Latest Posts by birdnhand20 - Page 3
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GRAND OPENING: Cat Executive is now open for business at https://www.etsy.com/shop/CatExecutive !!!
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15 LIFE & BUSINESS LESSONS FROM CHINA'S RICHEST MAN - JACK MA
He is the recently named China’s richest man - the man who took Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce business, to the biggest IPO in US history. His name is Jack Ma.
There is something interesting about successful Chinese entrepreneurs and leaders. I always find them to be much deeper and more humble than their American counterparts. After reading several articles about Jack Ma, I particularly admire him for starting out as an English teacher earlier in his life with no technical background, but great foresight, ambition, and determination.
Here are the 15 Life and Business Lessons from Jack Ma (translated from Chinese to English).
Your attitude is more important than your capabilities. Similarly, your decision is more important than your capabilities.
You cannot unify everyone’s thoughts, but you can unify everyone through a common goal. Let your colleagues and employees work for a common goal.
A leader should never compare his technical skills with his employee’s. Your employee should have superior technical skills than you. However, a good leader should have more foresight, higher tenacity, and higher endurance for failure than his employees.
Giving up is the greatest failure.
Only fools use their mouth to speak. A smart man uses his brain. A wise man uses his heart.
The world will not remember what you say, but it will certainly not forget what you have done. Don’t make complaining or whining a habit.
Adopt and change before any major trends or changes.
Your attitude determines your altitude.
A great opportunity is often hard to be explained clearly. Things that can be explained clearly are often not the best opportunities.
“Free” is the most expensive word.
When starting a business, you must have the ability to see, the ability to understand what is going on, and the ability to keep up with the pace.
When you’re small, focus and use your brain instead of your physical strength.
If you have a different mindset, you will have a different outcome: if you make different choices from your peers, your life will then be different from your peers.
The most unreliable thing in this world is human relationships.
Starting your company means you will lose your stable income. But it also means your income will no longer be limited, you will use your time more effectively, and you will no longer need to beg for favours from people anymore.
< This article was originally published in Chinese and was translated into English. Please share if you find this helpful.>
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Why Use Google Analytics?
When it comes to running an online business, it is important that you have visibility into the performance of your site, particularly how your customers interact with your site. Luckily, there is a free tool out there called Google Analytics that will help you do this. Below is the purpose of Google Analytics, as well as some of the key features and capabilities.
Purpose of Google Analytics:
Understand Your Audience
Sell and Convert
Make Business Decisions
Understanding Your Audience:
Know Your Audience
Audience Data and Reporting - This feature allows you to dissect your audience: the kinds of people they are, where they come from, how they find your content, and how loyal and engaged they are.
Advanced Segments - This feature allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic, like organic traffic or visits that led to transactions.
Filters - This feature allows you to limit and modify the traffic data that appears in any given report view (Ex: You can exclude traffic from certain domains).
Trace the Customer Path
Traffic Sources - This feature allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your referring sites, direct traffic, social media platforms, organic (unpaid) search keywords, and custom campaigns.
Map Overlay - This feature allows you to see your visitor stats broken down by continent, country and city, which will help you understand the real origins of your traffic and find the best places to invest for new opportunities.
See What Your Audience Is Doing
Behavior Reporting - This feature allows you to see new vs. returning visitors, how frequent visitors come to your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, etc.
Flow Visualization - This feature lets you see and analyze the path a visitor takes on your site. See where they came from, the pages they moved through, and where they exited your site.
In-Page Analytics - This feature allows to see how users really interact with your pages (Ex: see where are users clicking the most on your homepage).
Sell and Convert
Reach Your Performance Goals
Ecommerce Reporting - This feature allows you too see the performance of your products. Trace transactions right down to specific keywords, understand shopper behaviors, and adjust your shopping cart to build loyalty and improve sales.
Goals - This feature allows you to measure your sales, downloads, email signups, conversions, or define your own business goals.
Reach Peak Capacity
Real-Time Reporting - This feature allows you to see how many people are on your site right now, where they came from, and what they’re viewing.
Alerts and Intelligence Reports - This feature will call attention to any abnormal behavior happening on your site (Ex: A huge spike in traffic coming from a particular city or traffic source).
Site Search - When visitors can’t find what they want on your site, they search. This feature allows you to see what your visitors are really looking for, spot missed opportunities, and speed up time to conversion.
Site-Speed Analysis - This feature shows you load times across your site, so you can fix slow pages and make your visitors happier.
Make Business Decisions
Based on the information in Google Analytics, you will be able to make educated decisions regarding the following:
Product success and determination
How to better target and sell to your customers
Marketing and advertising strategies
Improved website design
Leaders are readers.
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Worth contemplating.
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Yoda speaks.
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Funny.
Think. Different.
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Awesome to see this.
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Be inspired.
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Discover Flexo, bendable, bouncy, flexible building bricks. Get more information here
For achievers only!
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8:15PM: The Blue Hour is a time for taking your own way home. With the Gear Fit2, you can track all the calories you burn.
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Find Your Hacks & Workarounds
No matter what type of business we are running or what goals we chase - we all face apparently insurmountable difficulties - as for example
building a user base for your app although there is no interaction yet,
having to postpone some to dos although they are all crucial and diligent,
finding investors without having finished that prototype yet
or hiring the great but still affordable talents that help you to get done all that work
…
The Dutch bicycle manufacturer VanMoof had such a problem as well:
They sell almost 90 percent of its bikes online.
But as they shipped the custom made bikes to customers, it found that they were often arriving severely damaged.
The damage reports were a major problem for the company because the street bikes that it manufactures are at the high-end of the market… But even with the best brand and great marketing you CANNOT WIN, if the products is delivered to the customer in bad shape or even in pieces…
But then the company came up with a genius solution - dropping shipping damage by over 70 percent!
What was the trick?
Printing a graphic of a flatscreen television on the side of the packaging box - making shippers think that they were transporting flatscreen televisions.
(Source: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/25/13048668/vanmoof-shipping-damages-dutch-bicycle-design)
A highly effective but yet cheap way of fixing the problem and giving the business the push it needed…
Innovate like VanMoof!
Always look out for solutions like this - practical, easy to apply, affordable but effective. Dare to try new paths, unconventional solutions, be creative. Find your hacks and workarounds.
your m
What will YOU think of next?
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Logo design is like the idea of the lean startup. Each iteration gets you one step closer. Awesome lesson in this.
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Startup business | logo concept
Perfect marriage of form and function.
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Where there is a will, there is a way :). Vertical garden in Madrid, Spain
Cereal Entrepreneurs: breakfast is served!
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10 “Spinoffs of Tomorrow” You Can License for Your Business
The job of the our Technology Transfer Program is pretty straight-forward – bring NASA technology down to Earth. But, what does that actually mean? We’re glad you asked! We transfer the cool inventions NASA scientists develop for missions and license them to American businesses and entrepreneurs. And that is where the magic happens: those business-savvy licensees then create goods and products using our NASA tech. Once it hits the market, it becomes a “NASA Spinoff.”
If you’re imagining that sounds like a nightmare of paperwork and bureaucracy, think again. Our new automated “ATLAS” system helps you license your tech in no time — online and without any confusing forms or jargon.
So, sit back and browse this list of NASA tech ripe for the picking (well, licensing.) When you find something you like, follow the links below to apply for a license today! You can also browse the rest of our patent portfolio - full of hundreds of available technologies – by visiting technology.nasa.gov.
1. Soil Remediation with Plant-Fungal Combinations
Ahh, fungus. It’s fun to say and fun to eat—if you are a mushroom fan. But, did you know it can play a crucial role in helping trees grow in contaminated soil? Scientists at our Ames Research Center discovered that a special type of the fungus among us called “Ectomycorrhizal” (or EM for short) can help enhance the growth of trees in areas that have been damaged, such as those from oil spills.
2. Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Lower Drag
When it comes to aircraft, drag can be, well…a drag. Luckily, innovators at our Armstrong Flight Research Center are experimenting with a new wing design that removes adverse yaw (or unwanted twisting) and dramatically increases aircraft efficiency by reducing drag. Known as the “Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Lower Drag (PRANDTL-D)” wing, this design addresses integrated bending moments and lift to achieve drag reduction.
3. Advancements in Nanomaterials
What do aircraft, batteries, and furniture have in common? They can ALL be improved with our nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are very tiny materials that often have unique optical, electrical and mechanical properties. Innovators at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have developed a suite of materials and methods to optimize the performance of nanomaterials by making them tougher and easier to process. This useful stuff can also help electronics, fuel cells and textiles.
4. Green Precision Cleaning
Industrial cleaning is hard work. It can also be expensive when you have to bring in chemicals to get things squeaky. Enter “Green Precision Cleaning,” which uses the nitrogen bubbles in water instead. The bubbles act as a scrubbing agent to clean equipment. Goddard Space Flight Center scientists developed this system for cleaning tubing and piping that significantly reduces cost and carbon consumption. Deionized water (or water that has been treated to remove most of its mineral ions) takes the place of costlier isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and also leaves no waste, which cuts out the pricey process of disposal. The cleaning system quickly and precisely removes all foreign matter from tubing and piping.
5. Self-Contained Device to Isolate Biological Samples
When it comes to working in space, smaller is always better. Innovators at our Johnson Space Center have developed a self-contained device for isolating microscopic materials like DNA, RNA, proteins, and cells without using pipettes or centrifuges. Think of this technology like a small briefcase full of what you need to isolate genetic material from organisms and microorganisms for analysis away from the lab. The device is also leak-proof, so users are protected from chemical hazards—which is good news for astronauts and Earth-bound scientists alike.
6. Portable, Rapid, Quiet Drill
When it comes to “bringing the boom,” NASA does it better than anyone. But sometimes, we know it’s better to keep the decibels low. That’s why innovators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed a new handheld drilling device, suitable for a variety of operations, that is portable, rapid and quiet. Noise from drilling operations often becomes problematic because of the location or time of operations. Nighttime drilling can be particularly bothersome and the use of hearing protection in the high-noise areas may be difficult in some instances due to space restrictions or local hazards. This drill also weighs less than five pounds – talk about portable power.
7. Damage Detection System for Flat Surfaces
The ability to detect damage to surfaces can be crucial, especially on a sealed environment that sustains human life or critical equipment. Enter Kennedy Space Center’s damage detection system for flat composite surfaces. The system is made up of layered composite material, with some of those layers containing the detection system imbedded right in. Besides one day potentially keeping humans safe on Mars, this tech can also be used on aircrafts, military shelters, inflatable structures and more.
8. Sucrose-Treated Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Yarns and Sheets
We all know what a spoonful of sugar is capable of. But, who knew it could help make some materials stronger? Innovators at NASA’s Langley Research Center did! They use dehydrated sucrose to create yarns and woven sheets of carbon nanotubes and graphene.
The resulting materials are lightweight and strong. Sucrose is inexpensive and readily available, making the process cost-effective. Makes you look at the sweet substance a little differently, doesn’t it?
9. Ultrasonic Stir Welding
NASA scientists needed to find a way to friction weld that would be gentler on their welding equipment. Meet our next tech, ultrasonic stir welding.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center engineers developed ultrasonic stir welding to join large pieces of very high-strength, high-melting-temperature metals such as titanium and Inconel. The addition of ultrasonic energy reduces damaging forces to the stir rod (or the piece of the unit that vibrates so fast, it joins the welding material together), extending its life. The technology also leaves behind a smoother, higher-quality weld.
10. A Field Deployable PiezoElectric Gravimeter (PEG)
It’s important to know that the fuel pumping into rockets has remained fully liquid or if a harmful chemical is leaking out of its container. But each of those things, and the many other places sensors are routinely used, tends to require a specially designed, one-use device.
That can result in time-consuming and costly cycles of design, test and build, since there is no real standardized sensor that can be adapted and used more widely.
To meet this need, the PiezoElectric Gravimeter (PEG) was developed to provide a sensing system and method that can serve as the foundation for a wide variety of sensing applications.
See anything your business could use? Did anything inspire you to start your own company? If so, head to our website at technology.nasa.gov to check them out.
When you’ve found what you need, click, “Apply Now!” Our licensing system, ATLAS, will guide you through the rest.
If the items on this round-up didn’t grab you, that’s ok, too. We have hundreds of other technologies available and ready to license on our website.
And if you want to learn more about the technologies already being used all around you, visit spinoff.nasa.gov.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Where will your wealth take you?
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Why look down while climbing the ladder of success? Opportunity awaits!
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When in doubt, innovate.
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The 25 Most Innovative Ag-Tech Startups Even the nation’s oldest and most storied industry – farming – isn’t immune to the information revolution. Here’s a look at the most promising technology startups that are seeking to improve the work and lives of America’s farmers.
Cool concept. Keep your minds open and sharp !
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Absolutely agree.
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A little light-hearted hump day tom foolery.
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5 Top Entrepreneurs’ Best Advice For Staying Ahead In 2017 Words of wisdom from people who’ve made it big.