Malicious Apps On Google Play Increase By 388 Percent |  |
- Malicious Apps On Google Play Increase By 388 Percent
- This Mompreneur Developed Her Own Prototype Overseas
- Advanced Personal Brand Building Checklist
- 11 Web Analytics Tools to Enhance Your Online Business
- ACA Rule Will Raise Insurance Premiums for Majority of Small Business Workers
- Bright Light Helps Market Products, But Makes Decisions More Emotional
| Malicious Apps On Google Play Increase By 388 Percent Posted: 03 Mar 2014 02:30 PM PST Online security company RiskIQ has announced that the number of malicious apps on Google Play has increased by a staggering 388 percent. That increase happened between 2011 and 2013 with the number of apps increasing from 11,000 to 42,000. Apps mentioned by Risk IQ seem to largely deal with personalizing your phone, entertainment and gaming. But apps popular with business users might also be affected too. The report classed an app as malicious if it contained spyware, or an SMS trojan. Malicious apps do a variety of different things including sending contact lists, email addresses and other important information to third parties without the user’s consent. Google managed to remove about 60 percent of malicious apps from Google Play in 2011. By 2013, the malicious apps Google had removed had dropped to only 23 percent of those in the store, the report claims. This means Google left the remainder of these apps on the site to be downloaded by unsuspecting users.
Not everyone is convinced by the report though. ZDNet expresses huge doubt, by virtue of the fact that Google routinely scans the Google Play store for malware, using a program called Bouncer. Bouncer also scans new apps which are uploaded to the store for the first time. And the app doesn’t make it into the store, unless Bouncer gives it the all-clear. So if malicious apps have really increased by almost 400 percent, then is Bouncer a total failure? If these stats are true, then it would be good news for Apple, who has many more safeguards in place to prevent malware apps. A report like this may deter people from using an Android device, and instead persuade them to use an iOS device instead. Image: Google Play The post Malicious Apps On Google Play Increase By 388 Percent appeared first on Small Business Trends.      |
| This Mompreneur Developed Her Own Prototype Overseas Posted: 03 Mar 2014 12:00 PM PST Rikki Mor was so desperate to find a brush that would untangle her daughters' curly hair that she designed her own prototype and had it created overseas. This mompreneur developed her own prototype. She decided to sell the brushes online to help other moms dealing with similar issues. Now she sells about 250,000 Knot Genie brushes each year online and in children's salons around the country. The brushes have even been featured on the Today Show and in gift bags at the Emmys. But it wasn't her original intent to start a business. Her product's success came only after years of trying every product already on the market for untangling hair. Mor spoke to Fox Business about the process of deciding to start a business.
She worked with an engineer to design a prototype of a brush that she thought would work with her daughters' curly hair. Then she used Alibaba.com to find an overseas supplier for a prototype and product supply. After experiences with a couple of unreliable sources, she found a person she trusted to outsource production of her brushes. She ordered 10,000 units in the first round and blew through them much quicker than she expected. Mor said that after a few slow months at first, everything sort of fell into place. She had people approaching her about carrying the brushes and featuring them on blogs and in other publications. The video below from Best Mom Products gives a more detailed account of Mor’s journey from working mom to successful entrepreneur. Mor's original intent in creating and selling the brushes was just to solve a problem she had experienced and to help other moms dealing with similar issues. But because she was so personally involved, she spent a lot of time and energy creating a product she truly thought would work. And even though she didn't have a lot of knowledge about manufacturing or product development, she took a leap of faith and was eventually rewarded for her efforts. Image: KnotGenie.com The post This Mompreneur Developed Her Own Prototype Overseas appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| Advanced Personal Brand Building Checklist Posted: 03 Mar 2014 10:00 AM PST The Internet has made personal branding a huge deal: Nowadays everyone can become a micro-celebrity. However, if you care about your professional footprint, personal brand search results and overall image – personal branding is actually a long, continuous process. Below is a checklist of what needs to be done in order to get your personal brand under control as well as build your name meaningfully. Personal Brand Building Tips1. Verify Social Media ProfilesVerified social media profiles stand out in search results and obviously make you look much more professional.
2. Claim Custom “Vanity” URLsIf you are wondering why vanity URLs are awesome, you can do some reading here. In a word, vanity URLs are easier to remember and type.
3. Build Your Personal Brand AssetsLeaving a trusted footprint online means doing your homework. Every bit counts. Any achievement, contribution or project involvement may become your strong personal brand asset. Don’t be afraid to share your achievements creating more online presence. As an example, LinkedIn allows you to add your certifications and sites like this one let you add your license and get a profile page on the site 4. Get InterviewedBlog interviews are by far the most efficient way to get control over your name search results and get established as a niche influencer. It’s not easy if you are just starting out, but here are a few tips to help:
Did I miss anything? Branding Photo via Shutterstock The post Advanced Personal Brand Building Checklist appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| 11 Web Analytics Tools to Enhance Your Online Business Posted: 03 Mar 2014 07:30 AM PST If you are running an online business, you need to have as much information as possible at your fingertips. It’s not enough to see how much you are making every month. You also need to see how much you could have made and didn’t. You need to know what your customers do when they arrive on your site. For example, what do they search for? How long do they stay on the page? And how many are repeat visitors? Armed with this information, you can then tweak your promotions to improve the length of time someone stays to browse. Or you can make it more likely you will make a sale. The old adage “information is power” is never more true than when running a website. So how do you get this information? The answer is simple. Use a free or paid Web analytics service. They can be easy to use, and set up. 11 Web Analytics ToolsGoogle AnalyticsWhen you access Google Analytics for the first time, you will be hit by a huge number of features. It can be a bit intimidating at first. After inserting the tracking code into your website, you will have more data about your website than you know what to do with. If you have WordPress (self-hosted), then you can also upload a plugin to keep track of your stats.
ClickyIn this tool’s tracking code, it actually includes the tag “Google Analytics Alternative.” After signing up, you are asked to place the tracking code on your website. If you have WordPress (or other sites such as Drupal or Joomla), you can upload a plugin instead. Clicky has some good features. But where it falls down is the below-average website design. First appearances really matter. And when you compare the Clicky site with the big sleek Google Analytics site, Clicky is going to suffer somewhat. Plus the tool is only free up to 3,000 daily pageviews. After that, prices start at $9.99 a month. Clicky offers pretty much what Google Analytics offers. So this is a good service to use if you don’t want to be relying on yet another Google product. You also have to be okay with paying for the service. Crazy EggJust by looking at the heat sources on the page, can you see the areas most clicked on by your visitors. CrazyEgg is another paid service with a 30 day free trial. But unlike Clicky, there is no free plan. The basic option costs $108 a year. But CrazyEgg is different in that it enables you to set up “heat maps,” which show you where on your site visitors clicked. The bigger the heat source, the more popular the area or link. How does this information help you? First you can find the best areas on your page for advertisements. Secondly, you can see if your latest new feature is being looked at and used. One glance at your page shows you what is being used and what is being ignored. OptimizelyOptimizely introduces the concept of A/B testing. This is when you have two versions of a website, and you show them to visitors at the same time. You then see from the stats which version was the most successful. Optimizely makes this very easy, but again this is a paid service, starting at $17 a month. (Of course, there is a 30 day trial period). After specifying the domain name and setting up your account, you can create multiple versions of your page. You can then tweak the code in each version so they are different. Then send them out into the world, and see what happens. MouseflowWhen people come to your site, Mouseflow will “record” what they do. You can see their mouse moving around. Watch it filling out text boxes, entering search terms into the search engine and much more. To get a better idea of how it works, try out the free demo page. It’s fun to see what you’ve just done come alive on the screen. How does this benefit you? Well, you can see from your visitor’s behavior if they scroll all the way to the bottom of your page. If not, there must be a serious issue with the content in the top half. Also, by watching people filling out your forms, you will get an idea if there are any problem areas. If they abandon the form halfway through, then you clearly have a problem that needs to be addressed. There are different plans for Mouseflow, including a free plan, and various paid plans. Have a look. UserTestingA report about your site, compiled by a real user who is paid to put your site through its paces. Again, this is an interesting spin on the whole analytics concept. Instead of lists of figures, pie charts and tables, UserTesting recruits a team of people to test your website and report their findings back to you within an hour. Is there something on your site you want tested? Are you not sure if the shopping cart on your site is fully functional? Do you want to see if the page is clear and unambiguous? UserTesting will find users in your demographic who will tell you what they think. You will get the written answers to your questionnaire, and a video of testers using the page. However, this is not cheap, so it should be reserved for the most important site investigations. You would be paying $49 per user. But, for real-time instant feedback, this is hard to beat. MintIf you like green, then you are in luck. Mint gives you a very green page with lots of facts and figures about your site. This service has a very affordable one-time fee of $30. But what you get for that fee is impressive. There’s more here than just the usual data (number of visitors, demographics, etc). You are also given information about the sites that brought your visitors here. It doesn’t matter whether they are search engines, social networks or another kind of site that’s entirely different. Plus you can see how well your RSS feeds performed and which of your visitors clicked on what. That will give you further confirmation about which content was most popular. So this tool could be very effective for blogs or other content driven websites. You can see the full list of features here. This is one service that takes on Google Analytics in a serious way. Check out the full list of plugins, both official and third-party. WoopraWoopra provides the usual stats, but what makes this tool stand out is the “behavioral profiles.” You can start to build a picture of each customer by seeing exactly what they did on the website and when. Customers are tracked across devices. So if they start an action on their iPhone and later continue it on a PC, Woopra will keep track of the action no matter what. Find out everything there is to know about your customers from their payment methods to what they bought, and when. Woopra will even tell you if a specific customer is on your site right now. You can then time how long they stay. Woopra has a free version. But the paid version starts at $79.95 a month, depending on your needs. QualarooHaving analytics stats is enormously valuable. But what is even more valuable is instant real-time feedback from customers who are currently on your site. Using Qualaroo, you can ask questions anywhere on your site, with any combination of variables. When a person starts to fill their shopping cart, ask them about their shopping experience. When the visitor leaves the site, conduct a brief exit survey asking how they enjoyed the site. Exit surveys are also useful when an action is suddenly abandoned. Think an incomplete download or an abandoned shopping cart full of items. Is there something wrong? Find out. The service starts at $79 a month and there is no free option. So this is a service for online businesses with a high turnover of site visitors who can afford to use the tool to learn why. PiwikFree, open-source, private. View your analytics stats from the privacy of your own server. Piwik is completely unique from all the other analytics tools we’ve looked at thus far. First, it is a free open-source Web analytics platform. This means you can download the software, and upload it to your own server. The information stays with you and not on someone else’s system. You pay nothing, and your data remains a secret. Check out the demo to learn more. Plenty of help is provided on the Piwik site. And it’s a great choice if you want to support the concept of open-source. But many of the features sound impressive too. CliqueMeIs your site image-heavy? Then get your visitors engaging on them by using CliqueMe’s photo page. Aside from many other features, CliqueMe gives you social analytics, too. The tool also provides information on some of the other sites your visitors have frequented. It even offers analytics for your blog comments so you can search for appropriate keywords. This last feature can help you with your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. But most exciting, CliqueMe provides you with an Instagram-like page to place your images encouraging your visitors to engage with them more often. There is also a “Trending Images” page, where site visitors can see which images are being viewed and talked about the most. Analytics Photo via Shutterstock The post 11 Web Analytics Tools to Enhance Your Online Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| ACA Rule Will Raise Insurance Premiums for Majority of Small Business Workers Posted: 03 Mar 2014 05:00 AM PST If you work in a small business, odds are that you are going to pay more for health insurance for yourself and your family in the coming years. That's because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has changed the way insurers are allowed to price health insurance on the small business market. Under the "adjusted community rating" rules put in place by the new law, insurers cannot charge healthier workers less for health insurance than they charge sicker workers the way they can charge better drivers less for auto insurance than they charge worse drivers. Moreover, while the new rules permit insurers to charge older people and smokers more than younger people and non-smokers, the allowable differentials are smaller than what insurers have tended to charge in the past. The Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reported (PDF) last week that the adjusted community rating rule will raise health insurance premiums on nearly two-thirds of the 17 million small business workers receiving coverage in the “fully-insured small group health market.” These rate increases are the inevitable result of efforts to reduce the cost of insurance for less healthy workers. If insurers can't charge businesses with older and sicker workers as much as they used to, then the companies with younger and healthier workers will have to pay more. The CMS’s analysts figured out that 65 percent of small businesses have paid lower-than-average premiums in the past and so will face cost increases, while 35 percent paid higher-than-average premiums previously and will get a price break. How much those premiums will rise is less clear from the report. The CMS identified only one organization that has analyzed the effect of the adjusted community rating on the cost of small business health insurance premiums nationally. That company, Oliver Wyman, estimates (PDF) that small businesses will spend 20 percent more in the fifth year of the new law as a result of changes to the adjusted community rating rule, and rules on guaranteed issue and insurance renewal combined. Because the CMS does not expect the guarantee or the renewal changes to affect premium rates, the Oliver Wyman finding suggests that small business health insurance premiums will be 20 percent higher than they otherwise would have been because of the ACA community rating rule. That's a sizeable increase. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that premiums for individual coverage in small businesses averaged $5,683 annually in 2013, and premiums for family coverage averaged $15,581. Workers will end up bearing a sizable chunk of this bill. Most economists believe that business owners will pass the increase in health insurance premiums on to their employees by reducing raises because business owners generally respond to increases in benefits costs in this way. But even if small business owners don't ask workers to pay for a higher fraction of health insurance premiums in response to the ACA-induced price increases, many workers will still be hit by the price increase. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports employees at businesses with between 3 and 199 employees already pay an average of 16 percent of the cost of individual health insurance premiums and 36 percent of the cost of family premiums. Cost Photo via Shutterstock The post ACA Rule Will Raise Insurance Premiums for Majority of Small Business Workers appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
| Bright Light Helps Market Products, But Makes Decisions More Emotional Posted: 03 Mar 2014 02:30 AM PST Light in your office or in your brick and mortar store may have a lot more impact on your business than you realize. In fact, bright light helps market products, but it may have a very different effect on decisions in the workplace, a study says. Researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management say evidence suggests that sunny days tend to make people more optimistic and full of well-being. However, seemingly contradictory data shows sunny days can also intensify the depressed outlook already present in people who are prone to depression. In a summary of the study’s findings Red Orbit reports:
So, to review, what researchers found was not that subjects were more positive under bright lights. Rather, the conclusion seems to indicate that brighter lighting conditions bring out more intense emotions. And, researchers say there are some practical business conclusions that can be drawn from all this. For example, one researcher suggests that when marketing products with a high emotional impact — say flowers, engagement rings etc. — higher light levels might make sense. On the other hand, researchers say, in an office environment where important business decisions are being made, you may not want people on an emotional tear. Instead, consider turning down the lighting level in your business office to mellow things out. Knowing the effect light levels have on your customers, clients and employers gives you a great advantage. Studying the environments that make your customers more willing to buy and your workers better able to make good decisions should make managing your entire business much easier in the long run. Light levels: Shutterstock The post Bright Light Helps Market Products, But Makes Decisions More Emotional appeared first on Small Business Trends.     |
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