Wix Launches a New App, Taboola Announces Acquisition


Wix Launches a New App


Wix launches a new app quite frequently these days. But this week the company launched something quite unique aimed at a very specific market. It may be the shape of things to come with more specialized small business offerings in the future. Taboola, the online “discovery” tool for publishers, also had big news. These stories are part of the Small Business Trends editorial team’s weekly roundup of news articles that could impact your small business. Read on for a full list of news posts from the past week.

Content Marketing

Wix Announces Revenue of $33.9 Million, New WixHotels

Web-based cloud development platform Wix announced $33.9 million in revenue in its second quarter earnings report. The company also rolled out its latest app WixHotels specifically targeted at the small hotel industry. The earnings represent an 82 percent increase year over year, the company reports. Read more about this announcement here.

Taboola Acquires Perfect Market, Provides Monetization for Publishers

For online publishers seeking to monetize their content, opportunities continue to multiply. Taboola, a service that uses cookies to recommend other content like videos, text and slideshows to your audience, has acquired Perfect Market. You’ve likely visited sites that use Taboola to recommend videos, news stories, and image galleries at the bottom of an article. Here’s the full post about Taboola’s acquisition.

Economy

Small Business Government Contracting Goals Met – First Time in 8 Years

The U.S. federal government met its annual government contracting goal for small businesses — for the first time in 8 years. Government contracting goals are measured as a percentage of overall government contracts awarded.  For 2013 the goal was to award 23% of all prime contracts to small businesses. Read more about the government’s goal here.

Survey: Half of Working U.S. Adults Either Own a Business Or Want To

Entrepreneurship continues to be a popular career choice in the U.S. Half of the working adults in the U.S. either own or want to own their own business, according to a recent survey conducted by the University of Phoenix School of Business. And of those Americans who work but don’t own their own business, 39 percent would like to some day. Age also seems to  play a factor. Here’s more about the survey.

Small Business: A Weaker Job Creator

Small business still creates more jobs every year than big business, but the difference is shrinking, data from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics reveal. As the figure above shows, companies with fewer than 500 employees generated 55.5 percent of all new jobs created in 2011, the latest year for which data are available. More data is available in this post.

Finance

Canadian Wagepoint Payroll App Now Launched for U.S.

Managing payroll is one thing if your employees or contractors are all in the same state or at least in the same country. But what if your team is scattered across several states or even north and south of the Canadian border? Here’s some information about a new payroll offering in the U.S.

Teenage Researcher: Your PayPal Account Can Be Hacked

Can your PayPal account be hacked? You may think your PayPal account is secure, but think again. Even if you’ve signed up for PayPal’s Security Key feature, you still need to ponder the safety of your account. An Australian researcher — just 17 years old — says it’s easy, for a hacker at least, to get around PayPal’s two-step (or two-factor) authentication precautions. Find out more here.

Management

How Not To Deal With Negative Reviews

It could be argued that a negative online review can cost you money. But one hotel’s experience show’s how not to deal with negative reviews, even if you believe they’ve hurt your business. The Union Street Guest House, located near the Catskills in Hudson, NY, charges customers $500 per bad review. Find out why this hurt the business here.

Are Your Salespeople Ready for the 2014 Retail Holiday Season?

Are you and your retail store ready for the 2014 retail holiday season? While the holiday shopping season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Gray Thursday (that’s what some experts have dubbed Thanksgiving) may seem far, far away, for retailers – it’s not too early to start planning.

Social Media

Look Up at the Sky: Is it a Bird, a Plane? No, it’s a Hashtag!

Former flight instructor and veteran entrepreneur Patrick Walsh is revolutionizing the hashtag: by printing them 1,500 feet tall in the sky. The massive messages can be seen up to fifteen miles away, providing an extremely effective form of advertising. Read more about his project here.

Photographers: You Can Now License Your Work Through Flickr

Flickr says its contributors will soon be able to potentially monetize their work through the site. The Yahoo owned image sharing platform recently introduced Curated Connections. The new licensing program will have curators working with independent photographers to share their work with those in need of image content. This post shares more info about the new offering.

Business Tools

Google Dynamic Sitelinks: Giving Advertisers Free Clicks

Google has given AdWords advertisers a pretty awesome gift: new dynamic sitelinks.  These are links to other pages in the advertiser’s site, and they are added free of charge, for the top three ad positions. That means Google will automatically generate sitelinks for certain ads. The best news: clicks on those dynamic sitelinks won’t cost you anything as the advertiser. Find out more here.

Sneak Peek at WordPress 4.0.

WordPress 4.0 is slated to be released August 27, 2014. A beta version of this new release of the popular content management system is available for testing. We took it for a spin recently to find out what differences you might encounter as you make the transition to WordPress 4.0 from WordPress 3.9 later this month. Here’s more information about the new version.

F6s.com: Where Startups Can Find Investors, Talent and Other Resources

If you run a startup and are looking for a way to find talent to hire, or investors or other resources, F6s.com was designed for you. Sean Kane, the co-founder of F6s.com says his site is geared to meeting these needs for startups. Kane called it “the Facebook of startups” in an interview with Small Business Trends. Read more in this post.

Small Biz Spotlight

Spotlight: Black Mermaid Soaps Says Bathing is Beautiful

Have you ever had a hobby that you thought just might work as a business? Denise Zannu was once a schoolteacher who simply enjoyed making soap for herself. Now she has a full business with multiple product lines including soap and other bath and body products as well. She’s been in business almost two and a half years. Read the full interview here.

Search Engines

What is Nofollow?

Search engines look at links as potential votes for the Web pages they point to. Some website owners have spent countless hours (and dollars) trying to improve their placement in search results, using link building as a primary method. In the early 2000s, blog commenting was playing a major role in most link building campaigns. Read more on this subject here.

comScore Acquires MdotLabs to Eliminate Non-Human Traffic Counts

comScore has acquired MdotLabs, a 14-month old company with expertise in detecting non-human traffic online. The acquisition is part of an effort to clean up comScore’s online traffic data. The company says MdotLabs’ technology will help isolate bots, click farms, and pay-per-view networks. Read more about the acquisition and what it could mean for your business.
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  1. Nice roundup. Perhaps the most surprising for me is the fact that small businesses are weak job creators. It may seem like they contribute much to the job market but it seems like they are weak in that area because of technology.