Tech World

Being successful often means learning from those who have already achieved their goals. Having a mentor is an amazing blessing to an entrepreneur, but not everyone can find one in person. If you haven’t yet found your personal business guru, here are 21 tips for young or aspiring entrepreneur to help get you started. 1. Challenge yourself.  Richard Branson says his biggest motivation is to keep challenging himself. He treats life like one long university education, where he can learn more every day. You can too! 2. Do work you care about.  There’s no doubt that running a business take a lot of time. Steve Jobs noted that the only way to be satisfied in your life is to do work that you truly believe in. 3. Take the risk.  We never know the outcome of our efforts unless we actually do it. Jeff Bezos said it helped to know that he wouldn’t regret failure, but he would regret not trying. 4. Believe in yourself. As Henry Ford famously said, “Whethe...

For startups, user growth, product growth, virality, marketing usually goes on the top of their priority list. As part of product planning cycles, embedding information security into their product/service is the last concern for most startups. Which is deeply ignored here? Information and data security. Often you see devops engineers, systems engineers, infrastructure engineers or system administrators wear the security hat in these startups and performs some of the small security fixes or patches. Even though they can perform research on the procedures to apply patches, harden databases, or implement remediation as a result of the industry breaches, they might not take every decision or option from security perspective. Consider the Code Spaces startup breach that basically caused them to go out of business due to improper hardening of the root passwords and not following the AWS security best practices. This deeply ignored lack of security awareness has actually...

Commencement speakers look for nuggets of wisdom that graduates will take with them as they journey forward in their lives. Along the way, speakers hope to inspire a life or two and create reason for a cheer, a tear or evoke fear. My speech will be titled 10 Steps to Achieving Success in Life. The list is by no means all-inclusive. However, I think it provides a very good starting point from which to develop a road map for successful living. I think the graduates will find great value in this list. I only hope that I will be able to live up to my own advice and consistently follow these 10 steps. 10 STEPS TO ACHIEVING SUCCESS IN LIFE 1. Set Goals : “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. - dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice’s Adventures i...

Entrepreneurs will often have amazing business ideas, but they put them on hold due to a lack of capital. They assume that their idea will never get far off the ground unless they have major funding behind them. It seems that every day there is a new startup receiving millions of dollars from venture capital firms, but what you don’t hear about is the several startup failures that burn through millions of dollars only to fizzle out and shut their doors forever. If your idea and plan of execution aren’t well thought out from the beginning, no amount of money can turn it into a winner. Have a great idea but very little money? Don’t let that stop you! Yes, there will be ridiculously long days with little to no sleep. Yes, you are going to be stressed. But those that want it bad enough will make it. Here are eight tips that can help you get your idea off the ground with limited funds. 1. Build your business around what you know. Instead of venturing off into uncharted ...

The queen of the discounts reveals how to secure a bargain. Britain's high street has stepped up its battle to tempt you to spend – with serious price cuts on clothing, footwear and electrical goods.  Inflation – the rising cost of food, clothing and other goods or services – eased back from 1.7 per cent in February to 1.6 per cent in March, according to official figures. And a similarly themed index from the British Retail Consortium and Nielsen, a global market research company, recently published figures showing a fall in shop prices thanks to large discounts on clothes and electrical goods. Mike Watkins, head of retailer and business insight at Nielsen, says: ‘Savvy shopping and looking for savings by buying on promotion is the way that most shoppers now look to save money and the continued fall in shop prices will also be helping households to keep to their budget.’  No one takes the job of family budgeting more seriously than Sandra Purser –...

There’s an interesting maxim about how long wealth actually stays with a person and their descendants. The saying is three generations, tops: one to make it, one to spend it, and the third to blow it. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but have you ever sat down and seriously thought about wealth and what it means to you? Or do you figure, “What the heck, I’ve always been broke, my forefathers were broke; it’s generational” – it’s just a rite of passage of sorts. If you feel that wealth is out of your reach, you aren’t alone. According to some experts, there are millions of ‘clueless potential millionaires’ who could be at the top of the wealth ladder if they only reined in a few bad habits. However, you may be a skeptic, and rightly so. Being wealthy means different things to different people. But according to the experts, there are financial mistakes many people make that keep them away from their possible wealth. What is Wealth Anyway?  Most...

A Green ICT project focused on office energy efficiency is a great way for your business to engage employees, reduce costs and your environmental footprint.  Here are the top tips from our TechWorld ICT Team to get you started, for more information about our programmes click here. Turn on Power Management.  PCs have power management features that are often disabled by default; turn them on for PCs throughout the organisation and you’ll get immediate savings in energy costs. Screensavers can use as much or even more power than your PC during normal use; instead of a screensaver set your monitors to go into stand by when not in use. Create a TechWorld ICT project.  Assemble a team to lead the initiative. Make sure they have management support, adequate resources, clear goals and the authority to drive changes. Enrol any enthusiastic volunteers who want to help. Create a TechWorld ICT policy.  Whether for...

To make your online business a success, some things can make all the difference. We know what works for our successful internet business customers - here's what they've told us: Plan: care at the planning stage - such as carrying out basic market research - makes your success more likely later on. Get your website found: lots of new online businesses don't think about how potential customers are going to find their website. It's not rocket science, but you need to know where to start. Tackle fraud : if cardholders have their card details used at your web shop without their permission, you will be responsible for refunding them - plus if you've already shipped the goods to a fraudster, you'll loose the value of these too. As a result, you have to protect your internet business from fraud. Look after your e-customers: when you aren't face to face with your customers, the customer experience ...

Makes business more attractive . Behind the scenes of an e-business there's a lot of technology going on. To start an online business you won't need to worry about most of this, but it's worth getting to grips with the basics. An e-business offers customers the option of paying for their goods or services on the internet. Many businesses which traditionally accept payments in a high street store, by telephone or by mail order have realised the benefit - and ease - of adapting their business for e-commerce. Enabling your customers to make a payment online involves a more sophisticated kind of website than one that is for information only. But it makes your business more attractive to customers who prefer to pay online, wherever in the world they are. What do I need to do? Setting up an e-business need not be complicated or costly, even if you have little or no expertise. You'll need three basic things: A website that allows shoppers to select the p...