Stripe Updates Checkout for Payments on Your Website, Mobile App

Stripe has just introduced an update to its Checkout services. The company says it streamlines accepting credit card payments on your website or mobile app.

Stripe allows credit card payments without storing customer information on your servers. Instead that information is sent directly to Stripe for processing. That processing includes encryption of credit card and other information. The service charges businesses 2.9 percent of a customer’s total plus another 30 cents per transaction.

Stripe updates Checkout to tackle several concerns and cater to consumer trends, writes Michaël Villar, a Stripe developer, in a post on the official Stripe Blog.

In one major change, Stripe promises better address support. This includes supporting separate billing and shipping addresses. But the new changes are also designed to make the payment process easier. For example, your customers will only need to enter their street address and zip code at Checkout. The rest â€" country, city and state â€" will be filled in automatically by Stripe.

Stripe has also added a “Remember Me” feature that it claims will encourage customers to come back to your store.  It allows your customers to store their credit card and shipping information. When a customer returns to your online store, they’ll receive a text message to confirm their credit card information. The same will happen when customers visit other websites or mobile apps accepting Stripe. Villar writes:

“This in turn enables a rapid checkout experience in the future on any site using Checkout. Our hypothesis was that it would increase conversion ratesâ€"and we’re delighted that it has been confirmed.”

Stripe says that the changes it has introduced also address the growing use of mobile devices. The explosion in the popularity of mobile payments makes this a very important enhancement for small businesses, too. Villar says that Stripe redesigned Checkout for all devices: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, OS X, Windows, tablet, desktop and mobile.

Stripe says the new Checkout process has already been tested on thousands of sites and through millions of transactions already. If your business is already using Stripe for a checkout system, the new interface will update on its own. If you want to add some of the new features introduced with the update, the Documentation page on Stripe’s site has instructions.

6 Ways To Leverage Your Street Sales Team for Social Content Marketing #SXSW

From SXSW, a discussion with Jason Suen of Hearsay Social and Patrizio Spagnoletto of Farmer’s Insurance.

Here’s there bullet list best practices:

• Instead of just one social corporate page, Farmers Insurance, encourages its agents to have their own pages, which gives Farmers a much broader reach.
• Sales people using social must shift their minds from an ROI model to a relationships model. From one where they are seeking a direct correlation between social and sales, to one where they value social as a means to deeper relationships with customers.
• Have two ROI buckets - Business buckets and social buckets.  The business bucket should cover: sales, retention rates, renewal, repeat purchases,  and net promoter score - and other more business focused categories. Your social bucket is a lot more than sales - it’s about  loyalty and retention of customers.
• When measuring the social benefits of your marketing - ask yourself what extent are you attracting and engaging your audience.
• Educate sales teams about the simple, hands on, tactical ways to use social media. What is a  hashtag and etc? First, explain, “why social?” Then explain the basics of how to do it. Then help them understand how to use social to get found (be findable) and how to have a social presence.
• Assist your sales teams with growing their digital network. Digitize your rolodox (holiday card list, email contact list)

Using Gamification to Drive Brand Awareness

With more brands embracing the power of content to build brand awareness, power social media, SEO initiatives and generate leads, it’s not surprising that there’s an abundance of content on the Web.

If you’re an information-seeker, it’s a fantastic scenario. But for brands, that means more innovation and creativity are required to stand out from the crowd.

Using Gamification Turns the Ordinary into Extraordinary

Savvy brands are turning to gamification to differentiate themselves from the competition, creating more engaging, interactive experiences that captivate users’ attention and create lasting impressions. Audiences have always been interested in engaging activities that offer valuable feedback. Quizzes like this customer service evaluation and this one have been around online for years - and in print magazines for much longer.

Gamification ups the ante with a higher level of interactivity, competition, rewards, and rich media. Happiest Minds (PDF) describes the process of gamification as:

“. . .introducing certain game-like constructs such as points and badges to non-game applications like websites and social applications to increase engagement and loyalty.”

Designing and Implementing Gamification is a Complex Process

But there’s a lot that goes into the gamification process, from conceptualizing an innovative idea and finding a unique and intuitive way to gamify the concept, followed by implementing those ideas in a user-friendly design. Getting into gamification for the sake of being in on the latest trend isn’t a good strategy. It’s actually pretty easy to miss the mark with gamification, and most brands wouldn’t want to throw that kind of budget at a project of that magnitude if it’s not going to produce results.

When done right, gamification can result in 100 to 150 percent increases in engagement metrics like page views, time spent on site, and other community activities. But Gartner estimates that as many as 80 percent of gamification initiatives won’t meet business objectives, mostly due to poor design.

How Does Using Gamification Drive Brand Awareness?

In order to address the winning tactics in creating successful gamification initiatives, it’s important to understand precisely how gamification can enhance brand awareness. This happens in a few different ways:

• The employee motivation domino effect: Gamification is used as a team motivation strategy internally, by creating friendly competition among sales teams, implementing badge programs and leaderboards, and so on. Motivated employees have higher levels of job satisfaction, and happier employees are more likely to deliver great service. Great service fosters brand loyalty and awareness.
• Happy customers will spread the word about brands they love in the form of word-of-mouth marketing, social media mentions, and online reviews. Any of these scenarios results in stronger brand awareness.
• Built-in social sharing features encourage social recognition. A best practice, implementing social sharing functions within the gamification interface encourages users to share their achievements, scores, badges, and the like with their networks. The result? Enhanced brand awareness.
• Built-in bragging rights: When used internally as an employee motivator, brands are inherently building benefits that can be used in key brand messages. For instance, a company can highlight the fact that 95 percent of its customer service representatives have achieved A+ rating levels based on the company’s internal agent rating system.
• And of course, the obvious scenario is one in which a company totally nails gamification, implementing a program that’s infectious and goes viral. Ultimately, these programs can become almost synonymous with the brand. Think along the lines of McDonald’s Monopoly.

The fact that gamification can influence brand awareness from multiple angles makes it an especially appealing option for enterprises. But to realize these benefits, effective execution is key.

Value and Motivation: Essential Gamification Components

Cognizant points out (PDF):

“Gamification can inspire a sudden spike in user interest and drive immediate results with even the most rudimentary game elements, such as points, badges, and leaderboards. However, if the audience does not realize value in the long term, the engagement begins to break down.”

Yu-kai Chou, a pioneer and keynote speaker in gamification, names eight core drivers of gamification. Meaning, programs hinged on one or more of these drivers are most likely to succeed. These eight drivers contain concepts that, to marketers, should feel familiar, encompassing ideas such as Development and Accomplishment, Ownership and Possession, and Social Possession and Envy.

In other words, gamification should create a meaningful experience and offer value to the user, by eliciting an emotional response or tapping into some external or internal motivator. After all, it is 75 percent psychology and 25 percent technology, according to Gabe Zichermann, author of two books on the subject, editor of the Gamification Blog and organizer of the Gamification Summit.

Cognizant also touches on four key elements of gamification, but from a more practical standpoint rather than a conceptual one:

Objective

What behavior are you trying to modify among the user base, and why? What does success look like? Tripit, for instance, uses a travel leaderboard to showcase travel statistics for users. The objective: Get people to use Tripit as their first choice for travel arrangements. If choosing one service over another was going to earn you some social status points, which would you choose?

Target Audience

A critical factor in the design process, the minute details of the interface and other elements must be carefully crafted to suit the preferences of the target audience. The Starbucks Rewards program is a great example of this, giving users the very thing most head to Starbucks for in the first place: Coffee.

Innovation

Make it fun. Will your target audience respond to badges? What achievements and rewards will your audience find worthwhile? Check out this Service Provider Challenge tool as an example. This example turns some of the most frustrating aspects of service management into a lighthearted experience, providing actionable insights users can put into practice immediately.

Justification

The compelling reason or reasons that drive your audience to engage and continue to do so. Why will the target user participate? Take a look at Domino’s Pizza Chefs program, for instance. Users have an obvious need to continue using this application - every time they want to order pizza.

One of the greatest things about gamification is its limitless potential. Brands can literally take gamification anywhere they can conceive, and in most cases, the more innovative, the better.

With the opportunity to make boring and mundane tasks more exciting while building brand awareness at the same time, it’s no wonder gamification is taking enterprises by storm.

Gamification Photo via Shutterstock

Don\'t let Snowden leaks chill cloud adoption

March 10, 2014

Cloud storage is itself under a cloud following Snowden, yet ironically its where the leaked data remains most secure says Campbell Williams

2013 was a brutal year for society's faith in Internet security. With the NSA leaks and the huge media controversy that continue to surround Snowden's revelations, Internet users and businesses alike would not be blamed for fearing for the safety of their data online.

As a result, any data shared on the Internet has been labelled vulnerable and unreliable and subsequently, corners of the market have begun to draw away from online data storage such as Cloud. AKQA is one such business that is trialling a new Storage Connect platform that allows access to files across a business but behind a firewall. 

Whilst it appears that the media have been successful in instilling fear into businesses that rely on the Internet (which let's face it, it is for most), the question we now have to ask ourselves is whether these ‘revelations' around NSA protocol are really ground breaking or have governments merely contemporised the ways in which they spy on their enemies and allies.  

Administrative data scandals since the 70s, such as Watergate, go to show that government officials have been delving into confidential information for decades. If anything, the Internet has improved the transparency of what is happening.

Government agencies have the right to request that popular browsers like Google disclose information about its users. In turn, Google has been publishing transparency reports since 2010. Google's bi-annual 2013 transparency report shows that 67 percent of data requests were at least partially handed over to the British government. The United States, perhaps unsurprisingly, exceeded this by divulging between 81 to 100 percent of the data, depending on the nature of the request.

Not only have the Snowden discoveries taught us nothing new about government surveillance, but it may also be argued they have ironically created misplaced panic on the Internet.  The very nature of the revelations shows that the main and most threatening weaknesses lie within companies. Snowden demonstrated how detrimental an employee with wide access to sensitive and confidential data can be to a company and in this instance, a government agency.

But the irony continues... Cloud storage now appears to be the one place that Government agencies cannot access information withheld by Snowden. British and US officials believe that he has stored further, unreleased data stating names of US and allied intelligence personnel behind a sophisticated encryption with multiple passwords. This has been said to act as his get out of jail free card as he uses the unpublished material to protect himself against arrest or physical harm.

The Snowden case is not unique to this debate. WikiLeaks is yet another illustration of how encryption can make data impenetrable and safe from hackers but not from employees. Bradley Manning, an ex-United States Army officer and releaser of the Afghan War Logs, is the only known contributor to WikiLeaks. He is now serving 35-years imprisonment after revealing to a fellow soldier that he was in possession of the documents. The encryption of WikiLeaks has remained unbroken.

Whilst it is, of course, advisable to check how secure your information is online before sharing it, perhaps it is time to look closer to home when looking for securer ways to protect our data.

Contributed by Campbell Williams, group strategy and marketing director, Six Degrees Group

6 Ways Retailers Use Content To Sell Better #SXSW @Birchbox @Outbrain Insight

Mollie Chen, BirchBox & Jeff Pyatt, Outbrain

(SXSW coverage sponsored by Infusionsoft - all in one sales and marketing CRM software for small business)

1. Produce content with intenet - not just for the sake of producing content. Make sure your readers want it (not just you) and that it serves a business puropse.
2. Measure the results (content analytics) of your content such as referral traffic, what converts the most and other key performance indicators that are of importance to your business.
3. Respect the different media. What looks good on Facebook might not look so great on Instragram. PUblish content for specific media.
4. Great copy and headlines gets more click through and viewer recallt han banner advertising. Outbrain did a test of a NY Times web site. After folks read the web site they asked a question about one of the featured banner ads on the web site. No one could recall it, but people did recall the sponsored content.
5. For retailers, all of your content should support your sales and lead to some call to action for the reader.
6. Birchbox ensures it’s content is very authentic. It has i’s own staff members test products, use products and genuinely share their stories about a product. One popular video is a staff member asking the audience if she should cut her hair, color her hair or get bangs.

3 Tech Guys: Join the Google+ Hangout Each Monday For Info on Everything Tech and Small Business

Join three of the most knowledgeable and influential guys in small business technology each Monday night at the 3 Tech Guys Google+ Hangout.

Join the 3 Tech Guys Hangout

Next event takes place on Monday, March 10th at 8 pm EST / 5pm CST

Brent Leary, Gene Marks and Ramon Ray will be talking all things tech and small business to help you discover what tech products are available for you to use to help grow your small business and make it more productive. Join now - you won’t want to  miss this 90 minutes of in-depth information and guidance from these three tech guys!

Russia suspected of Ukraine cyber attack

March 10, 2014

Government mobile phone hacks, viruses, leaks and website defacement are all reportedly underway in Ukraine following the takeover of Crimea.

Ukraine is reported to be under cyber-attack following the physical take-over of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea last month by some 30,000 unidentified well-equipped 'troops' in unmarked uniforms.

In addition to boots on the ground, a range of cyber warfare tactics are being deployed against the interim Ukraine government which ousted former pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych.

Dozens of Ukrainian computer networks, including those run by the Kiev government, are reported by the FT newspaper have been infected by the aggressive "Snake" or "Ouroboros," virus which was reported on by SC last week. 

Uroburos is a rootkit and it is designed to hide functions and processes in a system allowing its controller to act on a system without being detected. BAE Systems has recorded 22 infections of Ukrainian computer systems by "Snake" since the start of 2013, with 14 since the start of 2014 when former President Yanukovych faced serial protests. G Data is reported as saying that it suspects Uroburos' creators are the same people who attacked US systems Agent.BTZ malware whose programming language is similar, plus Uroburos checks to see if Agent.BTZ is already on a system, in which case it remains inactive. In addition, the software appears to have been created in the Moscow time zone and includes some Russian language.

Russia is the obvious suspect for both troops and cyber-attacks but as Dr Thomas Rid, Reader in War Studies, Kings College London commented to SCMagazineUK.com: “You may suspect, but there is no clear evidence in the code to allow attribution. It is really hard to pinpoint attribution without an inside leak, whether it was Russia, and if it was, who in Russia gave the order, whether it was the state, the FSB (Russian security service) - and if so, a local official, or whoever up to Putin. Attribution is a problem.”

Less concerned about formal attribution, a group of hackers calling themselves the Russian Cyber Command have responded by leaking around 1,000 documents from Russian defence trade intermediary Rosoboronexport (roe.ru), as well as lower level defacing of websites. The Russian Cyber Command says it has decided to initiate a true domestic cyber-war on Russian Military Enterprises “and eventually we shall deliver critical infrastructure companies on which Russian Putin's Empire stands".

A statement posted on CyberGuerrilla.org says that the hackers accessed the 500MB of files uploaded to BayFiles by sending malware to Rosoboronexport's CEO from India's embassy in Moscow, into which they had hacked.

Separately, Valentyn Nalivaichenko, the head of SBU, Ukraine's' security service told a news conference last week: "I confirm that an IP-telephonic attack is underway on mobile phones of members of Ukrainian parliament for the second day in row."

Some reports suggest that spying equipment could have been illegally installed in the wake of a 28 February attack when several communications centres in Crimea, maintained by Ukraine's telecom provider Ukrtelecom JSC, were taken over by unidentified attackers who wrecked cables and knocked out almost all landline, mobile and internet services in the region. However other commentators, who do not wish to be named, told SCMagazineUK.com: “It's not necessary to get physical access to carry out this kind of interception.”

Both those who want Crimea to remain part of Ukraine and those wanting it to integrate with Russia are hacking into and defacing each other's websites, including the Russian state-funded news channel RT, each calling the other Nazis.

On Russian social network Vkontakte, 13 community groups set up in support of the new interim government in Kiev have had access to Russian IP addresses blocked and the Federal Service for the Supervision of Communications Roskomnadzor, said it would continue to block Ukrainian community groups and any other IP addresses that might be displaying "extremist content".

Dr Rid suggested to SCMagazineUK.com that, “There's nothing new here. In fact everything is entirely to be expected.  We might see escalation in cyber-warfare if there were an increased use of physical force.”  Rid added that there was nothing of the sophistication of a Stuxnet being used, nor would this be expected as the adversary would not have had the time to create something like that.

Anonymous hackers claim MtGox still has \'stolen\' Bitcoins

March 10, 2014

The bad news keeps getting worse for MtGox. Two weeks on from being forced to close after hackers stole approximately 850,000 Bitcoins (BTC), the currency exchange now faces accusations that it is still holding onto some of the 'stolen' Bitcoins.

Forbes reports that anonymous hackers took over community website Reddit, as well as the personal blog of MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles, on Sunday to allege that Karpeles had actually retained some of the Bitcoins that the company said had been stolen from its users.

The blog post has since been removed, although the message can be viewed on Pastebin.

"It's time that MTGOX got the bitcoin communities wrath instead of Bitcoin Community getting Goxed. This release would have been sooner, but in spirit of responsible disclosure and making sure all of ducks were in a row, it took a few days longer than would have liked to verify the data."

The 716MB file dumps appears to include personal data - including Karpeles' home address and resume, as well as a purported screenshot of MtGox's Bitcoin balance.

Hackers say that this ledger shows that the trading exchange still has a current balance of 951,116 BTC which would - if true - mean that customer Bitcoins have not been lost, but rather that fraud has been committed. MtGox filed for Japanese bankruptcy on 28 February and claimed at the time that it had lost around 850,000 Bitcoins, including 100,000 of its own, as well as approximately £16.41 million (US$ 27.3 million) in customer deposits.

Forbes writer Andy Greenberg points out that it is possible that this could simply be a case of accounting mismatches, with the exchange counting Bitcoins as being safe even when they had already been stolen. However, it is worth noting that since MtGox has filed for bankruptcy protection, the public ledger of Bitcoin transactions - the Bitcoin blockchain (which tracks the movement of currency, while ensuring that the users are anonymous) - has not registered any movement of the “stolen” virtual coins.

“I couldn't verify that Sunday's database dump was real, or that it showed any of the 'lying' that the hackers claimed. In fact, it may simply show how MtGox's accounting mismatched with its actual store of Bitcoins-that it was counting Bitcoins as being safe in its coffers when they had already been stolen by thieves,” said Greenberg.

In related news, MtGox recently issued a press release to say that phishing campaigns have been making the rounds. Hackers have used MtGox's identity and been asking for the name, address, username, password and bank account numbers of those who have lost virtual currency.

Karpeles and other MtGox officials couldn't be reached for comment on this story.

Dropbox To Go Public, Cloud Storage Seems To Be The Hot Space

The cloud storage provider Dropbox has reportedly raised $350 million in private funding and may be contemplating going public, in order to raise even more. Dropbox was the first company to make cloud storage an acceptable and perhaps a “fashionable” way of storing files. Every cloud storage company since has merely been trying to emulate them.

In case you are not familiar, Dropbox starts everyone off on 5GB free. Then you can earn several gigabytes more for free by activating Camera Upload, and having all your phone photos automatically backed up to the service. Referrals to other people bring in a few hundred megabytes each and the company is always running contests to give away even more storage.

If you are a storage junkie though, you will need to pay for more. Dropbox has been criticized for being one of the most expensive cloud storage services and 100GB will set you back $10 a month.

You may wonder how Dropbox fares against its rivals, in terms of service, features and price. Below are the top ten.

Google Drive

It used to be called Google Documents, but now it is Google Drive. Free storage amounts to 15GB, as Gmail and Google+ photos are considered part of the same service. You can store anything you want in Google Drive, and there is a desktop app for dragging and dropping files on your computer. These files are then synchronized to Google’s servers for safekeeping.

More space can be bought, and the prices are extremely cheap, compared to Dropbox. 100GB can be bought for $60 a year, whereas 100GB a year with Dropbox would set you back $120 a year. Plus the big name recognition alone will probably be enough to assure you that this is a service to be trusted and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

OneDrive

Next, we come to the service formally known as Skydrive (before BSkyB took exception to the name). It is now called OneDrive, and it was relaunched a short time back to great fanfare. 7GB of space is automatically given, with a further 3GB if you switch on the Camera Upload feature. You also get 500MB for every person you refer who signs up for the service.

If you want to buy additional space, then OneDrive surprisingly comes out on top, narrowly beating Google Drive. For 100GB a year, you would pay $50 a year, compared to $60 for Google.

Feature-wise, it is pretty much the same as Google, with one big difference for Windows PC users. In Windows, OneDrive is built into the OS already, so there is no need to download additional software.

iCloud

iCloud has its legions of extremely loyal followers, so it is definitely worth a mention here. However, the drawback is that it is only available for owners of iOS devices. So that makes it a rather narrow club.

When you buy an iOS device for the first time, switch on iCloud, and all of your photos and other images will be automatically backed up to the iCloud servers. You can even schedule how often and when such a backup will take place. But here is another limitation - iCloud by default only backs up images, email and app data. So what happens to all of the important documents on your iPad that you want to make backups of?

That’s where iWorks comes in. iWorks and iCloud are two totally different things. For documents, you need to have Pages, for spreadsheets Numbers, and for presentations Keynote. These three apps are not cheap (they cost about $60 for the whole package), but if you buy them and have your documents in those formats, you can then save your documents to iCloud.

All iOS owners get 5GB free, with paid plans starting at $20 for 10GB. So this is not a budget friendly option.

Amazon Cloud Drive

There’s another big name that has gone into the cloud storage business: Amazon. Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player both make up part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is becoming a very popular Web hosting company. As with Google, you can be assured of your files’ safety, due to the size and stability of the company.

5GB is offered free of charge, and paid plans start at $10 a year for 20GB. If you want 100GB, that would set you back a paltry $50 a year. So here’s another one that beats Google for price. A desktop app is also provided for easy dragging and dropping, along with syncing online.

Box

Box’s biggest selling point is that the company often gives away lots of free space. By default, you only get 5GB free. But it is not uncommon for Box to hold temporary special offers. For example, you could get 50GB just for downloading the company’s smartphone or desktop app.

However, before you go completely loopy over the huge amount of free space, you should be aware. No file uploaded can be anymore than 250MB in size. So there are definite limitations to what can be stored.

SugarSync

Whenever someone writes a review of the best cloud storage services, one that keeps popping up time and time again is SugarSync. But since it is far from the cheapest service, and does not offer any free space whatsoever, it is difficult to understand what people see in it.

Once downloaded to your computer, SugarSync is accessed by a widget on your desktop. Drag a file onto the SugarSync widget and it will be uploaded to the cloud and to any other computers and devices that you specify.

Upon registering, you get 5GB free for 30 days to test the service. After 30 days, you need to switch to a paid plan. 100GB under the SugarSync plan costs $9.99 a month.

Bitcasa

Bitcasa is another service mentioned a lot, and with good reason.  Users get 20GB free and then for $10 a month, you get one terabyte a year of storage. No, that isn’t a typo. For $99 a year (you get a discount if you pay yearly), you will get ten times the space of Dropbox. If that isn’t enough to get your attention, then nothing will.

If you opt to stick with the 20GB free plan, you can put Bitcasa on 3 devices.  With all plans, you can stream high definition video, which is another plus for Bitcasa.  And of course, all of your files are encrypted, so they are safe.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan is another cloud service plan touted by its fans.

After installing the software program (which comes for Windows, Mac, and Linux), you select a drive on your computer or the entire computer. Then let CrashPlan do its work. It will index the entire contents of the drive or computer. And when that’s done, it runs quietly in the background. It will continually synchronize your files to the CrashPlan servers, so you don’t have to worry about losing the only copy of your presentation.

What is interesting about CrashPlan is that you can use the software for free to backup your files to another of your computers in your office or home. You can also use it to backup to an external hard-drive. But if you want off-site backup, then you need to pay. Prices start from $6 a month for unlimited storage space. The prices go down if you buy several years worth in advance.

Mozy

Mozy is another cloud storage option with many users singing its praises. Mozy comes with all the usual bells-and-whistles you would expect from a cloud backup service. But one service that makes Mozy stand out is that, in the event of a full file restore, you can have the option to have all of your files sent to you on DVDs. Of course, you can have them all sent to you online too. But the option of receiving everything on DVD’s is an interesting one.

Another really interesting service being offered by Mozy is for customers with “hundreds of gigabytes of data” that need to be uploaded. Obviously the initial upload will take forever. So Mozy will send out what they call a “Mozy Data Shuttle.” It’s pretty much an external hard drive. Once you have uploaded your files to it, mail it back. And Mozy will feed your data onto its servers for you.

Ubuntu One

There’s one final cloud storage option on our list: Ubuntu One. And you would be forgiven for thinking that it is restricted only to Linux systems. But it isn’t. Users of all operating systems can use it - even iOS devices.

The one drawback with Ubuntu One is that you only get 5GB free. That’s not great if you stack it up against some of the other services profiled here. But what makes Ubuntu One stand out is that it includes streaming music and 20GB of storage for $3.99 a month. Ubuntu One also has an online music store. If you buy a song from their store, then you get 6 months free music streaming and 20GB free. Even the hard-working small business owner needs to relax sometimes and listen to some music.

If music streaming is not your thing, then Ubuntu One sells storage space in blocks of 20GB at $2.99 a month each. And if you buy 12 months worth, then you get 2 months free.

One thing you should remember. If you pay for these cloud storage services a year in advance, you can get discounts of between 10-15%. It’s something to bear in mind if you are counting the dollars and cents.

Have we missed your favorite cloud storage service?

\'Off-the-shelf\' malware targets POS systems

March 10, 2014

Hackers are using "relatively unsophisticated" malware bought on the black market to target vulnerable point-of-sale (POS) systems, according to a new report.

Following on from high-profile attacks against US retailers Target, Nieman Marcus and Michaels Stores, McAfee Labs examined how many data breaches are being caused by relatively basic malware, often brought “off-the-shelf” on the black market.

“The breaches were unprecedented in numbers of records stolen, but what is even more notable is how well the malware industry served its customers,” reads the executive summary from the report. “The attackers purchased off-the-shelf point-of-sale malware, they made straightforward modifications so they could target their attacks, and it's likely that they both tested their targets' defences and evaded those defences using purchased software.

“They even had a ready and efficient black market for selling the stolen credit card information, including an anonymous, virtual-currency-based point-of-sale payment system. Raw materials, manufacturing, marketplace, transaction supportâ€"it's all there for thieves to use.” 

Researchers added that Lampeduza Republic is one of the better organised credit card black markets, with thieves often paying using anonymous virtual currencies like Bitcoin.

The report goes onto say that thieves are using ready-made POS malware tools like POSCardStealer - a Trojan which deposits card data onto external servers, Dexter, Alina, vSkimmer, ProjectHook and others to exfilitrate data.

Hackers used BlackPOS to attack Target, but researchers say that the attack was unusual because the US retailer uses a custom-built POS application, making it impossible for cyber-criminals to learn the system “offline” (something they can usually do by working on leaks of commercial POS applications).

Detailing the attack, researchers say that it was based on “several customisations” of BlackPOS. Details regarding Active Directory domain names, user accounts, and IP addresses of SMB shares were hardcoded into scripts that were dropped by some of the malware components, and the scripts were sent as plaintext files to a remote server.

“Nonetheless, we must recognise that this class of attack is far from ‘advanced'. The BlackPOS malware family is an “off-the-shelf” exploit kit for sale that can easily be modified and redistributed with little programming skill or knowledge of malware functionality,” reads the report. “BlackPOS source code has also been leaked multiple times. Just as we have seen with Zeus/Citadel, Gh0st, Poison Ivy, or many other leaked kits, anyone can employ, modify, and use them for their purposes.”

Quizzed on why hackers are opting for off-the-shelf malware, 451 Research analyst Javvad Malik said that criminals are, like legitimate businesses, looking for effective solutions at affordable prices. 

“Criminal organisations have the same basic business principles as legitimate businesses ie make as much whilst spending as little as possible,” he told SCMagazineUK.com. “Coming up with new malware isn't trivial or necessarily cheap, so it makes business sense to purchase off-the-shelf malware to carry out attacks.” 

Neira Jones, independent advisor and former board of advisor member for PCI SSC, says that it is worth noting that data breaches are likely to change by location - the US, after all, is still to adopt EMV (the equivalent of chip and pin), but says that reaching PCI DDS compliance should be the minimum standard for trading organisations.

“I have always believed that PCI DSS is a good set of controls and organisations should look at it as a minimum standard that they should achieve (even if they are not involved in card payments),” she told SCMagazineUK.com via email, further noting Verizon's recent PCI Compliance Report, which found that breached organisations are often less compliant.

“An organisation will only be as strong as their 'business as usual' security practices, making sure that they cover all aspects of people, process and technology.”

Jones went onto add that “well-documented” hackers will target POS systems via terminals (such as skimmers, firmware and inserted components), RAM scraping and network sniffing, and said that mitigation efforts are “not new either”. However, she warned that e-commerce sites are increasingly at risk and are a “relatively easy target for criminals.”

The McAfee Labs report, entitled McAfee Labs Threat Report: Fourth Quarter 2013, also found that Android malware samples had grown by 197 percent year-on-year, with ransomware rising by one million new samples for the year. The anti-virus company also saw the number of digitally signed malware samples triple for 2013, and noted a 70 percent increase in the number of suspect URL addresses.

A Winner Is Crowned: The Exciting Conclusion of the StartupBus Entrepreneurial Competition and a Look at the Top 7 Ideas

Last week we wrote about the 2014 StartupBus competition, a 3-day journey where entrepreneurs around the US and Mexico boarded buses, formed teams, and hurried to create a start-up business in just 3 days. The buses reached Texas on March 4, and on March 6th a winner was finally crowned.

There were actually three judging rounds to get through. Bus conductors judged the first round on the morning of March 5 and chose 12-14 teams to move on. The semi-finals took place later that day, where only 7 teams made it through to the finals.

Making it through to the final round were the following teams:

Beander - This team from the North bus created an online marketplace for micro-roasters and small specialty coffee shops to get the specialty green coffee beans they want. It allows these smaller businesses access to the best raw coffee beans on the market.

Bridgefy - This team from the Mexico bus proposed an Android app that would allow people to communicate when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections are down. In essence, it turns your phone into a two-way radio to be used when there are no phone signals, such as during disasters.

MiniMap - This team from the Northeast bus was inspired by video games to turn your to-do calendar into a visual compass. It plots your appointments, integrates with calendar apps, and helps you to navigate through the day and through your life.

Nutfund - This team from the West Coast bus proposed a system that would inspire major brands and Fortune 100 companies to take positive action. A given action is proposed, people who want to see that action happen then donate money, and once the action is taken the money is released to a chosen charity.

On The List - This team from the South bus designed a digital platform to bring your entertainment needs to the next level. Instead of just attending an event, they take the event and turn it into a real experience, with special perks and promotions from cool brands.

Smart Host - This team from the Northeast bus created an app to keep you up to date on the going rate of short-term rentals. You’ll see price trends and rental listings for your area, and get real-time data from online rental marketplace bookings.

Trustmail.io - This team from the Mexico bus was motivated to create a safe system for emails where hackers cannot get in. It is an encrypted mail service that works with your webmail and your browser to keep even the best hackers from getting into your private communications.

The final judging round took place at 2pm on March 6th. Judges included Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Liz Crawford, Cemre Gungor, Elizabeth McBrdide, Alejandro Villanueva and Michael Johnstone. Teams were judged by their execution, business and pitch.

In the end, Bridgefy took second place, and Smart Host went home with the gold!

Congratulations to Smart Host, and to all the ‘buspreneurs’ who competed in the StartupBus competition. Use the links above to explore the finalist websites and ideas - then come back here and let us know who YOU would have chosen for first place.

Google SEO Updates: What You NEED to Know

It seems like every time we go online, we see a bunch of new information about yet another Google SEO update that has changed the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape for good. Whether you’re a small business owner or an SEO guru, it can be taxing to say the least to keep up with all the nuances and shifting industry techniques. And that’s if you have the time to do the research.

What about those of us who are too busy to keep up with all the tweaks and overhauls? How do we find time to fit in the discovery and analysis of all this new SEO info, in order to keep our web presence up-to-date and operating with top efficiency?

Well, worry not! Here, we offer a handy guide on what you really need to know about the latest Google updates, as well as a little background on what’s gone on the past few years.

The Times They Are a Changin’

Most smart business owners know that remaining flexible and adaptable in today’s day and age is a great way to help ensure the longevity of their brand. If you expect everything to stay the same in business, you’ve got quite another thing coming! For example, in the last year alone, Google made an average of 500 adjustments to their search engine algorithm.

The vast majority of these adjustments were mere tweaks; nothing that made a significant difference to those in SEO. However, some of the changes over the last few years have had a serious impact on Google’s search engine, shifting the way the SEO industry works in more than one way.

Here are the top 5 things to note about Google updates:

1. Panda Update (February 2011) - This was essentially the first of several MAJOR Google updates that have taken place over the last few years. When Google launched Panda, the overall effect was that their search engine algorithm began to favor websites with higher quality content, instead of “thin” or less valuable content. Websites with spammy links and those who used black hat SEO keyword practices suffered …  A LOT.
2. Hummingbird Update (September 2013) - Forget floating like a butterfly. This update stung like a bee for more than a few websites. Why? Well, Google self-admittedly rolled out the biggest update to their search engine algorithm since 2001 with Hummingbird. If you were already using ethical SEO practices (i.e., white hate SEO, which supports high quality web content), your search engine ranking shouldn’t have changed much, but if you were using dubious SEO practices, your ranking likely would have plummeted.
3. SEO Isn’t Going Anywhere - After Hummingbird, some SEO marketers cried wolf, claiming that traditional SEO was disappearing altogether and warning the rest of us to make room for new types of online marketing. Well, that’s not really true. Smart business owners have stopped “chasing the algorithm,” yes, but SEO as a set of guidelines for best online marketing practices will never disappear.
4.  Content Marketing = SEO - If you use ethical SEO practices, you’ll realize you can’t have content marketing without SEO. High quality content is certainly king on the Internet, but without on-page SEO, for example (keyword research, title tags, site usability, etc.), you won’t get very far with that content, no matter how good it is. And without content, there’s nothing to optimize.
5. Social Media is SWEET - How can you say no to free advertising? Well, you can’t. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. That’s what social media can offer you. Free marketing. And it’s got a faster payoff than simply adding content to your website. How’s that? Well, people can share high quality content much faster on social media than search engines can keep up with indexing new pages. That means, the awesome new blog article you uploaded can get a lot of traction if you share it on Google+, long before the Google spider has had a chance to actually crawl the page.

It Just Keeps Getting Better

When marketers think of Google updates, they should envision the Internet as a place that’s continuing to get better all the time. That’s what Google is trying to do by making updates to their algorithm. They are continuously trying to improve the quality of the results they return to their users, which puts more pressure on websites to deliver better content and use better ways to deliver that content to users.

Google will keep making updates well into the foreseeable future, and search engines will keep getting smarter.

So, websites will have to keep delivering better, higher quality content in more unique and appealing ways and employ good SEO tactics if they expect to keep up with search engine updates.

What else can you do to keep up with the evolving SEO landscape? Avoid advertising practices that could scare your customers away, like pop up ads or outdated information.

The last one can be tricky, especially if you’re using a blog to report on and keep up with changes to the SEO industry. However, it’s not impossible to get around this. Many websites will post updates when new information surfaces that is valuable to add to a blog post or web page.

Whatever you do, if you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur, just remember that SEO will never die.

It will always be around to some extent, and if you learn how to use SEO the right way for your website, you’ll go farther than you ever thought possible.

Kelly Lucia is the Lead Staff Writer at PostsbyGhost.com and a first hand contributor at ChamberofCommerce.com. When she’s not writing content in the form of blog articles and strategic website copy, she can be found working on SEO projects for large-scale Chicago clients, composing clever tweets and Facebook status updates, and even proofreading part-time for local advertising agencies.

That Email From the IRS? It May Be Worse Than You Think

How could it be worse?

It may not be from the IRS, but may instead be an attempt at identity theft, or to hack into your computer, or infect it with malware.

Cybercriminals will be targeting small businesses this tax season with a variety of tricks intended mainly to steal information.

Brian Burch, VP of Global Consumer and Small Business at Symantec, shares examples of the kinds of schemes you may see this year. He also shares tips on how to protect yourself and your business from falling prey to these methods. In a recent email on cyber threats during tax season, Burch explains:

“…at tax time, small businesses are especially lucrative targets for cybercriminals, particularly in the BYOD era where work and personal data is accessed on the same device, including bank records and sensitive emails.”

Experts at Symantec have identified a number of emails that are preying on small businesses this year. Here are three potential scams to watch out for this year as you prepare your tax returns:

• Financial Trojans: These emails often leverage names of popular accounting software like TurboTax to make you believe it’s a helpful message. Instead, these emails entice you to click on links that may allow your financial credentials to be stolen.
• Tax season phishing scams: These emails have an HTML file attached. If these attachments are opened, they’ll reside on your computer and capture sensitive financial information. They could not only compromise your business information but also the personal information of your employees, too.
• Malicious threats like Cryptolocker: These are programs that encrypt files on your computer and hold them for ransom. Hackers often demand payments to unlock these files. And even when/if you do pay a hacker, the files may be lost forever.

Symantec urges vigilance at tax time for small businesses. Burch offers some tips for small business owners to avoid being hacked this tax season.

First of all, having internet security software is a must. But that’s not enough, Burch says. It’s also important to have a backup of your data prepared in the event of an attack or system crash. And when you’re ready to file your taxes, it’s important never to do it over a public network. Filing over a secure Internet connection is vital.

Burch also urges vigilance and to “be suspicious” of all incoming emails this time of year. This especially goes for any email from the IRS. It’s important to remember that the IRS will never email you or your business regarding taxes. And the agency won’t call you, either.

“Scammers are quite good at making emails and links look legitimate, and the most lucrative tax return schemes are based on identity theft, so ensure your email is truly sent from the advertised source before opening it.”

Some other tips that Burch offers are to password protect everything. Also, be careful when choosing passwords. This means not choosing “password” or your name as the key to access your data. Logging out of any application or site that requires personal information is another way to avoid having any information stolen. This is especially key if you’re using a shared computer or are on a public network.

Finally, if you’ve successfully avoided getting hacked through tax prep and filing, you don’t want to fall victim during the final step of the process. Symantec says getting your refund in direct deposit to your bank account is the safest practice.

Tax season scam: Shutterstock

Fewer Students Plan to Become Business Owners

College students are more concerned with making money now than they were before the start of the Great Recession, research by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at UCLA, reveals.

Maybe that’s self-evident.

But here’s a more surprising finding: The fraction of students intending to become business owners has also declined since 2007. That’s troubling because Americans have generally believed that business ownership is an important path to financial success.

Between 2007 and 2012, the fraction of incoming college freshmen who consider “being very well off financially” to be an “essential” or “very important” goal rose from 74.4 percent to 81 percent, the “American Freshman” reveals.

The surveys show that the share of students reporting “business owner” as their probable career declined 24 percent between 2007 and 2009 as the economy sank under the weight of the financial crisis and Great Recession. The fraction has risen modestly since the economic recovery began, but its 2012 level was 15 percent below the 2007 mark.

Business ownership was not the only career objective to take a hit in recent years. Between 2007 and 2012, the fraction of students planning to become architects or urban planners dropped 44 percent; the portion intending to become secondary school teachers declined 40 percent; the slice planning to be elementary school teachers slid 34 percent; the portion aiming to become foreign service workers dropped 30 percent; the slice intending to become business executives slid 22 percent; and the fraction planning to become lawyer or judges went down by 19 percent.

As students shifted their career plans in response to the weak economy, plans for other occupations increased. The share of students reporting military service as their probable career rose 50 percent; the fraction indicating nursing increased 40 percent; the share planning engineering went up 39 percent; the fraction aiming to become physical, occupational and speech therapists rose 38 percent; the portion planning to become social, welfare or recreational workers increased 30 percent; the fraction intending to be computer programmers or analysts rose 18 percent; and the fraction aiming to be scientific researchers went up 16 percent.

The drop in the share of students intending to become business owners was much larger among men than women. According to the CIRP surveys, the percentage of male incoming students intending to become business owners declined from 5 percent in 2007 to 4.1 percent in 2012. By contrast, the share of female students planning to be in business for themselves slipped from 2 percent in 2007 to 1.9 percent in 2012.

The declines were present at most, but not all, types of academic institutions. A smaller fraction of students indicated that business owner was their probable career in 2012 than in 2007 at public four-year colleges; non-sectarian private four-year colleges; non-Catholic, religiously-affiliated four-year colleges; public universities; and historically Black colleges. However, the fraction of incoming freshmen at Catholic four-year colleges intending to become business owners rose from 3.0 to 3.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, while at private universities, the share of students planning a business ownership career rose from 2.9 percent in 2007 to 4 percent in 2012.

The Power of Thinking Big, But Starting Small

How did Google manage to come out of nowhere? And how did it grow to reach $58 billion in annual revenues in 2013 â€" all in under two decades?

There are many explanations for the company’s phenomenal growth. But one technique small businesses can learn from is the ability to think big, yet take small steps. Here’s how it works.

In a post from Google’s Think Insights, Google’s former Senior Vice President of Adwords and AdSense, now Senior Vice President at YouTube, Susan Wojcicki explains. The process starts with the company’s Eight Pillars of Innovation. One of those pillars, says Wojcicki, is “think big, act small.”

This means the company may have big ambitious goals. But it starts to achieve those goals by taking small steps, one at a time.

Wojcicki writes:

“No matter how ambitious the plan, you have to roll up your sleeves and start somewhere. Google Books, which has brought the content of millions of books online, was an idea that our Founder, Larry Page, had for a long time. People thought it was too crazy even to try, but he went ahead and bought a scanner and hooked it up in his office. He began scanning pages, timed how long it took with a metronome, ran the numbers and realized it would be possible to bring the world’s books online. Today, our Book Search index contains over 10 million books.”

Can you imagine a billionaire scanning book pages? It seems an unlikely picture. But, with that kind of attitude, it’s not hard to see how Google has grown so big and so fast.

Do you have big goals in your business? Do they seem unimaginably far away and hard to obtain? Well, all you need to do is start one step at a time.

Rohit Arora, CEO and Co-Founder of Biz2Credit, tells us the key to achieving any resolution is to set small goals.

Rohit explains:

“Setting a goal of 50 percent growth in a year is noble, but it can be daunting. A smarter way is to plan smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming growth rates for each month of the year. By the time next December rolls around, the overall increase for the year may indeed be closer to the target.”

Start with where you want your business to be next month. You may be surprised at the results.

Think Big Photo via Shutterstock

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