According to a six-month global study backed by researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College, and Oxford University, all participating companies reported a massive boost in their performance, productivity, revenue, and employee satisfaction across the board, after trialing a four-day work week. The 32-hour week study, which monitored 969 people from 33 companies in the US, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada also concluded that two-thirds (67%) of employees felt less burned-out with no significant increase in workload during the trial period, and 96....

So what do the best account managers in businesses like marketing agencies, SaaS startups and professional services businesses do? My company gathered research, spoke to a number of client services experts, and thought through some of our own practices. The result: Four habits that successful account managers do regularly to improve relationships. Empathize Instead of Patronize How often has someone in a customer service role talked to you as though you were a child?...

Whether a kid wants to be a doctor, astronaut, or entrepreneur, his or her career is going to be all about interaction and technology. Shouldn’t the learning experience stimulate that? There are a slew of interactive education platforms and programs picking up dust in 2013, but four have risen to the top. As a parent, it’s wise to start researching which program might be best for your kids. On the other hand, a hodge-podge collection might be the better approach....

But why is FWaaS advantageous over traditional firewalls, and should businesses adopt a FWaaS package to remain secure in the modern era? Let’s find out: How Traditional Firewalls Work Let’s start with the basics, by defining how traditional computer firewalls work. On a conceptual level, Comodo describes firewalls as a kind of filter between your computer (or your network) and the internet. You have the power to alter that filter so that only the traffic you want to get through actually gets through....

Adjust the Brightness of the Screen The screen of the iPhone is the primary source of battery drains but luckily, you can conserve the battery life by adjusting the screen brightness by dragging the slider in the control center as far left as possible. You should also check the settings app, access display, and brightness and ensure that the auto-brightness is turned off. This prevents the phone from turning up the brightness when it considers it necessary....

She is currently president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and she is on the board of Vital Voices, where she mentors young female entrepreneurs. Von Fürstenberg is an entrepreneur who understands the ups and downs of the business, pivoting and rebranding. Here are five pieces of advice for startup founders: 1. On Being a Founder 2. On Taking a Step Back to Refocus your Business 3....

1. Communication Between Vehicles It would be very convenient to have a small machine that is able to provide the driver with a warning of an approaching vehicle in their blind spot. It could also help with traffic and keeping things moving as the vehicles communicate with each other when there is an issue on the road. 2. Traffic Updates on Your GPS Whether it’s on your phone or in your car, a lot of us rely on our GPS device to keep us on track and heading in the right direction....

In the beverage industry, there are spent brewery grain and spent coffee grounds. In other industries, there are broken cookies, pasta trimmings, agricultural silage, even wood chips. Because these organic byproducts have had seemingly little market value, they end up in landfills, burn piles, animal feed or – at best – compost and recycle bins. But that is changing as businesses realize their organic waste actually does have value. In fact, it can be used as the raw material for the production of commercially valuable all-natural biochemicals....

According to a study by RAND, the culture of today’s society where you work until you drop and get a badge of honor for working late and getting up early is costing us not only our health but employers $411 billion in productivity and about 1.23 million working days per year. Insufficient sleep has been deemed a public health problem by the CDC and linked to negative health effects. If you are lacking the Zs and in need of some ways to wind down the mental storm, try these sleep hacks....

Here are five steps to optimizing your website for mobile for the first time: 1. Survey Your Customers: The first step is understanding what your customers need to accomplish while using a mobile device. In most cases they are logging on to your site from different devices for very different, specific reasons. For example, users logging on via PC might be conducting research or looking to purchase your product. Mobile and tablet devices, on the other hand, may drive the most traffic to sections of your site where customers can get in touch with you....

1. Who will buy my products or services? Understanding which problems your potential clients are trying to solve is the key to launching a profitable product. Analyze current consumer trends and demands with the Google Keywords Tool to see how many people search phrases related to your business and how high the competition is. The trick here is to make sure your potential buyers not only have a problem, but they are also aware of this problem and looking for ways to solve it....

A regular content flow, can help your business build a reputation, attract new customers, increase customer retention, and improve SEO. But you need a plan, and an editorial calendar to ensure the content is consistent. Having an editorial calendar also allows you to plan out things other than blog posts, such as email marketing campaigns and social media posts. By including all types content on your editorial calendar, you can ensure different forms overlap to increase customer awareness on a certain topic....

Fortunately, there are now some innovative AI tools that allow businesses to leverage data for better efficiency. One exciting way companies are using AI is in their sales and marketing departments. Here are a variety of the ways in which artificial intelligence influences sales today and will do so in the future. AI-Powered Personal Assistants Few salespeople truly enjoy cold-calling or pursuing dead-end leads. Some sales activities that are ingrained have become massive time-wasters....

We asked seven entrepreneurs which SaaS products are the most attractive and why. Check out their answers and investigate the value of the following products for your startup. Ring Central We use Ring Central because it eliminates the need for an on-premise private branch exchange (PBX) in order to have a complete enterprise phone system. The cloud gives the same capability at a fraction of the cost. The mobility it offers is excellent: we can literally take our entire phone system out of the office, forwarding calls to our mobile devices and monitoring all activity through the app....

But technology has also brought a selection of tools that can help. These solutions will identify the news that interests you and deliver that news to your mobile device or PC each day. Here are a few of the top tools to help you learn about tech trends as early as possible in their development. Frontpageit Often the best sources of breaking tech news are the experts who closely follow the industry....

For the first time ever, the .CO domain registry is auctioning off the registration rights to the single number domain name 8.co. From now until February 9th, you can place your bids on what may just be the luckiest domain on the Web. According to .CO, it has teamed up with Heritage Auctions, the Dallas, Texas based auctioneer (which claims to be the largest auction house founded in America) to auction off the domain “8....

Led by former CEO of AOL, Steve Case, the Rise of the Rest is a startup bus tour that visits smaller ecosystems to help make launching a business a little bit easier. The tour will visit five cities in five days and Steve Case personally invests a total of $500,000 in local startups. At each stop, there are fireside chats and networking happy hours, as well as a pitch competition where Steve Case decided which startup will be going home with a $100,000 investment....

These tools will enable startups to organize their affairs so they can address their issues in a much better way. Such solutions will help to automate their manual tasks, saving their precious time and effort for crucial tasks. Objectives and goals are more clearly seen and met when confidence is boosted through organization. Check out these 8 useful web-based project management tools that will enable startups to be on top of their plans and projects:...

This concept has (some) benefits, namely, letting employees having the same device for work and private use and letting them work remotely from anywhere, thus improving their performance and increasing their satisfaction The concept is surely interesting and offers value to both employees and companies, but security concerns about BYOD should be considered. Ultimately, the whole field of modern enterprise mobility has plenty of security holes that should be taken in consideration, and these are some of them:...

One Technologies provides online marketing services and products in the direct-to-consumer credit monitoring industry. Much like some of the marketing services the company offers, One Technologies manages to acquire new customers by methodically going down various marketing channels: from SEO and paid search, to affiliate marketing and partnerships. When asked how the company manages to keep expanding its business after 12 years, Chang (currently the chairman of One Technologies) responds that when it comes to growing a company, it all “comes down to focus....