Category Archives: General

5 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Vijay Brihmadesam

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These days, it doesn’t take much to call yourself an entrepreneur. You don’t need an advanced degree, a certificate proving you completed required training or even a business card to pursue a dream of starting your own company.

However, having success as an innovator takes more than just a great idea. It takes dedication, hard work, sacrifice, and possibly even abandoning your comfort zone to have a chance at doing what you love.

Meet Vijay Brihmadesam. Like many people across the world, Vijay had a well-paying job and comfortable lifestyle working at a private equity firm in Palo Alto, Calif. And like many people, he was not happy with his current job and career path.

Long story short, Vijay got together with two of his friends and decided to leave the daily grind of Wall Street to pursue their passion — a fast-casual Indian food restaurant called Tava Indian Kitchen.…


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4 Ways to Keep Telecommuting Employees on Task

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This is a guest post by Kristine Hansen of Null Media.

While working from a satellite office, it’s easy for any telecommuter to feel like they’re on an island. But telecommuting offers tremendous business advantages, including cost reductions, environmental benefits, and access to a truly global workforce. So here are 4 tips for keeping your remote staffers motivated and on the same page, literally and figuratively.

  1. Jointly develop a growth plan. One drawback for telecommuting is that it doesn’t naturally allow time and space for feedback. Aside from annual reviews, employees who don’t regularly turn up at company headquarters may have no idea about how they are perceived by others. As a manager, you want all employees to feel invested in the company and their careers. Work together with each remote staffer on writing a growth plan that takes into consideration that employee’s job description, the areas where he would like to improve and grow, and what his long-term goal is – all of which can help to boost retention.

    2. …


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Customer Appreciation in Numbers: Infographic

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In February, we were flooded with positive comments (perhaps in the spirit of Valentine’s Day) on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Below is a visual representation of all the customer love we got last month. Thank you for your feedback! We always appreciate hearing from you.

How do you harness your customers’ positive feedback on social media? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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Don’t Be Such A Yahoo; Working Remotely Is OK

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Just a couple of weeks ago, in Austin we celebrated the Work from Home Day. Well, it wasn’t that big of a deal in the Zoho Austin office because we have a very flexible work schedule, and people work from home every now and then.

Then, a few days ago Yahoo! announced that they are ending all work-from-home and remote-work arrangements they had for most of their employees. That’s just a shame, Kara Swisher over at AllThingsD reprinted the internal memo.

It’s embarrassing to the technology industry that such a high-profile company like Yahoo! would take this step. While Marissa Mayer has taken some steps to googlify Yahoo! with free lunches and free iDevices, I think she has gone too far here in her googlification. I guess what most people miss here is that Google is also not a very remote-work friendly place. That may have changed, but at least it was not a few years ago.…


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Announcing Zoholics 2013, Zoho’s Annual User Conference

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Zoholics is back. The Zoho user conference we started last year received great response, so we are making it an annual event.

This year, Zoholics will be held at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport. Based on popular demand and feedback from last year, we are expanding the event from one day to two and a half days. This will give us plenty of time to cover a plethora of topics and have enough time to interact with you through various sessions.

So, what can you expect from this year’s event?

You will have an opportunity to learn a lot about our apps through our
training sessions, interact with the Zoho team through various
workshops, learn about the trends in the industry and interact with
fellow Zoholics. We have listed some of the topics we will be covering
at www.zoholics.com. The event will feature three parallel tracks – one general session track and two training tracks.…


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Infographic: Your Essential Tools for a Modern Business

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What tools are imperative in running a successful business? We asked you just that on Facebook. Interested in what your peers had to say? To help you visualize the insight you and other professionals provided, we’ve collected responses from our post and created an infographic with the results.

Are the responses what you expected? Are there tools that you haven’t thought of utilizing? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

 

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Three Tips to Entice Collaboration in the Workplace

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Collaboration is such an awesome idea in principle, but when it comes down to implementation it doesn’t always come out so rosy. The determining factor of any collaboration tool’s success is participation. So before you even think about what tool to use, how are you going to get people to participate?

At the Zoho user conference, Zoholics, in Burlingame, California, I caught up with Jacob Morgan, Principal and Co-Founder of Chess Media Group and author of the upcoming book “The Collaborative Organization.”

One of the chapters in Morgan’s upcoming book is about how you get people to adopt collaboration.

I asked Morgan to offer up three tips:

  1. MUST have senior level support: It can’t just be the CEO saying, “Yeah, you should do this,” but rather he/she has to actively participate and encourage others to participate as well.

    2. …


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