want promotional messages to interrupt. If you rely on this advertising tactic too often, chances are Google will suspend you.

Stay Away From Content Cloaking

Cloaking is one more way to increase search engine ranking irregularly. In its essence, the objective of cloaking is to present real content to the user but show something completely different to Google. This practice misguides spiders that crawl through the content.

Since Google has to know what is going on around the WWW, it will penalize you severely for misleading the search engine. And once you pay the fine, it will be extremely challenging to breathe a brand new life into your brand.

Spamming Can Destroy You

The anti-spam policy is one of the Google’s most important protection mechanisms. The biggest search engine hates ‘spammy’ content and if it reveals any activities in that regard, you will be penalized instantly. This is especially dangerous when you give links to websites already recognized as spammy. In this case, the only thing you will improve will be the negative ranking.

Don’t Make False Statements

You may have noticed that Google trying to adapt search engine technology so as to fit the traditional understanding of human morale. In that respect, Google is also fighting against false claims and statements that can mislead users. If users write too many negative comments about you, Google will probably find a correlation between your clickbait claims and the content you really offer to the followers. It won’t kill you but rest assured it will undermine your search ranking.

Pay Attention to Blog Comments

If you are running a blog, you have to be careful with the comment section. A lot of online comments are spammy in nature and you have to eliminate it from your page. But if you leave it like that, Google will notice irregularities and recognize an entire blog page as spam. You will have to pay the fine in this case, so you better keep your eyes open wide.

Conclusion

Marketing content is a big booster of modern business but Google is the ultimate generator in that regard. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to present products or services to the wider audience and increase brand awareness successfully.

That’s why you have to respect Google’s norms and act according to its technical guideline. In this article, we showed you how to avoid getting penalized by Google in 2018. Keep our tips in mind and act accordingly because these are the 8 Google commandments for this year.

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[There’s a new Facebook Messenger virus going around, beware of your friends!]

Did you receive a strange link from one of your Facebook contacts today? Stay alert: you may be the target of another hacking attempt. There are malicious people out there who want to decode your Facebook account or login to your Instagram account without a password in an effort to spread malware and infect computers around the world. Many of these hackers are gaining unauthorized access to your friends accounts and are using their accounts to try and trick you into infecting your computer with malware.

Here’s how to spot hacking attempts on Facebook

Many Facebook users have started to receive strange messages from their friends via Facebook Messenger. As mentioned by various reports, you will first receive a message containing a video with your image and to entice you to click on the video, a mind-blowing number of views is shown. If you click on the video, hackers will ask you for your username and password under the guise that it’s Facebook asking for your credentials. Of course, if you were to click on this link your computer will likely become infected and your account will also start sending similar messages to your friends.

A friend of mine actually shared this status update on his Facebook account just the other day and offers some good advice.

What can you do to keep your Facebook account secure?

As always, remain vigilant when online and be cautious of unusual messages from your friends, especially from friends you haven’t spoken with in some time.

Additional things you should do to stay secure on Facebook and online in general are:

• Use different passwords on every site. Don’t use the same password for your bank that you use for Facebook.
• It is highly recommended that you use a password manager to generate and store your passwords securely. My personal recommendation is 1Password.
• Use common sense. Common sense security is underrated but can make all the difference. If something seems off, don’t click it.

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[VIDEO: Promise Pegasus3 R6 unboxing]

We just got in the Promise Pegasus3 R6 and did a little unboxing video.

The Pegasus3 R6 is a 6-bay hardware RAID enclosure with dual Thunderbolt 3 ports allowing you to daisy chain up to six additional devices. Promise also offers two other models, the R4 (4 drive bay) and R8 (8 drive bay). The company recently started offering a “build to order” (BTO) option which allows customers to select from various configuration options including hard drives and solid state drives. Pricing for the BTO models starts at $1,499.

Pegasus3 R6.

The R6 model that Promise sent to us included 4 2TB SSD’s and 2 10TB HDD’s. It’s worth noting that according to Promise typical HDD performance will be approximately 200MB/s reads and 200MB/s writes, per drive and typical SSD performance will be approximately 500MB/s reads and 500MB/s writes, per drive. We haven’t tested anything just yet but will have more details of how things fare in our review. Another thing worth noting is that bandwidth on Thunderbolt 3 is limited to around 2.75GB/s.

In my opinion, I would either go with all SSD’s or all HDD’s. Of course, that decision ultimately depends on your planned use case for the device. We plan to explore that more deeply in our review.

Stay tuned!

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[5 tips on how to overcome writers and creative block]

Anyone with a creative spark knows full-well that staying motivated all the time is quite a challenging feat. Sometimes your creative juices stop flowing and you may not be up to task, be it writing, coding or designing.

“Creative block” is often considered a non-issue, since it’s all in the head. But staying inspired and clear-header is nigh impossible, especially in the modern age. The best that can be done is getting regular sparks of creative brilliance. Now THAT is definitely possible.

It’s normal for people to face periods of lackluster creativity, when there’s absolutely no desire to write or do anything that requires a creative solution. It’s important to diagnose the main trigger for this. In most cases, it’s either  perfectionism or boredom.

Why perfectionism? You may be unhappy with what you do, which may cause you to call into question every own decision. Naturally, that’s a good way to improve on quality, but also to work yourself up. Perfectionism is a real hindrance.

Whenever boredom gets thrown into the mix, it’ll lead to a steady decline in terms of results and may lead to further procrastination. (Speaking from experience here.) Every person dealing with software development, front-end and marketing will likely know what I’m talking about. If you’ve hit the proverbial wall, there are ways to get back on track.

What Writers Have To Say About Creative Block

One of the most popular writers, the master of horror Stephen King, used to claim that he never had to deal with any kind of creative block during his lengthy and prolific career. (Although, some sources claim he did have it once.) He claims to know how to tap into a permanent state of inspiration and be able to write at least 10 pages per day. King suggests that desire and will are the key for overcoming any creative block.

At the same time, other writers often prefer to spend days, weeks or even years complaining about own procrastination and lack of proper inspiration. (Writer’s block is a thing, but it’s severity is often blown out of proportion.)

If you’re a writer, staying fresh and current is kind of impossible. Current digital landscape is awash with content and information that has already been published and republished twenty times over. It’s genuinely disheartening to learn that what you’re doing has already been done. But you can put a clever spin on what you do, in most cases, it’s the only thing you can do.

Top Tips On How to Overcome Creative Block

Anyway, let’s get rid of creative block. In short there’s not much to it. When dealing with creative block, try out these suggestions. They are deviously simple, yet effective.

1. Come up with a self-imposed deadline. If you’re not under a strict time frame to deliver, make one. Nothing makes people freak like a good old deadline.
2. Take the entirety of the project you’re working on and break it up into smaller, digestible chunks. If you’re writing for a long-term project, try to come up at least few sentences or paragraphs every day. It’ll take longer to finish, but at least you’ll get some work done and won’t feel hollow about not doing anything.
3. Stand up, move a little and get your heart rate going. Sedentary lifestyles can take a lot out of a person, especially psychologically. Sometimes all it takes to break through the proverbial barrier is to move around a bit.
4. Listen to music. Workplace and studying environments tend to be filled with distractions. Music is a proven catalyst for improved concentration. Invest into a pair of great earphones and load up some of your favorite jams. I’m impartial to “Stars of the Lid” myself and I suggest looking into them.
5. Get a notebook and write down your plan for the day and for the day after it. Look, this one’s important. Having a clear plan and adding structure to your daily routine is vital part of being efficient. Adam Bennett from EssayClick puts it succinctly: “Structure is arguably the most important thing you can have. Once you have laid everything out and you begin to work, things begins to fall into place and take shape. Once you get into the flow, staying motivated is easy.”

If That Doesn’t Help…

It is said that success solely depends on personal talents and inspiration. If you’ve hit a snag, it’s probably time to reevaluate and approach things from a different angle. It is a gratifying feeling, to be excited about what you are doing, but obstacles can and will occur.

Overcoming creative block is not as difficult as it may sound at first. There are many ways of dealing with own procrastination and lack of proper inspiration, ones that I haven’t covered here. The bottom line is simple, in order to stay creative you need to enjoy what you’re doing. If that part is covered, you will always be motivated.

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[Buying Guide: the best wireless headphones for audiophiles]

If you’re in the market for the best wireless headphones for the geek and/or audiophile in your life (or for yourself), we have the perfect list of headphones for you to choose from.

Best Wireless Headphones

Bowers & Wilkins PX Wireless

Bowers & Wilkins PX ($399) – These are currently my favorite wireless headphones–they offer impeccable sound and have some of the highest build quality I’ve ever seen in headphones. The Bowers & Wilkins PX Wireless come in space grey or soft gold, both finishes look incredible. Check out our complete review here.

Sennheiser PXC 550

Sennheiser PXC 550 ($350) – The Sennheiser PXC 550 Wireless is very comfortable, relatively lightweight over-ear wireless headphone that sounds very good and features impressive noise-cancellation technology. They has touch controls and deliver excellent performance as a headset. The PXC 550’s also have good battery life.

Sony MDR1000X

Sony MDR1000X ($350) – The Sony MDR1000X are light and comfortable wireless headphones with excellent noise-cancelation and superb sound quality. They also sport a great mic for calls and have great battery life.

Master & Dynamic MW60

Master & Dynamic MW60 ($549) – The Master & Dynamic MW60’s are incredibly comfortable and offer a warm and rich sound that we’ve come to expect from M&D. They also have good battery life. It’s also worth noting that the MW60 headphones are perhaps one of the most stylish of this group and come in a variety of color choices. Be sure to check out our unboxing and first impressions video.

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[6 ways smartphones are contributing to an easier, better life]

A few weeks ago, our very own, Jeff Weisbein spoke about how smartphone addiction isn’t real. The argument was simple: smartphones have become so prominent in our lives due to them replacing much of the other devices or means of getting information.

For instance, Jeff mentions that unlike in the 1990’s, where newspapers and television were still the standards from where to get your news, today most of us check the latest news with a click of a button on our mobile phones. We can also watch a movie, call or send an email, check the time, update our calendar and even play games – all in one place.

Therefore, it is no wonder that we spend a considerable amount of time on our mobile phones. Now we’re not saying that we shouldn’t reduce the amount of time spent on our phones if we feel we should, but rather what we’re saying that it is kind of inevitable for us to spend this much time on our phones.

Moreover, if we really had to be completely honest about the use of smartphones, then we’d have to mention our phones make our lives way easier sometimes without us even realizing. Apart from being able to Skype call a friend who lives on the other side of the world, or being able to check your location on the GPS when you know you’ve totally managed to get lost, smartphones can actually help us better our lives.

People use the phone for various things, and sometimes you’d be surprised how much of the time spent on the smartphone is done for increased productivity, self-improvement, and even health reasons.

Here are just 6 ways how smartphones help make our lives a bit better:

1.   Smartphones allow us to listen to audiobooks on-the-go

Should audiobooks and smartphone replace physical books? Well, no – and in truth, they don’t. According to various studies, physical books remain the popular medium for readers, especially since ebooks plunged in recent years.

But what is anyone’s excuse if they don’t have time to read and cultivate their mind, when they can find time in the car, or on the tube, or in a queue to listen to an audiobook?

Unlike ebooks, audiobooks have actually contributed to increased sales of print books as people still seem to go to local libraries and bookstores before purchasing a book, in order to find information about new audiobooks.

According to a survey conducted about audiobooks in the U.S. in 2015,57% of respondents claim to browse through local or online libraries and 56% consult local bookstores. By the looks of it, therefore, audiobooks, unlike e-books, seem to be contributing to the growth of physical books rather than the opposite.

So why are audiobooks so popular? Well, for starters, audiobooks are a number one preference for people who are always on-the-go, running from one place to another without a moment to spare. They can listen to their audiobooks on their way to work or school, in a waiting room, or even when doing the boring yet necessary house chores like washing dishes or doing laundry!

Why should people give up on reading altogether just because they don’t have time for conventional reading? Or, rather, why can’t people just sit back and relax and listen to an audiobook when they are too tired to read? Not to mention that audiobooks are a great way to improve overall language skills, both reading and speaking, by listening to the way words are read and pronounced. It is thus no wonder why sales revenues for audiobooks have soared in this area in recent years, almost doubling between 2009 and 2015.

2.   Smartphones allow us to learn any language and in an interactive way

Surely most of us are familiar with famous language learning apps like DuoLingo and Busuu, but how much are we are aware that these applications are helping people absorb new languages and improve specific skills, such as writing, listening, reading and speaking?

These language apps are not only used by children and teenagers, but they are also used by adults who want to travel to a country where people don’t speak English or adults who perhaps want to further their career by perhaps improving their language skills.

3.   Smartphones Can Help With Chronic Diseases

What most of us might not know is that smartphones are also helping to revolutionize the way we cope with health problems, especially chronic illnesses. Thanks to the development of various medical apps for chronic disease management, such as MediSafe and PainDiary, patients are able to manage their medications better and track pain and symptoms of their disease, amongst many other things.

Although most applications have yet to be refined to ensure top-notch quality, there are already a number of medical apps that are making a difference for people who are sometimes overwhelmed by the demands of their daily regimes.

When it comes to health, both prevention and treatment are extremely important, and what the age of technology is doing is facilitating patient self-management by guiding them and reminding them how and when to take their meds, ensuring that they take the right doses and that they do not skip a dose. Overall, these applications help the patient stay on track and prevent them from slipping back into poor habits.

4.   Smartphones offer us an escape

Before you start thinking about how dangerous it is for technology to offer us a form of escape from reality, why not look at it from a different perspective? Don’t you ever feel like you are not in the mood to socialize or have no energy to do anything? Or feel like curling up in a ball and staying like that for an hour or two?

Smartphones can offer us an escape from our hectic day-to-day lives. One popular form of escape offered by smartphones is mobile gaming. There are so many possibilities and variation of games to feed your imagination like fantasy games or marvel superhero games. Who wouldn’t want to fly over a city or search for treasure, basically things that are not exactly possible in real life.

Another area that people are increasingly becoming interested in is mobile casino games like Mermaid’s Diamond, Rapunzel’s Tower and White Rabbit. At the moment, about 20% of mobile users are playing casino games on their mobile phone.

Sometimes, you just need to detach from reality a bit in order to be able to get back to it. One of the simplest ways you can do that is with your mobile phone. Considering that most of us carry mobile phones, it’s nice to know that a form of escape is readily available a few clicks away.

5.   Smartphones can help us organize our life and save us a lot of time in the process

Let’s be realistic. Carrying around a diary at all times is not always possible or ideal. Not to mention the possibility of misplacing or losing it in the long run. It’s always good to have a back-up on your phone, and let’s face it, we can’t deny how convenient it is to get a reminder on the phone the day before, or half an hour before a meeting. It just makes our increasingly busy life a whole lot easier.

Whether you want to check emails, schedule appointments, create a grocery checklist or book a flight, you can do all of this in one place – and if you had to think about it, this saves you a lot of time. Perhaps 22 days a year even, according to a report featured on the BusinessNewsDaily back in 2013.

6.   Smartphones make us more adaptive

Although this point is slightly controversial, it actually carries some pretty good points. A recent study conducted by Columbia University Psychologist Betsy Sparrow, entitled Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, explores how technology is changing the way we remember things.

When a group of participants was told they could look up information online to answer simple trivia questions, they did not make the effort to search the depths of their memory for the answer but rather thought of electronic devices and search engines to use to look up the answer.

Whilst this might seem like a new concept, in reality, it’s been around since the beginning of time. In fact, one of Einstein’s famous quotes goes like this, “Never memorize something that you can look up.”

What Einstein is referring to here is one way how our minds work in terms of memory, which is referred to as transactive memory. Transactive memory stores knowledge or facts that we would otherwise look up in books like mathematical formulas, or that we would rely on people to remember for us like the address of a place. Thus, to a certain degree, most of these facts carry little to no importance in our daily lives. Explicit memory, on the other hand, is the memory for skills, motions, and movements, like how to ride a bicycle.

When we use technology to look up information, we are changing the way our transactive memory works – by remembering where to find the information we are looking for, rather than remember the actual facts themselves. Therefore, with the advent of technology, our memory hard drive is changing in a way that we are able to remember where to access “files and folders” to retrieve information, rather than store the information itself.

How we recall and retain memory remains the same, but what changes rather, is what we choose to form memories about. Although this might seem like a bad thing at first, if we had to delve deeper into the implications of this, we would realize that it is actually beneficial in some ways.

For starters, one UCLA study in 2008 found that searching the internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning, thus stimulating and possibly even improving overall brain function. Secondly, this new way of reasoning and remembering things makes us much more adaptive.

What happens if you need an answer to a question you can’t google, you might ask? Well, according to

Psychologist Betsy Sparrow, if we desperately need that information, we will think of other ways and means of how to get that information; whether it’s calling up a friend who knows, going to a local library, or looking up in a directory, which further shows the enhanced ability of humans to find their way around when they’re stuck without an answer to something.

Hence, in a way, you can look at it from this perspective: instead of hoarding useless facts, you learn how to act fast in a situation where you need to find information on the spot.

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[This company makes fixing your broken iPhone so easy]

Probably everyone except me has broken their smartphone’s screen (and I type that knowing I’m now going to become a victim of a broken phone screen). The cell phone repair business is estimated to have generated $4 billion in revenue in 2016 and analysts peg the industry to continue to see growth of three percent or more per year. That’s a lot of broken phones.

As you would expect the most common repair for a phone is replacing a broken screen. When it comes to finding a reputable person or company to fix your smartphone that’s where it can get a little more complicated. There are many cell phone repair shops out there, but there’s no real standards around smartphone repair. Every tech has different techniques and methods which hopefully result in a fully functional phone after they’re done working on it. I was recently contacted by a company called Puls to try out their smartphone repair service for myself. They sent me a iPhone 6 that I got to break (which was a lot of fun, check out the video below) and then have their tech come right to my apartment and fix it.

The nice thing about Puls is that they operate all over the country and will send the repair tech right to you. The company specializes in smartphone repairs for all kinds of phones, including pretty much every iPhone and iPad as well as select Samsung, Google, and Motorola phones. Puls also provides other types of services such as mounting TVs or setting up and configuring smart home devices such as thermostats, smoke detectors, lighting, doorbells, cameras, and more.

As you can see in the video above, I broke the screen pretty bad and also noticed that the battery in the iPhone 6 needed replacing as well (the repair tech sent my apartment agreed with my battery analysis). In terms of my experience using Puls, it was very pleasant. I was provided a window when the tech would arrive between 2-3PM and at just about 2PM I received a call from Rob, the repair tech, letting me know he was walking to my building and would be here in approximately 2-3 minutes. When Rob got to my door, he was very kind, introducing himself and even asking if he should take his shoes off–which is a kind gesture (at least I think). Rob and I sat down at the kitchen counter and he got right to work, he worked quickly but professionally ensuring that all the proper steps were taken when disassembling and reassembling the phone. I’d say all-in had I not been bugging Rob while he was working the repair would have likely taken around 20 minutes.

I learned from Rob that Puls requires its techs to take tests before they are allowed to work on certain types of repairs to ensure that the techs know what they’re doing. This is good to know because as I mentioned with many other shops you just have to rely on the word of the individual fixing your phone that they know what they’re doing. I asked Rob how many phones he has repaired while working for Puls, his response shocked even me: more than 3,000 phone repairs over the course of Rob’s two years with the company.

Pricing for iPhone screen repairs starts at $79 to repair the screen on an iPhone 6 and if you need to have your battery replaced while having your screen replaced it’s only an additional $49. You can find the exact pricing depending on your smartphone and the issue it’s having on the Puls pricing page.

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[Turn your home into a smart home with these 8 gadgets]

Not long ago, the idea of controlling various items around the house through your smartphone or even by making a voice command into a nearby device may have sounded like a science fiction concept. However, technology has evolved considerably in recent years, and smart home technology is a reality. More than that, it is increasingly commonplace.

Smart home technology allows you to control everything from your appliances and HVAC system to your doorbell, blinds, clocks, lights and many other devices through an Internet connection. While you can command these devices to turn on and off or to function in other ways, they can also report back to you about their status or needs. This is called the Internet of Things, or IoT.

Through IoT, you can enjoy a greater level of convenience. You may be able to take better care of your home, reduce energy costs, keep your belongings safer and more. These are some of the top gadgets that you can add to your home to take advantage of modern smart home technology.

Amazon Echo

There are a full range of Amazon Echo products that can enhance your life in many ways. The most basic and affordable Echo gives you virtual assistance from Alexa, who can play music, give you the weather forecast and more simply by asking. More advanced Echo products can control different connected appliances and electronics in your home. Some even have a video monitor that can be used as a baby monitor, for video calls and more.

August Smart Lock Pro + Connect

Securing your home and allowing access are easier to do with the August Smart Lock Pro + Connect device. This is a wireless device that works well with Siri, Alexa and other home-based control systems. You can also lock and unlock the door remotely, receive alerts if the door is left open and more. Through this device, you will know each time the door opens and closes.

NestCam Outdoor

NestCam Outdoor takes your home security efforts to the next level. This is a weatherproof surveillance system that provides crystal-clear images viewable on your smartphone or other devices. It also has two-way audio functionality. This way, you can hear what is going on outside your home, and you can also communicate with those who are on your property.

Philips Hue Bulbs

Smart home lighting is possible through Philips Hue Bulbs. This is a complete smart home lighting feature that lets you control the color of the light, the intensity and the brightness with ease. One bulb offers you the ability to create a huge range of colored lights. Through the system, you can control the ambiance in your home with ease. Smart lighting systems can also be controlled remotely, and this could help you to save money on energy and even improve home security in some cases.

Ecobee4

If you want to improve the comfort of your indoor environment, the Ecobee4 is the right device for you. This device monitors temperature, humidity and ventilation in the room that it sits in. It also is connected to your HVAC system controls. When the room’s conditions are not desirable based on your specific settings, it will tell your HVAC system how to make adjustments. It also has smart motion sensors. It tells your system if you are home or not so that the thermostat can adjust accordingly.

June Intelligent Oven

Cooking foods perfectly is a breeze with the June Intelligent Oven. This is a countertop appliance that looks like a microwave, but it offers far more robust features. It can cook any food perfectly. You simply tell the device what kind of food it is. It monitors the weight and other features so that it perfectly adjusts the temperature and cook time for you. This is an Internet-based product that also has a camera and artificial intelligence features.

Eufy RoboVac 11

Robotic vacuums have been around for a few years, but many are unfortunately priced too high to be affordable for the average consumer. The Eufy RoboVac 11 is an affordable and very effective version to consider. It has a low-profile design and a large debris canister. While it is not WiFi-based, it can operate based on controls that you pre-select.

Robomow RS622

You do not have to pay someone else to mow your lawn to get out of this regular chore. The Robomow RS622 can be programmed to cut every inch of your lawn without you having to lift a finger. You can even control it from your wireless device. The cutting quality is excellent, and it does not use a bag that would require manual changing.

The latest gadgets available for home use can save you time and energy. Take a closer look at these amazing gadgets, and implement them into your home in order to take full advantage of their benefits.

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[6 great gadgets to help aging parents stay independent]

When it comes to aging parents, anything that can make their life easier, more comfortable, or more convenient is worth considering. If you looking to buy your loved one a birthday gift, or simply want to give them something they can use around the house, the six gadgets below are great options. Though you may be drawn to the latest smartphones and tablets, the features and benefits these devices provide may be lost on your parents or grandparents. Instead, focus on practicality and usability – do so and you’ll find that you can’t go wrong.

Amazon Echo

It’s worth noting upfront that Amazon Echo will require a subscription to Amazon Prime. If your parents or grandparents don’t have a Prime membership, you may want to buy one for them on their behalf. Once you’ve done that, you can set up their Echo and give them a rundown of its many features and functionalities. The reason the Echo is such a great option for aging parents is because its voice-activated software, Alexa, provides an incredible user experience – it is both easy to use and helpful. Your parents can call or message you, check the news, play music on-demand, and even place orders from Amazon, all with a simple voice command. There’s no fidgeting and no hurdles.

Robot Vacuum

For aging parents who have difficulty walking or getting about, robotic vacuum cleaners, like the Roomba and Dyson 360, offer up incredible versatility and usefulness. Not only do these gadgets prevent your loved ones from having to man-handle heavy, cumbersome vacuum cleaners themselves, but they also run automatically, which will help ensure that the house is cleaned on a regular basis – whether your loved one remembers or not. Admittedly, robot vacs aren’t inexpensive, but they do pay for themselves over time thanks to the convenience that they provide. Plus, they can also help you avoid having to pay for a housecleaner to come by once a week.

Tile Bluetooth Tracker

Easily worn or attached to items, the Tile bluetooth tracker makes it possible to keep track of people (or things) right from a smartphone or tablet. If your loved ones have smartphones of their own, Tile helps ensure they never lose valuable objects, like a set of keys or their wallet. Of course, it can also help you keep track of your loved one, which may be necessary if an aging parent is suffering from the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. With a variety of different Tile trackers to choose from, you and your aging parents are sure to find a solution that fits their particular needs. And best of all, it’s affordable and setup is a breeze.

MedMinder

If your parents or grandparents rely on prescription medications, the MedMinder pill dispenser should be considered a must-have. Featuring a built-in cellular connection, the MedMinder can provide your loved ones with reminders via text message or phone, so that they are always up-to-date on their medications. Additionally, MedMinder can lock the dispenser’s pill trays if needed in order to prevent an overdose – or simply to make the task of keeping track of which pills are due easier. And that’s scratching the surface of what the MedMinder can do. On the whole, think of it this way: this gadget makes taking medication easier, more convenient, and safer for your loved ones.

Lively Mobile

The Lively Mobile is a medical alert system that can be worn around the neck, on the body, or on an article of clothing. In the event that an aging parent or grandparent slips and falls, faints, or becomes incapacitated, the Lively Mobile provides a means of reaching help, even if a phone is out of reach. With GPS tracking, fall detection, and waterproof construction, this medical alert system is designed specifically with your loved one’s best interests and needs in mind. Should the unthinkable happen, an on-call emergency response team is never out of reach.

Automatic Jar Opener

Even for strong, young adults, jars can be stubbornly difficult to open. So for aging parents who may be suffering from arthritis or muscle loss, it can be downright impossible to open a jar. Thankfully, automatic jar openers like the Black & Decker Lids Off make this task simple and easy. Fully automated, this electric jar opener (and others like it) can remove a vacuum sealed jar lid in a matter of seconds, requiring no effort on the part of your loved ones. Knowing that they won’t have to try and open the jar themselves will allow your parents and grandparents to once again buy the foods they love without worry – arthritis or not.

Lend Your Loved Ones a Hand

Gadgets can make life easier for the aging parents and grandparents in your life. So why not put these gadgets to good use? While the six gadgets above are certainly helpful to have around the house, they’re merely the tip of the iceberg. Ask your parents about what daily tasks they might like help with, and see if you can’t find a technological solution to their problem. You might be surprised at what’s available.

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[12 must-have apps and tools for busy entrepreneurs]

Time management is one of the areas that many entrepreneurs struggle with. There are often many urgent tasks that must be accomplished within a set period of time, but there is seemingly not enough time in the day to tackle everything. After all, everything from conducting market research and collaborating with strategic partners to managing your finances and attending meetings requires your attention.

Today’s entrepreneurs who embrace technology can simplify their lives in many ways. Simplification could lead to saving your both time and money. There are easy-to-use apps that can assist you with financial management, productivity, customer service and more. So without further ado, here are 12 must-have apps for entrepreneurs that are worth taking the time to check out.

Pocket

Pocket is a free app that is available for Apple and Android devices, and you can even use it in your web browser. When you come across something that you need to save for viewing or use later, you simply store it in your Pocket app. This prevents you from having to backtrack or duplicate efforts later when you need to find that important file, website, picture or something else.

Basecamp

Basecamp is available with a paid subscription and is accessible through most devices. It is a robust project management tool that lets you link chat messages, emails, schedules, lists, documents and more all in one place. This keeps you, your team and even your clients all on one page. Because all efforts are unified, you may have far fewer fires to put out or miscommunication issues.

Trello

Trello is a free collaborative tool that has a user-friendly dashboard interface. Everyone in your company will have their own dashboard with their specific projects, teams and calendars. Team members can link together to consolidate all documents and conversations for projects they are working on. This is an efficiency tool that lets your entire team work more productively, and it can help you to collaborate better with a remote work team as well.

Wave

Sending and receiving money can be a hassle for entrepreneurs as well as for your clients and customers. Wave is a user-friendly and secure app that is available through the Apple App Store and Google Play. Unlike some other funds transferring platforms, this sends funds within seconds, and the fees associated with transactions are much more affordable. You will not have to deal with billing and collections issues or high financial fees when you use this app.

Evernote

This is an excellent tool that you can use to save time and add organization to your personal and professional life. Saving time and reducing stress in your personal life can trickle over to boosted productivity in your professional life. Through this platform, you can scan and save documents, such as business cards and even handwritten notes. These can be stored, shared and even found later with a fast search tool.

Mailchimp

For entrepreneurs who struggle to produce cost-effective marketing in a timely manner, Mailchimp is an excellent resource that can help you to produce, deliver and refine your content with better results and in less time.

This robust application facilitates the creation of email marketing messages, integrates data for customer analysis benefits, automates the send process and even analyzes your results. This application has a free version, and more robust applications are available for a monthly fee.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud-based file-sharing platform that lets you save time and stay more organized. It is available for one-man operations, and it allows you to save your files in one location and access them later from a different device.

In a team environment, it ensures that everyone on the team has access to the latest version of a file, and it eliminates redundant efforts. Multiple paid plans are available based on your needs, and the program can be used on a mobile device or on a computer.

Slack

When your team is out of the office frequently or when you have a remote team, Slack brings everyone together in an organized and collaborative manner. Communication is easy and focused through tailored messaging groups. Workflow is streamlined, and the efforts of the teams are transparent.

A basic free version is available for smaller and less robust needs. Two paid versions give you access to more substantial features, the ability to integrate external guests into a project, security features and more.

Hootsuite

Social media marketing and account management is essential for small businesses because it helps you to find leads, establish relationships and more. Hootsuite has free and paid versions, and its many features are designed to help you monitor and manage your social media accounts in one location. It even has report generation functions.

Salesforce

While there are many customer relationship management programs available, Salesforce is among the most established and robust. You can upload entire contact lists, sort leads, assign leads to different groups and more. Emails and files can be linked to specific contact profiles to keep you organized, and you can even log phone calls, set reminders and generate reports. This is a paid service with multiple subscription plans to choose from.

Skype

Skype has both personal and professional applications, and it gives you an easy way to communicate with your customers and contacts via your Internet connection. With Skype, you can eliminate the need to have a landline in some cases. You can set calls to ring through your computer when you are in the office and through your smartphone when you are away. You will never miss an important call. You can also use video chat features for a more personalized approach.

Toggl

For professionals who struggle with time management, Toggl can help you to stay on track. This application monitors what is taking up your time each day, and it lets you easily track how long you spend on each task. With this information, you can take serious action to improve personal productivity. Toggl also has budgeting functions, and there are enterprise-level plans available for more robust time management needs in a larger company.

Each of these tools can improve your professional life dramatically in different ways. However, using too many tools may slow you down in some cases. Add one or two tools to your routine to get accustomed to their usage before you try any additional tools.

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[CES 2018: the 5 best pet gadgets from this year’s show floor]

The 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that ran January 9-12 was the place to be to see all the new technology that’ll soon be introduced to the market soon. One of the biggest trends was tech for pets and their owners. The following are the five best pet-friendly gadgets that all pet owners are going to want in their lives.

1. PetMio

PetMio combines a smart tracker, smart food bowl and personalized diet solely for your pet to make sure they’re living their best life. The tracker on the collar provides info on their activity levels, as well as anything unusual to help a vet figure out if anything were to go wrong with your pet. The bowl tracks how much they’re eating and how fast they’re eating it, determining if they’re over or under-eating.

With the data collected, PetMio makes a custom blend of food for your pet and sends it to you when you need it. If they’re getting older or suddenly having issues, you’re notified and the recipe is changed. The app will also inform you if the trackers see any indication that your pet is getting sick or not feeling their best, so you know as soon as possible.

Overall, this is a huge step in pet wellness. PetMio sounds like a way to make sure our pets are as healthy and happy as possible and getting the diet and exercise they need.

2. Litter-Robot III Open Air With Connect

No one likes cleaning the litter box, but we do love our cats. This Litter-Robot model is the luxury litter box you didn’t know you needed. It’s self-cleaning, sifting the waste into a little drawer so you can then get rid of it. With the connectivity feature, you can check everything on your app while also monitoring your cat.

You can customize the settings of the litter box, get notifications when the waste drawer needs to be emptied and monitor your cat’s usage of the box so you see if there are any red flags. You can get a baseline down, determine what’s normal and monitor anything outside the normal that can serve as a warning to you. You can make sure your cat’s healthy while avoiding the gross elements of litter-box cleaning. It’s a win-win.

3. Whistle

We’ve all been bummed out by the “Lost Dog” posters we’ve seen peppered on telephone poles in our town. Whistle aims to make those posters a thing of the past while also giving insights into your dog’s activity and rest stats — all from a small collar attachment. You can set a safe zone for your pet where you’ll get a notification any time they go outside it. Using advanced GPS, the app can pinpoint your pet’s location anywhere in the US — making them easy to find if they get lost.

The app also lets you look into their activity level and the quality of their rest to make sure they’re getting enough of both for their size, breed and age. You can set goals if they need more of something and set up notifications if big changes occur that could indicate a problem.

4. Pebby

It’s hard to leave our furry friends at home, and it’s easy to feel guilty when you’re working an extra-long day. Pebby lets you both monitor your pet and play with them remotely, so they don’t have to just lay around waiting for you all day. The smart collar and ball system also includes cameras so you can see your loved one and play with them via the app. If you can’t play for a bit, the ball can go into auto mode, as well as play a message to them in your voice.

If your pet is rough with toys, you don’t need to worry. The casing is both shatterproof and waterproof, ready to stand up to even the toughest of pets. Pebby is a great tool to keep your pet entertained and make sure they’re not getting into trouble in your house.

5. petWALK Pet Doors

Doggy doors can be eyesores, and they’re a soft spot in the security of your home. petWALK aims to change that. With RFID technology, it opens only for your pet. It also latches securely, eliminating drafts that come from traditional flap doors. The system isn’t a security issue, as the door is lockable and sturdy. With its clip-on covers, you can make sure it looks good too.

The future of pet tech is here. With these gadgets, both you and your furry friends will be living your best lives in no time.

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[The best smartphones for gaming in 2018]

Mobile gaming has been around since the days of the Microvision, the world’s first handheld console released in 1979 by Milton Bradley. Ever since then, there have been dozens of mobile gaming devices of varying popularity – including Game Boy, Nintendo DS, PSP – but none of them had really managed to replicate the experience of a home console or computer.

Nokia attempted to enter the mobile gaming market in 2003 with their N-Gage gaming phone, but the phone fell short of mobile gamers’ expectations. It wasn’t until the smartphone revolution came about with the advent of the iPhone that mobile phones started to have the capability to compete with their more powerful stationary counterparts.

These days, mobile gaming offers thousands of high quality games available for download with your smartphone at the touch of a button, including AAA titles such as Super Mario Run, Minecraft and Pixel Gun 3D. While most mobile games can be run using any current generation smartphone, not every phone is built with gaming in mind and therefore will not provide the optimal experience for avid gamers.

With that in mind, we put together a list of the top performing smartphones for gamers. Whether you are an RPG gamer, a social gamer, a VR gamer, or even a casino gamer at sites like NinjaCasino, this list will help you find the best phone to meet your gaming needs.

Razer

The latest newcomer to the mobile phone scene, Razer was launched on November last year and has received nothing but stellar reviews since. A mobile phone designed with gamers in mind, Razer has spared no expense to provide the finest mobile gaming experience currently available.

Boasting a never before seen 120 Hz 5.71″ IPS LCD screen, Razer offers a smooth and highly responsive experience the likes you’ve never felt on your phone before. Not only does this offer much crisper graphics, but its fast response vastly improves gameplay and the feeling of immersion.

As for its processing power, it features a with a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 835 2.35 GHz processor, an enormous 8GB of RAM, and a Adreno 540 GPU, a monstrous combination practically unrivalled by any other phone in the business. Add to that a huge 4,000mAh battery, and an expandable 64GB internal storage, and the best and loudest stereo speakers a mobile device has ever seen you have yourself a top notch gaming system.

While this phone is aimed mainly at gamers, at a price of around €700 this phone is perfect for just about any user that demands peak performance from their device.

Samsung Galaxy 8+

 

Samsung’s flagship phone, the Galaxy 8+ features a combination of beautiful design and astounding processing power to become the second best option on our list.

Powered by a Samsung Exynos 8895 Octa or Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and a Adreno 540 or Mali-G71 MP20 GPU, the S8+ includes up to 6GB of RAM, and up to 128GB internal memory. The display is a brilliant AMOLED capable of scaling up to QHD+ resolution (2960 x 1440) and featuring a 529 ppi density. Its 3,500 mAh battery also guarantees plenty of time for gameplay.

Along with its impressive specs, the S8+ has vastly upgraded the Game Tools and Game Launcher introduced in the Galaxy 7, providing gamers with a highly improved experience and integrating games better than ever before.  Game Tools is built into the navigation bar and will show up any time you load up a game, allowing you a plethora of useful options, such as turning off notifications, turning off the “invisible” home button, or allowing you to record the screen and even your reactions to the game using the front camera.

At a price of €850, it may seem like an expensive option in comparison with the cheaper Razor – which boasts better specs- but with Samsung’s impeccable design and reliability, and the fantastic non-gaming features it offers it is certainly worth its price tag.

OnePlus 5T

 

By far the most affordable phone on this list, the OnePlus 5T is a phone that punches way above its weight class. One of the fastest and most respectable phone manufacturers growing out of China, OnePlus received glowing reviews for their previous model, the OnePlus 3, and have managed to improve considerably with their latest offering.

Featuring a Snapdragon 835 SoC with the best clock speeds on this list, the OnePlus couples it’s octa-core 2.45 GHz CPU with a Adreno 540 GPU and 8 GB of RAM to deliver a lightning fast gaming experience. Add to that a 128 GB internal memory and a 3,300 mAh battery and you have yourself the best gaming phone that €559 can buy. You can even get a cheaper option for a mere €499 if you don’t mind having just 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage.

OnePlus also offers software features designed for optimal gaming, including the “Do Not Disturb” mode which blocks all notifications from popping up on top of your games. This mode can be customized to include any apps you want.

iPhone X

Finally, we arrive at one of the most hyped phone of all times and a true gaming dynamo. The only iOS phone on this list, the iPhone X not only features top of the line internals but also an extensive game collection that includes thousands of titles not available for Android users.

A bit step towards the future from Apple, the iPhone X does away with key elements of previous models such as the famed home button and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Instead it introduces face recognition and new methods of navigation that tend to simplify the overall experience.

But what makes this phone a great gaming machine? That would have to be its powerful A11 Bionic chip featuring a 64-bit architecture, a neural engine and an embedded M11 motion coprocessor. Combined with 3 GB of RAM and a 5.8-inch “Super Retina HD” AMOLED display boasting a resolution of 2436 x 1125 pixels, you can expect some pretty powerful results.

Apple’s new firmware also includes advanced augmented reality features which give game developers plenty to work with in creating the next generation gaming experience. This feature uses the iPhone X’s hugely powerful camera to overlay graphics to your surroundings, creating a highly immersive experience.

The downside? At a price point starting at $1,000 it is by far the most expensive phone on this list, and the most expensive flagship smartphone on the market. While it’s impressive 12-megapixel camera capable of recording 4K video at 60fps, its fantastically intuitive iOS 11 and fun Animoji features add to the overall experience, if you are a gamer on a budget you might want to stick to the Razer or OnePlus 5T.

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[How to bypass international carrier rates by making voice calls with Viber]

The advancement of phone technology has made it extremely easy to constantly connect to the world around us. We can talk, text, and reach our friends with the blink of a wifi password.

Unfortunately the one thing that hasn’t changed is how we make phone calls. Going abroad and having to do something as simple as make a dinner reservation, becomes difficult and costly. International calling rates are still high, and although we can now make in-app phone calls between users (like on WhatsApp), there is still the friction that exists when needing to call landlines from abroad. Until now.

Viber, has done a good job in understanding the need between in-app calling and out-app calling, which is why it has introduced Viber Out to over 900 million users worldwide. Users are able to call any number, whether it’s a landline or cellphone, all around the world, at a lower cost rate than your average phone service provider, which solves issues with roaming fees or having to transfer to a local SIM while traveling. Viber Out users no longer have to be in fear of massive international calling rates, and are able to reach anyone, at anytime, from anywhere. With the positive user feedback surrounding out of app calling, many competitors in the app-messaging space will probably be soon to follow.

The service first emerged in the Philippines, following Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. In an effort to assist in the crisis, Viber offered Viber Out to local residents so that they could quickly get in touch with family, friends, and needed emergency services. Now, it’s offered world-wide as an affordable calling alternative to cell-phone carriers.

While Viber is not the only player in the crowded messaging app space, WhatsApp, has yet to offer out of app calling, and Skype (its closest competitor) offers a similar service, where their out of app calls are priced based on location. Viber Out has appealed to the market by understanding demand and offering an affordable cost compared to its competitors.

While it is very affordable, pricing for Viber Out pricing does change based on the location you want to call. As shown above, calling the UK from the US can be as little as $1.99/month (which equates to 100 minutes of talk time). You can also purchase minutes with a pay as you go plan starting at $4.99 which is equivalent to approximately 260 minutes of talk time. That being said, you wanted to call India from the US, the price points are slightly different. You can still use the $4.99 pay as you go plan if you want but it will only equate to about 215 minutes in talk time or pay $7.99/month for 1,000 minutes of talk time. You can even call Russia, so if you’re Donald Trump or some other Trump family member, Viber Out works for you too. Subscription pricing to call Russia from the US runs for $13.99/month for 300 minutes–though I’m not sure if that’s enough time for The Donald and Putin they may need a bigger plan.

Anyway, it’s exciting to see where the world of mobile technology is headed, especially when it comes to communication. Who would have thought 35 years ago, with the invention of the first cell phone, that we would have the power to hold a small device and communicate so instantaneously with anyone around the world. If hardware technology is increasingly progressing, our system applications should as well. It’s important to welcome the continuous advancements in technologies, and keep on-trend and up to date with what’s to come. Viber Out is definitely something I’ll be using the next time I take a trip abroad as I’ve been burned in the past by high-priced international plans from my carrier. 

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[6 content creation tools to produce awesome content]

Content marketing is a critical requirement if you want to grow your business online. It allows you to improve the visibility of your business and position it as a thought-leader. Also, great content ranks well on search engines for the right keywords and helps drive highly-qualified visitors to your website, who might eventually become paying customers. In fact, did you know that business are spending up to 28% of their marketing budget on content creation and production?

However, today’s readers are looking for in-depth, informative and visually appealing content that delivers immense value. Generic articles don’t cut it anymore.

Here are 6 content creation tools that you can use to produce high-quality content that engages your readers.

 

1. Title Generator by TweakYourBiz

Title is the most important part of any content. In fact, 80% of people don’t go past the headline. So you need to make it interesting, unique and click-worthy. This tool makes it easy to generate tons of titles that compel people to click and read more. All you have to do is enter the topic you want to write about and it will give you a list of headline suggestions that you can use in your blog posts, landing pages, or even as email subject lines to drive more clicks.

2. Hemingway App

Named after the great American novelist, this tool allows you to write great articles by parsing them and  providing style suggestions that you can use to improve your content. For example, if a sentence is highlighted in yellow it means that your statement is complex & lengthy, and that you might want to shorten or split. If it’s highlighted in red, it means that your sentence is so dense that the reader is sure to lose track of the logic.

It even provides suggestions to replace long words with shorter, simpler ones, and points out common errors such as mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. In fact, it even provides a readability score for your content, indicating how easy or difficult it is for readers to understand your content.

You can download Hemingway Editor to your laptop, or use it online anywhere, anytime.

3. Ginger Software

Ginger Software is a handy tool that allows you to quickly create better content using your mobile, tablet or laptop. In addition to a grammar checker, it also provides automated sentence rephraser and translation. It even offers a personal trainer who can assist you to craft awesome content for your audience.

Ginger can be installed on PC, tablets & mobiles allowing you to access it wherever you are. It can seamlessly integrate with most popular word processors such as MS Word, Google Sheets and Open Office, and even your web browser so you can work faster and be efficient.

4. Canva

Today, it’s not enough to create text-only content, it’s important to make it visually appealing too. Canva is a great tool that allows you to easily create stunning visual content that you can use to enrich your content and engage your readers. It provides an intuitive drag & drop interface, tons of pre-designed layouts and professionally designed templates to choose from.

You can quickly create images using hundreds of free templates, or pick from millions of vectors, illustrations and stock photos. It even provides Instagram-like filters to refine your images. You can also use visual elements like icons, shapes, fonts in your images, for free.

5. Creately

Many times, we need to explain complex ideas such as architecture and processes in our content. Providing a visual breakdown of our ideas makes it easy for readers to understand what we’re saying. Creately enables you to simplify complex ideas using visuals. For example, you can use it to help your readers better understand workflows, showcase your products & services. With Creately, you can collaborate in real-time and create more than 50 types of visuals to communicate your ideas.

6. ThingLink

ThingLink is a really cool tool that allows you to annotate your images and videos, and make them interactive. It’s very useful for businesses and educational institutions who need to create interactive training material for their teams. Companies can also use it to provide an immersive user experience for their potential customers. Here’s an example

You can also use it to tag the important visual elements on your website/blog with rich links, to drive engagement. For example, you can use it to provide a better shopping experience and capture audience attention. It’s like having the Pinterest shopping button (buyable pins) right on your own, native content.

Wrapping Up

Use these tools to create stunning content that’s well-written, visually compelling and stands apart. This will not only attract more readers but also entice them to share your content, and spread the word. When readers see the value in your content, your blog/website will become their go-to source of information.

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[Smartphone addiction isn’t real, can we please stop this already]

Can we please stop with this idea that “smartphone addiction” is a real thing?

For most people, smartphones have two main functions: communication and entertainment. And in my view, any function which a smartphone has taken over for us are simply because they have replaced an older way of doing that thing. For example, with smartphones you can read the news without needing an actual newspaper or magazine, play a game without a console, watch a movie or TV show without a TV, call someone without a landline, communicate with a friend on the other side of the country without having to mail a letter, share pictures without an actual photo album. These are just a few examples.

If you examine so called “smartphone addiction” it makes sense as to why people are always on their phones. Smartphones have replaced a lot of things that people did pretty frequently in the past as well and simply packaged it all into one device. I read an article in the New York Times recently by Farhad Manjoo in which he writes:

Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week. It could also needle you: “Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?” It could offer to help: “If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?”

First, that sounds terrible. Forget the fact that the copy written is condescending and belittling and just focus on the substance of what Farhad is saying which is “Apple should tell us when we’re using any app for too long a period of time.” I love Apple but who are they to determine what is an appropriate amount of time for me to be using an app?

He goes on to write:

Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications.

Yes. I’m with him on that, but more control over notification settings is a feature (and a nice one at that) but even if this was something Apple implemented in iOS I think it would be praised by iOS users more as a way to be less annoyed but unwanted notifications and less as a way to control “addiction.”

If you’re a parent and you are concerned that your child is on their smartphone too much, be a parent and implement rules or just flat out take it away. It seems simple to me, though I’ll admit I’m not a parent. But I can tell you that I firmly believe the burden is on parents, not companies when it comes to this topic. I grew up in the 90s–did my parents go after TV manufacturers or TV networks and ask them to make TV less “addicting” because I watched too much TV? No. Instead, I didn’t get a TV in my room until I was older and yes it sucked because most of my friends already TVs in their rooms. Point is, I managed, I grew up, and I’m fine.

Every generation will likely face this question of is XYZ too addicting? And as it turns out, this generation the question is about smartphones.

Have any thoughts? Leave them below in the comments!

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[Bitdefender BOX is a hardware security solution for all of your devices]

The internet is incredible–I don’t think anyone would argue with that statement. However, as incredible as it is, it can also be dangerous. Internet security is becoming more important as more people put more of their lives on internet connected devices and that’s where Bitdefender BOX comes into the picture. The folks over at Bitdefender have been in the security business for over 15 years (the company was founded in 2001) and their latest product isn’t software-based but rather a hardware solution that sits in your home to keep you and devices safe and secure.

What is the Bitdefender BOX?

The Bitdefender BOX is an IoT security solution that is easily configured to your home network. Once configured on your home network, Bitdefender BOX offers two main kinds of protection: network level protection and local protection.

Recently the company released the second generation of the Bitdefender BOX which sports much improved hardware specifications when compared to the first generation BOX. The improved specs mean the product is much faster and better equipped to handle more devices. It also supports the latest wireless standards, 802.11ac.

Bitdefender BOX 1 vs Bitdefender BOX 2 specs.

How does Bitdefender BOX work?

You can configure your Bitdefender BOX in one of three ways when setting it up. The first is to have the Bitdefender BOX replace your existing router–this is the method Bitdefender recommends as the easiest and most convenient setup option. However, you can also choose to connect the BOX to your existing router via the the LAN port and run your existing router in Bridge mode. And the third way is to just create a brand new network using the BOX–this method means you’ll have to reconnect all of your devices to the newly created network.

Once you have it setup, the Bitdefender BOX essentially acts a bouncer of sorts (like the big guys at clubs) between your device and the internet. It will stop bad things from loading, protect your data, and keep an eye out for weird behavior. It does this by offering two main kinds of protection. The first one I’ll be discussing is the network level protection.

Network level protection 

The way network level protection works is that any device (computers, tablets, Kindles, smartphones, IoT devices, etc) connected to your network will receive the following security benefits from Bitdefender BOX. There’s no extra software necessary to install, it’s automatic–just because you’re connected and all traffic is running through the BOX.

Web scanning

BOX checks every website that the devices connected to it attempt to visit and if the website is listed as malicious in the Bitdefender cloud database, BOX will block access to it.

On demand Vulnerability Assessment

BOX offers the option to scan a certain device and check for vulnerabilities. If the device is found to be vulnerable, you will be notified in the BOX management app regarding the vulnerability BOX has found (week credentials, outdated firmware, CVE vulnerabilities, etc). It will also include tips on how to address and secure your network, based on the specific vulnerability BOX has identified.

Device detection

Once a new device is connected to a network protected by BOX, you will be informed through a notification displayed in the management app and will be asked if you want to allow the device to be connected to the network.

Exploit prevention

This engine will identify and block exploits through a mechanism similar to other popular IDS solutions in the market. It includes generic signatures to cover a wide array of attacks as well as specific signatures wherever needed.

Anomaly detection

The anomaly detection engine uses machine learning and cloud correlation to understand how devices should behave under normal circumstances and is able to accurately identify, block and alert upon any malicious activity.

Brute force protection

This security module blocks forced authentication on devices connected to the BOX protected network.

Sensitive data protection

This module will identify whenever credit card information or passwords is sent over a non-encrypted connection and block the attempt.

The second kind of protection offered by Bitdefender BOX is local protection.

Local protection

With the purchase of Bitdefender BOX, the company also includes a year of access to Bitdefender Total Security (after the initial year if you wish to keep using Bitdefender Total Security it will cost $99/year). In terms of the additional benefits of using Bitdefender Total Security, you will get access to the company’s VPN (virtual private network) which will secure your connection by encrypting the data sent to and from your device as well as by hiding your IP address wherever you are. Additionally, with Total Security installed on your devices you can use the Bitdefender Central app to remotely run scans, locate devices, and even remotely lock them or even wipe the information off of them as a last resort.

The company has apps for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

Should you get Bitdefender BOX?

Bitdefender has built a great solution here for securing your home with BOX. The company also offers a free IoT scanner to help you determine whether or not the Bitdefender BOX is right for you. I suggest you give it a whirl. Overall, if you have a lot of devices connected to your network and want a kind of “set it and forget it” solution that’s always on the look out for you, Bitdefender BOX is probably a good solution for you. The Bitdefender BOX retails for $249.

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