Archive: 2012 May

As National Small Business Week comes to a close, I’d like to pause to say it’s been pretty incredible to be a part of the events celebrating small business, the drivers of our economy. My team and I have had ample opportunity to talk with small businesses owners, and what stands out to me the most is their ongoing struggle to manage it all — simultaneously building customer relationships, managing business operations and producing a product or delivering a service. It’s the time small business owners spend purchasing supplies, planning travel, reporting expenses,...

Expanding The Deem Network With my background as the CEO of HomeRun.com, I am passionate about matching merchants with consumers and businesses that are in the market for what they are selling. I have long believed that the “daily deal” has incredible potential as a performance-based marketing innovation, but that in their current incarnation, daily deals remain inefficient to the detriment of both the merchant and consumer. This is why HomeRun joined the Deem ecosystem last fall. Today, it has all come together for us at Deem as we expand the Deem Network, giving...

by Joshua Zerkel In my work with small/medium businesses and entrepreneurs, I hear a near-constant refrain: overwhelm, overwork, and lack of productivity. While there’s no one silver bullet that can solve all of these problems in one fell swoop, choosing and implementing the right technology can make a HUGE difference not only to how you work, but to your overall bottom line in your business. In particular, online or cloud-based tools (that is, applications or services that you access via the internet, instead of being installed on your computer) have a number of...

Our team has had the opportunity to sit down recently with many small businesses owners and their employees. We know these workers are constantly strapped for time — but we were looking to understand more about what’s filling their schedules. We recently spoke with a woman who manages multiple parts of a small Bay Area-based biotech company. She wears many hats for the company — marketing and communication, business management, purchasing, and several one-off day-to-day tasks. Her job is a constant balancing act. For her purchasing role, she relies on a series of...

These days, everyone is talking about Big Data. Politicians are using it to microtarget voters. Parents are relying on baby-data apps to compare their children’s progress to others. Universities are crunching numbers to predict the success of their students. And, across the board, innovative companies are harnessing the massive amounts of available Big Data to get an edge on the competition. We’re all talking about Big Data at conferences, cocktail parties, and networking events. I’m as engaged in these conversations as the next person, as data analytics is critical...