The Above the Cloud podcast is back this week with a new episode featuring Josh May, co-founder & CEO of POWr, a San Francisco based start-up that builds website plug ins for self-service website users, mostly small business owners. Josh sees POWr’s role as helping SMBs make their sites more competitive with big businesses. Josh started his…
Square is buying website creator Weebly. Weebly has free and paid website products. The transaction is valued at $365 million, comprised of a mix of cash and Square stock. Square said in its press release that it will now be able to offer “one cohesive solution to start or grow an omnichannel business”: Today, it…
Now widely reported, Amazon for the first time disclosed how many Prime members it has around the world — more than 100 million. It didn’t provide a regional breakdown but third party estimates suggest the bulk of Prime subscribers are in North America. The number was presented in a shareholder letter (.pdf) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission:…
Jenn Allen believes most tech companies are getting it wrong when selling to “cloud native” small businesses. And getting it right is important, given we’re looking at a pretty rapid transition from older to younger business owners in the coming years as Baby Boomers set to hit retirement age at a 10,000 per day clip…
About a year and a half ago we developed a set of six principles that served as the foundation for what would become the Tech Adoption Index. These principles were the reasons we believed the small business shift to the cloud would become the biggest game changer since SMBs started building websites and shifting their media spend…
Last week WeWork acquired digital marketing firm Conductor. After it happened I got a number of informal messages like: WeWork + conductor, make sense? Many people were surprised by the move, and from a distance it’s initially confusing potentially. WeWork rents office space; Conductor manages digital marketing and SEO for enterprises. These two functions seem relatively distant from…
Cloud-based technology, software as a service (SaaS) and other digital platforms are revolutionizing how businesses big and small manage everything from HR and payroll to marketing and supply chain. As these technologies “flow downstream” and become more affordable/available, small businesses are beginning to adopt these technologies. The 2017 Tech Adoption Index Survey revealed that roughly…
To help small businesses with the hiring process, Facebook announced its “Jobs” tool connected with Facebook Pages roughly a year ago in the U.S. and Canada. This week, the company announced an expansion of the program to over 40 countries, allowing small businesses all over the world to post job openings and job seekers to…
An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in some ways states the obvious when its says that Millennials and teens are rapidly moving away from cash and in the direction of payment apps like Venmo and CashApp. The article underscores a few key principals driving the Local Search Association’s Tech Adoption Index program, which is measuring the small business shift…
A new forecast from technology research firm IDC, projects that SMB IT spending will hit $600 billion in 2018 and reach nearly $700 billion by 2021 – growing at nearly 5% a year. According to the press release announcing the forecast, IDC divides the SMB market into two buckets: mid-sized and small. Mid-sized businesses (with employee size ranging from 101-999) will spend more than $400…
