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The Basics of Branding

Learn what this critical business term means and what you can do to establish one for your company. Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does "branding" mean? How does it affect a small business like yours? Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors'. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be. Are you the innovative maverick in your industry? Or the experienced, reliable one? Is your product the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high-value option? You can't be both, and you can't be all things to all people. Who you are should be based to some extent on who your target customers want and need yo

Five Signs You're Too Smart For Your Job

Human beings are creatures of habit. We can fall into ruts very easily. One of the easiest ruts to fall into is to stay in a job too long, way past the point where the job holds any new challenges or learning experiences. We can see why people stay in their jobs too long. It’s a pain in the neck to change jobs for one thing, and we also wonder “If I take a new job, is it going to be a move out of the frying pan and into the fire?” The problem with that thinking is that we forget one vital point. The process of looking for a new job and getting it is an important learning experience in itself. Staying put in a job that requires nothing of you intellectually or creatively is not a disservice to your employer (as long as you’re doing your work) but it is a disservice to you. You deserve a lot more from a job than just a paycheck and a place to go during the day. You deserve to have meaty problems to solve and smart people around you to collaborate with. You deserve somet

Review: Warren Buffett's Management Secrets: Proven Tools for Personal and Business Success

Overview Even in today's economic climate, when so many investors and major companies are failing, Warren Buffett continues to be successful in all aspects of his life. Mary Buffett and David Clark have written the first book ever to take an in-depth look at Warren Buffett's philosophies for personal and professional management — what they are, how they work, and how you can use them. Through close examination of Warren Buffett's life and career from his earliest days to now, Buffett and Clark shed light on his decision-making processes and reveal his strategies for keeping on track and maintaining focus. They examine Buffett's inimitable leadership qualities and explain how Warren integrated what he learned over time into a winning management formula and became not only the manager whom other managers want to emulate but also the second richest man in the world. A true companion volume to Buffett and Clark's successful Buffettology series, Warren Buff

"Disability brought my life into focus," Deepa Malik

An army mans wife, mother of two, a restaurateur with a social cause, a former beauty queen, an accomplished swimmer on the international platform and now a wannabe biker; 38 year-old Deepa Malik wears a multitude of hats and firmly refuses to let any conversation veer to sympathy that her disability often attracts. Malik became a wheelchair user in 1999. Most recently, she became the first paraplegic to participate in the gruelling Tour-de-Himalaya Car Rally.  Allister Mark Syiemlieh  of  D.N.I.S.  caught up with her. D.N.I.S.: You were the first paraplegic woman to join the world of sports in the Indian scenario. Were you apprehensive? How did you go about it? Deepa Malik :  Yes, I was apprehensive! Because being paraplegic requires special attention like living arrangements and wheelchair accessible bathrooms etc. These need to be taken care of before you venture to do something. As for joining the world of sports, it was purely by luck. The Maharashtra Paralympic Sports A

The Legends

Rahul Dravid Dravid was born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. He belongs to a Maharashtrian family settled in Bangalore, Karnataka. He has a younger brother, Vijay. Dravid's father worked for  Kissan , a company known for producing jams and preserves and thus he earned the nickname  Jammy  from his teammates at St. Joseph's Boys' High School. His mother, Pushpa, was a professor of architecture atBangalore University. Rahul Dravid has a degree in commerce from St. Joseph's College of Commerce, Bangalore. Dravid started playing cricket at the age of 12, and represented the state at the under-15, under-17 and under-19 level. [17]  Rahul's talents were first spotted by former cricketer Keki Tarapore who was coaching at a summer coaching camp at the Chinnaswamy Stadium.He went on to score a century on debut for his school team. Along with the batting, he was keeping wickets. However, he later stopped keeping wickets on advice from former Test players Gundappa Vishwanath

World’s First Website, Created By Tim Berners-Lee In 1991, Is Still Up And Running

Tim Berners-Lee Even if you can’t name the inventor of the World Wide Web (It’s Tim Berners-Lee!), you’ll probably want to celebrate one of the information network’s most important milestones.  On August 6, 1991  — 21 years ago — Berners-Lee published the world’s first website  from a lab in the Swiss Alps. The site, originally found at the clunky URL “http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html,” was updated frequently after launching; therefore,  images of its earliest versions were never saved . Nevertheless,  a later copy from 1992 is still preserved and welcoming visitors . The bare-bones website was created, appropriately, to explain the World Wide Web to newcomers. “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents,” the site reads, going on to explain how others can create their own webpages. About this project This project aims to preserve some of th