KACHARAGADLA

The increasingly paperless business world requires many electronic signatures, and somebody to assure you the signatures are genuine. With more business conducted on the Internet than ever before, it makes sense that those sharing documents, agreements and contracts would also want the convenience of digital signatures or electronic signatures. That explains market research companies like  P&S Market Research  show continuing strong growth through 2023. They attributed this demand to "increasing use of digital signatures to reduce deception, growing government focus towards eliminating paperless work coupled with growing adoption of digital signature-based biometrics in various end-use industries, across the globe." With my business, we send out a  lot  of documents that need to be signed by our customers -- some days it's hundreds of documents. This makes it crucial for our  business  to automate this process. We've used countless companies to help u

User-centric firms should identify and track the core actions that can make or break their businesses. Traditionally, executives have used standard metrics, such as cash flow, inventory turns and operating income, to get a broad sense of the health of their firm. However, the game has changed with the rise of digital business models centered on the user. New metrics need to be devised based on the core user actions that drive value creation in such models. Threadless, an online T-shirt retailer, crowdsources its designs from a community of designers and curates the best designs through a social rating mechanism. Threadless relies on two core user actions: the upload of new designs by designers and the voting on designs by the Threadless community. A failure by the community to provide adequate feedback on designs would discourage designers from uploading new ones in the future, leading to a downward spiral. To ensure a healthy and scalable business model, Threadless needs to ac

Many cash-strapped startups abandon the "superfluous" investment of marketing. Big mistake, because marketing can actually provide that cash. Startups face many challenges, but none as precarious or life-threatening as the struggle to remain cash positive. The  Minority Business Development Agency  (MBDA) estimates the average cost to start a business to be  in the neighborhood of $30,000 ; and there’s significant variance in this figure, with some businesses starting out for just a few hundred dollars and others requiring upwards of millions. But, remember: These numbers are only startup costs. In addition, new companies have to pay thousands a month in team salaries, office-leasing fees, raw materials and other ongoing operational costs -- all while struggling to secure enough revenue to stay afloat. Caught in this dire financial balancing act, most entrepreneurs end up abandoning investments they come to view as superfluous, such as marketing and advertisi

In the 1950s television advertising became a force in the media. Over the next half century, television commercials were the main medium for corporate brands to drive consumerism to new heights. But things changed. The internet, social media and now digital devices, fragmented the medium and attention spans along with it. Today, consumers can control what they want to hear and watch. They can turn off the TV and watch their favorite show online, without ads.  They can read web magazines and block ads. And when they see ads on different devices and then visit the store, they expect consistency. According to a  Percolate   2016 Trends paper , “In the age of the hyperconnected consumer, brands have to design customer experiences that ensure they meet customer expectations and provide a seamless experience on all channels.” Content plays a central role in that customer experience. With so much noise, so many messages and so many media formats vying for the customer’s attention, ad