Friday, March 14, 2014

Always Keep Your Online Reputation Up!


Really very important statement and if you follow it, your business will prosper.

Have you ever tried to type your name/company name and see what is being spoken about you? It’s very important to scan everything and if there is any negative stuff, it’s necessary to remove.


How to monitor your reputation
There are many tools that can help you and the most important is setting Google Alerts. It’s free and it tracks all types of web results, like news, blogs, videos and more.
If you are using social media, for example Twitter, you can monitor your name using a hashtag to see what is written about you. And one more important thing about socials: go private – modify privacy setting in all your social platforms,  ensure that only friends with whom you don't mind sharing your personal life or photos will have access to that information. Also de-tag from any uncomplimentary pics of you.
There is also another way of tracking – Question and Answer websites, like Yahoo Answers. If anyone is asking questions about you, your company or a particular keyword, you can track those on certain Q&A sites.

Who needs an online reputation and why
Every human being, any company needs a good online reputation. And if you don’t control your brand online, your competitors will do. Imagine you work in a company which is not aware of your present reputation and competition finds this out. What will happen then? The company you work for is at risk, you, as well.

Another situation: you’re looking for a better job and you’re not aware of what is being spoken in the internet about you (there are lots of “kind” people around us). It would be so difficult for you to find the desired work, as many companies know how to check your “online reputation”.
Or you sell some product - today people don’t buy anything before checking who the seller is or what is being said in the product reviews.

Who really cares about your online reputation
As stated above, many people may be interested in your reputation, starting from consumers, business partners, marketers, journalists, stock holders to co-workers. The easiest way is just to have a “good” reputation.

How to manage your online reputation
There are some points you should follow to improve your online reputation. Google posted some good advice on how to manage your reputation through search results which says:
  • Think twice before putting your personal information online.
  • If something you dislike has already been published, try to remove it from the site where it's appearing.
  • Proactively publish useful, positive information about yourself or your business.


Finally it’s not so difficult to be a “positive”, “kind” and “wise” person. Build credibility, be polite and accessible, respond to any criticism and you’ll prevent reputation problems. And the most important thing – think before you click!

Friday, March 7, 2014

February Acquisitions




As promised I’m going to inform my readers about most important acquisitions of the year. If in January I thought that it’s the beginning of the year which is due to great changes, now I can say that I changed my mind and decided to call 2014 an “acquisition” year.

Many biggest companies buy more and more companies. But the “Wow” acquisition of the year (and not only year - it’s one of the biggest tech acquisitions since 2001 when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion) became Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition. February also became the biggest acquisition month for LinkedIn. Let’s go by date:

5.02.2014 - Amazon Acquires Video Gaming Studio Double Helix Games
Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years. Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of their ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.

6.02.2014 - LinkedIn makes its biggest acquisition by paying $120m for Bright
LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition deal ever! Bright is a natural fit for LinkedIn as it makes a bulk of its revenue from its Talent Solutions group. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made several updates and launched new features to improve the process for recruiters - Bright may kick things up a notch.

11.02.02014 -Yahoo Acquires Social Diary Wander For A Price Over $10M
Originally, Wander was focused on sharing travel experiences in a diary, but soon pivoted focus onto an app called Days. The app lets users create a series of photographs and gifs in a package called a “Day,” which can be shared the next day. Days is about sharing an entire story of how your day went. 

13.02.2014 - Yahoo Acquires Technical Recruiting Startup Distill
Distill was working on a way to make technical recruiting easier by pairing video interviews and programming challenges. Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. 

14.02.2014 - Rakuten buys Viber for $900 million to expand digital empire
Rakuten aims to be the world's number one Internet services company, and buying Viber complements its strategy in the digital space. Viber has rocketed in popularity as a potential rival to Skype, announcing 100 million worldwide users in September 2011, and then more than 200 million in May of 2013. The Viber app is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows 8, Mac OS X, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or Wi-Fi connections. Besides providing Rakuten access to new markets, the deal will offer new potential markets for Viber through Rakuten users. 

SlickLogin is a small startup, whose product involves a unique, sound-based system for logging into websites.

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform with 450 million MAUs, which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! 

21.02.2014 - Apple acquires TestFlight creator Burstly

Burstly offers a full suite of products to power the entire app lifecycle. The app ecosystem is crowded but Burstly provides tools to help you navigate with ease. 

21.02.2014 - Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn't succeeding.

24.02.2014 - IBM Buys NoSQL Cloud Provider Cloudant
Based in Boston, the privately held Cloudant offers a hosted version of the ApacheCouchDB open source data store. Its own version, called BigCouch, can be run across multiple servers, providing a way to build and maintain an extremely large and fast data store for a front-end application.