Snapchat is losing twice as much money as it did last year

Snapchat Profit LossSnap reported its earnings for the first time since becoming a public company in March of this year. Its daily active user count clicked up to 166 million, a 5 percent increase over last quarter, up 36 percent from this time a year ago. That puts it behind Instagram Stories, a competitor launched by Facebook that copied heavily from Snapchat and has already passed 200 million users. It also means...

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The “Gig” Economy and How it Will Impact the Future Working Landscape

gig economy, digital staffing agency, eCommerce, FinTechMost people typically think of the working economy as employment that is divided between two groups: employed and self-employed. The latter provides more flexibility but does not come with any rights, while the prior establishes an abundance of rights, but limited flexibility. The "gig economy", as it is commonly referred,  examines the latter partition: comprising of the seemingly self-employed and highly flexible type of...

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How the IoT Drives Business Productivity

IoT's impact on Business ProductivityThe IoT's Enhancement of Business Productivity and Efficiency

Basically, the IoT sector is comprised of many online sensors that are being entrenched into an increasingly wide range of devices and other digital entities. Examples include in-transit wooden pallets, the HVAC systems of high-rise buildings, and many more. This shift has facilitated the massive generation of reams of crucial data for business analysis to improve their own efficiency. Additionally, production...

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FTC Head Wants The Internet of Things to Regulate Itself

Internet of Things Business RegulationThe acting head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Maureen Ohlhausen, has said that she believes the Internet of Things industry should largely be left to regulate itself, rather than being subjected to external oversight. She also defended the use of data analytics to target consumers with different offers and pricing. As much as the tech industry likes to try and create new standards, it has often taken external...

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Shopify: The Invisible Selling Machine

Ecommerce Online Digital ShoppingFrom the ­unlikely setting of Ottawa, Shopify has ­quietly been powering an e-commerce revolution.

Shopify has done a pretty good job hiding itself from the world. The company’s e-commerce platform was involved in purchases by more than 100 million individual shoppers in 2016, yet it is invisible by design, enabling the end-to-end operation of its customers, some 400,000 individual retail shops and brands. It proudly operates not from San Francisco or...

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Google Targets Mobile Back-End Development

Google Mobile Back End DevelopmentWith front-end mobile coding taken care of in the recent release of Android Studio 2.3, Google targeted cloud-based back-end development at its recent Google Cloud Next '17 conference. While the show addressed cloud development in general, Google's mobile focus was exemplified by new serverless computing initiatives that provide back-end functionality for Android, iOS and Web apps. These include an update to Google App Engine -- its nine-year-old serverless runtime environment...

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6 Mistakes Your Ecommerce Store Must Avoid

Ecommerce DesignEcommerce marketers have four basic objectives. To start, they must bring new visitors to their store. Next is to convert more of these visitors into customers. Then they must look at ways to increase the average revenue earned per customer session. Finally, they must create incentives for these customers to return for future purchases. Apart from bringing new visitors to your store, the rest of the marketing objectives are all directly influenced...

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Could Google give fintech apps a needed boost?

Google Chrome Mobile FinTech AppFintech companies that have developed products for the under-served have a big challenge — reaching their intended customers. Google and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are hoping to change that. The tech giant and CFSI, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting financial health, have been collaborating on ways to help customers wade through financial apps in the Google Play store. They are also trying to guide developers on building...

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Why UX is pivotal to the future of SEO

User Experience SEOSearch engines are advancing at the fastest rate we’ve seen in many years thanks to machine learning. These advances have allowed the search engines to focus on providing the most relevant results, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of user experience (UX). At the end of the day, what is good for the consumer is good for organic search performance — especially if we consider how machine...

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