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We asked five entrepreneurs which apps they use to make their day-to-day a little less stressful. Take a look at the list below and get your stress under control: Breathe I like to use the Breathe app on my Apple Watch. Sometimes, a simple cure for stress is to simply breathe. Meditation has been proven to calm your mind, and this app helps you to do just that. It reminds me each day to stop, take a deep breath, close my eyes for a minute and relax....

A good enterprise startup has the potential to transform how an entire industry does business — and, in turn, change how consumers interact with these industries. Here are a few of my favorite enterprise startups you should be watching and why I think they’re excellent examples of what enterprise startups can achieve. 1. ChowNow What it is: It’s a CRM solution that gives restaurants the power to accept online orders via mobile and desktop....

Partial success of this approach and agile-growth can be contributed to the great array of new development tools and technologies. Here are the top-5 most essential ones. Agilo for Scrum If you are on the Scrum Masters team, Agilo for Scrum is indispensable. This add-on will automatically update all the key stakeholders on the overall project’s progress and make your team aware of all the latest updates. Project managers will appreciate the “Sprint Report” feature and burn down charts to data mine and govern all the process....

Finding Help When You Need it Image via Flickr by MorboKat The data that metrics produce are usually hard facts, but they can also be subjective. Don’t be afraid to look outside of your company for an unbiased opinion about which metrics your company needs. Companies like Ruota Consulting empower new startups to succeed. Consultants are more than accountants; they are business specialists that help startups look at the figures and address production efficiency so that your company remains profitable....

However, the successful development of a prototype requires making some important decisions. The most important of them are determining the type of the prototype, the differences it will have from the final product, the costs involved, and the goals you can achieve with it. Usually, the answer to this question is to impress your clients by showing them exactly what they’re paying for. However, you might also develop prototypes to test equipment performance or try to find ways to improve it....

There are many ways that you could be losing revenue without even realizing it. That’s why you need to take a long, hard look at your startup to see if you are guilty of letting these 5 revenue killers slip through the cracks. Complex Checkout Process Everything that you want the customer to do should be as easy as possible. Ideally, this means that you’ve kept your forms as short as possible, and that you’ve made the process of answering your landing page calls-to-action as easy as you can....

And this guide is going to show you some of the trends you should be looking out for. The On-Demand Economy Will Continue to Change the Workforce Businesses need to get things done right now and they’re not willing to wait to get things done. The on-demand economy and the number of rising contractors has increased the need to connect with platforms where people can get things done for you....

I’m sure those 500 media professionals relished the opportunity to complain, as journalists often do. Luckily, complaints to them are tips for entrepreneurs – tips on how to make sure your email gets opened, read, and responded to. Let’s start off with the problem: 81% of media prefer email pitches, yet publications in areas like Technology, Business, and Consumer Trends are getting 300 pitches a day. Many of those (over 68%) are getting sent to editors....

These “cease-and-desist” letters are a tool intellectual property (IP) owners use to enforce their IP rights. The idea is to explain the IP owner’s rights and strongly request that the potential violator stop using the ostensibly infringing mark. These letters are usually sent by lawyers and often threaten to sue if the violator doesn’t stop. Although these letters are a legitimate way to police trademarks, sometimes trademark owners want to control more than they actually own....

It’s the second report from PitchBook – the first was released last year and became a huge hit – and looks at the educational backgrounds of more than 13,000 startup founders across the globe. Using data on founders, looking specifically at whether they received VC funding between 2009 and July 2014 and from which undergraduate program they graduated, the report by PitchBook ranks the top colleges from around the world that are successfully producing VC-backed entrepreneurs....

1. Always use two-factor authentication Keep all your transactions and customer accounts safe by asking for a second verification factor in addition to standard username/password combination, to authenticate certain actions. It could be a numeric code via text message or a special code generated on a phone app like Google Authenticator. With 2FA on, breaking into anyone’s account gets much harder. 2. Enable cloud encryption Most free cloud storage is rather easy to break into for a middle-skilled hacker (that’s, in fact, how all the personal celebrity photos end up online)....

Technology is linear. It is the way of the world. According to data taken from the lines outside of Apple stores when a new iPhone drops, people love new tech and hate old tech. After all, no one gets nostalgic for horse-drawn carriages until it’s snowing in Central Park and their car won’t start. While there are those that prefer older models to their modern counterparts, these outsiders are often dubbed “nostalgic” rather than “trendsetter....

We dug into seven different cases for the iPhone 7 Plus and a couple for the regular iPhone 7. From rugged to sleek, each has their own set of highs and lows. We tested each case using some rudimentary measures that replicate how you’d interact with them on a daily basis. For starters, we conducted several scratch tests (denim, car keys), light drop tests, phone removals, and measuring their specs....

Lesson #1: What It Means to Have a Mentor In the first two weeks, Techstars arranged 40 mentor meetings for each team. Each team would only have 20-30 minutes for a mentor. We had to articulate our product, and where we needed help, to each mentor so that mentors would know whom to connect us with and what they could offer. Because we had such a short time, being prepared was extremely important....

With so much content on the internet today, it’s basically become a dream come true for advertisers and anyone who is looking to sell something online. Websites and blogs can easily monetize their content through the use of affiliate marketing, Google AdSense, and many other monetization methods. Today we are going to look at seven different ways you can start making money from your website, your audience and creating valuable content in the process....

To be considered for the list, companies must be private, have at least one venture capital investor, and have raised money in the past four years. Startups who go public or get acquired aren’t included. Forty-eight new companies joined the Billion Dollar Startup Club in 2014, which is dominated by companies in the US (50), mostly in San Francisco (20) and New York (5). The top industries represented are software (23), consumer Internet (15), and ecommerce (15)....

We might be prone to think that agtech is just about modifying the genetics of the plants we’re growing, but that is not the whole truth. There are startups that are developing drone technology specifically for farming and researchers creating living microbes that kill the pests that ruin the crops we eat. Agtech is really beginning to revolutionize farming, and it’s benefitting both the farmer and the consumer in a big way....

“We’re making it more valuable to have your own copy of music again,” says founder Richard Zelson, whose background is in economics and real estate. Founded in 2010, the New York City startup uses Bluetooth or Wifi to stream your music to other users, so it does no hosting or streaming itself. Music lovers can rock out to tracks simultaneously or hear 90-second clips from another user’s playlist – as well as sharing audiobooks and podcasts....

To say hate speech is having its moment on social media would be a dire understatement. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become breeding grounds for some of the most offensive content you can find online, and tragically, the purveyors of these sites have done little to solve the problem. However, with Facebook hemorrhaging more and more money with every advertiser that pulls out, could the company finally change its infamously neutral stance on hate?...

AlphaLab Gear will be longer than the traditional accelerator, running from October to May and offering startups $25,000 or $50,000 in funding. They also get office space; mentorship on design, engineering, and manufacturing; and a membership to TechShop Pittsburgh, which has prototyping and engineering equipment. Selected startups can also recruit students from the Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh robotics programs, and take advantage of the “robotics cluster” in Pennsylvania....