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The Lulu Company. The Lulu Chronicles. Catching Up (On All Things Lulu) OVERVIEW So as usual I have overloaded myself with work and deadlines, and am a little upset I've fallen behind the schedule I've set for myself. But not to fret! My will to persevere still stands strong and content is developing behind the scenes. Here's what's coming this weekend: BUSINESS CARDS FINALLY finished designing my Business Cards, and got them all ordered to pass out to my fam and friends this holiday season. :) Check out the designs below: PHASE 1 CONTENT So according to my own self-made schedule I should be much further along in this series than I am.

Slight delays with my day job, keynote speaking at University of the Pacific for Native American Heritage Month, and helping my girl Robyn with the Launch of her original music at the live show The Robyn Effect. (Check out her HOT original music HERE - THE GOOD AND THE BAD and HERE - POWERFUL AS POISON). PHASE 1 : Motivators 1) Basic Biological Needs 2) Protection of Self and Family 3) Healthy and Balanced Community. Entrepreneurs Need to Brand Themselves First. Branding a Great Company: Start With Why. If you're the head of your company, you have to be able to define not just what your company does, but why it does it. Having difficulty? That's normal. You can blame it on the way your brain works. The part of the brain that contains decision-making and behavior doesn't control language, so when you're asked questions about why you do what you do, it's natural to get tongue-tied.

That's where great leadership comes in. Leaders are required to put in to words what a group does; they're required to cross over between the decision-making and behavior sphere and the language sphere. So it's up to you, as company leader, to define your "why. " 1. Apple can sell phones not simply because they have the smarts to make phones; every single one of their competitors can make phones too.

As long as Apple's products are consistent with its cause, the company has the freedom to do things other companies cannot. 2. 3. 4. So ask yourself: Can you define your "why"? Do Patents Really Matter To Startups? New Data Reveals Shifting Habits. Editor’s note: Leonid Kravets is a patent attorney specializing in developing IP strategy for young technology companies. He blogs on the topic at startupsip.com. Robert J. Moore is the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, which helps online businesses make smarter decisions by making their data more understandable and actionable. For more information, visit RJMetrics.com.

To be notified of any new findings regarding this study, register for updates. Arguments about the value of patents have heated up over the past few years. Just how much attention are start-ups paying to patents? How We Did It We used the CrunchBase API to identify the industries and backers of 12,404 technology companies. In order to provide the most recent data possible, we limited our study to only published patent applications (not issued patents, which are typically not published until several years after application). Patent Rates by Industry Company industries were pulled from CrunchBase. Investor Influence Conclusion. Start-Up Businesses Should Aim for These Three Goals. It’s been said that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. That’s why goals are so important. And for hungry start-ups–the ones with a right-brain passion to create a world they want to live in and a left-brain calculation of how to build that world with no money–setting three kinds of goals is vital. 1.

Mission: What is the enduring purpose of the venture? To answer this, ask yourself what problem matters most to your venture and why you are willing to go years with little pay or sleep to solve it. Charlie Javice is co-founder and CEO of PoverUp, a social network for university students to get involved in social enterprises. A start-up’s mission must be deeply meaningful to the founder and be compelling to people that the founder wants to hire. (MORE: Why Your Small Business Needs to Be on Social Media) 2.

The answer to this question is of primary importance to a start-up’s investors who want a return on their capital– by getting acquired or going public. 3. New Pride App Makes Business Social Networks Easy And Fun To Use. Pride’s simple setup and ease of use make it an ideal social network for businesses Many workplaces are looking at options for social collaboration. The idea is to harness the power of social networks as an internal communication and collaboration tool. While there are some powerful and full featured options in this space, a new iOS and Android app called Pride aims to provide the core benefits of social networks in a free service that’s extremely easy to set up, manage, and use.

More importantly, Pride delivers a fun and playful experience that is likely to encourage employees to use it while delivering some very tangible business benefits. Pride was created by mobile and social enterprise startup DoubleDutch, a company that delivers mobile CRM and event management solutions. DoubleDutch developed Pride first as an internal solution for its own business teams. Like other social tools, it offers activity feeds or timelines for individual users, teams, projects, and so on. Related. The Happiest Cities For Job-Seeking College Grads. 4 Tips for Millennials to Work Well with Boomers. Smartphones. Social media. Skype. Technology has made it easier and easier to communicate across distances near and far. Communication across generations, however, is a different matter – especially when it comes to the workplace.

In fact, businesses are reporting that generational differences are causing workplace tension, according to Dale Kalika, senior lecturer at the W.P. Carey School of Business. If you’re a Gen Y-er feeling a little apprehensive about working effectively with older professionals, consider these tips for collaboration: 1. Look around. “Depending on the company culture, especially in old-school corporate environments, it is sometimes common to see miscommunication between generations,” says YouTern CEO Mark Babbitt.

It often comes down to how we communicate: “one-sentence texting and on-the-fly, in-cubicle discussions vs. lengthy emails or the longer, more formalized meetings perhaps preferred by Boomers, for example,” Babbitt says. Remember, nothing beats face-time. 2. Six Ideas for Increasing Customers to Your Web Design Services | Mightydeals Blog. Whether you’re just launched your web design business or you’ve been in the game for a while, you know how difficult it can be to attract web design clients. It seems as though there are thousands of competitors out there, and you can’t seem to get potential clients to choose you over anyone else.

But don’t worry – here are six things you can do right now to start attracting more clients to your web design business and increase your bottom line. 1. Package Services as Products Often, potential customers are nervous about spending money on web designers because they don’t understand the costs. They can’t see prices on a website anywhere and automatically assume the designer is over their price range. One way to combat this is to create products for sale. Even if you don’t want to sell these kinds of products, you can package services as products with a fixed price. Action Step: Think about what kinds of services you offer that could be made into products for a fixed price. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 4 Brands That Know How to Tell a Story. Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. She was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of WOMMA.

What makes a brand stand out from its competition? For some, it’s their cutting-edge design, for others it’s their customer service. But for many successful companies, it’s their ability to tell their brand story. Stories, unlike any other element, allow brands to connect with customers on an emotional level. And stories in the digital age are particularly potent. 1. TOMS shoes, which are sold at more than 500 stores around the world, was founded on the ethos that for every pair purchased, one pair is donated to a child in need. The company has developed an extension of this story online, with their One for One campaign. 2.

Mr. Sadly, there has never been a real Mr. 3. 4. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 4FR. Jobs: Hiring Process Increasingly Automated by Companies. As most anyone who has recently applied for a job knows, hiring has changed dramatically in recent years. The Internet has replaced job advertisements in newspapers, one of the key factors driving the financial decline of the latter, and software has replaced most recruiters. Because job applications are done online, applicants rarely talk to anyone, even by e-mail, during the hiring process. One upside of this automation is that applying for jobs has been made considerably easier, an outcome that was intended in the 1990s, when these systems were born and employers were competing to attract applicants. But there has been an unintended downside: That ease, combined with the huge pool of job seekers, now means that employers are overwhelmed with job applications.

At the same time, human resource departments have been pushed to cut costs, especially their own head count. The only way to meet those two demands has been to move even further toward automating the entire hiring process. Economic Theory Doesn't Say That Small Business Owners Maximize Profits. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GettyImages Adam Davidson profiles the small business owners of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where we both grew up, and finds that many of them are still plugging away even though it would have been more profitable to sell their leases to big national chains that can better take advantage of the currently upscale state of the neighborhood.

It's a good piece, but I did want to clarify something. The conceit seems to be that it's somehow surprising or shocking that a business owner would be "disavowing economic theory and not trying to maximize her profits. " The thing is to the best of my knowledge there is no economic theory that says small business owners maximize profits. Where profit maximization enters into the picture is precisely with the widely held large business. It's interesting to inquire into the extent that that actually happens. Business cycles: Stabilise that certain something. IN ADDITION to using my colleague's post as a jumping-off point for broad economic foreboding, I'd like to borrow it in making a much narrower observation about monetary policy. He rightly notes that the American economic picture is the most perplexing. The fundamentals seeem to be lined up nicely: deleveraging has proceeded surprisingly quickly, housing markets are rapidly clearing, petrol prices are subdued, manufacturing workers are once again globally competitive, and so on.

Yet once again, the American recovery is losing a step. Why? My colleague suggests there's a small but meaningful chance of disaster in lots of places around the world, and so the typical investor is skittish: Is it any wonder that the marginal investor or business would prefer to hold Treasury bonds or sit on cash? And that sort of disengagement can make economic pessimism self-fulfilling. This dynamic is clearly important. One can envision an alternative policy approach, however. Ryan Holiday: How to Write Any Essay: The Spartan System. Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory. It follows then that the best advice for writing a paper -- be it a high school essay, a college research paper, or even an office memo at a Fortune 500 company -- would come from the tactics of a brilliant military commander.

I discovered these tactics myself as a student, reading in awe of the mastery of ancient military masters and put them to good use. I could then -- and still can, when necessary -- bust out a ten or even twenty page paper with a few days notice. What Was My Secret? In my reading of Greek history, I stumbled across an obscure military maneuver, one designed for troops penetrating deep in enemy lines. My essay format works the same. Forget your teacher's boring prompt. Here is the outline for a hypothetical five paragraph paper: Introduction: (see a complete intro example here) Begin with a broad, conclusive hook.

Wasting Time Can Make You A Star At Work. Why Start-up Culture Is Bad for Creativity. Something is happening to the start-up culture—and I'm not sure I like what it's doing to me. For a couple of years now, one of the core start-up mantras has been "release early and release often"—or, even more pithy, "fail fast. " There's nothing wrong with this idea on the face of it. But combine it with the romanticized notion of working day and night narrowly focused on your start-up, and you have an entrepreneurial culture that's fast-paced on a whole new level. Most days, this is exciting and it is what's required to keep up with the pace of innovation in the tech community. But more and more, I'm starting to think that the constant pressure to go-go-go may be killing more organizations than it's helping.

Where 'Aha' Moments Really Come From I've been reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. Think about the most creative companies: Apple doesn't iterate on the fly. According to Lehrer, we need the right mix of focus and freedom from pressure to be at our most creative. How Dictation Tools Can Help Speed Up Your Workflow [INFOGRAPHIC] We all know the pen is mightier than the sword, but for 21st-century storytellers, the voice could be the one tool to rule them all. With speech-recognition software such as Siri and Dragon Naturally Speaking becoming more widely available to users, it's time to ask yourself: How can I improve my workflow with dictation tools?

A new infographic from Carissa Newark of accountingdegree.net lays out just how much faster you can get work done with these tools, which can process information three times faster when compared to average-speed typing. It's a great advantage for writers, especially those of us who may never type as fast as record holder Sean Wrona, who recently clocked a key-smacking velocity of 256 wpm at the Ultimate Typing Championship. For now, dictation tools top out at a speed that's about as fast as most of us can talk, but imagine if these tools could actually keep up with some of the world's greatest speed-speakers?

Have you improved your typing with one of these tools? Infographics / how content marketing is competing with traditional advertising these days — the advantages to content marketing, which types of companies are using it and how much they’re spending on it, which tactics are the most popular, and which key c.