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Delivering an effective presentation requires more than just self-confidence. It requires techniques that connect the speaker with the audience on a personal level and transmit a message that leaves them feeling satisfied. To find out how to give an excellent presentation, we spoke with the 2015 Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking, Mohammed Qahtani. Qahtani is a security engineer in Saudi Arabia who joined a Toastmasters club in 2009 on the recommendation of a friend. He obsessively took to training to become the best speaker he could, and this year he survived seven rounds of a competition that lasted six…

Less than six months after announcing a $40 million Series B investment, alternative lending startup Fundbox has closed on another $50 million in funding to provide small businesses with the immediate cash they need to stay afloat. Spark Capital Growth led the round, which brings Fundbox’s venture funding total to $108 million in just under a year and a half. Bezos Expeditions, Sound Ventures (the fund recently launched by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), and Entrée Capital participated, joined by existing investors Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Blumberg Capital and Shlomo Kramer. For small businesses that run on invoices, Fundbox issues loans…

Some things are better if kept private. I have seen many people hating it like anything when their friends or family members try to unlock their smartphone without their permission. And sometimes due to lots of successive incorrect attempts, the phone gets hard-locked – that means the only way to unlock your phone is via your email. This is enough to irritate a person. Also, you can not do anything about it because you don’t know whom to yell at. Today, I am going to tell how you can capture a photo of that intruder who tries to unlock your…

Lync is a tool that can add significant benefit to small, medium and large sized businesses and organizations. Microsoft Lync is a powerful tool that was designed to improve the communication and collaboration of businesses no matter the size, large to small.  The unified communications platform hosts all of your communications products under one roof.  No longer will you have to manually switch between programs when you nee to instant message a client, email a co-worker or join an online video conference. Microsoft Lync 2013 saves you valuable time throughout your workday and will make communicating both internally as well as externally much…

Microsoft offers telephony? Microsoft doesn’t offer telephony… EVERYONE knows THAT!  So, how is it possible to turn one of the world’s most ubiquitous software packages into a complete phone system for your business?  With Lync, that’s how.  Surely, by now you have heard of Lync… the moniker that was bestowed upon Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) back in 2010. Old school telephony Lync Online, which is a component of many Office 365 licenses, is a powerful communications platform, offering presence, instant messaging, voice over IP (VoIP) calling, desktop sharing, and audio and video conferencing… all from a single interface.  Lync makes…

Optimizing our organic search and refining our SEO craft is something we're always practicing as digital marketers and small business owners. Especially when you consider how competitive—and expensive—paid search is getting. You don't want to pay Google for every click to your website, so you're doing the right thing by trying to optimize your organic search and drive traffic that way. Because we're all at the mercy of Google and the other search engines out there, very rarely are there SEO tactics that are black and white, but when it comes to the basics of getting your small business off the…

Just because Google's "undo send" feature recently rolled out doesn't mean you're in the clear when it comes to email mistakes. After all, when you're working as quickly as you do, it only makes sense that you're going to slip up every now and again. Even if you're a perfectionist. In fact, there are a few things that all professionals end up doing at some point or another — in their careers (if not once a year). So, rather than panicking, just follow our lead. 1. Clicking send before you're supposed to It's hard to stay calm after you accidentally…

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Most of us can agree that there is nothing more wasteful (or frustrating) at work than a useless meeting. Sure, it can be valuable to discuss important projects and initiatives face to face, but at a certain point it becomes a case of diminishing returns. And not knowing when or where to draw the line is becoming a widespread business liability. Unnecessary meetings cost businesses a mind-blowing $37 billion a year, according to at least one report. Meanwhile, studies have shown that employees spend more than 60 hours a month in unproductive meetings—half of which they consider to be a…

Reasons to Reconsider Remote Working Creating a Global Company Without Ever Signing a Lease The summer after I graduated high school in 2004, I was sitting in a branch office of a Morgan Stanley SVP working away at my computer building a model to calculate average exponential interest rates over time. It was simple enough: I remembered the equation from sophomore year, and it was just a matter of solving a few lines of algebra, writing a little code, and making it foolproof enough that a banker could enter the inputs on his computer while pacing around his office on…