Aviary is a pioneering and leading provider of creative tools for web and mobile.With a suite of online creative applications and a powerful API, we offer a simple (and free!) solution for creators of all genres to build, edit, and share their work. We're a small, creative team and we're passionate about powering the world's creativity. If you're an awesome person who wants to help us achieve that goal, we'd love to hear from you!
Kubec also said that, at least in Europe, people have been getting malware just from listening to music. "You can run a standalone music application, which displays an ad. If it hits a Java exploit, you get infected." He also criticized the blogging tool WordPress for its shared theme plug-ins, because they're often written with backdoors installed, creating yet another vector by which hackers can access your Web site.
This brings up another point. If entrepreneurs can build sophisticated technologies so cheaply in the Web world, who needs venture capitalists any more? Software startups often spend the first few months of their existence polishing business plans and pitching investors. They can instead be working with smart people all over the world and focus their energy on perfecting their technologies, as Beat The GMAT did. When law school grads can build successful technology companies—Park says his site has been profitable since its inception, with annual revenue close to $1 million—the notion that website founders need computer programming backgrounds is outdated.
I know what I'd rather be doing.
About RockMelt
Your Browser. Re-Imagined.
RockMelt is re-imagining the browser for how people use the web today by making it easy to stay in touch with friends, search online, and get updates from your favorite sites.
If it makes it easier to stay connected to my large Social Sphere then it will.
In November, Nansee Kim-Parker raised $20,000 on LendingClub.com in less than two weeks to open TokyoMoto, a San Francisco motorcycle-repair shop. After clearing a prescreening process, she posted details of her background and her business idea and attracted hundreds of small lenders from around the country. Her loan has a three-year fixed interest rate of 9.85%.
"It's like a village, gathering support here and there," says Ms. Kim-Parker, who calls traditional bank credit "unaffordable" for small businesses.
Lydia Hamilton-Monnie says she was turned down by three banks before raising $25,000 on Prosper last year to open a plus-size women's apparel store in Milwaukee. With a three-year fixed rate of 12% on the loan, Ms. Hamilton-Monnie says she is on track to pay back her nearly 1,000 lenders by December 2012.
Peer-to-peer lending sites, which first appeared in the U.S. five years ago, charge borrowers a fee for connecting them to a network of lenders, who put up anywhere from $25 to $1,000. Lenders are paid back with interest, with the rate set on the basis of a site-assigned credit rating, minus the site's fee. Most loans are for less than $10,000, but they can exceed $30,000.
Forget the banks, or even funding from local quasi-public/private funds, get you startup up and running with a peer-to-peer loan. Have you looked in to or used peer-to-peer loans? What do you think?
These and other high-profile hacking attacks are changing the way the public perceives the incidents. "Breaches are increasingly viewed less as a weakness on the part of the company and more as the sophistication and relentlessness on the part of the hackers," said Michael Fox, who specializes in data-breach response at ICR Inc., a communications firm. "There's not as much of a stigma attached."
While a breach often results in fines and other costs, customers don't tend to flee. Sales at TJX Cos. Inc., the parent of TJ Maxx and other stores, climbed 7% in the fiscal year following its disclosure in January 2007 that hackers stole as many as 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers.
I (Douglas Craver | @dougcraver) often tell the tech startups I advise that there is a lot more forgiveness in the market than you thing. Problems are inevitable and it is all about how you handle them that counts, not the problem itself.
Appirio's just released a software package that lets enterprise customers put together an iPad or iPhone app almost on a click-and-drag basis. The apps are hooked together using Salesforce.com's cloud-based systems, and pushed out "live" to business's iPad users.
Sounds simple, but Appirio's new package comes with huge promises, too. It allows developers with almost no iOS experience to build an app, meaning they could even be company executives rather than coders. Its home base in the cloud means it won't hog up company hard drive space, either. As founder Narinder Singh tells Fast Company, it's really hard today for businesses to put together their own apps, since "you want the experience of a native app that feels like Angry Birds but you don't have the experience to build it yourself." Companies find themselves using in-house coder teams, but that's not necessarily speedy or cheap.
Hence the new package, which basically lets firms quickly strap together a native iPad or iPhone app to meet a particular business need, distribute it to their staff, and have them "updated in real time, in the field without needing to redeploy," Singh says. And unlike a web-app solution, mobile apps can allow companies to manage apps in a much more centralized, controlled way, and leverage the extra powers a native app on an iPad and iPhone can have compared to a more limited web app--including ease of use, since they use all the familiar input methods used by iOS. To speed up the app-building process, the company's even put together a suite of template apps, including systems like field surveys, location-based apps, time and action-tracking apps, and search and display apps.
Thanks to my partner Jack Ricchiuto (@zenext) for pointing me to this article. I recently told him that DIY SaaSs that let the user build their own apps, like you can do with Podio (http://www.podio.com) for project management, were the future of what I call "self-service computing" made possible by the Cloud.
The results were the latest sign of trouble for the company, which is watching handsets from rivals like Apple Inc. eat away at its once-dominant share of the smartphone market. RIM hasn't released a new BlackBerry model for nearly a year as it tries to rejuvenate a product line that's been criticized as clunky, under-powered and stodgy.
Research In Motion is signaling weakness in the marketplace, with sales of high-end BlackBerry devices falling and delays in releasing a new operating system hurting its share of the mobile business, MarketWatch's Dan Gallagher tells Laura Mandaro.
It has seen its share of sales in the benchmark North American market fall to 16.5% at the end of the first quarter of 2011 from 41.3% in the year earlier period, according to research firm Gartner.
Some observers worry RIM is fast following in the path of Finnish handset maker Nokia Corp., which recently issued a steep second-quarter revenue warning, citing market-share loss to rival smartphones, most notably low-end devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software.
Following up on the advertising toolbox, you also need to let the media (oh if only there was a site about web 2.0 and social networking where you could get covered…) know about your new venture. We’ve gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free.
Chris Waddell
Champion paralympic skier
Middlebury CollegeA couple of years ago, I spent a bunch of time in Tibet and I came home. And I went to go get my mail. My mailbox is at the end of my street, so I parked my car and started pulling my chair out. And this little girl rode by, probably like 6 years old, on her little pink bike, streamers coming off her handlebars, and she said, “What happened to your legs?”
I said: “I was a ski racer here at Middlebury, and it was my first day of Christmas vacation. I went to the mountain with my brother, met up with a bunch of friends, took a couple of runs preparing to train, and my ski popped off in the middle of the turn. And I fell in the middle of the trail, and I broke two vertebrae.”
She said, “So you’ll never walk again?” And I said, “No, probably not.” As she rode away, she said, “That’s too bad.”
I wish that I had stopped her because if I’d never had my accident I never would have been the best in the world at anything. I wouldn’t have turned a hobby into a profession. I don’t think I would have had the guts to get up in front of you and talk. Wouldn’t have acted in a soap opera. I wouldn’t have met presidents and heads of state.
But that little girl saw the tragedy; she didn’t see the potential gift.
Solution: As a Result, Social Media Management Systems are Emerging
Like CMS and WMS for centralized website management, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) empower social media teams to manage multiple distributed social channels from one location –enabling the opportunity to build deeper relationships by being in more places at once.Definition: Social Media Management Systems are collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool.
How it works: Three simple features In the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage social data. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.
Since its inception, Knotice has been consistently recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in northeast Ohio (most recently #8 on the 2011 Weatherhead 100, among others). With increasing demand for Knotice’s marketing software and services, the company is in the process of hiring for approximately 23 new professional-level jobs between now and August 2011 across several departments. (For a complete list of opportunities, go to www.knotice.com/careers.)
To help attract the attention of qualified professionals who may be ready to make a change, Knotice has even erected a billboard along I-77 North near downtown Cleveland that reads “Grow with us” – a not-so-common sight with the current economic conditions.
That’s why the resume is on the out, and the bio is on the rise. People work with people they can relate to and identify with. Trust comes from personal disclosure. And that kind of sharing is hard to convey in a resume. Your bio needs to tell the bigger story. Especially, when you’re in business for yourself, or in the business of relationships. It’s your bio that’s read first.To help you with this, your bio should address the following five questions:
- Who am I?
- How can I help you?
- How did I get here (i.e. know what I know)?
- Why can you trust me?
- What do we share in common?
