When you’re a real estate agent, you need three things: leads, leads, and more leads. When you’re selling a home, you need as many buyers as possible to know about it. When you’re assisting a buyer, you need to use all the tools at your disposal to help them find a property that suits their…
Xbox for pets . . . Airbnb for airplanes . . . eBay for marketing ice cream . . . we’ve all heard a crazy company “idea” plus rolled the eyes before. So, the truth is, this really is how countless companies commence. The founder falls in love with a certain big idea which, for them,…
Mobile apps are one of the fastest-growing industries on Earth. From 2012 to 2013, estimates of total worldwide downloads nearly doubled. The number is now passing 100 billion downloads annually. Businesses & their customers, can’t get enough apps. This is, of course, great news for the app developers we all know and love – the…
Hidden among the large amount of data released regularly by the Federal Reserve is some valuable information about the terms of Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed loans. I found the numbers intriguing because they show that the average SBA-guaranteed loan is smaller, of shorter duration and carries a lower interest rate than I would have…
Don’t miss the important news for your business this week. The Small Business Trends editorial team has this roundup to keep you informed Web Business AOL acquires Gravity for more personalized content. Gravity helps publishers personalize or customize their content. The company already works for AOL properties like TechCrunch. But it also provides plugins for…
My son loves roller coasters. Last summer we were visiting Cedar Point for a couple of days to ride coasters. As we waited in line for several hours to get on a coaster, I noticed something astounding. Every person in line was wearing at least one brand on a T-shirt, on a hat, sneakers, back…
What device are you reading this article on? A Windows desktop? An iPad running iOS? A Nokia Windows Phone? An Etch-A-Sketch? Well, whatever you’re using, we have news for you: the future is beyond skewed toward the Android operating system. According to data from Gartner, about 2.3 billion devices were shipped in 2013, and of…
“Why do I need a mobile app? Don’t I spend enough between mailers, coupons, and everything else I do when it comes to marketing? Why take on another headache?” Because it will make you money. (Pretty simple, right?) How, you ask? Well . . . Mobile orders An app lets you offer mobile ordering, which…
By 2015, it is estimated that close to a billion consumers will be using mobile devices only (no laptop, no desktop). And many, many others will be using their mobile devices more often than their other devices. For small businesses, this means that maintaining a mobile presence is highly important, if not essential. The main…
According to a report from Smith’s Point Analytics released late last year, mobile cloud services platforms are projected to grow over the next four years from $ 579 million to a staggering $ 4.4 billion in 2017. The mobile cloud is no joke! Of course, when you’re making projections, you can come up with any…