Our Latest Events, Contests and Awards List

Welcome to our latest curated list of events, contests and awards for small businesses, solo entrepreneurs and growing companies. To see a full list or to submit your own event, contest or award listing, visit the Small Business Events Calendar.

Featured Events, Contests and Awards

Who Gives a Fund Contest - Caribbean CruiseWho Gives a Fund Contest – Caribbean Cruise
August 29, 2014, Online

Create a short fun video using the phrase “Who Gives a Fund.” Share it on social. The video with the most views will win a round trip within the continental U.S. to beautiful Miami, and a 3-day cruise to the Caribbean, for two. See WhoGivesaFund.com for complete rules and details. Presented by eSmallBusinessLoan.com, to highlight that traditional bank loans are not the only source of money for your working capital needs in your business.
Hashtag: #WhoGivesaFund

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This weekly listing of small business events, contests and awards is provided as a community service by Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology.

The post Our Latest Events, Contests and Awards List appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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10 Clever Tips From Our Community For Increased Profits

Your business goes mobileEdit

It’s time for another community news and information roundup. This week from our community come some tips on profitability. Many factors go into your business’s profitability and success from marketing to monitoring key metrics. This week we look at these factors and more to help you build more small business success.

Learn the Power of Video (V3 Integrated Marketing)

Video is becoming not only a powerful marketing tool, but an important sales tool as well. Here marketing and digital strategist Shelly Kramer clues us in to how this format can be used even more effectively for your brand.

Use Tools To Spread your Online Presence (Techmania 411)

To obtain profitability, it’s important to first get your business and brand out there. To get you started, explore tools like Signpost. Small Business Trends contributor and tech writer Alex H. Wong looks at how this product works to expand your presence on the Web.

Learn From the Best (Wealthy Gorilla)

While every business is different, you can always learn something from those who have been successful before you. Here entrepreneur and blogger Dan Western gives us an overview of one such success story prompting more discussion in the BizSugar community.

Make Your Marketing More Relevant (Small Biz Daily)Whether communicating through social media or another channel, being relevant is most important. Here business blogger James Wirth gives us some idea of how to get started.

Master Your Social Media Channels (CorpNet)Not all social media channels are the same. Here social media marketer and Small Business Trends contributor Susan Payton gives us a channel by channel review. Learn how Twitter differs from Facebook and other channels and how your message must vary accordingly.

How to Build More Online Traffic (Smart Marketerz)

If your business is online, than traffic is imperative. Blogger Erik Emanuelli gives these tips for growing your traffic. See these additional comments from the BizSugar community.

Carefully Watch Your Small Business Metrics (Wells Fargo)

Small Business Trends founder Anita Campbell gives us someadvice on how to monitor small business metrics for greater profitability. This two part series of posts will give you an overview of what needs to be monitored and why

Use Customer Personas to Craft Your Message (Basic Blog Tips)

To make your marketing massage on your blog or elsewhere, you must know more about the customers you are talking too. Small business advisor E.J. Dealy has these suggestions for using customer personas to craft a more effective marketing message.

Learn How to Price Your Products or Services (EnMast)

How you price your products and services definitely determines profitability. Small business owner Kaleigh Moore gives us some tips leading to some added discussion in the BizSugar community.

Develop Your Personal Brand (Tweak Your Biz)

Whether you work for a large corporation or a small business, personal brand is important these days. But for small businesses and entrepreneurs it can be especially critical for marketing your business successfully, says Tweak Your Buz founder Niall Devitt.

We hope you found this edition of the community and news roundup helpful. To make suggestions about what we should cover in future editions, email us at sbtips@gmail.com, or share with us in the BizSugar community, our first destination for the freshest and most authentic small business voices.

Your business goes mobile via Shutterstock

The post 10 Clever Tips From Our Community For Increased Profits appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Making a Business Out of Juggling and Funny Faces

juggling business

Can you make a business out of juggling and funny faces? David Beach has for years.

Beach originally became interested in the entertainment business when he appeared in a play back in elementary school. Since then, it's been his goal to make a living as a film and TV actor.

Though he has appeared in those mediums, he's also picked up some other skills along the way.

juggling business

Through his career, he's worked as a prop comic, ventriloquist, juggler, emcee, voice-over artist, and more. He has performed at Disneyland, Universal Studios, and various other venues to make ends meet in between acting jobs. He said in a phone interview with Small Business Trends:

"I've always been an actor at heart, but all of the comedy and variety stuff is a great way to continue working. And it really is a fun way to make a living."

Beach said he first started picking up these different skills while attending Catawba College in North Carolina. He lived down the hall from a magician and met various other types of performers. He learned how to juggle, took some improv classes, and even worked with clowns on occasion.

juggling business

His first regular paying job was performing at Carowinds amusement park in Charlotte, North Carolina. He worked there for two seasons during his college years. Since then, he's performed at other amusement parks along with parties, events and other venues. He does all of this while also working on his film and television career.

Beach said that he enjoys all the different types of performing he gets to do. But the most difficult part has been juggling all of the different business aspects:

"When studying theater you learn pretty much everything you need to know about being on stage. But learning the actual nuts and bolts like getting jobs, finding an agent, and all the technical stuff you just have to learn as you go."

Because of that, Beach said he would recommend that anyone interested in the entertainment industry learn as much about business as possible. So much of it involves promoting yourself and staying determined to find work.

"It really is a job, regardless of how fun it can be."

The post Making a Business Out of Juggling and Funny Faces appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Apple iPhone a danger to China national security: state media

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese state media branded Apple Inc's iPhone a threat to national security because of the smartphone's ability to track and time-stamp user locations.
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Get to the Heart of “The Ruby Programming Language”

ruby book“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,” ~ Tomorrow Never Knows, Beatles

George Harrison of the Beatles once stated what he thought the song Tomorrow Never Knows represented – to establish a quiet reflective mind that has stopped assessing every thought at every moment.

In the less musical world of application programming, developers are facing a number of options that keep them thinking every moment about what programming language to use for developing my app.

Sometimes, when you think too much it’s easier to get back to the basics. One good basic among programming books is The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan (@_DavidFlanagan) and Yukihiro Matsumoto (@yukihiro_matz), nicknamed “Matz” within the developer community.

I picked up the book during my app development course in Washington D.C. I think the book will help budding entrepreneurial developers form an initial idea of how to use Ruby as a great reminder of object oriented programming basics.

Ruby – Who Could Hang A Programming Object or Method On You?

The book has a unique background. Matsumoto is the creator of the Ruby language. He wrote the book under a different name. Flanagan updated the book with notes on version 1.9. One detail: Ruby is now at version 2.1 as of this review’s publication. But I picked this book specifically because of Matz and Flanagan to get enough of the basics to be helpful to newbies to programming. (jruby.org and rubypal.com are given technical review credit – and are good sources to follow for the latest information.)  They cover the variation well.  In fact, I found the book does a better job in covering Ruby syntax than some blogs on Ruby.

The opening chapter captures basics of the Ruby interpreter and some the kiddie-I-still-need-training-wheels syntax. But later chapters elaborate on specific programming details that will form the functions to run an app. Chapter 6 focuses on methods, with Chapter 7 noting classes – groups of text that are used to invoke variables.  But Chapter 8 also elaborates on metaprogramming – programs meant to ease syntax use by simplifying certain actions or functionality that gets repeated within a Ruby program.

Overall, you will view comparisons on how certain operator expressions are typically used. Here are shots I took on my camera to show examples. Each example uses a number of elements, one set arranged in an array and another in a hash, which, loosely speaking, is a type of array with key/value pairs of the elements.

ruby1

The book also shows how some syntax have similar functions. The image below shows a few different ways to do a string to symbol conversion.

ruby2

These are small examples, but their inclusion is meant to strike the imagination of a developer as an idea for an app is created.

Kitchen Sink … But The Kitchen Is Still Needed

I use that line to explain how this book's scope is thorough – which you should expect from the inventor of a program – yet can still leave you with needing more to have everything.

The downside of this book, ironically, is that it is meant for Ruby rather than explaining Ruby on Rails, the framework that allows for interaction among app files. David Hansson created Ruby on Rails. He's the Co-Founder of 37 signals, the company that produces the project management software Basecamp.

An aside: You can read more about his thoughts on productivity through the books Rework and Remote. I've reviewed both for Small Business Trends.

The impact from no Rails discussion is that if you are a beginner, you overlook discussion about model, controller, and viewer – the sets of files that operate between what the app user sees and the backend.

In short, and in true developer fashion, expect to learn more beyond this book.  But the downside is not a showstopper for learning from this book. Think of the book as a encyclopedic version of a Ruby ingredient and you can get the best from it over time.

Who Would Benefit Most From This Book

Clearly, this is a developer's book. So developers with a preference for object oriented programming will enjoy it. If you are reading about Javascript programming, such as that described in Programming Javascript Applications, you'll appreciate the differences and similarities.

Let this book start you on the path for being a better developer.  Yes, you’ll need the “on Rails” to be complete.  But this book will have you "relaxing and floating downstream" from your Ruby programming troubles.

The post Get to the Heart of “The Ruby Programming Language” appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Female Yahoo executive sued for sexual harassment

(Reuters) - A high-level female Yahoo Inc executive has been sued in California by a woman who worked under her and is accusing her former boss of sexual harassment and wrongful termination.






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