1. Get Your Startup Started

2. App Marketing

3. App Monetization

Security keys like the one made by Yubikey give you a way to log into a website simply by plugging it in and pressing a button. You don't even need to type in your password anymore, much less generate a one-time code. While the method has it own weakness, considering it relies on a physical item you can lose, it's considered safer than two-factor authentication, especially the type that sends you codes via SMS. Hackers could intercept messages sent to your device, after all, and gain entry to your account that way.

Unfortunately, Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) -- that's what you call the type of multi-factor authentication that uses physical keys -- support is pretty limited at the moment. You can already depend on it for protection on Chrome, but you'd have to manually activate it on Firefox by going to "about:config" first. Microsoft won't be rolling out U2F compatibility for Edge until later this year, and Apple has yet to reveal whether Safari will ever support the standard. Further, only a few websites and services can use it, including Facebook and password managers such as Keepass and LastPass. It remains to be seen if Google's positive experience with the standard can help it become more widespread, but it's definitely the kind of meaningful testimonial that could give it a massive boost.

With more than 1.4 billion users per month, groups has become a core product for Facebook, and it intends to use Watch Party to keep even more people locked in and connected to those who share similar interests. Facebook says that it's heard from group leaders that Watch Party is perfect for people watching things like Q&A sessions and how-to tutorials about cooking, crafting, home improvement, playing an instrument and more. Back in April, the company said that nearly two billion people had watched Facebook Live broadcasts to date, demonstrating the potential for features like Watch Party -- especially since users who watch together can comment and add emoji reactions in real time.

Soon, those Watch Parties won't just be limited to groups. Facebook also revealed that it is already testing the tool with profiles, while pages (public profiles for businesses and other organizations) could get it in the near future, as well. Facebook says that, in its internal testing, some Watch Parties were able to generate thousands of comment from people who were watching a particular video simultaneously, with some groups dedicating over 10 hours to a single Watch Party. The success of Twitch has already proven that there's a dedicated audience looking to watch internet video with others, regardless of the genre.

For profiles, Watch Party could be a good way to have shared viewing experiences with close friends and family members. The same goes for pages of brands or news publications that want to show videos of, say, an unboxing of a product or host a conversation about a recent story. For Facebook, the goal here is simple: To keep users interacting with one another as much as possible.

Naturally, as Facebook continues to deal with controversies around the spread of toxic content on its site, Watch Party isn't exempt from that. Erin Connolly, Facebook's product manager of social video, to Engadget thatthe company will use all the tools at its disposal (including artificial intelligence) to ensure that Watch Parties are safe for everyone. She added that Facebook will also rely on group administrators and other users to report any content or interactions that may be harmful, just as it's done for any video on Facebook Live. "Keeping the communication safe is something that's really important to us," she said, "and [that's] a responsibility we take really seriously across Facebook."

Connolly said that, as Zuckerberg has expressed publicly, Facebook continues to invest in systems which can help detect potentially unsafe material on the platform faster -- and that's going to come in handy as Watch Party expands. "This is something that we care deeply about," she said. "We'll be obviously monitoring really closely, and continuing to hear feedback from the community to make sure that this is going well."

Activists are gaming Google's algorithm so that when people search for "idiot," almost all of the top results are pictures of President Donald Trump.

Protesters are publishing articles that associate the word "idiot" with Trump while sharing and upvoting other articles that do the same.

The net effect of this is that the association inside Google's algorithm becomes stronger, producing photos of Trump when people input the term "idiot."

Here's what the Google image search page for "idiot" looked like Thursday morning from Business Insider's office in London: Google

Eight of the first 10 images show Trump's face directly. Of the remaining two, one is Ash Sarkar, a protester who called the British journalist Piers Morgan an "idiot" while talking about Trump.

Do you know how the dinosaurs were doing the day before they got wiped out?

They were flourishing. Mooching around eating ferns and each other, happy as Larry. To all intents and purposes everything was good. Then boom, it suddenly wasn't.

That's the thing about seismic change. It happens at pace, you often don't see it coming and the impact can be immense. It happened to the big beasts of the music industry, it happened to the film distributors via the double asteroid of Netflix and Amazon. And right now, the ad industry is looking up at the sky trying to work out whether it’s better to huddle together as one or split into smaller tribes.

At a time when the economy is swirling and the high street is feeling sick, extinction level events are a very real threat for brands. In these unpredictable times, the instinct from agencies and marketers can be to do more. Perversely, one of the best ways to respond could be to do a little less, more intelligently.

Better, smarter, braver

There are already too many brands in the world and many of them, if we’re honest, just occupy space. I’m pretty sure a quarter could disappear overnight, and people wouldn’t really care. Rather than more of the same, drifting along safely without offering any real value, we need better, smarter, braver, more thoughtful work. That’s the only way to create meaningful brands that have lasting impact in the world.

In 2015 Shareaholic released statistics about the state of social media in that day’s market. According to the site, social media had grown to be the number one referral traffic source on the web, overtaking email campaigns and direct advertising. In all, it was driving 31.24% of overall traffic on its own.

During 2017, a controversial and aggressive year in online news and discussion, search overtook social media. But the social side is creeping back up, and it is clear that the importance of narrowing focus on social campaigns can’t be overstated.

The Big Problem with Social Media Referral Traffic

With the above stats in mind, let’s not try to hide the elephant in the room: Social media traffic doesn’t convert that well and for two obvious reasons:

Hard doesn’t mean impossible though. With the right tools and tactics, you can put that traffic to good use.

This article outlines one specific tactic to learn to convert your social media traffic: monitoring your competitors.

The smallest of factors could mean the difference between a viral post and a dead tweet.

Even experienced social media marketers make mistakes, so it pays to review common blunders.

Are you guilty of any of these social media marketing sins?

1. Publishing too often or too infrequently

Your frequency of publishing matters more than you know. Publishing too often could annoy your followers, and publishing too rarely could drastically reduce your reach.

July 17, 2018 6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

It's no surprise that social media marketing is crucial to business growth in 2018. After all, we're living in a digital world -- one where there are 2.62 billion social media users worldwide, according to Statista. Coupled with reports that show 93 percent of marketers place a high value on social media as a business growth tool and more than 50 percent who claim it has improved their sales, I'd say every business should be allocating time, energy and resources toward social media marketing.

Related: Teens Are Increasingly Ditching Facebook. Here's How Entrepreneurs Should Respond.

It’s been almost 15 years since Skype launched and soon you’ll be able record calls on the app. What a time to be alive.

Skype used to be the monarch of video calls, but it has fallen behind its competitors in recent years. One reason for this is the shoddy updates and lack of features we now take for granted.

Microsoft has announced some major feature updates for the app that will be rolled out over the coming months. And, in all honesty, these should’ve been available for some time.

Examples? Read receipts (what?), private conversations (come on), profile invites (sorry?), and, of course, call recording.

Previously, the only way to do this was using a third party plugin. In fact, customer demand was so strong for this feature, that Skype‘s FAQ page actually had a list of applications that could do it:

Data visualization has quickly become a standard for disseminating information on the web. It’s used across a range of industries, from business intelligence to journalism, to help us understand and communicate the insights within data.

Our brains are primed to process information that’s presented visually, making it much easier for us to understand data visualized in charts and graphs than data listed in tables and spreadsheets. A great data visualization should leverage these strengths of the human visual system to display data so that it can be readily absorbed and understood. It should take into account what we know about visual processing to enhance and ease the viewers’ experience of the data.

With so many tools and frameworks now available for building these graphics, it’s time to go back to basics. What makes data visualizations effective? What guiding principles should we follow when designing with data?

The following best practices will help you design rich, insightful data experiences.

About The Author

Lyndon Cerejo is a certified user experience strategist in Capgemini’s Rapid Design & Visualization practice, with a successful track record with … More about Lyndon…

Persuasion is all around us, in our everyday lives. As designers, we can use ethical persuasive design methods to get users to take some action. With plenty of persuasive methods available, we have to be selective about what we use.

(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) The persuasive design toolbox is filled with powerful tools based on psychology. These tools range from Cialdini’s set of six principles of persuasion to ten times that number of Persuasive Patterns. Presented with all these methods, it can be tempting to use all of them to cover all possible bases, using a shotgun approach, hoping that one will resonate with your target users.

However, applying persuasion principles and patterns in a haphazard manner just ends up being persuasive design clutter. Like user experience design, designing for everyone is designing for no one. Randomly thrown together persuasive techniques will also make users feel manipulated, not in control, making them abandon the site or experience. The key to persuading your users is to keep it simple: using focused persuasive techniques and tactics that will work for your users.

Persuasion Funnel

AIDA is an acronym used in marketing and advertising to describe the stages that a customer goes through in the purchase process. The stages of Attention, Interest, Desire and Action, generically follow a series of cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling) stages culminating in a behavioral (doing e.g. purchase or trial) stage. This should sound familiar since this is what we do through design, especially persuasive design.

Microsoft has finally launched its Whiteboard app for Windows 10 devices. It’s a free tool for collaborating on ideas with as many people as you like, and it’s not half bad.

Whiteboard (which has been available in preview since last December) is designed for use with a stylus, so it’ll automatically recognize when you’re trying to draw shapes and tables, and help you out with your doodles.

Of course, it works just fine with a mouse or your finger on a touchscreen too. You can draw, add sticky notes, import images, paste text, and pull in pictures from the web using the built-in Bing search tool. All these elements can be manipulated and moved around the board as you wish.

It’s also easy to invite people to collaborate from wherever they are in real-time by sending them a link. Of course, they’ll need a Microsoft or Office 365 account to dive in.

There are several other whiteboard apps out there, but with this, Microsoft can offer it to Office users, integrate it into its Teams group chat app (which is now available for free), and sync your data across devices when it later arrives on the web, iOS, and Android.

The post-2016 MacBook Pro could — quite generously, I think — be described as a “shower of shit.” I’m still not exactly sure what Apple was thinking when it shipped a laptop with no USB-A ports and a keyboard that doesn’t actually work.

They’re bad, but until recently, those wedded to Apple’s ecosystem could at least purchase the more conventional 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro.

I did say “until recently,” because as spotted by the eagle-eyed folks at 9to5Mac, Apple has discontinued sales of the only really true pro laptop in its computer lineup.

If you want to buy an Apple laptop with a keyboard that doesn’t break with the chance contact with a speck of dust; has USB-A ports and an SD card slot; and doesn’t require you to buy a myriad of arse-clenchingly expensive dongles, your only options are the wheezing, aging MacBook Air, or to head to eBay or Craigslist.

The move comes at the same time it updated its current-generation MacBook Pros with faster processors, more RAM, and not a lot else.

A notorious ‘download bomb’ exploit, where users are bombarded with automatically downloading files when they visit a specific website has returned with a vengeance after having been patched out in Chrome earlier this year. Most major browsers are affected by it aside, interestingly, from Microsoft Edge. 

Bleeping Computer reports that the exploit was originally discovered late last year. It works by initiating thousands of downloads when a user visits a specific webpage, which makes it impossible to leave the site in question (unless a user pays for a shady bit of ‘tech support’).

Read more: Amazon Prime Day

Thankfully, it was a fairly easy process for Google to patch out the issue, and it did so at around Chrome 65. Unfortunately, users have noticed that with Chrome 67 the bug has returned, and now it appears other browsers are also affected, including Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera (to a more limited extent).

There’s one major browser missing from that list, and it’s Microsoft Edge, which has a user base that has historically lagged far behind all its competitors. It’s not yet clear why it’s unaffected by the exploit.

As we’ve seen from recent cyberattacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya — which are generally attributed to North Korea and Russia respectively — attacks on critical infrastructure can have a devastating impact on industrial production and hence on quarterly profits, with global estimated losses in the billions of dollars.

Additionally, targeted cyberattacks like TRITON that compromise large-scale cyber-physical systems — such as petrochemical mixing tanks, turbines, and blast furnaces — can cause catastrophic safety failures, environmental damage, and even loss of human life. (TRITON is generally attributed to Iran.)

The growing number and sophistication of malicious cyberattacks on critical infrastructure have led European Union (EU) legislators to adopt the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive (NISD). The new directive requires companies from critical infrastructure sectors to adopt specific technical and organizational measures to manage threats to their networks and information systems.

While the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a privacy directive focused on organizations that collect personal data, the NIS Directive is focused on strengthening resilience for providers of critical infrastructure services. In particular, NISD applies to organizations that provide “essential services” in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, transport, banking & financial, water, health sector, and digital infrastructure (ISPs, DNS providers, etc.).

EU member states had to incorporate the Directive into their national laws by May 9 of this year — a couple of weeks before GDPR went into effect — and are required to identify operators of essential services by November 9. So while we’ve seen no actions yet against providers, we could begin to see the effects of the new laws by the end of the year.

We’re currently living in a digital age where almost everything can be accessed with just an internet connection. With this in mind, it has become crucial for businesses big and small alike to have some sort of online presence. The internet is a big place, which means there are various ways to make your mark online in an achievable and cost-effective manner.

With its growing influence in the world today, social media has become a necessity for businesses to open a direct line of communication with customers. While some companies are so popular that they don’t need much to build their social media presence, small businesses will need to work harder in order to create a strong social media presence.

Once that decision has been made, following a few simple steps will place you on the right path:

Pick the right platform for your business

The first decision you to make is which social media platforms you want your target audience to find you on. You need to be wherever your customers are, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat or something you haven’t even heard of.

Among the seizures were opioids, over 100 guns (including a grenade launcher), $3.6 million in gold and cash, and 2,000 bitcoins. Law enforcement also grabbed bitcoin mining devices and cars bought using the ill-gotten income. Officials didn't name all the those facing charges, but examples ranged in age from 21 to 34 and included multiple people in New York and California.

This isn't a decisive victory over dark web markets. By its very nature as an anonymized, highly secure space, the "Darknet" (as the DOJ calls it) makes it relatively easy for bootleggers to operate in relative obscurity. It does show that the US is willing to stage large-scale busts, though, and serves as a reminder that even a space as secretive as the dark web is vulnerable if someone can compromise it from the inside.