SSTV Giveaway, Meet Our Winners

By Small Business Editor It s time to announce the winners of the SSTV Giveaway at Small Business Trends. Kudos to the creators of the two winning tweets: Kimberly Thompson and Suzanne Lankford. Here are their winning entries: Smart signage TV?! #SSTVGiveaway! There is NOTHING like TV sign to get people to notice your shop and attract them to your door! #needitbad — Kimberly F. Thompson (@kimberlytoday) July 1, 2015 A roadblock is getting folks to visualize delicious new menu items. We eat with our eyes, first! #SSTVGiveaway http://t.co/cwTwbuAiO4 — MomsEats&SweetThings (@sweetthingsnkt) May 20, 2015 From Tiburon, Califormia, near San Fransisco, Thompson is a health coach who tweets at @kimberlytoday. Hailing from Katy, Texas, Lankford is a restauranteur and operates Mom s Eats & Sweet Treats, a local family owned and operated ice cream shop and restaurant. She tweets for her business at @sweetthingsnkt. What They Won Both contestants will receive a 40-inch Samsung Smart Signage T
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SEO Toolkit for Sharp Entrepreneurs

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Amazon Web Services Announces Availability of Amazon Aurora to All Customers

By JoAnn McFarland Amazon, best known for online sales of thousands of items, is making Amazon Aurora, its MySQL-compatible database engine, available to customers in three regions. These are the U.S. West, U.S. East and the European Union. Formerly, the engine had only been available to a thousand companies participating in a review of the technology. These include Alfresco, Zumba and Earth Networks, among others. These and many other companies had favorable reviews of Aurora. Amazon Aurora was created to provide database services comparable in price to open source databases, but with the scalability, durability and reliability of the commercial databases. Current Amazon RDS (Relational Data Service) customers can quickly convert to the new system. Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Amazon Database Services, AWS explains: “Today s commercial-grade databases are expensive, proprietary, high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms that these database providers are comfortable emp
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The 5 Best Real Estate Apps You’ve Never Heard Of

5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.
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Drama at HubSpot as CMO Fired After Book Investigation

By Anita Campbell HubSpot has fired Mike Volpe, its long-time Chief Marketing Officer, for “ethical violations” involving a book about the company. One other executive, Joe Chernov, Vice President of Content, resigned. And the company has sanctioned a third executive, Brian Halligan, Hubspot s Chairman and CEO, for not reporting the employees actions to the Board of Directors in a timely manner. Halligan is also one of the founders of the company — but now that it is publicly traded has to answer to the Board of Directors. The inbound marketing software company s press release says that Volpe was terminated for ethical violations “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a book involving the Company.” It s an unusual situation. Companies that provide software to small and midsize businesses rarely have this much public drama. Twitter chatter on the account of Scott Kirsner, a Boston Globe columnist, speculates the book in question is being written by Dan
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The 5 Best Real Estate Apps You’ve Never Heard Of

5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.
http://bit.ly/1Oya4rl

Be Skeptical of Those Promising Top Ranking on Google

By Michael Guta You ve probably heard it a million times. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. But human nature being what it is, there is always someone trying to take advantage of another person who is not well informed. And ranking on Google is one of those areas where this happens — a lot. Business owners across the U.S. have been plagued recently by calls from a company or companies offering to improve their search engine positioning. Whether it is through email or phone calls, the marketing effort of these companies is convincing if you re new to online business. But that was not the case when Dave Delaney received a call. Delaney is an award-winning 15-year veteran marketer, and a trusted name in the industry. He was featured by Forbes as a professional networking expert to watch in 2015. Lucky for owners of online businesses, Delaney took time to relate his experiences an article for The Tennessean. First, here is the warning he gives: “If anyone promises
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