Tag: small business

How Twitter Appeals To Small Businesses With “Quick Promote”

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdExchanger

Twitter has developed ad products for big budgets, but it’s also trying to appeal to the small and mid-sized advertisers. Earlier this week, Twitter started rolling out “Quick Promote”, making it easy for small business owners to amplify selected tweets without knowing the intricacies of digital ad tech. Overall, this rollout marks another product off Twitter’s Tailored Audiences feature, which enables advertisers to use Twitter’s congregated user data to better target their branded content.

In related news, Twitter has struck a deal with Google to make its 140-character updates more searchable online, which would grant branded content on Twitter even more exposure by showing up in search results.

UPS Now Offers 3D Printing

Posted on by Lab Team

If you work for a startup, own a small business, or an entrepreneur, the UPS store will now offer you 3D printing on site. UPS is offering the service for companies that want to quickly and cheaply roll out models and prototypes of devices they want to produce. The store is testing the uPrint SE Plus, which according to the manufacturer is better equipped to handle detailed, industrial-type projects than the Makerbot – albeit at ten times the cost. Staples attempted to capitalize on 3D printing last fall, but the offerings are only available online in select locations. For the time being, UPS’s service is rolling out in San Diego, with the intent to reach across the nation.TA

SteelHouse Slingshot Tackles Viewthroughs

Posted on by Lab Team

Marketing tech startup SteelHouse announced the launch of a feature called slingshot that tackles the elusive metric of “viewthroughs,” or people who see and ad and are promoted to visit the advertisers website without clicking on the ad itself. The traditional measurement of “clickthroughs” doesn’t take these viewers into account and thus fails to fully determine an ad’s effectiveness. Even worse, though, is the tact that “viewthroughs” aren’t prioritized like “clickthroughs,” in the sense that the clickthroughs land on a custom page created for people who arrive through the ad, while viewthroughs will just enter through the homepage. SteelHouse claims to fix this problem by integrating their technology into both ads and websites – both from laptops and through mobile. Currently, the technology is limited to visitors who show up within an hour of seeing an ad; nonetheless a test with entertainment hardware company Creative Labs resulted in an 87% improvement in conversion, a 322% lift in overall revenue per visitor, and a 27% increase in average order value. 

Pertino Launches Small Business Cloud Network

Posted on by Lab Team

Pertino, an Internet startup, today debuted their cloud-based, hardware-free network for small businesses. They use Amazon Web Services (AWS), which makes it possible for businesses to create secure, online networks through integration of a combination of its software and AWS data centers. Businesses log into Pertino and connect to a data plane that routes them to their network that’s managed by their service called software-defined networking. People can file share or use the network to create a remote desk service. 

Now in a limited beta run, Pertino has installed its software in data centers worldwide, from Sydney to Sao Paolo. As the AWS network is nearly global, Pertino can expand its reach into nearly any expanding network, and aims to take out hardware systems made by companies like Cisco and Juniper. As it stands, more and more companies are moving to software-based cloud networks for streaming, data storage, and file transfer, rendering traditional hardware storage and transfer systems nearly obsolete. For now, Pertino is competing with other companies like Big Switch Networks and Nicera, but Pertino is specifically targeted to small businesses and startups, with a cost of $10 per person. For now, Pertino is only compatible with Windows 7, but executives say cross-OS compatibility will be coming later this year.