The workshops, to be led by a staff of Google experts, will provide one-on-one consultation with Entrepreneurs Conference attendees, including businesses looking to launch new websites, as well as companies looking to optimize already established websites for their businesses. Among the valuable assets entrepreneurs will gain from the 1-hour workshops are online tools and training from Google team experts, as well as custom search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for their businesses. Topics covered by each workshop are as follows:

Grow Your Business Online

• Learn the basics of how other people find your business online, with methods like SEO, web analytics and more.
• Run your business more efficiently with online tools, including applications for improving collaboration and communication.

Promote Your Business Online

• Attract customers down the street or across the country with online marketing tools like Google AdWords and AdWords Express.
• Learn to focus your marketing efforts and budget for your target audience.

The workshops and free consulting services being delivered by Google, a conference sponsor, are exclusive to registrants and will be delivered on a first-come, first-served basis, with limited consulting slots available. In addition, attendees will have the opportunity access the insights of Google Inc. Global Diversity Program Business Development Manager Chris Genteel, a speaker/presenter of this year’s Entrepreneurs Conference.

Google is among the major corporations looking to do business with you at the 2012 Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference + Expo hosted by Nationwide, May 23-26, at the Hilton Chicago Hotel in Chicago, IL. Search and follow the hashtag #BEEC2012 on Twitter for the latest updates on conference speakers and sessions. Expect innovative sessions, high-powered speakers, and an early peek at the products, trends, and services you’ll need to stay ahead of the curve. To register and find out more, visit www.blackenterprise.com/ec/

(Image: Instagram)

Instagram is living the ultimate startup dream.   The San Francisco-based upstart, which launched exclusively as an iPhone app back in October 2010, has created a new clique of photo enthusiasts.  Instagram alone boasted over 30 million users prior to its acquisition by Facebook. Now, the platform’s user base surpasses 40 million users; that’s equivalent to 5% of Facebook’s user base. When the company launched the Android version of the popular photo-sharing app earlier this month, it added an additional 10 million Instagram users to its already growing numbers in a six day time period.

What startup wouldn’t want a robust acquisition or initial public offering with a huge payoff?  Facebook acquired Instagram for a cool $1 billion in early April, and this story could not have been written any better, even if Steven Spielberg penned the script himself.

With Facebook’s Instagram acquisition still the topic of conversation in the tech space, here’s a look at why the popular mobile application has experienced tremendous growth:

A True Problem Solver

When pitching your product or startup idea, ask yourself: What problem am I trying to resolve? Instagram focused on solving the dilemma of taking strong, visually appealing photos from your mobile device and sharing them instantly. The startup does it better than any of their competitors—Facebook and Flickr included.

Perfect Your Product Before Expanding

What makes Instagram so popular is that it creates beautiful photos without the hassle of lugging around heavy photography equipment. The startup started small, focusing on Apple’s iOS platform. This allowed the company to create a greater user experience. Instagram users can utilize one of several pre-created filters or other effects to capture those shareable moments. Instagram’s decision to expand to the Android platform was done only after the team felt it was ready to advance.

Capitalize On the Desire to Share in Real Time

One might argue Instagram is what Facebook wants to be—a mobile app.  If Facebook could turn back the clock, it’s safe to say (with all the opportunities mobile has to offer)  it would launch on a mobile platform.

Timing Is Everything

If Instagram launched before its 2010 debut, I’m not sure they would’ve been as successful as they are today. The platform’s release, which came shortly after the iPhone 4 stepped onto the market, was a strategic business move. Photo-centric apps didn’t stand a chance prior to the release of this version of the Apple product.

With Facebook serving as the largest photo sharing social network, the powerhouse company decided to eliminate their competition: Instagram. Why, you might ask? Well, for one, so Google and Twitter could not acquire them first. And, secondly, in order to get a stake in the mobile-first, user-centered, photo-focused space, they needed to merge with a company that was already doing what they sought to do. (Remember: Facebook is a web-based interface that allows users to curate albums of photos.)

Instagram honed in on creating the best possible product, which would yield the greatest user experience. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team kept it simple, meeting the needs of the user and filling an industry void.

The one billion dollar question…how will the Facebook acquisition of Instagram change the mobile app we have come to love?

(Image: Thinkstock)

For many workers, the 9-to-5 turns into 9-to-whenever-the-work-gets-done. That can often entail working unpaid overtime, missing those key family moments, or eating dinners at your desk. In some industries, such as technology and social media, working odd hours is part of doing a job well or completing a major project, and a typical 9-to-5 day just isn’t realistic.

In a job culture with the looming veil of fear that one could be fired or laid off, many feel guilty for leaving work on time or not putting in the extra hours to show their loyalty and hard-working qualities to the higher ups.  But one tech executive, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, recently rejected this notion, saying she makes it a point to leave on time every day so that she can take care of an important aspect of one’s well-being: personal time and family bonding.

“I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids,” Sandberg said in a video posted on Makers.com. “I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.”

Writer Pete Cashmore explores why leaving work on time is okay, and how many successful leaders have made it a point to put a cap on overworking,  putting priority on the intangible and irreplaceable moments in life.

Read more at CNN.com…

Spotify Play Button is now integrated into the Tumblr dashboard (Image: Spotify)

It’s been less than a year since Spotify launched in the US, and partnered with social networking juggernaut Facebook, but already the music streaming service is taking its offerings to the next level announcing Spotify Play on Wednesday. The new embeddable button allows users—mainly bloggers and web editors—to embed any Spotify song, album or playlist directly through their blog, site, or social networks.

Mirroring functionalities found on Google’s YouTube, the newly-released button gives visitors access to over 15 million tracks and allows them to play legal music directly on your site. The popular music provider has partnered with various web publications, including  People, Rolling Stone, Mashable, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian, as well as services like FanBridge and ShareMyPlaylists.com.

Spotify Play Button is now integrated into the Tumblr dashboard. With the click of the “audio” tab, users can simply type in a specific song or album and the micro-blogging site creates the widget for you to fit into your blog theme.

“Adding the Spotify Play Button to your Tumblr, website, or social page will light it up with music in a flash and feature any song, album or playlist,” Spotify noted in a blog post. “To enjoy the tunes, all you have to do is hit Play. Totally free. Totally instant. Totally awesome.”

Facebook users can insert songs into their Timelines via FanRx, which will allow them to “feature specific songs or albums, draw attention to new releases, fan-only demos or exclusives.” Brands can do the same with FanBridge.

Spotify is available in only thirteen countries—the USA, UK, Finland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Spain and The Netherlands. Hence, the embeddable tracks will only play in these countries.

For those who want to add the Spotify Play Button to their site, just grab any song, album or playlist URI from within Spotify and go to its developer website to get the embed link.

But with so many options to engage customers and fans, the question remains, is Google+ right for your business? A skeptical audience confronted Product Marketing Manager at Google Keri Kandel at South by Southwest Interactive on Tuesday.

The issue many in the audience addressed was whether or not Google+ is “worth it.” Although the jury may be out on this issue, there are some innovative ways your business can use Google+ Hangouts, a free group video chat service. Kandel mentioned that companies such as Samsung have previewed new products, and Dell Computer’s Michael Dell has led hangouts with fans.

Kandel also mentioned a new feature, Hangouts On Air, which will allow users to record and edit a hangout for future viewing. This will allow more flexibility and creativity to promote one’s brand.

Google+’s largest issue, the lack of customers actively using the service, might actually benefit companies in the short term. Since users’ streams are not clogged with information (unlike Facebook’s news feed or Twitter timelines), it will be easier to get your content noticed. One Google+ pitfall mentioned by an audience member, however, is the fact that the demographic skews more in favor of tech workers and early adopters, and might not work well for a health care corporation for instance.

If your company has a blog on Google’s Blogger platform, you can easily connect it to Google+, allowing companies to automatically update their page with blog content. Users can also easily get to a company’s brand page by typing + and the name in the Google search bar; for example, +Dell brings that brand page up first in the search results.

Can Google+ win out the skeptics? Only time will tell. There are some unique features that might make your business stand out on Google’s fledgling social media platform. A savvy business will weigh the pros and cons to see if it is a worthwhile investment.

Follow BlackEnterprise.com’s coverage of 2012 South by Southwest (SXSW) at blackenterprise.com/technology .

Moderated by Soledad O'Brien, CNN's 'Black in America/Silicon Valley Aftermath' panelists (left to right) Jason Samuels, Professor of Journalism at NYU/Lead Producer at CNN CNN/NYU;Hank Williams, CEO of Kloud.co; Hajj Flemings, CEO/Co-Founder Gokit and Co-founder of NewMe Accelerator Wayne Sutton discuss the hour-long network series (Image: Mary Pryor)

“CNN’s ‘Black in America’ / Silicon Valley: Aftermath” was one of SXSW’s most anticipated panels among blacks in technology. The panel followed up on the NewMe Accelerator, a 2011 breakout tech organization that’s gained continuous attention and support within the new media industry.

NewMe brought eight black-owned tech startups together to live under one roof in Silicon Valley last summer to fine-tune their startup ideas, hone their craft, and receive mentorship from a bevy of digital rock stars. CNN filmed a documentary about the experience for Black in America 4: The New Promised Land – Silicon Valley, and a firestorm of positive (and negative) reactions spread across the web after it debuted in November 2011.

Today Soledad O’Brien reunited with a few of the entrepreneurs to get their unfiltered opinions about the documentary and find out what has happened with their companies since the hour-long special aired.

NewMe participants Hank Williams, founder of New York-based Cloud.co; NewMe co-founder Wayne Sutton, and BlackEnterprise.com Technology columnist Hajj Flemings joined the panel to give the SXSW audience an insider’s view of their experience in their Valley home. They all made a point of reiterating that the CNN segment about their experience was a documentary, not a reality show.

The group spoke about the controversial statements made by TechCrunch co-founder Michael Arrington about not knowing any black tech founders in Silicon Valley. Some black people found Arrington’s comments to be racist, while Williams and others on the panel defended his comment. “Because of Arrington’s comments, it really made this conversation mainstream and it forced people in the industry to acknowledge the problem,” Williams said.

The documentary also caused black tech communities around the country to organize. Sutton discovered there were viewing parties across the country. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that Sutton and fellow co-founder Angela Benton decided to host NewMe community events in cities outside of Mountain View, California, where Google, LinkedIn, and their NewMe house were all located in an effort to mobilize people to take action.

“What the documentary did was create a conversation across the country,” said Sutton. “After the viewing of the documentary, minority community groups across the country were all asking what they could do to help build awareness in their own communities.”

The panelists discussed how NewMe can impact STEM education. For example, Flemings created a pre-screening for 200 high school students in Detroit. “We wanted to change the life cyle of what true success looks like,” said Flemings. Williams stated that the visibility of blacks in technology through NewMe and the CNN documentary will help inspire young minorities to pursue an education or career in an area they previously didn’t know was available to them.

“We do not have sufficient visibility,” says Williams, in regards to blacks in technology. “One of the things that struck me if you type in ‘black scientists’ you get George Washington Carver. We’ve had other black people with relevance since George Washington Carver.”

O’Brien suggested that parents who want to cultivate their child’s interest in science and technology should find out what interests the child has and find technologies that revolve around those interests.

One audience member asked whether Silicon Valley is actually still relevant considering other cities like Austin, with strong technology ecosystems, are emerging as places to open up shop. Sutton said he and others from the summer accelerator program have moved their families permanently to Silicon Valley. Each of the panelists believed that the hype surrounding Silicon Valley is deserving given that living there places one’s company in the midst of IT giants who are more available for face-to-face networking.

Lastly, the panelists updated the audience on the progress of their startups. Things are coming full circle for participants like Flemings and Sutton who will be launching GoKit, a company they started at SXSW 2011, on Sunday.

Additional reporting provided by Winston Ford.

Follow BlackEnterprise.com’s coverage of 2012 South by Southwest (SXSW) at blackenterprise.com/technology .

Phil Simon, author of The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business says these innovative businesses share several common threads. “They embraced platform strategies really well, which is really the central message of the book. They built up their platforms and added different features or offerings.” The lessons that can be learned by these companies are applicable to any business, not just those in the high-tech or digital space, says Simon.

Keep reinventing yourself. In the Age of the Platform, companies that constantly reinvent themselves lead the pack. Keep adding planks to your platform. Start a newsletter. Become an expert at an online industry forum. Add new services or features to your suite of offerings. Find an underserved market niche and modify your product/services to fill their need. Write a white paper. Team up with a complementary business and share customers. Revamp your website. Whatever you do, don’t stand still. The moving target survives.  “As for when it’s time to do it, I would argue that you are better off doing it too soon than too late,” asserts Simon. “Companies like Microsoft that have been, traditionally, very late to things like search or cloud computing are trying to play catch up.”

Curate your customers. Apple curates many passionate users and turns them into partners (app developers for their iPhone and iPad) who pay back profits. How might your customers generate profit for you? Maybe you offer a reward for referring a new customer. Or create a wiki that enables customers to suggest new product lines. Think of new ways to get your customers expanding your brand for you. In the Age of the Platform, the fundamental relationship between a business and its customers is changing. “Just remember that you’re never going to make everybody happy and there is a kind of customer you’d want to go for,” says Simon. “When Facebook has 845 million users and it makes a change to one of its features, and it ticks off 1% of them, that’s a pretty good batting average, but you still have 8.5 million people who are upset.”

(Image: Thinkstock)

Let others’ platforms do the work. There are free and low-cost tech tools designed to build or expand your platform that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others enable you to add planks such as blogs, plugins, widgets, integrated social networks, podcasts, videos, etc. Groupon can bring customers to your business. Salesforce.com enables a small company to act and operate like a big one. Sites like eLance allow you to connect with low-cost specialists of almost any vocation. All of the popular social media sites offer great free branding tools. Sites like Kickstarter enable entrepreneurs to test new product ideas in advance.

Don’t be afraid to expand into unchartered territory. “What if Google had been satisfied with just being a search engine, or Apple had only made computers?” asks Simon. “Great platform companies understand that the more high-quality services and products you offer, the more customers and growth opportunities you’ll attract.” He says diversifying invites serendipity and makes your company more resilient to unexpected changes in a market. Find something your company does really well and then use that as a starting place for a brand new endeavor. Perhaps you translate all of your marketing materials into Russian to serve the local Ukrainian community. “You never know which new path will lead to unforeseen success.”

Be sticky. Attracting customers with your great products and services is step one. “Getting them to stay with you – and only you – is the ultimate goal,” asserts Simon. He points to Amazon.com’s launch of the Kindle Fire as an example. The product made it easier for users to shop at Amazon.com and consume media and entertainment at Amazon rather than anywhere else. He suggests small business owners asking the following: “How can your business lure in customers and keep them there? With amazing customer service, follow-up, regular email specials, or contests? With interactive features at your website, birthday coupons, or preferred customer perks? Make it hard for your customers to want to go anywhere else.” He also recommends using existing platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Pinterest.

Move quickly, and make small bets. If you see an emerging need or trend in your industry, be the first one on your block to blog about it, ask your customers about it, and turn it into a new offering. You don’t have to sink a lot of money into this new endeavor, but you do need to act decisively to beat your competitors. The worst that can happen is you’ll fail. But you’ll know how to improve it before any of your competitors do. Being first fearlessly is a characteristic of successful platform companies. “Merck had put out a drug called Vioxx that cost over $1 billion. All of a sudden the FDA shut it down and there were law suits stemming from the people taking it and dying or having heart attacks,” says Simon. “If you’ve got a digital product you can fix it seamlessly. You can turn it off seamlessly. Your ability, now, to make a change, that’s why to me the costs of failure are a lot smaller.”

Small business is BIG BUSINESS at the 2012 Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference + Expo hosted by Nationwide, May 23-26, at the Hilton Chicago Hotel in Chicago, IL. Expect innovative sessions, high-powered speakers, and an early peek at the products, trends, and services you’ll need to stay ahead of the curve. Beat the March 16 Early Bird deadline to get a $200 registration discount at www.blackenterprise.com/ec/! And be sure to nominate your company or another business for our Small Business Awards! Want to pitch your business idea and win $10,000? Don’t miss the chance to enter our Elevator Pitch Competition before March 30 to qualify for the $10,000 grand prize. To register and find out more, visit www.blackenterprise.com/ec/

Time Is (Almost) Up: Google’s privacy settings take effect March 1 (Image: Google)

Listen up Google account holders, you only have a few remaining hours before the web search giant enforces its new privacy policy set to take effect March 1. The U.S. Internet company said in January that it was abridging its privacy policy, combining data on users from all of its platforms—search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google+ and the Android operating system to name a few. Since users cannot opt out of the changes, it’s caused quite a stir among consumer and privacy advocates, public officials and international government agencies.

The company is reminding users that they won’t be collecting any more data than they were before and the new terms have several added perks—more accurate web search results, features that work across various platforms, and more targeted advertisements—however, as Internet watch dogs have expressed, folks aren’t buying it.

Google’s shift from profiling users separately on each of its products and sites to a single compilation of data found in profile form has users up in arms.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit foundation that advocates for online privacy and digital right, stated: “Search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more.”

BlackEnterprise.com has a few quick pointers on tip toeing around Google’s privacy policy (or at least will allow you to cruise the Internet with greater ease).

Forget signing in

Many Google services don’t require users to sign in, so don’t even bother. If you are not logged into Google + or Gmail, Google won’t know who you are and, thus, can’t add data to your profile. Happy searching!

Turn off Google search history

Sign in to your Google account. Then go to www.google.com/history or go to “Account Settings” menu at the top of your navigation settings. Go to the “Services” section and choose whether you’d like to view, enable or disable your web history.

Click here to continue reading…

Clear your browsing history on…

Chrome

Go to the far right of your toolbar and click on the wrench icon. Select tools and go to “clear browsing data.” To clear your entire browsing history, select “Beginning of Time.”

Firefox and Internet Explorer

Go to the “Tools” menu; click on “Clear Recent History.”

Wipe YouTube history

Once signed in to Google’s main page, click on “YouTube” in the toolbar on the top of the page. Click on your user name and choose “Video Manager.” After selecting history on the left-hand side of the page, opt to “Clear Viewing History.”

Remove Gmail chat history

Before you begin chatting, make sure your conversations are “off the record.” Making this selection will not store your chat history or the history of the person with whom you’re talking to. Conversations with that specific person will not be recorded until you manually turn that function back on. To go off the record, select the “Actions” tab in chat and select “Go off the record.”

Don’t forget: If you’re at your wits end with the changes, you can delete your entire Google account altogether.