Have you been thinking about ways to make money in tech? Maybe you’d love to start a business but don’t know what to launch. Or, you’d rather stay behind the scenes and generate income without getting your hands dirty or being seen.

Whatever your preference, you’ve got options. Here are 8 of the simplest methods for making money in tech.

1. Investments

The more effort and money you put into your investments, the more likely you are to see bigger returns. However, if you’re willing to accept a lower return, there are plenty of ways to invest in profitable industries without having to do too much work. For example, if you don’t want to invest in real estate properties directly, you can invest in existing apps or find a gap in the market and create your own app to bring more value to the market.

Investing in opportunities like IT startups is also an excellent opportunity to generate big money. Even though startups are risky, it can be rewarding when an investment pays off. If you’re an early investor in a startup that makes it to IPO, you can see returns in the thousands of percent and end up wealthy.

The downside to investing in startups is that around 90% fail to make it to an IPO. It’s almost impossible to know ahead of time what the chances are of any given startup failing. There have been many companies that seemed great but failed, and vice versa.

Startups fail mainly for eight reasons:

• Premature scaling
• No product-market fit
• Marketing issues
• Team conflicts
• Inability to generate substantial revenue
• Running out of money
• Operational issues
• Legal issues

If you’re considering investing in a tech startup, take some time to read about past companies that failed hard. You’ll get a more detailed insight into why startups fail and see some of the red flags to look for before you invest your money. This information will help you do better research. For example, Pixelon’s founder was on Virginia’s most wanted list for skipping bail after being convicted of stock swindling. It’s probably a good idea to research the founders and maybe even run a background check.

There are many other types of tech investments you can pursue, including stocks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be exploding right now, so that’s likely a good aspect of tech to look into.

2. Start an ecommerce store

In 2021, the ecommerce market generated $288.8 billion in revenue and $45.7 billion in net revenue. Ecommerce is constantly growing, and if you can find your niche, build a good website, and market your business, you’ll be taking home a share of that pie.

Don’t worry about competing with big retailers. Small ecommerce stores can be highly profitable. You don’t need to be as big as Amazon to run a successful online store. There are millions of small ecommerce stores currently, and many of them are still growing. What you need is a good niche, high-quality products at a low price, a market for your products, and amazing customer service.

If selling physical goods seems like too much work, you can sell digital products, like software or games. The concept is exactly the same.

3. Sell outsourced services

If you can outsource 100% of your services, you can run virtually any type of tech business you want. This means you can choose a profitable niche, and you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to know how to run a business.

Many people are already doing this with website design, accounting, video marketing, SEO, video production, reseller web hosting, and more.

While web design is probably the most popular option, there’s a lot of competition in the market. You’d have to create something really special to stand out in the market. However, accounting has far less competition and is just as easy to outsource. For example, you can hire a third-party company to prepare tax returns for your clients. This is a basic service, but it’s absolutely necessary, so it will always be in demand. Even tax preparers use third parties to process their clients’ returns to save time.

4. Try affiliate marketing

Top affiliate marketers make bank, and you can, too. You just have to find the right opportunity and put in the time, energy, and effort. You also need to learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, which you can learn online. There are countless guides and resources out there, including videos, that will walk you through the entire process.

The easiest way to earn money through affiliate marketing is to sell products and services you can be interested in because that’s how you’ll write convincing copy. Otherwise, be prepared to hire out all your sales copy needs.

Some of the most profitable affiliate niches include:

• Technology
• Wellness and fitness
• Financial products, like debt settlement

No matter what niche you choose, go for high-commission items so you don’t end up working really hard to earn pennies.

Choose products or services you can replace if they get discontinued, you lose your account, or something changes that makes it not worth promoting. Never build an affiliate business around a specific product because it may not last long.

You can find affiliate marketing opportunities by searching Google for your target product or niche plus the word “affiliate,” ask companies you’re familiar with if they have an affiliate program, or use sites like Commission Junction, ClickBank, FlexOffers, Amazon Associates, and other similar sites. Even Shopify has its own affiliate marketing program.

5. Open an electric vehicle (EV) charging station

You’ve seen them in the news and maybe even at the grocery store – EV charging stations are starting to be installed at various places, even in small cities. The market is small but expected to grow significantly now that laws are being passed to mandate electric vehicle use.

The market exists, but it might take a while to become standard. There is a push for most of the United States to have only electric vehicles by 2030, and Ford is getting a head start by spending billions of dollars on new EV models. Ford is replacing the Edge, Escape, and Transit Connect with all-electric models.

However, if you start now and build your first charging station, you’ll be ahead of the game when electric vehicles are either dominant or required.

6. Partner with developers

If you aren’t a programmer but have some amazing ideas for software or mobile apps that can make a difference in a particular industry, consider contacting developers for partnership opportunities.

Remember that not all ideas are worth pursuing, so you might face a lot of rejection. It’s worth pursuing if you have great ideas that can genuinely fill some unmet needs in a hungry market.

7. Start a podcast

It seems like everyone has a podcast today, and there’s always room for more. Millions of people enjoy listening to podcasts on a regular basis, usually through providers like iTunes or Spotify.

Podcasting is ideal if you have something important or useful you’d like to share with the world, either by yourself or by interviewing various guests. The best podcasts share controversial, unusual, or strong views on various subjects.

You can post videos to YouTube and repurpose them on Spotify, or vice versa. You can also host a live show if you prefer, and take calls from your audience. There are radio show hosting services that make this possible and all you have to do is install an app on your computer or phone.

If you start a podcast, be prepared to pay all required licensing fees for any media you broadcast. Licensing media for podcasts is a bit complicated, so be sure to consult with an attorney before doing anything. You don’t want to make a mistake and get in trouble with rights management companies like BMI.

Also, when you produce your final audio files, ensure you nail the sound quality because nobody will listen to your podcast if the audio is poor.

8. Start a 3D printing business

The demand for three-dimensional, custom products is rising. In 2021, the market was valued at around $16 million and is expected to grow by 24% each year. Because of the cost, most people don’t have a 3D printer in their home but would love to have a custom-made product. There’s good money to be made by printing your own designs or printing custom designs submitted by your customers.

You can make money producing parts, novelty items, artistic items, models, prototypes, and more.

Although it’s a profitable niche, there are a few points of caution. If you’re going to make things that are regulated, like medical products, ensure you align with all applicable state, local, and federal laws. You also can’t print designs if they would infringe on someone’s intellectual property rights.

What tech business will you start?

This list just covers a handful of money-making opportunities in tech. The possibilities are endless, so if you don’t like what you see here, keep looking or invent your own idea.

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

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If there’s one niche of the business world that never stops evolving, it’s marketing. Digital marketing is highly dependent on the maturation of online technologies and is continuously pivoting and responding to new developments. Having said that, are you prepared for 2023?

The Digital Marketing Trends Set to Define 2023

Now is the time to begin planning ahead to account for the digital marketing trends of 2023. By staying current, you can develop a digital marketing strategy that takes the latest tips, trends, and frameworks into account.

“A good digital marketing strategy gives your company a cohesive plan that is consistent through your many online and offline channels,” Marcel Digital explains. “After all, you want your branding and message to be the same on your point-of-purchase advertising in your stores as it is on your social media pages and website. A cohesive message saves time and effort by not having employees recreate a marketing message for every channel.”

But our focus is not to discuss how to create a cohesive message. While important, we want to dig into the how. In other words, how do you execute once you’ve zeroed in on your message?

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Though classic marketing principles and approaches will always prove effective, sometimes it’s helpful to study the latest trends to get a feel for innovative opportunities that can take marketing to the next level. And in this article, we want to focus on a few of the top trends for 2021. Take a look:

1. Live Video

Live video streaming has exploded over the past three years (and will continue to do so over the next decade). Powered by social media platforms, live streaming is available to the masses and provides an avenue for the continued democratization of content. Just consider the following data points as curated by HubSpot:

• Internet users watched approximately 1.1 billion hours of live video in 2019.
• By 2027, the live video streaming market is expected to hit $184.3 billion.
• By 2020, live streaming is expected to account for 82% of all internet traffic.

Those are significant numbers – too significant to ignore. And there are plenty of reasons why businesses are making the jump to live video, including:

• There’s almost no learning curve to record live video. There’s no need for a script, props, or post production. You hit the record button and push out live content. It’s casual, relaxed, and relatable.
• There’s no requirement for advanced technology. While you can certainly enhance quality with some tech upgrades, a smartphone is all that’s needed to get started.
• Live video feels exclusive and commands longer average view times when compared to pre-recorded videos. (There’s a sense of urgency from the viewer that they might not be able to see the content later.)

Live streaming video is used in a variety of capacities and is highly dependent on your brand, goals, and content strategy. However, it’s ideal for things like Q&As with an audience, customer support, special announcements, interviews with influencers, live events, and backstage events.

If you’re new to live video but want to get started, the best piece of advice is to jump in and do it. Try a couple of videos and see what happens. Were you comfortable? Did you enjoy it? Did the audience engage? What can you learn?

Your first shot at live streaming won’t be perfect, but you can always optimize over time.

2. Programmatic Advertising

Another sweeping trend is the growth of programmatic advertising. If paid traffic is part of your strategy for 2021, you need to gain some understanding and proficiency in this area.

As MarTech Advisor explains, “Programmatic advertising is the process of automating the buying and selling of ad inventory in real-time through an automated bidding system. Programmatic advertising enables brands or agencies to purchase ad impressions on publisher sites or apps within milliseconds through a sophisticated ecosystem.”

Over the past couple of years, programmatic advertising has become the preferred method of running ad campaigns. It offers real-time insights, enhanced targeting capabilities, increased transparency, better budget utilization, and provides a way to combat ad fraud effectively.

Programmatic advertising can be deployed in a variety of channels and formats, including display ads, video ads, social ads, audio ads, native ads, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads.

Contrary to how traditional media buying works, programmatic advertising doesn’t usually involve publishers and advertising working together in a one-to-one fashion. The type of programmatic deal – such as real-time bidding, private marketplaces, preferred deals, or programmatic guaranteed – determines how they’re delivered.

3. Voice Search

Would it surprise you to learn that approximately 27 percent of the online global population uses voice search on mobile? Or that more than 1 in 3 US internet users use a voice assistant monthly (up from just 9.5 percent in 2018).

Consider that by the end of 2023, roughly 30 percent of all internet browsing sessions will include voice search. And that more than half of adults use voice search on a semi-regular basis.

The writing is on the wall. Voice search will soon become the preferred method of browsing the internet. It’s faster, hands-free, and ultimately more convenient.

So what does that mean for digital marketing? Well, it changes everything, particularly on the content strategy side of things. People speak differently than they write. Consider, for example, someone searching for a pizza restaurant. Their queries might look like this:

Typed: pizza restaurant Bronx

Spoken: What’s the best pizza restaurant in the Bronx?

Voice search is ushering in a new age of SEO and content creation where long-tail keywords are the focus. Natural, conversational language wins the day. Brands that adapt to this style will see their SEO rankings improve and search traffic scale.

In terms of blogging strategy, brands should focus on developing content that answers questions. People go to Google when they have a question and the search engine knows this. So in an effort to satisfy their users, they’re elevating content that answers very specific questions.

4. Interactive Content

Online users are growing bored with basic blog posts and static content. They want to be stimulated. They also want control over their experiences. And these desires are currently culminating in the rise of interactive content.

Research shows that interactive content gains 2X more engagement than static content. This has led 34 percent of marketers to include interactive content in at least 10 percent of their strategies.

The most popular types of interactive content include quizzes, polls, interactive infographics, AR, VR, and online calculators.

Interactive content is typically just a subsegment of the larger content strategy. But in 2024 and beyond, it’s going to become an even bigger portion. While many brands are currently developing one piece of interactive content for every nine pieces of static content, that number will likely increase to 20 percent.

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5. Shifts in Influencer Marketing

In 2016, the influencer marketing industry was worth an estimated $1.7 billion. By the end of this year, it’s projected to be worth somewhere north of $9.7 billion.

People like to hate on influencers, but they’re effective. The earned media value for money spent on influencer marketing was roughly $18 for every dollar spent in 2019. And over the last three years, there’s been a 1500% increase in brands searching for “influencer marketing” on Google. In other words, it’s effective and here to stay. But as we enter into 2021, this industry will undergo significant shifts that will ultimately change the way businesses approach marketing and advertising.

One of the biggest shifts will be the rise in micro influencers. These are influencers who have small yet loyal followings (anything less than 10,000 followers). And what they lack in reach (compared to large influencers), they make up for with high engagement and affordability.

It’s also possible that we’ll see an increase in performance-based influencer marketing. In the past, it’s always been sort of a flat fee deal. Businesses pay per post and the influencer gets the same amount of money no matter what happens on the engagement front. But as the influencer arena gets more competitive, brands will gain more leverage. Soon, we could see payment based on the number of clicks, comments, or even sales.

Ultimately, the changes in this space will be dictated by consumers. Followers make it clear what they do and don’t respond to by the type of engagement they offer. As brands and influencers gather more data and analytics from these types of posts, they’ll iterate and zero in on what works best.

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Hit the Refresh Button on Your Digital Marketing

No digital marketing strategy is set in stone. As you approach 2021, take the time to understand the new trends so that you can shift your strategy into a direction that aligns with the trajectory of the larger consumer marketplace. Whether it’s live video, programmatic advertising, voice search, interactive content, or shifts in influencer marketing, there’s ample opportunity for growth and expansion.

The post Exploring the Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2023 appeared first on ReadWrite.

The sophistication and accessibility of technology has made it easier than ever for average people to get involved with investing in and trading stocks. In the future, as new technologies continue to emerge, it’s going to become even more accessible. This “democratized” stock trading could completely change how we think about investing—and how the average person performs economically.

So what exactly does the future hold, and how can we control for even better outcomes?

Current Technology Trends

Current consumers have access to a wide range of technologies related to finance and stocks. With stock apps, they can quickly invest money digitally, without leaving their homes. With budgeting apps, they can plan out their individual finances and save money for whatever they desire.

More importantly, they also have access to brokerage apps, which allow them to buy and sell stocks, bonds, and index funds as often as they like. Many such apps are switching to offer zero-commission trades, meaning you won’t have to pay a transaction fee for each trade you make. And with most apps offering low or nonexistent account minimums, people can get involved in trading with just a few thousand, or even a few hundred dollars.

This is complemented by the prevalence of apps meant to help investors make better decisions, all with the help of stock APIs. A stock API is a programming interface that provides real-time financial data to a source that requests it. For example, a developer working on a data dashboard might use a stock API to provide dashboard users with accurate, up-to-the-minute data on individual stock performance or broader performance metrics. With better APIs, developers can make even better apps—and consumers can become even more educated, ultimately making better investment decisions and feeling more “in tune” with the market.

Trends are also moving toward machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Algorithmic trading, which relies on data derived from stock APIs, uses machine learning and intelligent decision making to buy and sell assets on users’ behalves. Rather than being forced to conduct individual research and make risky decisions, investors can rely on the performance of an impartial, data-driven algorithm.

The Benefits of Democratized Stock Trading

Already, democratized stock trading has had a number of positive effects, which should increase even further in the future:

• Stock investing for all. The stock market has historically performed well, with occasional bear markets and recessions that temporarily disrupt earnings. Generations of people have used it as the cornerstone of their retirement planning strategy and used it to generate wealth. However, many people have avoided investing in the stock market because they don’t have the available capital, because they were too intimidated to try and figure out how to invest, or because they were afraid of making a bad decision. Now, the democratization of stock trading has made it possible for anyone with a bit of extra cash and an internet connection to get involved in investing.
• Higher overall financial knowledge. The accessibility of real-time stock market data and other financial data is also playing a role in boosting overall financial knowledge. Fiscal literacy has always been a problem, especially in the United States, and while the introduction of a few new apps won’t immediately change that, the downstream effects can be highly positive. Experienced investors now have faster, more accurate channels where they can learn more about their investing prospects, and total newbies can dive into investing even if they’ve never considered it before. Additionally, the prevalence of stock API-based apps is increasing the popularity and public perception of stock investing, leading to more independent learning.
• Wealth distribution. Regardless of how you feel about it politically, there’s a massive wealth divide in the United States; the wealthiest people control far more capital than the poorest people, proportionally. And because capital can be a source of further growth, that becomes problematic—especially over the course of multiple generations. But when even the poorest members of society have access to a mechanism of financial growth, it becomes possible to build a more equitable distribution.
• Funding opportunities. Some people view stock investing as unidirectional, but remember, the entire reason the stock market exists is to allow businesses to attract more funding for growth. If you’re considering starting a corporation and you’re interested in raising capital to expand, the stock market is one of your best options; more people investing means more prospective investors you can call upon to gather the capital you need.
• Financial opportunities. There are also opportunities for software developers and financial experts. With the availability of smarter, more reliable stock APIs, developers can create apps and tools that other people can use to improve their knowledge or improve their investing approach. This is both financially rewarding for the people creating the tools and practically useful for the people using them.

Repercussions of Democratized Stock Trading

Are there any repercussions or side effects as a result of higher access to stock trading?

• Individual risk. As with any financial endeavor, the individual bears some level of financial risk. In a world of democratized stock trading, individual investors are left to their own devices to perform due diligence and assess risk. If non-experts are allowed to buy and sell assets at their own discretion, it could leave them with higher losses. The stock market has historically performed well over long periods of time, and assuming a diversified position, but this is still no guarantee of success—especially if individual investors are ignoring conventional advice or making emotionally reckless decisions.
• Economic bubble formation. Economic bubbles have the potential to bear significant economic consequences, including the development of large-scale recessions. Bubbles begin to form when an asset becomes overvalued, or overly popular; with too many people buying in, prices skyrocket beyond reason, and an untenable number of investors hold the asset. Later, the bubble “bursts,” prices plummet, and consumers and institutions alike lose millions (or even billions) of dollars of collective value. More people investing in a collection of assets could make it easier for such a bubble to form.
• Flash crashes. We also need to consider the potential consequences of algorithmic trading. Stock trading algorithms tend to make decisions much faster and at much higher volume than individual investors, which can trigger events like “flash crashes,” where the prices of a given asset or collection of assets plummets seemingly spontaneously. Fortunately, the market has already taken measures to correct for events like these in the future; “circuit breakers” shut down the market if a period of activity is too volatile or destructive, as a safety mechanism to prevent further undue losses.
• Price inflation. Over time, the democratization of stock investing will increase demand and trading activity. More people will be buying and holding stocks, which can drive relative prices higher. In some ways, this could represent a higher barrier to entry for the next generation, but it also provides an avenue of growth.

Adapting to a New Environment

Overall, the democratization of stock trading doesn’t seem to be an inherently good or bad development. More individuals are going to have access to prospective investment growth, but they’re also going to be exposed to more risk. People will be better financially educated, but highly volatile, unpredictable events are still going to flourish.

It’s important not to view democratized and algorithmic stock trading in terms of good or bad, but instead acknowledge that it’s a complex new environment with astounding new opportunities. The accessibility of new information, particularly with the help of stock APIs and new apps, is never a bad thing. However, it will take time for the market (and individual investors) to adjust to the new possibilities. As technology continues to advance, we’ll need to adapt to those changes even more rapidly.

This article was update 3-15-2022.

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The commercial real estate industry has changed considerably over the past year and a half. Some of the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been devastating while the impact of others remains to be seen. However, when investors look to the future, there’s one thing we can all get excited about, namely the rise of the smart office.

Commercial Office Space in a Post-COVID World

When the COVID-19 pandemic first shocked the United States in April 2020, the majority of the American workforce still “went in” to work. In other words, they commuted into the office, plopped down in a chair, and performed their job duties in a corporate office. When shutdowns forced companies to get creative, everything changed.

Today, much of our workforce is now working remotely from home. Some companies have even decided to get rid of their corporate offices and go 100 percent virtual — a shocking 180-degree pivot that would have been unthinkable just two years ago.

Other businesses are choosing to return to the office but are making important changes and investments along the way. Listed below are a few of the early trends already unfolding.

• Office buildings are getting smaller as remote and hybrid positions reduce the need for square footage.

• With employees doing more work from home, many companies are turning unused office space into collaboration spaces for virtual meetings.

• Safety, proper spacing, and social distancing are fresh on the minds of businesses and commercial office space owners.

While the long-term ramifications of the pandemic on the commercial real estate world remain to be seen, one thing is certain. Businesses are getting smarter about how they optimize their offices for efficiency, productivity, innovation, health, and safety.

No, seriously — the buildings themselves are actually getting smarter. The smart office is emerging as the next iteration of office space. For those who are paying attention, there are several exciting trends coming down the pipeline.

Breathing New Life Into Commercial Real Estate — the Smart Office

We often throw around the term “smart office,” but what exactly is it? It’s more than just having technology in a building. It’s about the intentional use of the right technology.

“A smart office is a workplace where modern technology is leveraged to help employees work smarter, better, and faster. This can be achieved by clearing away hurdles for the employees,” Senion explains. “By removing menial tasks and unnecessary obstacles — activities that drain time and energy from the workforce — smart office solutions let employees focus on what really matters.”

When compared to the traditional office, a smart office offers its workers several distinct benefits. These include:

• Greater productivity. Technology offers many advantages for businesses, but increased productivity is probably one of the most important. By making menial, repetitive tasks faster and more efficient, organizations can better utilize resources, cut costs, and enjoy greater flexibility. This represents a solid win for everyone.

• More efficient use of square footage. As expensive as commercial square footage is in competitive urban markets, being more efficient with square footage is an absolute priority. Thanks to the intelligent use of high-tech office spaces, companies can turn static workspaces into flexible areas with two or three different uses. This allows businesses to lease or buy smaller office spaces and save money.

• Improved collaboration. Collaboration is extremely important, especially nowadays when most companies have some sort of hybrid workforce with some employees in the office and others working remotely. Utilizing smart solutions, it’s easier to communicate and engage with coworkers and employees — regardless of whether they’re in the same physical space or not.

• Better employee well-being. When your team feels supported and has the tools it needs to work efficiently, there’s better overall focus and satisfaction. In other words, mental health gets a boost. Plus, as you’ll see in the following section on smart office trends, there are certain smart office technologies that also make it safer for employees to interact in a face-to-face manner.

When you add these benefits up, it becomes clear why the smart office is becoming so popular. Although it does require a significant investment on the front end, the advantages are clear.

4 Smart Office Trends Worth Tracking

As with anything technology-related, trends come and go. What’s popular right now will not necessarily be the most viable option in 12 to 18 months. Having said that, here are four smart office trends making the rounds in 2021 and 2022 that are worthy of your investment.

1. 5G Networks

The next wave of internet connectivity and data connection is here. We’re talking about 5G, of course. It’s difficult to overstate just how much of an improvement 5G is over 4G. This new network reduces download times, speeds up connections, and leads to smoother streaming for virtual meetings and other forms of communication.

2. Flexible Workspaces

Regardless of whether companies choose to go back to 100 percent in-person working in the future, or stick with hybrid teams, one thing is sure: virtual is part of our new reality. That means businesses must be prepared to host and join virtual meetings with customers and clients, business partners, and employees. And — since first impressions are everything — businesses must take steps to integrate the right technology.

Another popular trend is the rise of flexible workspaces that double as in-person conference rooms and virtual meeting rooms. These facilities come equipped with advanced camera and audio systems, lighting, and even green screens for inserting virtual backgrounds into the mix. The overall goal is to create sophisticated, high-tech spaces that can be used by employees to maintain a professional image during virtual meetings.

3. Internet of Things (IoT) Sensors

IoT sensors and associated advanced technology is allowing businesses to increase their connectivity, flexibility, and responsiveness without the need for investing in complex systems, wires, or superfluous devices.

Some solutions are super practical, such as installing fire suppressions systems that don’t require access to a water supply or electricity. Other solutions are more complex, such as temperature sensors, proximity sensors, and touch sensors. In either case, IoT technology is changing the game for good. Manual tasks are being automated, people are staying safer, and the modern smart office is becoming an increasingly frictionless place to work.

4. Intelligent Sanitization

In a world where the COVID-19 virus is still a serious concern for millions of people, it would be remiss not to mention some of the smart technology that’s helping to create safer and healthier workplaces for employees who want the ability to interact face-to-face. More specifically, there’s a lot of exciting innovation happening in the areas of sanitization.

For example, consider air purification and air circulation systems. While these technologies have been around for some time, they’re now being integrated into IoT platforms. As a result, they’re able to work together with people-counting sensors to create safer and better-ventilated office environments that dynamically adapt to real-time circumstances.

Intelligent, automated UV disinfection is another technology that’s expanding beyond healthcare facilities and into modern smart offices. These systems use UV-C lighting to disinfect surfaces at regular intervals. Depending on system integration, some can automatically detect when people enter a room or leave a room. This allows the UV-C to kick in at just the right time.

Putting it all Together

For businesses that are committed to continuing to maintain a presence in a physical office space, the smart office is clearly the way of the future.

Thanks to newer technology such as 5G networks, IoT, cloud computing, and AI, it’s now possible to enhance productivity, lower costs, improve collaboration, and simultaneously keep employees healthy and safe. In a post-COVID world, where uncertainty is high, those are positive trends you’ll want to keep an eye on.

Image Credit: rodnae productions; pexels; thank you!

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Business process automation, or BPA, is one of the more exciting movements in the business world. BPA promises greater efficiency, better output, lower costs, and all of the other secondary benefits that go along with these.

But until technology catches up, things will continue to lag behind. So the question is, what’s in store for 2022?

What is Business Process Automation?

As the business world becomes more technologically advanced, so do the tasks and processes that growing organizations use to remain competitive in the marketplace.

According to Laserfiche, “Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. It accelerates how work gets done by routing information to the right person at the right time through user-defined rules and actions. As a result, BPA helps organizations streamline processes such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management and more.”

For a process to be “qualified” for BPA, it needs to meet certain criteria and factors. For example:

• The process should require consistency throughout the organization.
• It should be repeatable.
• The process should be somewhat predictable.
• It should be free from error (every single time).

The objective of BPA is to make processes more streamlined and cost-effective. In other words, these processes should reduce costs, lower inputs, increase profitability, and simultaneously require less manual effort and/or person-hours.

The Difference Between BPA and BPM

While the terms are used interchangeably, business process automation and business process management (BPM) are not the same thing. Whereas BPA uses technology to automate repeatable tasks, BPM is a collaboration between the business and IT to model and optimize business processes to meet larger strategic goals. To put it another way, BPM is a practice that looks at the organization as a whole, while BPA is a strategy for improving particular processes. Thus, BPM is the overarching ideology, while BPA refers to the individual action steps.

“A BPA and BPM combination can be powerful, as BPM outlines and provides an architecture for all of the business processes to be mapped and automated,” Red Hat explains. “When applied within a BPM practice, BPA can be used to continually monitor and improve process efficiencies.”

It’s always a good idea to have a BPM framework in place. Still, as we move into 2022, leading organizations are more focused on implementing specific BPA technology to improve efficiency and profitability in key areas of their businesses.

As such, that’s where innovation is focused right now.

The Top Trends in Business Process Automation

Innovation is booming in the BPA space. So while we could highlight dozens of individual ideas and innovations, we’ll keep it simple and focus on the biggest trends we see as we prepare to turn the calendar from 2021 to 2022.

1. End-to-End Organizational Visibility

From a management perspective, having gaps in your organizational visibility is dangerous. It allows small issues to fester under the surface and potentially proliferate into much larger problems down the road.

Thankfully, BPA solutions make it easier to enjoy end-to-end organizational visibility with few (if any) gaps.

For example, FinancialForce has a cloud-based professional services automation platform that allows businesses to easily manage teams across the entire organization with rich, real-time insights.

This includes the ability to schedule the right people with the right skills for the right projects at the right time. It also streamlines the traditionally finicky handoff that exists between sales and service. Departments can work together through a shared view of the customer pipeline instead of working in silos.

Platforms like this are becoming more commonplace in organizations of all sizes. Because once you get a system in place, it’s totally scalable and adaptable. (They’re so effective that you’ll wonder how you ever did without.)

2. Better Employee Onboarding

Your business is only as good as the people you have on your team. And if you want to have a productive team, it all starts with a strong onboarding process.

The onboarding process is where you make your first impression as an organization. If things get off on the wrong foot, it’ll compromise your ability to get maximum value out of your employees. However, if things start positively, it gives you a nice launching pad for bigger and better things.

BPA paves the way for streamlined and automated employee onboarding by eliminating endless paperwork, disjointed tasks, employee dissatisfaction, and low productivity. In addition, it ensures a smooth transition from one onboarding task to the next, which fully integrates employees into the organization in a way that stabilizes the organization.

3. Proactive Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity threats are a big deal for small businesses and large organizations alike. (In fact, many hackers are actually targeting small businesses because they tend to be more vulnerable.) But thanks to advanced BPA solutions, it’s possible for any organization of any size to be more proactive with its cybersecurity efforts.

When implemented correctly, automation can proactively detect cyber attacks at the very first sign of a threat. This ensures attempted attacks only make it to the “front porch” and never actually “inside.”

BPA is quickly becoming an essential component of any company’s cybersecurity blanket. The best tools have validation technology in place and require multiple levels of authentication.

4. Voice-Activated Automation

We see significant growth in the voice-activated automation space (and you can expect it to explode onto the scene in 2022). This technology, which is also growing quickly in the consumer marketplace with technologies like Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Home, is perfect for increasing flexibility and productivity in the workplace.

The key to voice-activated automation in the workplace is to implement it in ways that promote greater efficiency (rather than convoluting existing processes). Examples include:

• Turning lights on and off in areas where employees are likely to have their hands full (like storage rooms).
• Recording notes and video in meeting rooms.
• Unlocking doors and other access points.

Voice-activated automation is especially powerful when it comes to connecting different platforms. For example, when you combine a tool like Google Home with an application like IFTTT or Zapier, the possibilities are endless.

5. Reallocation of Human Labor

For decades, people have been worried that automation and robots will eventually steal jobs away from humans and make employees obsolete. But the more we watch BPA advance, it becomes clear that this is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true.

What BPA will do in 2022 is simply reallocate human labor to more strategic positions. In other words, automated technology streamlines menial, repetitive tasks (which are expensive for businesses and frustrating for employees). In turn, these employees are able to reallocate their energy, creativity, and talent to tasks that require human input. This makes them more valuable to their employers, while also ensuring employees spend time doing more enjoyable work.

6. AI Tech Stacking

Artificial intelligence will become much more commonplace in organizations in 2022. More specifically, we expect to see different tools layered and integrated together in a way that increases their value. This includes machine learning, image recognition, natural language processing, and even intelligent optical character recognition.

By creatively and intentionally combining multiple AI technologies together, businesses will be able to use these tools in ways that were previously thought impossible. This will fundamentally transform digital workflows and dramatically increase productivity across the board. It’s going to be a game-changer, to say the least.

Looking to the Future

It’s impossible to know which specific technologies will take root over the next three to five years. (So much can change so fast.) However, this much we know to be true: Business process automation will continue to be a core focus for growing organizations that want to improve productivity, ramp up their output, and bolster their bottom lines.

If you want your organization to enjoy these tantalizing perks, you’d be wise to place a similar emphasis on BPA in 2022 and beyond.

The post Business Process Automation Trends Coming Down the Pipeline appeared first on ReadWrite.

If you want your company to keep up with the latest trends, remain competitive in terms of efficiency, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards, you need to invest in new software and change your software systems occasionally.

On the front end, this is a demanding issue. You and the other leaders of your organization will need to research and do your due diligence to find the best app or platform for your needs. But on the back end, you’ll likely run into at least some integration issues.

Notably, your employees may not be as receptive to the new software as you’d like. If they struggle to adapt to the new software, they may misuse it, it may cost them time, it may stress them out, and they may outright refuse to use the system altogether.

If you want to see all the best benefits of your new software and keep your team happy at the same time, it’s important to use proactive strategies to make the integration process as seamless as possible.

Why Employees Struggle With New Software

Let’s start by examining some of the reasons why employees struggle with new software in the first place:

• Status quo bias and reluctance to change. Technology is always changing, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s excited about the prospects of learning how to use new gadgets and new platforms regularly. In fact, most of us are slow to embrace change; while we might fawn over new tech gadgets in our personal lives, we like our jobs to remain the same as much as possible. We crave routine and consistency, so we know what to expect every day. When you force people to change the main platform they use on a daily basis, you’re going to meet some resistance.
• Skepticism of benefits. You have a good reason for adopting this new platform. Maybe it’s to improve efficiency or streamline communication. But just because you believe it doesn’t mean your employees will. If you can’t prove that this system is an objective improvement, some of your employees will be reluctant to adopt it.
• Confusion and usability issues. Every other problem gets worse if the system is hard to use in any way. If an employee logs into the platform for the first time and doesn’t intuit what to do – or if they run into glaring technical issues (like bugs that prevent them from working or slow loading times) – they’re going to resist adoption. Even if they go along with the new system, they’ll likely be slow and inefficient when using it.
• Competing products. Most companies have a suite of tech products keeping the company running, including chat apps, project management platforms, and data storage solutions. If your employees are juggling dozens of platforms simultaneously, it’s going to be hard for them to keep everything straight. In addition, forcing them to learn yet another new platform may add stress to an already stressful setup.
• Frequent change woes. You might run into additional problems if your business is forced to change regularly to meet new regulatory standards. For example, if you work in the healthcare industry, you may practically require an EHR platform to help manage patient records, but it needs to fully comply with the latest patient privacy laws. If your employees anticipate further changes in the future, or if they don’t have faith that this is a long-term solution, they may not take the platform seriously.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to address these common issues.

Culture and Attitudes

Everything starts with your company culture and the attitudes of the people who work there. If you work to create a culture that encourages change and adapts quickly, you’ll find it much easier to introduce new platforms to your team.

• Embrace change. Do everything you can to embrace change within your organization – and turn “embracing change” into a core value. Encourage your team to think of change as an opportunity, rather than a threat. Teach them to be adaptable in the face of changing variables.
• Keep things moving. It’s also effective to keep your organization as mobile and agile as possible. Change things up from time to time, whether that means moving around your meeting time slots or rearranging the office furniture. In a malleable environment, change is embraced much easier.
• Set a good example. It’s also important to set a good example as a leader. Do your best to embrace new ideas and change your routine on occasion. If you’re overly stubborn and attached to traditional systems, your team will be too.

Persuasion and Trust

It’s also important to establish trust with your employees and persuade them that this is a tool worth using. If your employees have total faith in this solution, nothing should stop them from using it.

• Be proactive. Start the process as early as possible. Let your employees know you’re thinking about changing platforms or making a major upgrade. It will give them time to adjust and get used to the idea.
• Explain your reasoning. You don’t have to explain every leadership decision to your employees, but it can help you build trust and persuade them to your side. Why are you investing in this new platform? What are the advantages you hope to see?
• Prove the benefits. Are you certain you’ve chosen the right technology? If so, prove it to your employees. Some people on your team may be reluctant to adopt a new system no matter what, but most of your employees are likely persuadable. Show them the numbers that demonstrate how much more efficient this system is.
• Illustrate the transition. Plan how your company will transition to this new system and show that plan to your employees. If it’s a phased, gradual transition, a greater share of your employees will likely be on board.
• Answer questions transparently. From the early days of consideration to the final days of adoption, your employees will likely have lots of questions for you. When they ask those questions, try to answer them as fully and transparently as possible. If you dodge questions or if you’re seen as withholding information, it could work against you.

Education and Training

Even the most intuitive platform should be shown and taught to your employees. With a better approach to training and education, your staff members will be much more likely to use the platform as intended.

• Choose the right platform. If you choose a well-designed platform, with a good UI, it will be intuitive for most of your employees. If it’s easy to learn on the fly, most of your workforce will have no problems adopting it. But, of course, you’ll still need to provide at least some training to make things go smoothly.
• Give early demos. Introduce your staff members to the platform early and often. Warm them up to the idea before they’re forced to use it on a daily basis as part of their job.
• Get hands-on. Please don’t assume that your team members will watch the training videos; have a plan to give them hands-on, one-on-one training. Providing individualized, tailored training and education experiences will ensure everyone can use the platform to the best of their ability.
• Follow up individually. Collect feedback and see how people are adjusting. If anyone is having a specific problem, see if you can help them sort it out.

Ongoing Support

It’s also important to ensure that there’s some form of the ongoing support available to your employees. That could take any number of forms, including robust customer service from the app developers or education and assistance from your in-house IT team. No matter what, your employees should have a constantly available channel of communication that can help them resolve issues, clarify points of confusion, and use the app smarter.

There are no strategies that can totally eliminate resistance or difficulties when adopting a new tech platform in your business. However, these proactive approaches can introduce your team to new platforms more warmly and more successfully.

The post How to Help Staff Members Adapt to New Software appeared first on ReadWrite.

Self-driving cars are set to dramatically reduce accident rates as well as injuries and deaths from those accidents. But as they roll out and become more commonplace, they’re probably going to get some people killed. In fact, there are already early reports of fatalities caused by self-driving cars; tests of Uber’s fully autonomous vehicles have resulted in both injuries and deaths, and semi-autonomous Tesla vehicles have been involved in a number of accidents.

Is the public ready to accept deaths from self-driving car accidents? And if not, what steps would it take to get us there?

The Safety Dilemma

First, we need to understand the safety dilemma that self-driving cars introduce. Currently, there are around 35,000 deaths as a result of motor vehicle crashes in the United States each year. That’s close to 3,000 people every month, or 100 people per day. Hypothetically, if there was a new technology that could reduce that fatality rate by just 1 percent – just 1 person a day – that could save 350 lives annually. Since the majority of car accidents are attributable to human error, and autonomous vehicles can reduce the error rate to close to zero, we can assume that autonomous vehicles can sharply reduce the overall fatality rate of motor vehicle accidents (and reduce total motor vehicle accidents as well).

However, even a single car accident can cause major damage and multiple deaths, and a single incident of major negative publicity casts doubt on the safety and efficacy of self-driving cars in general. If a handful of magnified cases lead the public to believe that self-driving cars are dangerous, we could face delays of autonomous cars for years to come – ultimately resulting in more lives lost.

The Sources of Public Pushback

There are several reasons why the general public reacts negatively to the prospect of deaths from autonomous cars:

• Fear of change. People generally don’t like change. Because of status quo bias, we tend to prefer things exactly how they are, rather than risk changing dynamics in a way that could potentially make things worse. Our current motor vehicle fatality rate may be exceptionally high, but it’s what we’re used to. Incorporating autonomous vehicles on the road would require a massive overhaul to many societal constructs, forcing us to change how we think about driving, how we pay for insurance, and more. If you’re already afraid of an evolving society, and if you’re reluctant to adopt new technologies, every reported death from an autonomous vehicle is going to seem bigger and more impactful than an equivalent death attributable to human error.
• Fear of the unknown. People also fear the unknown. Right now, autonomous vehicles occupy a kind of abstract space in our minds; they’re a construct of imagination, rather than something tangible and practical. Semi-autonomous vehicles are already on the road, but most of us haven’t yet ridden in a fully autonomous vehicle, so we don’t know what it’s like. If we have no existing framework for how to consider or work with a new technology, it’s going to seem especially scary – and even more so when it does, inevitably, result in the loss of human life.
• Disproportionate reporting. Deaths and injuries from fully autonomous vehicles are often highly visible to the public, being reported on by every major news outlet in the country, while deaths from “normal” accidents are so commonplace and so readily accepted that they’re rarely acknowledged. How often do you hear about traffic fatalities in national news outlets? By contrast, any time even a semi-autonomous vehicle is involved in a collision, the news is practically impossible to escape. For members of the public unfamiliar with the hard, high-level statistics, this can make it seem like autonomous vehicles are killing people left and right – while manually driven cars are completely safe.
• Agency and control. The “trolley problem” is a well-known philosophical thought experiment in which a person is given the option of redirecting a “trolley” from one track to another; on its current course, it will kill three people, but if you divert course, it will kill only one. The utilitarian perspective is that one death is preferable to three deaths, but many people struggle with the concept of exercising agency in choosing that one person’s death. This is because people feel in charge of their decisions – and they don’t want to directly cause someone to die, even if it means passively allowing multiple other people to die in the process. On the road, drivers often feel in total control of their vehicle, capable of making their own ethical decisions and directing their own destiny. But putting them in a vehicle driving itself fills them with dread because it means their agency is being sacrificed entirely. Can you make a compelling argument to this type of person that an algorithm can make better decisions than they can? To do so would require both total faith in the algorithm developers and a willingness to abandon personal control.
• Responsibility and justice. Legitimately, some people are worried about how responsibility and justice will be served in fatal collisions involving autonomous vehicles. If someone is killed and an autonomous car is found to be the root cause of the accident, who goes to jail? Who pays the fine? Will this responsibility fall on the driver, even though they didn’t do anything to cause this accident? What about the software developer? The vehicle manufacturer? This is murky territory no matter what, but it’s especially difficult to digest if you already have apprehensions about the safety of autonomous vehicles.
• Other reasons to hate self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are going to lead us to some complicated infrastructural changes and present new dilemmas (including some we haven’t even considered yet. For many people, these changes range from scary to detestable. For example, some people hate the idea that they may someday be outlawed from owning and/or driving a manual vehicle. Some people don’t trust the autonomous vehicle industry and feel there are ulterior motives guiding the industry in this direction. Some people hate the idea of police officers being able to remotely control your vehicle if you’re caught committing a crime – or hate the idea of hackers accessing a vehicle and using it for their own gain. If you hate self-driving cars for these or other reasons, it’s easy to latch onto a fatality as a justification for your beliefs.
• Lack of firm thresholds. It’s also worth noting that most people don’t have firm thresholds they use to evaluate the efficacy of autonomous vehicles. It’s somewhat ridiculous to demand perfection; vehicles are fast and heavy machines in a complex world, so fatalities are inevitable no matter how safe the system is. But how safe is “safe enough?” Would a 1 percent drop in human lives lost be enough to satisfy your goals? What about a 5 percent drop? Are there other metrics that need to be achieved before you consider autonomous vehicles safe?

Changing the Narrative

Right now, it seems the general public is unready to accept the deaths that will inevitably be caused by autonomous vehicles – even as autonomous vehicle manufacturers set out to reduce deaths and reduce damage as much as possible. Because of this public sentiment and ongoing pushback, policymakers and manufacturers have an uphill battle ahead of them.

If we’re going to facilitate a world in which vehicular fatalities occur at a much lower rate (while simultaneously making the world more conveniently accessible to the entire population), we need to find a way to change the narrative. We need to proactively identify the root causes of anti-autonomous vehicle perspectives and work to change them from the ground up – or at least attempt to quantify and objectively evaluate those perspectives.

The post Is the Public Ready to Accept Deaths From Self-Driving Car Accidents? appeared first on ReadWrite.

When marketing becomes too much to handle, most businesses assume that they need to hire an employee or outsource to a contractor. But don’t be so quick to grow your payroll. It’s possible that you could automate many of these tasks with streamlined digital solutions.

4 Powerful Ways to Automate Your Marketing

By its very nature, marketing is an activity of scale. In order to successfully build up your business and grow your brand, you have to get in front of as many people as possible. But if you’re trying to handle all of your marketing efforts manually, you’re probably exhausted. There’s simply too much for any one person (or department) to handle alone. And this is where automation comes into play.

Automation – which is basically the strategic combination of software, applications, and artificial intelligence to streamline time-consuming processes and produce results at scale – is a powerful tool that is not deployed nearly enough by small businesses and growing brands. But if you can pick the right spots to automate your marketing, it could change everything.

Whether you’re nursing a small startup or you have a booming business that’s bursting at the seams, the following solutions could provide exactly what you need at this precise moment in your company’s life:

1. Automate Email Campaigns

Did you know that more than 68 percent of businesses spend seven days or more on the production of just a single email? (It takes 14 percent of businesses a month or longer to push out an email!)

Or did you know that most companies are in the process of producing between one and five emails at a time?

We’ll let you do the math…but that’s a lot of time spent building and sending emails. And yet nobody is denying the value of email. So the question becomes, how do you automate your email campaigns so that you can enjoy the benefits without unnecessarily wasting hundreds or thousands of man-hours each year?

One answer is to leverage an email marketing platform that allows you to use automations and triggers to streamline these touchpoints. Any major email marketing platform is going to have similar features, but we’ll use a tool called ActiveCampaign to illustrate how effective this can be.

Within the ActiveCampaign platform, you can create individual campaigns that are automatically managed using “triggers.” A trigger is any event that your business can track – like subscribes, unsubscribes, form submissions, email opens, web pages visited, links clicked, purchases made, or specific dates (like a birthday or customer anniversary).

Once one of these triggers is “tripped,” you can create an automated email sequence that’s sent out to that user. This sequence can include anywhere from one message to a dozen or more (sent out at predetermined times and intervals).

Once you draft the email copy and create the campaign, it all happens automatically…at scale. Whether you have 10 people on your email list or 100,000, everything happens flawlessly. It can literally save you thousands of hours every year.

2. Automate Content Promotion

Content promotion is another time-consuming element of marketing that we hear a lot of people complain about. And while it is time-consuming, it can be automated without much effort. You simply have to develop a plan and create the right processes on the front end.

Here’s one dead-simple process you can replicate:

• Step 1: Sign up for a social media management tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, which allows you to manage all of your accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) from one place.
• Step 2: Create an account for a tool called Zapier. This is an automation service that makes it easy to connect apps and create powerful automated workflows. It works great for marketing and content promotion.
• Step 3: Create an automation process (called a “Zap”) that connects your blog’s RSS feed to your Buffer or Hootsuite account. Optimize it so that your blog post is shared to each of your social networks every time the RSS feed refreshes with a new blog post.

That’s just one example of how you can automate content promotion using Zapier. There are literally dozens of other ways to spread your content without lifting a finger. If you haven’t explored these opportunities yet, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

3. Automate Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of successful companies. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t collect enough data to produce meaningful insights and takeaways. And of the companies that do, just a small percentage are able to make sense of the data they collect. Automating customer feedback and analysis could be a vital decision for your business moving forward.

There are plenty of ways to automate your feedback loops, but we’ll touch on just a couple. The first approach is to use an advanced SMS text survey software like Delighted to procure instant customer feedback in a convenient and streamlined process. Here’s how it works:

• You craft a simple survey within the Delighted platform and initiate a campaign.
• Each customer receives the survey in an SMS format.
• Customers reply with a numerical score to each question.
• The Delighted platform responds with a free-form follow-up question.
• Customers can provide a more detailed explanation in their own words.
• Data is organized for easy analysis.

If you have a Zapier account, you can trigger surveys to be sent out after specific actions are completed in a customer’s lifecycle.

You may also find it helpful to automate feedback related to customer churn. (This is especially important for subscription businesses that rely on customer retention to sustain revenue.) There are tools that can be leveraged to send out exit surveys any time a customer cancels a subscription and/or fails to upgrade from a free trial. These surveys won’t do anything to keep the customer, but they can give you a good idea of why people are leaving.

A third option is to automate your feedback analysis by using a “customer sentiment” tool. Services like MonkeyLearn can “read” your feedback and effortlessly organize all responses into general theme-based buckets. This lets you identify and group common pain points, which makes it easier to track customer sentiment and address pressing issues as quickly as possible.

4. Automate Lead Generation

You might assume that automation stops at lead generation, but you’d be wrong. While there are certain aspects of lead generation that can’t be handled by an algorithm, this list is growing smaller by the year. Thanks to advanced technology and artificial intelligence, lead generation automation is more practical than it’s ever been.

Chatbots are among the fastest-growing technologies in this niche of advanced tech. They can be used to automate and enhance the overall customer experience by increasing engagement and initiating high-value touchpoints that would otherwise go ignored.

One of the more impressive use cases for chatbots involves the use of Facebook’s native Messenger platform. Because regardless of how much experience you have or what type of skills you possess, you can create interactive chatbots with no coding required.

Facebook chatbots are basically automated customer service agents/sales reps that empower your business to engage with Facebook prospects at scale. And while you’re probably not going to close deals on Facebook Messenger, these bots are excellent “setters.” They can indoctrinate prospects into the funnel and provide a steady flow of pre-qualified leads to your actual sales team.

Here are some examples of powerful ways you can leverage Facebook Messenger chatbots to assist with lead generation:

• Blast out content and share it with your most loyal followers
• Conduct quick webinar signups and get people to show up to live events
• Automate your drip campaigns and nurture leads
• Send out appointment and event reminders so that people never miss an engagement
• Provide powerful customer service (including answering FAQs and giving out directions)

As mentioned, you can build your own bots for free (and it’s relatively easy for anyone to learn). Rather than having to code, you simply create logical workflows that operate on an if/then basis. These bots can take some time to build (depending on how intricate you want to go), but will ultimately save time when deployed on a large-scale basis.

Reduce Bloat With Automation

Automation can’t solve everything, but it can provide relief in areas where you need it most. Advanced technology, like the solutions outlined in this article, prevents bloat and allows you to scale without having to continually add more people to the payroll. It’s an efficient way to manage resources and grow in a timely and sustainable manner that respects both the brand and the bottom line.

You don’t have to implement each of these solutions today, but it would be wise to take action as soon as possible. Pick one area where you stand to improve the most and put that strategy to work.

Then, once you have that piece in place, move on to another one. It’s through this diplomatic yet proactive approach that you’ll find results.

The post 4 Ways to Automate and Streamline Your Marketing With Advanced Tech appeared first on ReadWrite.

With all of the strict laws and compliance requirements that exist in the industry, running a law firm can often feel like a walk on a tightrope. But with cloud computing, new opportunities are providing new freedoms.

When used strategically, they can totally change the game.

A Primer on Cloud Computing

The innovation and evolution of cloud computing has been one of the single-most transformative technologies of the century. It’s revolutionized every industry on the planet, including both product-based businesses and service professionals.

As a lawyer, you don’t have to be a cloud computing expert. You do, however, need to possess a baseline understanding of what it is and why it matters. This will allow you to maximize the use of cloud technology within your firm and enjoy the many benefits that stem from an investment in this area.

According to Microsoft Azure, a leader in this industry, “Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (‘the cloud’) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.”

For lawyers and their firms, the biggest benefits of cloud computing include:

• Low cost. Cloud computing requires far less overhead. This makes it a much more cost-effective option for law firms that want to enjoy greater efficiency at a fraction of the cost. There’s no need for expensive hardware, software, or on-site servers. Everything is managed online and paid for through a simple, predictable monthly fee.
• Scalability. With cloud computing, you never have to worry about your expenses and hardware investments outpacing your growth. You can scale elastically and enjoy greater cost-savings as you grow. (You can also scale back down, should circumstances require you to become smaller for a period of time.)
• Improved performance. By investing in the cloud, you instantly gain access to a massive network of the world’s top data centers and advanced technology. This gives you increased performance (without having to invest in the newest software or hardware on your own).
• Greater security. Cybersecurity is extremely important in today’s digital world. When you invest in cloud computing, you gain access to superior security that keeps your client’s sensitive data out of the wrong hands.
• Faster speeds. Nothing is more frustrating than slow page loading speeds, lagging applications, and glitchy interfaces. Cloud computing provides self-service and on-demand services, which allows law firms to navigate millions of data points in a matter of just a few clicks.
• Enhanced reliability. At the end of the day, your firm needs a digital platform that you can trust. Cloud computing platforms have robust disaster recovery systems and data backup solutions that make business continuity less expensive and time-consuming. The result is far greater peace of mind.

When you combine all of these benefits, it’s easy to make a case for cloud computing. And while the legal industry is certainly lagging in cloud adoption, you’re probably more familiar with cloud computing than you realize.

For example, if you use a resource like LexisNexis or Westlaw for legal research, you’re an active user of a cloud service. Similarly, if you use a mainstream email platform like Yahoo or Gmail, you’re using a cloud service. Wikipedia, Spotify, YouTube…these are all cloud services.

Whether you realize it or not, much of your online activity is already rooted in the cloud. And by being more intentional about how you leverage cloud computing in your own practice, you can enjoy a multitude of benefits (like the ones highlighted above).

How the Cloud Impacts Attorneys

By and large, the legal services industry is trailing behind most other industries in cloud adoption. According to the latest 2020 survey from the American Bar Association (ABA), 66 percent of firms with 500+ lawyers, 65 percent of firms with 50-99 lawyers, and 52 percent of solo practices are using cloud solutions.

Confidentiality and security issues are the major concerns for attorneys who are slow to adopt. Other common points of contention include the perceived loss of control over data, the cost of switching, and unfamiliarity with the technology.

As you consider growing your own firm’s dependence on the cloud in the coming months, here are some different factors to consider:

1. It’s Time to Trust the Cloud

When it comes to attorneys who are hesitant to invest in cloud computing, reliability and security are always chief concerns. But is this an overblown issue?

“Lawyers have always entrusted confidential data to third parties, including process servers, court employees, building cleaning crews, summer interns, document processing companies, external copy centers, and legal document delivery services,” Nicki Black writes for MyCase.com. “Absolute security has never been required in these situations because absolute security is an impossibility. Rather, due diligence requires that you take reasonable steps to ensure that confidential client data remains safe and secure. Cloud computing is no different.”

Now is the time for our industry to get over the perceived lack of reliability and come to grips with the fact that the cloud is by far the best solution for keeping data safe (particularly data at rest).

Think of it like this: When you store sensitive data on your own servers and computers, you’re 100 percent responsible for updating your devices, installing new software versions, patching vulnerabilities, and ensuring all accounts are properly protected. When you move to the cloud, the bulk of this responsibility shifts to the cloud provider. This frees you up to spend more time focusing on serving your clients (rather than wasting energy on administrative tasks).

Having said that, the cloud does have its own unique set of challenges. Depending on the cloud provider you choose, there’s always the risk of temporarily losing access to your data. And, for better or worse, your entire security strategy is only as good as the security of the cloud provider. You’ll need to carefully negotiate an agreement that protects you and your clients in a worst-case scenario.

2. Use the Cloud to Enhance Collaboration

One of the cloud’s best features is the flexibility it gives firms to work remotely and collaborate efficiently regardless of geography. Using cloud computing, many firms have been able to scale and expand with less friction than ever before. Sibley Dolman Gipe, for example, now has ten offices spread throughout the entire state of Florida.

With locations in Clearwater, Boca Raton, Doral, Tampa, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, New Port Richey, St. Petersburg, North Miami, and Sarasota, Sibley Dolman Gipe has branded itself as “Florida’s nationwide personal injury law firm” – and cloud computing plays a major role in this evolution.

Like other law firms that have expanded from a single location to multiple locations, cloud computing has served as the backbone for this growth. In particular, it allows for effective team collaboration, remote team members, smart calendaring, virtual meetings, and centralized file storage.

One of the more noteworthy developments with remote cloud solutions is the rise of location independence for legal staff. It’s no longer necessary to hire in-person administrative staff members, who can be expensive and resource-intensive.

For the first time ever, firms can hire virtual assistant and other independent contractors to save time and money.

3. Reduce Stress With the Cloud

With so many strict requirements, regulations, and stipulations on what data lawyers can collect, when it can be accessed, and how it can be stored, many law firms and attorneys lose sleep over their tech stacks. And while the cloud is far from perfect, it goes a long way toward reducing stress.

For one, the cloud removes a single point of failure (which exists when data is stored via an on-premise solution, like a local computer). It mitigates risk by spreading data out across multiple systems. Furthermore, the virtualization of your data gives you the ability to revert back to a previous point (in the event of a crash or other compromising event).

Secondly, the cloud eliminates many of the IT server headaches that command so much of a law firm’s time and internal resources.

“Even at a small firm, you need a server that securely and reliably hosts software. However, any physical server requires maintenance to keep it running and must be fixed when it breaks,” ABA mentions. “The private cloud is the server and includes updates, maintenance, and repair as part of the contracted service, which means you don’t have to buy or manage servers.”

The Future of Law

It’s hard to know where the industry is going for sure, but the cloud will certainly play a key role in its next interaction and evolution. And though it’s been around for more than a decade, 2021 will be the year that thousands of firms take the first step toward being fully reliant on cloud computing to manage their firms, store their data, and serve their clients.

While there will certainly be friction, there will also be plenty of benefits. When it’s all said and done, the cloud produces a net gain for proactive law firms.

The post Cloud Computing and Lawyers: What Attorneys Need to Know appeared first on ReadWrite.

The COVID pandemic has turned a simmering trend into a roaring boil. Telehealth, which was once a small segment of a billion-dollar industry, has become commonplace and sometimes even preferred.

The Meteoric Rise of Telehealth

From June 2019 to June 2020, telehealth claim lines increased by a whopping 4,132 percent nationwide, growing from just 0.16 percent of medical claim lines (pre-pandemic) to 6.85 percent of medical claim lines (during the pandemic). And even as the pandemic slows down in many parts of the world, telehealth services continue to be in high demand.

Research from Frost & Sullivan predicts growth of nearly 700 percent by 2025, with a five-year compound annual growth rate in the neighborhood of 38.2 percent.

While every healthcare system is different, here are a couple of real-world examples that show just how quickly (and significantly) telehealth has grown over the past year:

• At NYU Langone, virtual urgent care visits grew by 683 percent between March 2, 2020 and April 14, 2020. Non-urgent care visits ballooned by an incredible 4,345 percent over that same period.
• At MedStar Health, the system went from approximately two daily telehealth visits to 4,150 (in a matter of two months). They now have the infrastructure in place to enable more than 15,000 virtual visits per week.

Stories such as these are common across the healthcare landscape over the past year. And nearly all experts are in agreement that this is just the start.

“The critical need for social distancing among physicians and patients will drive unprecedented demand for telehealth, which involves the use of communication systems and networks to enable either a synchronous or asynchronous session between the patient and provider,” says Victor Camlek, healthcare principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

At this point, technology is not the biggest barrier to adoption. We’ve reached a point where the technology – including a combination of cloud computing, IoT devices, and 5G connectivity – is in place to provide exceptional services. The single biggest bottleneck is patient-side education. Once the gap is closed and patients understand what’s happening in the industry, adoption will really take off.

The Benefits of Telehealth

While the recent increase in telehealth services was clearly driven by a need for social distancing, it’s important to look at the big picture. To understand the long-term appeal of “virtual medicine,” we have to get clear on the benefits. They include:

• Lower cost of care. Telehealth dramatically reduces the cost of care for patients. It does so by eliminating physical barriers and increasing the chances that patients will actually take the time to invest in preventative care (which makes early detection possible).
• Better engagement. A lack of engagement is one of the biggest concerns patients have before trying telehealth for the first time. But in most cases, patients actually discover better engagement than in-person visits. Wait times are lower, notifications keep patients engaged, and they have the doctor’s undivided attention.
• More convenient. The convenience factor of telehealth is hard to beat – particularly for rural and elderly populations who may find it difficult to make it into a doctor’s office for an appointment. The same goes for immuno-compromised individuals who need non-urgent care, but don’t want to put themselves in a risky situation by visiting the doctor.
• More profitable. Not only is telehealth more cost-effective for patients, but it’s significantly more profitable for doctors. Telehealth visits require fewer resources and are also less time-consuming. This allows doctors to see more patients per day. The result is lower overhead and more revenue.
• Superior patient satisfaction. In one study, 87 percent of patients using telehealth indicated they would use it again. This high level of patient satisfaction indicates that these services are here to stay.

When you put all of these benefits together, it’s clear why the experts and analysts are so bullish on the future of telehealth. Now let’s explore some of the trends.

Top Trends in Telehealth for 2021 and Beyond

Anytime you have a rapidly growing space with new technology, trends will come and go. Here are a few of the top short-term telehealth developments for 2021 and beyond:

1. Shift in Medical Residency Training

While the core underlying principles and responsibilities for healthcare professionals remain the same, whether in-person care or telehealth, there are plenty of nuances that come with remote care. And though doctors and nurses can always adapt, there’s something to be said for formal training.

For the first time ever, we’re seeing a new class of healthcare professionals enter the industry with telemedicine training.

As Osteopathic.org explains, “Younger physicians have grown up in a predominantly digital world. So, it’s natural that the doctors of tomorrow are learning to use technology in conjunction with their traditional medical education.”

We’re seeing this both in terms of dedicated telehealth tracks and subtle changes to how medical students are trained.

For example, video recording for medical residency observation is now commonly used in many programs. It offers a number of benefits, including the ability to standardize patient scenarios, review a student’s performance, and offer real-time remote feedback.

VALT software by Intelligent Video Solutions is one commonly used platform. They have a wide range of features, including a “talkback” feature that lets remote observers communicate with students in real-time during their clinicals to reinforce good behaviors and provide suggestions. This keeps the information fresh in the students’ minds and promotes greater retention.

It’s little details like this that are creating sweeping change. It’ll take time, but with thousands of young professionals entering the industry with a totally different perspective and skillset, a natural shift to telehealth is bound to occur.

2. AI Becomes the New Triage

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new. But the way in which it’s being used to enhance telehealth services is quite revolutionary. In some practices, AI is now being leveraged as an alternative to typical “triage.”

For example, AI-based software can rather effectively identify pulmonary nodules in chest X-rays. By determining whether or not moles are malignant, treatment plans can be initiated with less delay and greater accuracy. In essence, the software becomes your “triage person.” And from that point, the doctor can review the results, meet with the patient, and implement a proactive treatment plan.

While AI should never replace the doctor, it can be a great option for enhancing the physician’s role. Viewed through this lens, AI will continue to act as a useful telehealth tool (cutting down on in-person visits and speeding up results).

3. Support in all the Right Places

It’s one thing for the technology to be in place. But in order for telehealth to truly take off (and stick around), there has to be ample support from the “powers that be.” And over the past several months, we’ve seen new support come from all of the right places. This includes employers, insurers, and one of the world’s largest companies.

As industry insider Sarahjane Sacchetti explains, “Employers are taking notice of this shift with 32% indicating that expanded virtual health services are a top priority, and this number will quickly rise as employers look to offer flexible and convenient benefits in support of employees and to drive productivity.”

As far as insurers go, companies (and even government-administered programs) are more willing than ever to cover telehealth services. They see the benefits in remote care and are supporting patients who go this route.

Additionally, Amazon’s own in-house telehealth service is vocal about creating changes to reimbursements so that remote health services – including in-home care – can be paid for in the same way that other types of care are reimbursed.

Amazon is putting its money where its mouth is. The billion-dollar ecommerce giant has recently joined forces with companies like Landmark Health, Dispatch Health, Home Instead, Ascension, and a handful of other organizations to create the “Moving Health Home” coalition.

4. Need for Greater Cybersecurity

As the shift to telehealth continues, the topic of cybersecurity will become increasingly important. Between HIPAA laws and other strict industry regulations, providers will have to enhance their systems to mitigate attacks and prevent breach attempts from compromising sensitive patient data. It’s a very real concern that will require a concerted effort and fresh innovation.

Telehealth: More Than a Trend

There’s no denying that the massive spike in telehealth adoption is the direct result of the pandemic. However, that’s only part of the story. As things begin to normalize, it’s becoming clear that the sudden surge in remote medicine was more than an isolated boom – it was a real world use case that telehealth is a viable option in today’s marketplace.

Moving forward, we can expect to learn a lot from 2020 and 2021. And while it could be years before we see this industry mature to its potential, it’s clear that things are on the right track. This is more than a trend – it’s the next evolution of a trillion-dollar industry.

The post Exploring the Growth of Telehealth and What it Means for the Industry appeared first on ReadWrite.

While the travel and tourism industry has taken quite a gut punch over the past year, there’s hope that things will soon return to normal. And when they do, we’ll get a better taste of the impact big data is having in this space.

What is Big Data?

For 20 years, big data has been widely defined as data that “contains greater variety arriving in increasing volumes with ever-higher velocity.”

“Put simply, big data is larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources,” Oracle explains. “These data sets are so voluminous that traditional data processing software just can’t manage them. But these massive volumes of data can be used to address business problems you wouldn’t have been able to tackle before.”

The best way to understand big data is by exploring the “three Vs” mentioned above:

• Volume. The power of big data lies (at least partially) in the amount of data that’s produced and processed. Not every data point is useful or necessary, but it’s the casting of a wide net that creates powerful opportunities and insights.
• Velocity. This refers to the speed at which data is received and acted on. High velocity works in tandem with high volume. (If speeds were slow, the volume would bog down the systems and create costly inefficiencies.)
• Variety. Finally, variety refers to the different types of structured data that exist. This might include text, video, audio, or location-based data.

The tentacles of big data touch every area of our lives. But while we often discuss its impact on science, software, or IT, we rarely dig into the impact it has on fields like travel and tourism. The more we lean into this relationship, the better we’ll understand where the industry is going.

How Big Data is Impacting the Travel Industry

Big data isn’t something most people spend a lot of time thinking about – particularly in the travel and tourism space – but it plays a key role behind the scenes. Here are a few specific ways it’s having an impact:

1. Personalization

The travel and tourism industry is more competitive than it’s ever been. The sheer number of businesses operating within individual niches of the travel industry is mind-boggling. Whether you run a hotel, resort, cruise line, airline, or other tourism business, you can’t expect to stand out without a strategy. And one of the best strategies involves personalization.

Thanks to big data, businesses are able to collect, organize, and leverage thousands of data points on customers to identify and meet the unique needs of their audiences. Whereas businesses were once restricted to targeting very broad groups, big data makes it possible to zero in on very specific subgroups and niches. This leads to hyper-focused messaging, more relevant offers, and improved customer experience.

2. Differentiation

Another related point of emphasis is how big data – and particularly the analysis of the data – empowers these businesses to understand why their customers make the decisions they do. In other words, it helps answer questions like, why did they choose us over the competition? In crowded markets, the answer to this question can create much-needed clarity and serve as the basis for marketing, advertising, and even content strategy.

In a post-COVID world, unique differentiation will prove to be a marker of success for businesses that survive and thrive. Traveler expectations are higher than they’ve ever been, and it’s the businesses that provide clarity and reassurance that will win customers.

3. Security and Vetting

Border security, as it relates to international travel and tourism, has always been an important issue. But it’s become even more critical as it relates to COVID and related health concerns.

For years, developed countries have relied on big data to fuel their border control and immigration systems. Canada, for example, uses an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) system that requires travelers to register for entry. This allows the country to collect data on visitors, identify potential threats, and understand when and where people are entering. Most other countries have a similar system in place.

In the coming years, it’s possible that big data will lead to major advances in “Smart Borders” – border security systems that are designed to create safe and cost-effective geographical demarcations that prioritize the safety and well-being of both nationals and travelers.

Smart borders, which rely on a steady influx of big data, allow countries to (1) employ risk-based decision making, (2) enhance standardization through the normalization of data requirements and international partnerships with other nations, (3) improve cost-savings for governments by diminishing the need for resources at the border, and (4) welcome new innovation into this part of the travel ecosystem.

4. Real-Time Travel Assistance

So much of the growth of big data is powered by the evolution of the smartphone. With 81 percent of Americans now owning a smartphone (up from just 35 percent in 2011), nearly every traveler is a walking data point. And while we can talk all about the security concerns of constantly giving out personal information, one of the benefits of this around-the-clock connectivity is the opportunity for real-time travel assistance.

Mobile apps are popular among most travel and tourism companies (including hotels, airlines, tour companies, travel planners, etc.). And many of these apps are able to use location data to make tailored recommendations to travelers. For example, an app notices that a traveler is staying in a hotel that’s located near a popular attraction. A push notification is then sent to the user’s phone for a 20 percent discount on the price of admission. Or, the app – which has been given access to the user’s contact information – sends out an email newsletter with top travel tips for the area.

Some people might find notifications like these to be annoying, but others find them helpful. Companies will have to find the balance between intrusive and helpful. Once they do, the sky becomes the limit.

5. Revenue Management

As much as they may enjoy helping people, every business in the travel and tourism industry has one major goal: drive revenue and maximize profitability. Big data can help in both of these areas.

Take hotels as an example. Hotel managers can use big data to improve revenue management. In particular, they rely on internal data relating to historical occupancy rates, average revenue per room, and guest information (location, return stay frequency, etc.). They can then contrast that internal data with external signals, such as time of year, holidays, and market rates for other nearby hotels. This leads to dynamic pricing strategies that are better able to maximize revenue and drive optimum profitability.

On a related note, big data can also help project demand. This allows hotels, resorts, and even tourist sites to more accurately staff their businesses so that they’re prepared but not over-staffed.

6. Reputation Management

Revenue management is difficult without a proper reputation management strategy. In today’s internet-connected, social media-driven marketplace, you must have a strong reputation to be competitive within your niche. Big data makes it possible for a business to accurately manage its reputation in positive and productive ways.

Take social listening tools as an example. With the right social listening software, businesses can automatically and intuitively listen to what customers (and target customers) are saying on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. These systems rely on keyword data and sentiment (which can be detected via advanced algorithms) to judge how the marketplace feels about a brand and/or the larger industry. And because this happens in real-time, it’s possible for businesses to then respond with more strategic content and advertising.

7. Market Research

As always, market research plays a catalytic role in business growth. And while most businesses are focused on collecting data for the purposes of understanding their own businesses and customers, there’s something to be said for leveraging big data to study the competition and gather valuable market research on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This often leads to better innovation and more strategic partnerships.

Adding it All Up

Big data is having a noticeable impact on industries far and wide. From product development and predictive maintenance to machine learning and operational efficiency, it’s making its presence known.

From industries like software and IT to ecommerce and tourism, big data is truly living up to its name. And the more we understand what it is and how it’s influencing the world around us, the more opportunities we can leverage in the coming years.

The post A Look at the Convergence of Big Data and Travel appeared first on ReadWrite.

If you’re marketing a startup in the modern world, you should be using a wide variety of different channels simultaneously. Today’s audiences consume media in a multitude of different forms, using a number of different mediums to communicate with each other. Most national brands employ marketing and advertising strategies through search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) ads, social media messaging, email marketing, and even traditional advertising forms like print and radio.

But one of the most effective ways to get in front of your target audience is to use SMS marketing – the art of sending direct SMS text messages to your target demographics.

Why SMS Marketing?

So what are the advantages of SMS marketing? Why would you use this marketing strategy when there are so many other viable options available?

• Directness. SMS messaging is a direct channel. You aren’t placing an ad on a billboard and hoping your target audience eventually sees it. Instead, you’re sending a message to an individual’s phone number.
• Immediacy. Texts are also immediate. You can send them instantaneously and your recipient will likely receive a notification immediately that they have a new message to read. It’s a fast, uninterrupted medium.
• Automation potential. One of the biggest appeals of SMS marketing is that it can easily be automated. No members of your team are writing out and sending messages by hand; you’re relying on a service to send texts at the right time and in the right way.
• Easy integration. It’s remarkably easy to integrate SMS text marketing with other marketing strategies. For example, you can use SMS texts to get new email subscribers, send people to your social channels, or distribute links to your landing pages.
• Data access. With SMS texts, you can gather more data about your audience. Not only can you measure open rates and response rates very easily, you can also use SMS messaging to distribute and collect surveys.
• Higher engagement. SMS texts tend to have higher engagement rates than other communication mediums, such as email.

So what steps can you take to use and improve your SMS marketing strategy?

Choose the Right Service Provider

Your first job is to choose the right service provider. There are many SMS gateways to choose from, and consulting an SMS gateway list can help you figure out the differences in terms of functionality, scalability, pricing, and of course, user ratings and reviews. Choose a platform that gives you access to all the tools you need, support for the number of recipients you plan to send to, and solid reviews and testimonials all-around. With the right platform in place, everything else will be much easier to manage.

Research and Understand Your Target Demographics

Before you start drafting messages and sending texts, it’s important to research and understand your target demographics. Generally speaking, SMS marketing is better for younger audiences, who are more likely to use their phones and respond to text messages. But no matter who you target, you should know which types of messages will work best. Using market research, figure out what times of day will be most effective, what kinds of calls-to-action (CTAs) will work best, and more.

Keep Your Messages Short and Sweet

SMS text messaging isn’t a perfect medium for communication; it becomes unwieldy and annoying when used to convey long and complex messages. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to keep all your outgoing SMS messages short and sweet. There isn’t a strict character limit to follow here; just try to keep your message as concise as possible. Most of the time, one or two sentences should be plenty to get your message across. If you end up writing more, see if you can trim it down.

Always Tie to a Call-to-Action (CTA)

Most, if not all of your text messages should have a built-in call-to-action (CTA) – an opportunity for your recipient to take action and engage with your message in some way. For example, you could encourage your recipient to click a link and visit a landing page associated with your brand or you could ask them to subscribe to your email newsletter. You could also ask them to respond to the message directly. The point is to get them moving – and push them closer to a conversion.

Master the Timing and Frequency

Timing and frequency are vital considerations if you want your SMS marketing strategy to be successful. It’s important to be persistent and follow up with your audience multiple times; most people are only responsive after multiple messages. But at the same time, if you overwhelm your audience with an annoying bombardment of messages, you’ll end up turning people away.

Consider starting by sending a message once every other day, sending around 8-10 messages before you scale back. Then, experiment with different numbers of messages and different timings to see what works best for your brand.

Use a Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

Written text messages can work well, but if you want to make an even bigger impact, consider utilizing a multimedia messaging service (MMS). This approach incorporates other forms of sent media, such as links to online videos or images. It can make your message much more interesting, engaging, and distinguished from the competition.

Create a Sense of Urgency

If given the opportunity, most people will intentionally procrastinate. They may like the idea of the offer you’re making, but they’ll delay taking action if they feel like they can. You can fight back against this tendency by creating a stronger sense of urgency with your SMS messages. Give people a limited time to respond to your offer, or suggest that your offer will disappear in short order.

Create Marketing Synergy

Good marketing strategies employ synergies to get more out of individual tactics. It’s not enough to roll out an SMS text marketing strategy and hope it’s enough to support your brand entirely. It needs to link together with your other strategies, such as SEO, PPC advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing. Encourage fans from other channels to sign up for your SMS messaging service, and use texts to guide fans to these other channels as well.

Come Up With Exclusive Offers

Why would someone want to be subscribed to your SMS message feed if they’re already subscribed to your email newsletter and other communication channels? Make it enticing by coming up with exclusive offers for your SMS subscribers. For example, you can offer exclusive discounts, freebies, sneak peeks, and other rewards for customers who get SMS texts from you directly.

Use Short Surveys

Startups often fail because they never adapted to serve their customers better. They didn’t take the time to learn about their customers’ wants and needs, nor did they study the competitive landscape to improve their own offers.

Avoid falling into this trap by utilizing short surveys in your SMS marketing efforts. Send your customers brief, 1- or 2-question surveys they can answer with succinct responses, such as a “yes or no” or a numerical rating. You can collect tons of information this way, and use customer feedback to improve your products and services.

Personalize the Message

Many people won’t pay attention to a generic, clearly mass marketed message. If you want to get their attention and attain a higher response rate, you need to personalize the message in some way. That could be something as simple as using their name in the message, or you could send specific messages based on each customer’s previous buying habits or interactions with your brand.

With these strategies, you can craft an SMS marketing strategy that can help your startup grow in visibility, memorability, and influence simultaneously. It’s a bit tricky to get started, but once you set up an automated, scaled campaign, you’ll see massive benefits for your bottom line.

The post How to Utilize an SMS Marketing Strategy appeared first on ReadWrite.

No matter what kind of business you’re starting, what your growth model is, or what kind of team you’re starting with, you’re going to need money to get started. These days, it’s possible to launch a startup on a razor-thin budget, working remotely so you don’t have to pay for an office, scrapping together resources you already have, and working with the smallest team possible. Even then, you’ll need thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to get what you need to build early momentum.

Fortunately, there are dozens of different ways you can fund your business. But this presents a problem of its own. With so many possibilities, and all of them having strengths and weaknesses worth considering, how do you ultimately decide the “best” way to fund your business?

Funding Options for Your Business

You can start by charting out some of the most common and popular ways to fund a business.

These include:

• Venture capital. One of the most popular choices for startup entrepreneurs is working with a venture capitalist (VC). VCs can be individuals or firms, dedicated to investing in small companies. VCs tend to have a lot of available capital, making them an ideal choice if you’re looking for a big injection of cash – though they broker smaller deals as well. Oftentimes, the VC will provide funding in exchange for equity in the company, forcing you to share profits later on and/or forfeit some degree of control. Additionally, VCs can be extremely competitive, making it difficult to stand out from the competition.
• Angel investors. An angel investor is an individual (and usually a wealthy one) who is willing to invest in small businesses. Angel investors aren’t as dedicated to the practice as VCs, so there’s often less competition for their attention. However, they may be harder to find, depending on where you live. Still, angel investors work much like VCs, providing promising young ventures with money in exchange for partial equity and/or some control in the business. Some angel investors also serve in a mentoring capacity, providing direction and advice to growing young entrepreneurs.
• Crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is another popular option – and one that wasn’t available 15 years ago. The idea here is to attract small amounts of funding from a large number of micro-investors, rather than working with one wealthy individual or large firm. This distributed model often makes it easier to get the funds you need, but there are a couple of logistical hurdles. For starters, crowdfunding is restricted; you may find it difficult to pursue equity crowdfunding, and some popular crowdfunding platforms are particular about the types of projects they host. You’ll also need to think carefully about how you market your business; your positioning will play a massive role in whether contributors decide to donate to your venture. You may also be beholden to your investors in some way, responsible for fulfilling a promise with the money you’ve received.
• Personal funding. If you like the idea of being more independent, you can attempt to fund the business yourself. If you’ve accumulated wealth over the years, this may be a straightforward practice. Otherwise, you’ll need to get creative to summon the money necessary to get your business moving. For example, you could sell a major asset (like a home) and use the proceeds to launch your startup. You could also cash in a 401(k) or similar retirement platform (though this isn’t recommended).
• Grants and loans. Sometimes, you can fund a business with the help of grants and loans. Resources like the Small Business Administration and local Chambers of Commerce can help connect you with special programs meant to incentivize business creation. On top of that, you can work with your bank to review loan options, and potentially open a floating line of credit you can tap into as you continue to help your business grow. Of course, the downside here is that many loans require repayment with interest, and if your credit isn’t strong or if you borrow too much, it can eventually become a burden.
• Special loans. Depending on your personal circumstances, you may qualify for special types of loans that can provide you with capital immediately – and not require you to pay interest for some time. For example, if you’re in the middle of a personal injury claim, you may qualify for pre-settlement legal funding, which can give you capital immediately that you won’t have to pay back right away. Use these proceeds carefully if you decide to go this route.
• Partnerships. You may also choose to fund your business with the help of a partnership. Securing a business partner who has more money to put into the business could be exactly the cash injection you need to make the startup work. Of course, that also means you’ll need to feel comfortable working with a partner over the long-term development of your company.

Determining Your Priorities

Clearly, each of these options has something going for it – and many of them have significant drawbacks that weaken them. So how are you supposed to make the decision?

• Capital requirements. First, lay out the capital requirements of your business? This may seem like an obvious question, but too many entrepreneurs enter this space with only a vague idea of what they truly need. Spend some time developing a business plan and sketching out the financial model. Be prepared to ask only for the funding you need.
• Desire for control. How much control do you want to retain over your business? Would you be okay with heeding the direction of investors? How much power are you willing to forfeit to get the funding you need?
• Type of business. What kind of business are you hoping to start? Is there a flexible approach that can help you get access to more options? For example, can you start as a local company before expanding nationally to reduce your initial capital requirements?
• Personal savings. How much do you currently have available in personal savings? Are you capable of funding this business independently, or are you totally relying on external sources of funding? How much would it take to close the gap?
• Risk tolerance. Consider your personal and business risk tolerance. Do you have a backup plan in place? What would happen if things go wrong?
• Hybrid options. There are usually few restrictions on the number of funding methods you can pursue simultaneously. If you want to compensate for the weaknesses of one funding method, consider simply supplementing it with another, complementary method.

Getting Started

If you’re just getting started and you’re need help making this decision, these are the most important steps you should take:

• Develop your business plan. Take the time to write your business plan and pay especially close attention to the financial section. Here, you’ll be able to calculate exactly how much funding you need, what your risk tolerance is, and more.
• Play with your options. Spend some time evaluating your options. Consider the primary sources of funding available to you and how they might affect the management and future growth of your business. Compare these hypothetical situations to each other and see if one stands out above the rest.
• Network. Finally, spend time professional networking. Building your network is never a bad thing, and it can introduce you to many potential partners and investors. If nothing else, you’ll meet peer entrepreneurs and business owners who can share their experiences and give you perspective on the world of funding.

Choosing a mode of funding for your business is one of the most stressful and impactful decisions you’ll make as a new entrepreneur. But if you put the time into this decision and take it seriously, it can help support your startup’s growth for years to come.

The post How to Decide the Best Way to Fund Your Business appeared first on ReadWrite.

While all large and successful organizations have already gone through significant digital transformation, 2021 may be the year that small and medium-sized businesses dive in headfirst. Are you ready to join the fold by embracing the next iteration of the business world?

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation has been called a lot of things over the years. And while some would argue that it’s nothing more than a buzzword, those who are involved with it know that it’s more than conceptual. When executed with vision and precision, it can revolutionize a business from the inside out.

In the simplest form, digital transformation can be described as the process of leveraging the correct blend of digital technologies to modify existing business processes and/or create new ones. The objective of digital transformation is to enhance the customer experience and establish simpler, more cost-effective systems that streamline every aspect of value creation.

As industry thought leaders often say, digital transformation begins and ends with the customer. When businesses recognize and follow through on this idea, they can expect to yield an array of benefits, including:

• Greater efficiency. Think about the bottlenecks in your business – the things that slow down processes, frustrate employees, and prevent you from reaching your full potential. In many cases, technology is involved. And if we dig a layer deeper, we’ll find that these technologies are outdated and/or being improperly leveraged. The beauty of digital transformation is that it allows you to fight through these bottlenecks and speed up your business through greater efficiency and output.
• Better decision-making. It’s not enough to have data. You need to know what to do with that data. Digital transformation ensures you’re collecting and interpreting data correctly, which allows you to improve decision-making and guide your company in a better direction.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction. Research from Gartner shows that more than 81 percent of companies are competing primarily on customer experience. And as we said on the front end of this piece, digital transformation is ultimately about the customer. By enhancing customer satisfaction, businesses can cultivate loyalty and squash the competition.
• Increased profitability. An impressive 56 percent of CEOs say digital improvements have helped them increase revenue in the past. And as we move forward into a world where digital transformation becomes even more integral to the health and well-being of organizations, we’ll see this number grow even more.
• Superior company culture. While customers may be the focal point, digital transformation has a positive impact on employees as well. Over time, this emphasis on digital transformation fosters a superior company culture that reduces turnover by elevating retention.

Identifying and understanding these benefits provides some context as to the value that digital transformation provides. The only question is, are you doing what it takes to yield these advantages?

6 Strategies for Seamless Digital Transformation

Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It takes months and years of proper planning and careful execution. However, you can begin experiencing positive results almost immediately. Here are a few tips to help you do just that:

1. Gain Top-Down Buy-In

There is no digital transformation without comprehensive buy-in from all organizational stakeholders. And more specifically, you must begin the process with buy-in from the C-suite.

Research from McKinsey & Company finds that companies who engage the chief digital officer (CDO) at the beginning of the process are 1.6 times more likely to report successful digital transformation on the back end.

Achieving buy-in requires you to be knowledgeable and articulate in your messaging, but it shouldn’t be difficult. If you do a decent job explaining the benefits of digital transformation, the C-suite will have every reason to support the strategy.

The bigger challenge, per se, is that you’ll have to reaffirm the buy-in continually. In most C-suites, approval is not a one-and-done idea. You’ll need to show momentum and progress through objective data. Be prepared to document the results every step of the way.

2. Assign a Point Person

Don’t be fooled into thinking you can roll out an entire digital transformation strategy with a hodgepodge team of people who already have their hands in a dozen other duties and responsibilities. If you want to be successful with your approach, you should find someone who can lead the way. This may look like hiring a new person for the job or reassigning someone. Whatever the case, be sure to practice discernment.

There are a few key characteristics to look for, including a comprehensive understanding of the digital marketplace, as well as a personality that’s conducive to building rapport and moving others to action.

“For business leaders driving digital transformation, they must be able to lead change and communicate a vision to superiors, peers, direct reports, and users,” mentions Box, a leader in the digital transformation space. “They must understand the impact of a new business model. At the same time, They have to be adept at working with IT managers — explaining the big picture and negotiating specific requirements from IT.”

This person won’t be in charge of executing every element of the strategy, but they will be the ones championing the cause. Everything flows from this person, so get it right!

3. Establish Clear Vision

Your “point person” will be in charge of helping to clarify and communicate the vision for your digital transformation strategy. It’s more important that your vision is comprehensive than catchy. It should be a holistic yet specific idea that considers every aspect of the organization. This includes:

• Branding
• Marketing
• Sales
• Tech stack
• Performance
• HR
• Budget and operational costs
• Expected Outcomes
• Stakeholder impact
• Etc.

Your vision essentially amounts to a digital roadmap for the future. It explains where you’re going and which aspects of your organization the strategy will touch. (Which should end up being every department, element, and asset.)

4. Evaluate Current Gaps

Take a look at your current technology stack/processes and contrast this with where you want to be in six months, a year, or three years from now. Consider where there are opportunities to pivot and improve, as well as where you’re coming up short. These are your gaps.

Technological and process-based gaps are where the opportunities for significant digital transformation exist. It’s not just about replacing legacy systems and doing away with obsolete processes that no longer produce the results you need. You need to rethink your approach to certain areas of your strategy – like marketing and sales – and imagine what these areas could look like in a perfect world.

As always, think about these gaps through the eyes of the ideal customer. Every digital initiative should support the customer in specific ways. If an “improvement” happens at the customer’s expense, it’s not true digital transformation. It should start by enhancing the customer experience, then (and only then) should you consider the internal impact.

5. Set the Appropriate KPIs

Every organization goes into a digital transformation strategy with the hope that it’ll work out, but there’s a difference in hoping and knowing what’s actually happening. The best way to evaluate the success of your strategy is to set objective measurements ahead of time. Well-developed key performance indicators (KPIs) with pre-defined benchmarks give you something to measure against.

Setting KPIs begins with figuring out what you want to measure and then building from there. If, for example, you’re trying to measure the success of a new application that you’re introducing to your user base, good KPIs would include: daily active users, ratio of repeat to new users, conversion rates, abandon rates, and average time spent on the app.

Is the goal to evaluate customer experience based on a new onboarding process or customer loyalty program? Metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), customer loyalty index (CLI), and sentiment analytics are insightful.

User engagement is a fun one to track. You have options such as net promoter score (NPS), traffic sources, customer satisfaction index, bounce rate, and exit rate.

If it’s the reliability of IT systems that you’re interested in measuring, you may keep an eye on specific metrics like uptime, mean time to failure (MTTF), mean time to resolve (MTTR), and mean time before failure (MTBF).

Other large-scale KPIs that touch various aspects include employee performance, innovation, operational performance, and financial performance.

6. Beware of the Shine

It’s tempting to become mesmerized by the shine of new tech and innovation. And with so many different tools and applications being released on a regular basis, it’s difficult to differentiate between the ones that have the potential to be useful and the ones that are a waste of your energy and resources. Be diplomatic in your decision-making!

Where is Your Focus?

Every digital transformation strategy will have a unique flavor. And while it’ll look a bit different in execution and application, many of the same underlying principles are present across the board. For best results, study what others are doing and view their approaches through the lens of your customer and your business. Your roadmap lies somewhere inside these lines.

The post Is 2021 the Year of Digital Transformation? appeared first on ReadWrite.

IoT is growing as more smart devices, from light bulbs to vacuums, give us more control and automation capabilities. IoT can be a massive benefit to all kinds of business operations. If you want your company to enjoy the advantages of IoT, you’ll be well on your way by reviewing our tips below.

Increase Energy Efficiency

One of the most significant advantages of IoT is it can boost the energy efficiency of most companies, from FedEx delivery route businesses to those that sell baby clothes. How?

The market for smart home and business thermostats is expected to grow by at least 20% in the next several years. Being able to monitor the use of energy in a commercial building and tweak lighting, water, usage, and temperature can cut down on energy waste.

HVAC tends to use a lot of power in company buildings, so the grown of smart thermostats opens up a vital opportunity to reduce costs and increase ROI. It’s estimated that smart thermostats have cut electric bills by 25% in homes that use them across the US. And we can expect similar savings in commercial properties.

A smart thermostat can lower cooling and heating to a minimum when staff isn’t in the office, and optimize it when it is. Smart thermostats offer almost immediate ROI when you implement them in your offices.

Replace Custodians With Automatic Vacuums

Custodial staff can be anything from essential to a disruption to a severe security problem. They also can be costly. Your business can save money and stay clean with a few robotic vacuums from Roomba or Eufy.

You also can bring in your custodians for a deep clean each month and leave the rest to the machines. And don’t worry: With the fantastic powers of IoT, they will let you know when they need emptying.

Track Equipment

Asset management can be a major hassle for any business that doesn’t have employees bring their own devices. Giving out company phones, laptops, and other electronics means it all must be tracked in a database. Who has that laptop, when did they take it, and when will it be back? It can take days or weeks to figure out where a missing device went.

But with IoT tags such as the Aruba asset tracker, you can always find your devices, no matter where they are.

Boost Productivity With Smart Coffee Machines

Coffee is a mainstay for many people, and that’s never more obvious than in the office. Sharing coffee brewing duties, keeping everything stocked, and making sure there’s plenty of coffee in the cupboards usually is a shared job. But if you use a connected smart coffee machine, such as the ones sold by Keurig and Nespresso, you can do for your coffee quaffing what IoT printers have done for ink – it’s never out of stock.

Reduce Operating Costs

IoT solutions can help companies slash costs and stay competitive. In manufacturing, smart devices can be helpful to monitor equipment and reduce downtime. They can predict misalignments and failures in your production line.

Understand Consumer Behavior

Understanding how consumers think is vital to the success of your business. With IoT devices, companies can collect, monitor, and analyze consumer data from social media, mobile, video, and Internet usage. This lets business analysts predict consumer preferences so that companies can more effectively design products and services and offer value-added features for superior engagement.

Improve Productivity

IoT devices can help your manufacturing company assess demand and better manage production stages by doing real-time tracking of raw materials and parts. Companies can collect worker data to find their most productive work schedules and schedule vital tasks and meetings.

Smart devices also can enhance facility management by telling employees about technical disruptions.

Facilitate Administrative Assistance

Smart technology exists in many forms, and some of the biggest-selling applications are for automated locks, lights, and thermostats. More people are utilizing virtual assistants to connect all smart devices into one network.

For instance, it’s estimated that nearly 30% of Americans use virtual assistants Google Home or Amazon Echo. Most of us use them to use apps without using our phones physically. Companies can also share the benefits by using them to set up meetings, scan emails, and obtain critical information and data while doing other things.

For instance, rather than asking Alexa what the temperature will be in New York City tomorrow, you can ask what last year’s annual revenue was compared to the year before. While AI needs more development before it can mimic human-to-human conversation, it’s probably coming shortly.

Lowers Company Security Risks

Virtual assistants can be linked with security systems to give business owners access to more safety and remote monitoring. It’s estimated that at least 140 million home monitoring systems will be delivered to homeowners this year, which will double in five years. With smart security, homes and businesses can lock their doors remotely, turn lights on and off, and even operate window blinds!

As smart technology improves, we can anticipate a more cohesive future for smart homes and businesses. More smart tech devices will be linked to create a more consistent experience and add more services, such as security systems that enable remote monitoring.

Telecommuting is becoming more popular, so connected security technologies have severe implications for business executives and owners. Some estimates say that 70% of company employees work at least part of the week remotely. Because you and your workers probably telecommute sometimes, it’s vital to establish a business security system that you can monitor and adjust remotely. When you aren’t in the office, you can use smart technology to check for suspicious activity in the building, control locks, and get alerts for any security breaches.

The goal of smart tech is to make your home life easier, more comfortable, and efficient. But business owners also are discovering that the same line of smart devices can save their company money and increase efficiency and safety. We can expect smart technology and IoT to affect businesses more over the next few years, and we hope you’re a part of it!

The post How You Can Use IoT To Enhance Your Business Operations appeared first on ReadWrite.

Like many industries, the manufacturing industry experienced a significant impact from COVID-19 over the past year. Perhaps the biggest impact is that manufacturers have accelerated their adoption of IoT and various sensors in an adapt to future-proof against similar circumstances. CNC machining, which is the bedrock of manufacturing, is no exception.

But apart from COVID-19, why now? What makes it plausible and sustainable? Two things: the increasing adaptation of 5G and its usability on the manufacturing floor and machine learning that utilizes that network.

Whether you’re taking a look at the supply chain, a completed and installed component, or anything in between, automated optimization is the future of manufacturing. 5G will allow for the vast amounts of data from sensors to be seamlessly integrated, analyzed, and processed in real-time. Machine learning will be responsible for those actions.

These adaptations will also ameliorate some of the worker shortage that manufacturing is currently experiencing. Although there will be less demand for workers, there will be an increase in the technological skills workers need.

What’s the Difference Between Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

Sometimes people use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) interchangeably. Artificial intelligence is the broader idea that machines can carry out tasks in a way that mimics humans or is “smart.” Machine learning is a specific application of AI. It, especially deep learning, is what will most impact CNC machining in the near future.

Deep learning is a category of machine learning that layers algorithms in such a way that it creates a learning system for the machine. This learning system doesn’t require as much human guidance as other machine learning or tools currently in use on the machine room floor. As the computer parses the data in one layer and has its findings, those findings improve the decision-making power in the next layer.

How Do AI and Machine Learning Help on the Machine-Room Floor?

AI and machine learning have the potential to impact a myriad of things on the machine room floor, from the people to the product to the machines themselves. There are many machine monitoring systems at use on machine-room floors already. However, as the monitoring systems improve their ability to gather data and pull in information from ERP systems, the data will be ideal for machine learning. This will increase exponentially as sensor use spreads.

Machine learning will be essential to make sense of the vast amounts of gathered data. This data will help manufacturers identify opportunities to optimize processes, machines, reduce downtime, and much more. Here’s a look at some that are on the horizon or already being implemented in various forms.

Reducing Machine Downtime

As sensors monitor standard components on CNC drills, lathes, and mills, they’ll be able to predict when parts are approaching the end of their life cycles. This is key because even as other tasks are automated (such as calculating and entering offsets), the tool wear continues to creep in and impact results before it can be detected.

Subsequently, machines can break mid-production or need a part that isn’t readily available. Predictive maintenance can save money, time, and resources. Planned downtime via sensors allows for just the right amount of maintenance and extends the life of the machine’s components. Machine learning and AI can parse the data and help manufacturers identify the best time to plan for downtime.

MachineMetrics is an example of this. Their anomaly-detecting algorithm can identify when a machine is in a different state than a pre-established baseline. The company gathers streaming data from hundreds of diverse manufacturing companies and thousands of different machines. When a machine may stray from a baseline, it’s time to look at maintenance.

Optimization for CNC Machines

There are several examples of companies that are already exploring ways to optimize CNC machines. Some of it is taking place within a virtual setting (like NCSimul’s latest update), while others are taking place using machine data. The optimization in a program like NCSimul optimizes the pre-manufacturing process, as programmers are able to test parameters within a digital twin—a virtual copy of the CNC machine.

An example of a company using machine learning and IoT to optimize CNC machinery was Fraunhofer Institute’s project to mount 5G sensors directly onto the workpiece. That sensor monitored chatter and would correct to avoid errors when it sensed the chatter. They were able to reduce the average blisk rework rates by 10%, from 25% to 15%. That small change could result in large savings for a manufacturer.

Automation of Processes

The amount of data that the machine-floor sensors produce would overwhelm an individual attempting to analyze it on their own. However, using machine learning to evaluate the data, manufacturers will be able to see trends that they might not have otherwise noticed. When the information from the sensors placed throughout the factory is input alongside ERPs, CRMs, and other systems, opportunities for automation will come to light. These opportunities will help ensure that items are delivered right-on-time. Automation, together with robots, will help manufacturers meet the growing pace and demand of the market.

Robots & Cobots Can Increase Production & Decrease Accidents

Machine learning and AI will also show up on the machining floor in the form of robots and cobots (collaborative robots). Some cobots may do simple tasks such as putting finished parts into bins. In other instances, they may replace tools or insert pieces into the CNC machine’s chuck. Robots and cobots can work 24/7, increasing the production levels of a factory, and by handling some of the more dangerous tasks, can reduce accident occurrence.

CNC machining’s future is quickly approaching a more holistic manufacturing process, where machines and humans are more linked via the IoT sensors and cloud computing with 5G. AI and machine learning are critical to this advancement, and some would argue, undergird the entire process. They will optimize and improve efficiency on the machine room floor, leading to greater output and fewer errors. This optimization will be necessary in order for companies to keep up with the growing demand for quality products with a faster turnaround.

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When you think of living a holistic lifestyle, do you picture someone being completely off-grid with no computer, no internet, and no smartphone? While some people do live this way, the absence of IoT tech doesn’t define a holistic lifestyle.

Smart technology and a holistic life aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, plenty of people live a happy, healthy, joyful life filled with smart technology. The key is they don’t allow their tech to control their lives. They’re not glued to their smartphones, and if their smart coffee maker stopped working, they’d happily brew a cup of coffee by hand.

There are countless ways smart technology can improve your life. Here are just a few specific ways.

Smart tech can give you critical food and drug recall alerts

Part of living a healthy, holistic lifestyle involves knowing when your favorite food brands test positive for dangerous contaminants. This goes for your pets’ food, too. Food recalls are far too common, and it’s hard to stay on top of every single situation. The easiest way to stay on top of each situation is to subscribe to alert mailing lists and pipe your emails through your smartphone so you’ll never miss a recall.

Even more common than food recalls are drug recalls. As much as you might try to live without over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, sometimes that’s hard. For instance, you might need to take ibuprofen once in a while to ward off a stress headache. There’s no shame in that. However, some seemingly innocent OTC drugs end up having devastating health consequences.

For example, the popular heartburn drug, Zantac, has been voluntarily recalled by the manufacturer. Zantac is the brand name for the generic drug called ranitidine. Unbeknownst to the public for years, the chemical structure of ranitidine literally becomes a carcinogen during metabolization. That’s pretty scary.

If you’re not taking any OTC drugs, you might be taking a medication that is keeping you alive. If that drug gets recalled or black boxed, your doctor may not know about it for a while. Using a smartphone to receive alerts when drugs are recalled could save your life.

Smart technology and holistic living are compatible

You can live a holistic lifestyle while embracing smart technology; you don’t need to choose one or the other. Technology won’t negatively impact your health unless you’re literally sitting at your computer all day long and you never get up to interact with the world.

In some cases, smart tech can even help you live a healthier life. For example, Fitbit tracks a user’s health data like steps taken, burned calories, and heart rate. Tracking this data can help individuals see the impact of their exercise routines, and it also helps them achieve their goals. Other wearable smart tech can be used to transmit data to a healthcare provider, and some wearable devices deliver pulsed electromagnetic frequency (PEMF) treatments.

Other smart devices are incredibly helpful to people with disabilities. For example, there are smart shoes that provide haptic feedback to guide blind people safely around neighborhoods using a smartphone GPS connection.

Haptic shoes convey directional information in a way that doesn’t distract the wearer or anyone else around them. The shoes are equipped with actuators and vibrators on all sides. After the wearer’s smartphone calculates their route, vibrations in the shoe guide the wearer to their destination. These amazing shoes also detect obstacles like steps and curbs and use the same vibrations to guide the wearer around immediate obstacles.

You can use smart tech to connect with likeminded people

Smartphones and smart tablets are tools that can connect you with likeminded people. No matter what your passion is in life, you’ll find a group of people online who share your interests.

The best way to connect with people is to use video conferencing software. Audio phone calls are okay, but why just use voice when you can connect through video conferencing? If you have an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, you already have video conferencing built into your device via FaceTime.

It’s more fun connecting with people through video chat than voice chat. You can tell so much more about a person when you can see them live. Video is the next best thing to an in-person meeting.

You can also connect with people all around the world and you won’t pay a dime beyond what you would pay for data. If you’re on Wi-Fi, then there’s no extra charge.

Connecting with people all around the world is inspiring and can be beneficial for your business. People from different cultures often have different ways of viewing situations and can come up with ideas and solutions you would have never thought about.

You can use smart tech to discover potential business partners

If you’re running a business, there’s no better way to find potential business partners than by assessing the people you’re already connecting with online.

If you’re discussing business with people over the internet, you might get a feeling that someone is a potential business partner. Smart tech will facilitate video conversations so you can get a better idea of who those people are.

Most people can sense who a person is just by being in their presence. Video conferencing is the next best thing if you’re working with people across the world.

Smart technology allows you to bring your workouts anywhere

Perhaps one of the coolest ways smart tech supports a holistic lifestyle is facilitating the ability to take your workouts anywhere. Some online workout programs are hosted in the cloud, like Apple Fitness Plus, which makes them available anywhere you have an internet connection.

You can also upload your workout programs to your private cloud hosting account if they’re not already available online. Last, if uploading is too much work, you can simply load your smart device with your workout programs and use your device to play the programs. If you happen to be in a hotel with a smart TV, you can connect your device to the TV to play your workout video on a larger screen.

Smart tech will help you track progress and goals

As long as you aren’t tediously tracking data that doesn’t matter, using smart tech to track your progress and goals in any area of life will prove beneficial. For instance, you can use your smartphone to track your reps while you’re at the gym instead of lugging around a notepad. You can also download an app to track what you eat. There are also apps that will tell you what to eat and when to eat depending on your body type and specific goals.

Technology has always been great for tracking progress. You can also track your business goals, sales, and just about anything else from a smartphone app.

Embrace smart technology as a way to enhance your holistic lifestyle

Living a holistic lifestyle is central to wellbeing. A holistic lifestyle involves taking care of your entire self – your mind, body, and soul. Smart technology can help you take better care of yourself by providing you with tools to stay on track.

Regardless of what you’ve read online, living a holistic lifestyle isn’t about giving up gluten, eating a plant-based diet, and living in a converted shipping container tiny home. Living a holistic lifestyle is about unifying your mental self with your physical self to promote overall wellness. It’s a lifestyle that keeps you in touch with the way your thoughts and attitude impact your physical health and keeps you in tune with nature, whether you eat gluten, fish, beef, or potatoes. It’s not about what you eat – it’s about who you are.

Technology has the power to facilitate your growth both in your personal life and in business. There’s no reason you can’t use a little smart technology to sustain a joyful, healthy life.

The post How to Live a Holistic Lifestyle While Embracing Smart Technology appeared first on ReadWrite.

Launching a startup is ridiculously exciting. Not only do you get a chance to control your destiny and build an effective team, but if you’re lucky and you work hard, you could turn it into a “unicorn”—a billion-dollar enterprise.

Of course, most of you reading this know that the odds of your business becoming a tech unicorn are slim, even if you have a great idea in place. That’s because more than half of all startups fail within the first five years of operation.

Understanding the reasons why startups fail can help you avoid such a fate. So what are the driving factors that lead to startup failure?

Lack of Market Need

One of the most common causes of startup failure is a simple lack of market need. Economic systems rely on supply and demand. With a startup, you may be supplying a product or service, but if there is no demand for it, it’s not going to sell. You can have a great product, fair pricing, and the best customer service in the world—but it doesn’t matter if people have no need for your product.

The best way to prevent this from occurring is through market research. Before getting too deep into startup development, it’s important to research your target demographics and confirm their desire for a product like yours.

Poor Customer Experience

Another incredibly common motivator for failure is poor customer experience all-around. Not to be mistaken for customer service, customer experience refers to the overall experiences a customer has with the brand. It includes their first impressions, their experiences when using the core product or service, and their interactions with customer service.

If the usability of your product or service is poor, if your customer service is insufficient, or if other experiences are lackluster, your customers aren’t going to stick around. That’s why customer experience should be one of your top priorities for strategic development.

Running Out of Capital

Many business owners launch startups with the intention of running lean—relying on minimal resources to preserve the business for as long as possible. But even the leanest businesses need money to keep running. If you run out of capital prematurely, the business can’t sustain itself—no matter how good the business model is.

This is usually a problem with businesses that are self-funded or those that are utilizing a minimalistic approach. The solution is to start generating consistent revenue faster or to work with angel investors or venture capitalists to get more funding.

The Wrong Team

Sometimes, it’s a team issue. Your startup relies on a team of connected, experienced professionals collaborating to make your vision a reality. If there are members of your team who are inexperienced, or if they’re unwilling to put in sufficient effort, or worse, if they sabotage your efforts, your business isn’t going anywhere.

Too many startups hire quickly and with reckless abandon. But in many cases, it’s better to take your time and make sure you get the right people for your team.

Fierce Competition

Good businesses tend to get a lot of attention. If it looks like you’re making good money and dominating the market, it’s only a matter of time before another ambitious entrepreneur steps in to try and get a piece of the pie. If another startup competes with yours directly and they have a significant edge—such as offering a lower price, being more available, or offering better customer support—they’re inclined to undermine your startup’s operation.

Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your competitiveness, such by lowering prices, targeting a different demographic, or pivoting entirely.

Pricing and Cost Issues

The basis for a startup’s continuing operation is its underlying economics. If you want to continue existing, you need to make money—ideally more money than you’re spending on things like employee salaries and raw materials.

Many startups fail because they can’t manage things like pricing and cost. If they charge too much, customers leave. If they don’t charge enough, they don’t make a significant enough profit. If costs get out of hand, the company will collapse. The only real solution is careful financial planning and management.

No Real Business Model

It’s incredible how many startups get launched without a proper business model. They have a great strategy for getting attention or earning downloads, shares, and engagements, but there’s no real way to make money.

Before starting a business, you need to have a business plan. And no matter what your product or service is, there needs to be some way to monetize it. It’s possible for this model to evolve over time, but without a model, the business will inevitably fail.

Insufficient Marketing

At a certain point, your startup could become so popular that it’s self-sustaining. But most startups, especially young ones, heavily rely on marketing to increase their visibility. If a startup straight-up refuses to invest in marketing and advertising, it’s probably going to fail. If it doesn’t invest in the right strategies, it’s probably going to fail. If it invests too much in the wrong type of strategy, it’s probably going to fail.

Marketing is hard to get right, but it requires a decent investment and a solid strategy to direct its efforts. Working with a professional marketing agency is often the best solution.

Bad Timing

Sometimes, a startup just gets the timing wrong. If the product is too new, and audiences aren’t ready for it, it’s not going to make much of a splash. If you’re too late to a saturated industry, you’re going to blend in as white noise.

Timing is incredibly tricky, and unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to correct this potential issue. Market research and competitive research can help you determine the state of the market, but no matter what, there’s going to be a little luck involved.

A Loss of Focus

Some startups don’t explode in a burst of fire; they gradually wither away. Over time, an entrepreneur may become disillusioned with the business, or they may become motivated by new goals and different ideas. It could also be a problem that an entrepreneur is unable to clarify their vision, making it impossible for the business to achieve a focused goal.

In either case, there is no focus for the business, and the business declines as a result.

Internal Disputes

The greatest strength of a startup can also be its greatest weakness: the collaborative power of the team. Startups rely on an entrepreneur, a team of employees, investors, mentors, and other professionals and authorities to coordinate its actions. If these people can’t agree, or if they’re constantly undermining each other, the business can’t possibly survive.

Setting a coordinated, mutually agreeable vision from the beginning can mitigate this.

A Pivot Gone Wrong

Startups sometimes pivot; when faced with a sudden market change, new competitor, or other issue, the startup transforms to become a different kind of business altogether. This can be a powerful, life-saving move—but it can also go terribly wrong.

If you pivot too quickly or without a proper plan, you could end up exacerbating the problems that already exist, rather than solving them.

Legal Issues

In rarer cases, startups fail because of legal issues. There may be standing lawsuits against the business, copyright infringement claims, or an issue where the startup is directly breaking the law. The only solution here is proactive legal planning; otherwise, you may run out of money fighting the issue in court.

As you can see, there are dozens of ways that startups can fail, so it’s tough to stop all these potential modes of failure at once. However, with the right level of planning, research, and self-awareness, you can identify the weaknesses and threats that are most likely to impact your business and root them out.

The post The Main Reasons Startups Fail appeared first on ReadWrite.

Human resource (HR) departments have long been integral to organizational success, and they’re likely to remain that way for decades to come. But the nature of HR is likely to evolve with new technologies, research, and trends.

What does the future of HR look like?

Remodeling the Workforce

For starters, we may see HR leading the charge in remodeling the shape of the average workforce. Increasingly, employers and consumers alike are valuing diversity and inclusion; companies are working harder to ensure a mix of people from different backgrounds are included at all levels of the organization. In the future, this is going to become an even bigger priority.

But this is a minor change compared to the next generation of workforce management. We’re already starting to see a blend of human beings and machines in the workplace, and in the near future, this is going to become more prominent – even in businesses filled with mostly high-skilled, white-collar workers. How will you handle the transition from a human position to one handled by an AI algorithm? How will you ensure that humans and machines can collaborate and maximize productivity together? How will you optimize the balance between human beings and machines in the workplace? And how can you tell what an optimal balance is?

These will be the big-picture questions dictating HR development in the future.

Remote Work

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was gaining popularity. Employees were getting a feel for the benefits of the arrangement, such as cutting down on commute time, improving flexibility, and even increasing productivity. At the same time, employers get to save money and see better results. After the pandemic forced businesses to rethink work and increase safety, these benefits became more apparent to a wider range of businesses.

Today, HR departments are evolving to treat remote work as the default – rather than a temporary or gimmicky new approach to conventional work. That trend is likely to continue into the future as remote work becomes even more widely accepted.

The Evolution of HR Software

Today’s HR departments and organizations rely on HR software like Rippling to handle things like payroll, benefits management, and employee device management. Using one platform, they can store, review, and gather information, send messages, and even generate reports to analyze data. It’s seemingly comprehensive.

But in the future, these platforms will likely become even more robust. We’ll see the addition of new streams of data, real-time analyses, and possibly the inclusion of machine learning and AI algorithms to increase productivity or improve results.

Culture and Unity

Part of HR’s job is to create and sustain the culture within an organization, and make the team feel unified. This is increasingly difficult in a world dominated by remote work, but it’s increasingly demanded by the workforce.

Accordingly, HR will need to find new channels for communication, teambuilding, and collecting employee feedback. Organizational culture management is going to evolve into new forms, and employees will have to develop a different set of expectations for how it’s facilitated. In line with this, HR leaders will have to remain agile, forging culture-based connections when they can while still preserving the structure of the business.

The Gig Economy: Here to Stay?

Technology is responsible for introducing the “gig economy.” Though freelancing and gig work concepts have existed for decades, apps like Uber, Fiverr, and Airbnb made it much easier for individuals to offer their services as freelancers. In turn, corporations have attempted to take advantage of this by relying more heavily on contractors and freelancers instead of making the investments in full-time employees. This is favorable as a cost-saving measure, but it also introduces more flexibility into the organization. And while workers miss some benefits, they also have more freedom to control their workloads and explore other opportunities.

However, it remains uncertain whether the gig economy is here to stay or whether it was something of a temporary detour. Either way, HR departments will have to adapt to keep in line with current trends.

The Employee Experience

We’re already seeing a wave of momentum favoring the development and maintenance of the “employee experience.” In other words, how does an employee feel about the business and engage with the business, from the moment they’re recruited to their ongoing career development? Positive employee experiences lead to higher morale, higher productivity, and higher employee retention. The subjective nature of the employee experience can also reveal a lot about how the organization operates.

In the future, employee experience will become an even higher priority – and become easier to measure and control. Better tools will make it easier for employees to provide feedback about their experiences throughout their careers, and better analytics platforms will make it easier to figure out which changes to make to improve the business.

Data-Driven Insights

Nearly all departments and all industries are increasingly relying on data to improve, and HR is no different. In the future, HR will become even more reliant on data to operate efficiently.

Today’s HR departments use a variety of data points to create images of job candidates, employees, and organizational efficiency, such as hours worked, employee retention, and metrics related to recruiting, training, and development. Data may become even more granular in the future, studying nuanced elements of employee behaviors from the moment they’re recruited.

Most of these data will be collected automatically, with the help of device tracking and robust HR software platforms – which leads to our next points.

AI and Automation

HR departments are also likely to incorporate more AI and automation. Automation is a no-brainer; if you can automate a task that ordinarily requires manual human effort, you’ll instantly reduce the hours your employees need to work. Not only does this save the organization money, it also frees up human employees to focus on more important things.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will also serve a bigger role in the future. With sufficiently advanced machine learning algorithms, HR leaders can quickly and efficiently crunch the numbers they’ve gathered and come to a final conclusion. And in the right context, a suitable AI could even handle previously human-exclusive tasks, such as handling employee conflicts or interviewing candidates.

Sustainability and Image

Today’s consumers care more about sustainability, and not just environmental sustainability. Human and social sustainability require businesses to engage in socially responsible hiring and employee management practices. Today, this includes hiring people from a diverse range of backgrounds, treating employees fairly, and compensating them well. In the future, these are going to become even bigger priorities for consumers, which means businesses will need to do more to make their operations transparent (and show off their sustainability efforts).

The very nature of human and social sustainability may also evolve in the near future. For example, if machines are gradually replacing human jobs in a certain industry, will it be considered socially sustainable or responsible to maintain at least some human jobs?

Cycles of Progression

Over time, the rate of change within HR departments is likely to increase; in other words, HR progression will be accelerating. As we’ve seen, technology tends to evolve exponentially. New technologies get incorporated into existing businesses that create even newer, better technologies. And once things like machine learning and big data analytics get thrown into the mix, it’s hard to stop that momentum.

This acceleration will also be fueled by competition. As HR departments begin pushing the limits of their productivity and effectiveness, other HR departments must follow suit to keep up. Nobody wants to be left in the dust with a years-old platform that’s now becoming obsolete in mainstream workforces.

Even with the onset of AI, automation, and a machine-heavy workforce, HR departments are going to remain important for productivity and sustainability for the foreseeable future. However, the role of an HR manager or HR director is going to change substantially in the coming years. No one can predict the future, but we can see many of these trends already developing in the present. The transformation is already unfolding.

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How we shop, how we work out, how we receive medical care – you name the sector and odds are good that it underwent some major transformations during 2020. That being said, many of the most dramatic changes were less the result of the COVID-19 pandemic than accelerated by it, and this is particularly true in the world of connected tech. Companies didn’t invent entirely new processes to remedy pandemic-related service gaps, but hurried in-progress solutions to market. And, in so doing, they also transformed our lives at home and out in the world.

What types of new technology have been particularly major players in our lives during 2020? At the heart of it all were a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) products, like virtual dressing rooms and Face AR for video conferencing, as well as well as AI-based fitness tools like Mirror, a connected fitness device acquired by Lululemon Athletica last year. But as critical as such technology appears to be to our new lifestyle ecosystem, such elements represent significant challenges, especially for the manufacturing sector.

Automated Manufacturing Meets Glass

Automation has been central to the manufacturing sector for years and it’s long been recognized that the only way the industry can keep up with demand today is by continuing to build on industrial automation. When it comes to glass, though, that’s easier said than done. After all, in premise, glass’s value comes largely from the fact that it’s clear. That’s not a problem for human workers who can still perceive its bounds and work with it in industrial settings, but it can present real challenges to robotic vision systems and create barriers to mass manufacturing new technologies.

In typical manufacturing settings, robotic vision programs use reflected light to scan materials and identify key points, allowing for precision work with minimal human involvement. When this same vision is turned on glass or highly reflective metal, however, these vision systems can’t collect the necessary information; the glass or metal is essentially invisible. Observing this issue, there are now new manufacturers working to develop advanced robotic vision programs that use different systems, such as light filters and changing points of view, that can enable such systems to successfully work with glass or shiny metals.

What does such robotic vision look like in practice? Imagine that a business wants to install new glass storefronts that allows customers to interact with displays or browse without even setting foot inside the store. It’s a good idea, and one that shares many traits with other display trends that have been in the news for nearly a decade, but tricky to execute in practice. To create a transparent glass display that’s actually a functional LCD screen, manufacturers will need to be able to apply the same types of automated manufacturing technology that they use for computers, and that means using robotic vision that can see the glass its working on. It’s a tall order, but it’s also the reality of modern technology.

Fitness AIs Rise

Another area in which improved glass-detection will be key to manufacturing is in the growth of the connected fitness sector. Connected fitness has been all the rage since the launch of products like Fitbit, but that was just a starting point. Since then – and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in interest in home fitness – the market for connected fitness tech has exploded. In addition to Fitbit, there are now countless other fitness and health wearables, home fitness equipment like the Peloton bike and SoulCycle’s competitor bike, and the Mirror fitness system mentioned above. All this is to say that people want to work out at home and they need tools to do it.

The Mirror fitness system represents many of the challenges facing glass manufacturing today. Placed in your home, it acts precisely as the name implies – as a mirror – but turn the device on and it’s a mirror, a screen playing a class, and an AI-connected system offering workout modifications and tracking fitness goals. That’s some complicated engineering, and it raises questions about how the device, and other devices like it, is made.

Most of the high-tech mirror and glass products on the market function, at least to some degree, on proprietary technology, so a full glimpse behind the curtain isn’t possible. However, we can infer based on our understanding of robotic vision systems that these products rely on cutting edge technology. Unlike other AI-powered machine vision programs, the ability to detect objects isn’t enough. Instead, it needs to be able to detect items that are, in many ways, meant to avoid detection.

Windshields And Other Glass Innovations

Where else is new glass manufacturing technology in use or on the verge of emergence? There are a number of areas of interest, including smart windshields that could prevent distracted driving, AR smart glasses, which have proved their growth potential in recent years after the initial failure of Google Glass, and much more. All of that indicates high demand for more complex, precise glass manufacturing and processing tools, with invisible but overlaid sensor systems.

One product that may be especially influential in understanding connected technology engineering and manufacturing is the subsector of smart glass known as light control glass of LCG. This glass product has recently experienced an explosion of growth stemming from its use in construction.

LCG has been embraced by builders and property financiers who recognize the health benefits of access to sunlight. Instead of installing tinted glass in window-heavy buildings, then, they choose digitally modifiable glass; individual users can adjust their windows with the power of touch. Better manufacturing technology now allows these glass products to filter out specific light forms, include hazardous UV rays, or darken to mimic traditional privacy glass. Within its niche, this is what’s known as a dynamic material and its applications are extensive.

Now, a significant part of what makes glass so valuable in all of the above applications, as well as in our smart phones and tablets, is that it works well in conjunction with the types of plastic conductive materials commonly used together. Essentially, the plastic conductive film touches the glass and completes a circuit. Typically, that doesn’t work with an all-plastic system, though, which is why we all have to go around worrying that we’ll drop our cellphones and crack the screens. The glass is just too important.

What some new equipment manufacturers are now attempting to develop is a plastic alternative that can stand in for glass’s conductive properties, which would allow for touch-sensitive but durable and lightweight products. Essentially, the more products that rely on touchscreens, the more incentive there is to develop an affordable, plastic alternative. Glass may function well and feel high-end, but it’s expensive and often impractical and our connected environment demands innovation.

Smart Glass Goes Plastic

Among the many potential applications of plastic alternatives to conductive smart glass products include high wear and tear, including AR-based virtual dressing rooms, the high-tech reinvention of stores like Toys R Us, which now features numerous touchscreen stations, and many children’s products. Plastic alternatives are also ideal for outdoor applications like the National Parks, local hiking trails, and even amusement parks, where touchscreens are more likely to be subject to weather conditions and other activity. Durability is a common manufacturing priority across industries, so everything we learn about smart glass manufacturing should be quickly applied to plastic analogs.

Over the last decade, we have steadily made progress towards a moment when users expect everything to be touchscreen equipped, but that moment remains elusive. Still, we’re getting closer, and sturdier material options will bring us closer still. Other improvements in projected capacitive technology allow for faster response times from touchscreen tools, greater durability that prevents scratches and cracks from significantly impacting overall device function, and new anti-glare and anti-stiction technology for greater interactive ease.

Ultimately, transparent conduction technology is going to steadily move away from glass, but most innovations will likely still begin with glass manufacturing. Because of the many advantages that glass offers in terms of quality and conductive capacity and its preference as a material in high-end connected tech, glass is the obvious template. New practices and materials will develop from there.

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