Prandelli invita a regole comuni sull"uso dei social

Il Mondiale brasiliano è oramai alle porte, e al fine di evitare gaffe e malumori, lo spogliatoio della Nazionale potrebbe presto adottare delle regole, comuni e condivise, che metteranno al riparo i protagonisti della spedizione sudamericana da incomprensioni.
A confermare quanto sopra è il C...

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Chinese E-Commerce Stock Goes for a Breakout

via StockCharts.com – Blogs:

Shares of Dangdang ($DANG) are making a big move this month with a triangle breakout on expanding volume. First, notice how the stock surged from ~4 to ~12. Second, the triangle consolidation worked off overbought conditions. Third, the high volume breakout signals a continuation of this advance. Careful with this one: low-price times internet-play times Chinese-stock equals risk cubed.

Click this image for a live chart

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Chinese E-Commerce Stock Goes for a Breakout

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Trading, breakout, chinese, consolidation, continuation, dang, dangdang, internet, times, triangle

Watch Forex Market And Its Players – Forex Market Trading

Watch Forex Market And Its Players – Forex Market Trading

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Watch Forex Market And Its Players – Forex Market Trading

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Watch Forex Market And Its Players – Forex Market Trading

Watch Forex Market And Its Players – Forex Market Trading

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Forex, advanced-live, currency, education, forex, internet, learn, results, rich, robot, trading

Tips To Choose A Best Web Hosting Company

To make a website or blog accessible globally through internet it must be hosted on a server. A host server is a system that store necessary data and files of a website and connects with high speed internet to explore a website to worldwide visitors. A website owner can buy or rent a server hosting space from a web hosting service provider.There are uncountable hosting companies available in online and local host market. So, here quality matters a lot. If you are getting confusion to select a best company from the fish market of hosting company then you can check out the following factors. I hope it will help you to find your desire best hosting company.ALSO: READ: Best Tips To Choose Perfect Domain Name …

via Shine Mat:

To make a website or blog accessible globally through internet it must be hosted on a server. A host server is a system that store necessary data and files of a website and connects with high speed internet to explore a website to worldwide visitors. A website owner can buy or rent a server hosting space from a web hosting service provider.

There are uncountable hosting companies available in online and local host market. So, here quality matters a lot. If you are getting confusion to select a best company from the fish market of hosting company then you can check out the following factors. I hope it will help you to find your desire best hosting company.

ALSO: READ: Best Tips To Choose Perfect Domain Name For A Blog

1. Your actual needs

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Nowadays almost every web hosting company offers a variety of packages with different features. Pick up one that meets up your needs. Do not necessary to buy more than your demand. You can increase your limit anytime without any effects on your website.

2. The types of hosting

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There are two types hosting offered by hosting company. One is “Shared” and second is “Dedicated” Shared hosting designed as multiple users/ websites on a single server or a drive and Dedicated hosting designed as one server for one specific user for a single website. So, dedicated web hosting technology is a powerful and high speed option however it is very costly. Generally most websites use shared hosting system because of its huge demand and cost effective. So, if you choose shared hosting package then must inspect about total number of websites/ users are shared with you. Huge shared users can increase your site or server loading time or you can get server error messages while trying to visit your website.

• What Is Custom Domain, Subdomain And How Does Domain Work?

3. Product and service pricing

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Many webspace or hosting company offers two types of service. Free host and Paid host. If you are a beginner then Free hosting service suites you best but when it comes to professional then you must switch to paid service. Compare the prices and other features with another reputed company to select.

From my view, Hostgator has best pricing option for their different types of hosting services. You can check their price on Hostgator’s website.

Get 25% discount on Hostgator’s hosting price by using the promo code:

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4. Server Up time and security

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Mostly all hosting company tells to serve with 99.9% server uptime. Actually even I don’t know, how much it is really true for all company? Well, you can not find the real truth instead of inspecting their background and talking with their other customers. It’s really an important part so be careful about server uptime. Also make sure their server is high secured and if any accident happen they are guaranteed to restore your backup files.

5. Best customer care and support

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Customer support is very important for web hosting company. All users are not expert and they may need help for settings or customer may need immediate support regarding their website crash, errors or such conditions. So, make sure they have solid and friendly customer support just like as wow!

• 20+ Spicy Tips To Make A Blog Popular

6. Internet connectivity speed:

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Web hosting server must be connected through a super fast internet connection. T1 or T3 are fast internet connections right now. Ensure that your chosen hosting company using high speed internet connection in their server system. Dial-up, broadband or any other slow connections should be avoided.

7. Other terms and conditions

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All web hosting company has their own terms and conditions or business policies. There you may find some restriction area on web script, image hosting, monetizing, web contents, payments and so on. So, it is important to read the terms and policies carefully of the service provider.

Best wishes on your blogging career. Ohhhh Hoooo!!!! Happy Valentines day in advance. Stay healthy pals. Allah Hafez.

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Maybe Financial Literacy Is NOT the Answer to Student Overborrowing

Dave Cannon has made several attempts over the past decade to learn the basics of money management. The Seattle entrepreneur took a class in personal finance when he was an undergraduate in college, and another when he attended Brigham Young Universityâ��s business school. But the lessons, by and large, didnâ��t take. By the time he hit 30, Cannon had racked up a $12,000 credit card tab and, in tandem with his wife, another $60,000 in student loan debt. â��Itâ��s hard to turn an hourâ��s worth of education into a system youâ��ll use every day,â�� Cannon told The Pacific Standard. But that doesnâ��t stop us from trying. There is a certain line of thinkingâ��embraced by Wall Street and politicians of both partiesâ��that holds that one of the major…

via Affordable Schools Online:

Dave Cannon has made several attempts over the past decade to learn the basics of money management. The Seattle entrepreneur took a class in personal finance when he was an undergraduate in college, and another when he attended Brigham Young University’s business school. But the lessons, by and large, didn’t take. By the time he hit 30, Cannon had racked up a $12,000 credit card tab and, in tandem with his wife, another $60,000 in student loan debt.

“It’s hard to turn an hour’s worth of education into a system you’ll use every day,” Cannon told The Pacific Standard.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying.

There is a certain line of thinking—embraced by Wall Street and politicians of both parties—that holds that one of the major causes of the Great Recession was the public’s lack of financial literacy. The root problem wasn’t just an unchecked mortgage industry or an investment sector that wagered billions on Byzantine mortgage-backed securities; the ignorance and greed of Main Street Americans, which made them easy marks, played a major role too. To fend off further economic calamity and keep families afloat, many financial literacy advocates believe our best hope is to teach people to live within their means, to carefully check mortgage documents before signing them, and to save enough money to survive a prolonged period of unemployment. All we need are the right educational tools.

Answering the call, financial literacy initiatives, both public and private, have proliferated wildly over the past several years. There’s Sesame Street’s “For Me, For You, For Later,” in which Elmo and his preschool-age fans learn the basics of spending, saving, and living within one’s means as the furry Muppet decides to forgo a $1 “stinky ball” in order to save up enough money to purchase a glittery “fantastic ball” instead. At the other end of the age spectrum, there’s Money Smart for Older Adults, a joint project of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau designed to teach the elderly how to avoid falling for financial scams.

The leading cause of bankruptcy is not overspending, nor lack of adequate financial planning, but the financial free fall caused by a health crisis.

In between, there are numerous online games, like Financial Football, a co-production of Visa and the NFL that quizzes players about things like compound interest and identity theft as they make their way toward a virtual end zone. There are programs for children and teens peddled by personal finance gurus like Dave Ramsey. And there are untold numbers of special school curricula, many created by financial services outfits like Capital One or your local credit union, which offer education with a side of brand awareness. (Banks relish the opportunity to get their names in front of future customers and their parents in a warm and virtuous context.)

Government, too, stands squarely behind these efforts. More than a dozen states now require that their students take a class in personal finance before they can receive a high school degree. And the Obama administration—acting under the terms of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law—has set up a federal Office of Financial Education housed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Financial education supports not only individual well-being, but also the economic health of our nation,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a speech last year. In case that doesn’t make clear what’s supposedly riding on this effort, in 2012 the U.S. Senate held a hearing titled “Financial Literacy: Empowering Americans to Prevent the Next Financial Crisis.”

There’s only one problem: mounting, resounding evidence shows that financial literacy education doesn’t work. Dave Cannon’s experience is not the exception but the norm. “We have this idea that if we teach kids good habits they will use them. But it’s just not true,” explains John Lynch, a consumer psychologist at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Not all behaviors are governed by rational intentions. “A kid in the backseat of a car,” Lynch says, “is not thinking about Sex Ed.”

FINANCIAL LITERACY PROMOTION MAY sound perfectly sensible—who wouldn’t want to teach children and adults the secrets of managing money?—but in the face of recent research it looks increasingly like a faith-based initiative. Consider one recent paper, scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Management Science. In a meta-analysis, Lynch and the marketing experts Daniel Fernandes and Richard Netemeyer compiled the results of more than 200 studies of financial literacy programs, adjusting for subjects’ family background and personality traits that had been ignored in the previous research. The result? Financial education has a “negligible” impact on subsequent financial decisions and behavior. Within 20 months, almost everyone who has taken a financial literacy class has forgotten what they learned.

These findings echo the results of another recent working paper, by the economists Shawn Cole at the Harvard Business School, Anna Paulson at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Gauri Kartini Shastry at Wellesley College, on the efficacy of state laws requiring financial literacy to be taught in schools. Their conclusion: “State mandates requiring high school students to take personal finance courses have no effect on savings or investment behavior.”

Another study, from 2009, tested the financial literacy of recent high school graduates who had taken a highly regarded personal finance class. They did no better than graduates who had not taken the class. One of the study’s authors, the economist Lewis Mandell, was a founder of the modern financial literacy movement, but the evidence has prompted him to turn his back on the mainstream financial literacy paradigm. “Financial education doesn’t work when it’s given in advance of when the consumer needs it,” he says flatly.

Reluctant to give up entirely on educating consumers, a number of scholars—including Lynch and Mandell—are now pushing for a model of financial literacy promotion known as just-in-time education. Instead of teaching personal finance in schools, the idea goes, a combination of education and coaching should be offered at the point of sale, or when people have reached a point in their lives when they actually need a given financial service. Don’t offer retirement education in high school or even college. Wait until someone starts a new job and needs to understand and manage a 401(k).

It sounds like common sense. But even just-in-time education has its problems. If counseling is delivered at the point of sale, for instance, the potential for conflicts of interest is huge. Where does education end and marketing begin? With no credentialing or oversight requirements in the financial literacy world, it’s up to the consumer—the one in need of enlightenment, remember—to determine whether a lesson objectively and thoroughly covers the most important bases. Take, for example, Ally Financial, a company that offers car loans and other products. It has put together an entire online education site called Ally Wallet Wise. But the site makes no mention of subprime auto loans, does not say how to determine whether you are being offered one, and doesn’t help users find out what an optimal interest rate might be.

In addition, the very notion that there is some moment that’s “just in time” for many financial decisions may be a mirage. Consider retirement savings for a moment. In our current, do-it-yourself model of financial planning, built on instruments like the 401(k), consumers must begin saving early in life to maximize the money they will have on hand at the end of their careers. But that often doesn’t happen. People stay in school until their late 20s, or, faced with competing demands on their funds, come to believe they can’t afford to put money away for some ill-defined future need. They make bad decisions for what seem like good reasons. If a counselor comes along at some point in this process, it’s likely not going to be “just in time,” but either too early to make an impression—or too late to make a significant difference.

Finally, it’s worth noting that standards of good advice have a way of shifting over time in a way that, say, basic facts of history or math do not. It used to be that people saving for retirement were told to set aside 10 percent of their salary. Now, many experts suggest 15 or even 20 percent.

You can see the promise and peril of financial literacy education play out in Dave Cannon’s life. The information presented in his money classes was “a blur,” he now says. “When we were in college, we were just surviving. There was not much use for financial principles.” So he forgot those principles more or less immediately.

What he does recall is that some of the classes were obviously lightly disguised marketing ploys. With a laugh, he recalls how one of his instructors, a seller of financial services, treated class as an opportunity for gathering leads. “A lot of financial advisers give good trainings,” Cannon says, “and then they follow up and try to sell you more expensive stuff.”

Cannon finally did start to take some financial principles to heart when he and his wife recently decided they wanted to buy a home. They went to a mortgage broker who sat down with them, explained that their debt to income ratio was too high, and helped them work out a budget—one that allowed them to simultaneously pay down their credit card debt while saving more aggressively for a down payment. They’ve since cut their credit card debt in half and have begun looking for homes. So just-in-time counseling works? Cannon says yes. “I wasn’t really ready to learn how to make a budget or build savings ’til we had goals,” Cannon told me. “The first behavior I needed to learn to change was to stop spending so much damn money.”

A FEW MONTHS AGO, a website called Low Pay Is Not OK brought a burst of national attention to a financial literacy initiative created by Visa and McDonald’s, designed to teach low-wage McDonald’s employees “practical money skills for life.” The online program included a suggested monthly budget for a typical employee that left room for $800 of “spending money” after expenses. The budget assumed that this employee would take a second job to bring in extra money, while not spending a penny on child care or heat, and spending a laughable $20 a month on health insurance. The intended moral of the budgeting exercise: “You can have almost anything you want, as long as you plan ahead and save for it.”

The sheer cluelessness of this exercise caused uproar on the Internet, and no wonder. The United States is an increasingly class-stratified country, where the engines of mobility appear to have stalled. Minimum wage jobs lead to other minimum wage jobs. Salaries are stagnant. College tuition has soared at rates well beyond that of inflation, forcing students to turn to loans to get by, which in turn leaves them servicing massive amounts of debt in their 20s, a time when financial literacy classes—citing the power of compound interest—say they should save. The leading cause of bankruptcy is not overspending, nor lack of adequate financial planning, but the financial free fall caused by a health crisis.

Dave Cannon may attribute his financial troubles to a lack of discipline and poor money management, but when I asked him how his credit card debt grew, he told me it was medical bills. “My family wasn’t in a position to help,” he offered by way of explanation. No amount of financial literacy can change a situation like that.

Personal shortcomings and mistakes in managing money can indeed worsen the financial situation for many of us, but even these may be more a function of stress and scarcity than ignorance. Recent research by the behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir has shown that perfectly intelligent people become much less so when they are experiencing a shortage of money, time, or attention. They develop a kind of tunnel vision that erodes the long-term thinking essential to financial planning. (Indian sugarcane farmers, for instance, perform worse on cognitive tests before a harvest, when they are cash poor, than they do after they’ve sold a crop.)

Trying to take some of these realities into account, a small group of educators is fundamentally rethinking the concept of financial literacy. Chris Arthur is an eighth grade teacher and a Ph.D. candidate in education at York University in Toronto. When he taught the subject in the past, he exposed his students to the Great Piggy Bank Adventure, a traditional financial literacy game produced by T. Rowe Price and Disney, and introduced them to the business concepts promoted by Junior Achievement, the children’s entrepreneurship organization. But last year he also made them play an online game called Spent, which is not a financial literacy product at all.

Spent was designed a few years ago for the North Carolina charity Urban Ministries of Durham. The concept is simple. The gamer assumes the role of a low-wage worker—like, say, someone at McDonald’s—attempting to get by until the end of the month. Players are faced with a relentless series of decisions and tradeoffs, and almost anything—a gift for a child’s birthday, a plea from a family member to help pay for needed medication—can send them into a financial downward spiral.

Needless to say, it’s just about impossible to achieve anything resembling financial success in the game of Spent. And that’s the point. “It challenges the dominant framing of financial insecurity as wholly a problem of ignorance and irresponsible consumer behavior,” Arthur told me.

Spent, like the controversy that ended up swirling around McDonald’s suggested employee budget, points to an oft-buried truth. The financial literacy movement presumes that with a modicum of education, we can all be equal in the financial and economic marketplace. But that’s a false promise. Financial literacy is, first of all, no substitute for financial regulation. It’s also an ultimately ineffective personal solution to a systemic political and economic problem. And even McDonald’s knows it. As I was reporting this piece, the Low Pay is Not OK website released a recording of a McDonald’s employee calling the firm’s help line for financial advice, saying she could not make ends meet on her salary. The counselor she spoke with suggested she locate a local food pantry and apply for food stamps and Medicaid.

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Maybe Financial Literacy Is NOT the Answer to Student Overborrowing

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Personal Finance, cannon, college, college life, internet, king, lynch, online, standard, street, student loans

Reader Profile: JV

The following is the latest post in my “Reader Profiles” series. Each post in this series details the financial situation and challenges of an FMF reader. The purpose of this series is to help us all identify with people like us (in similar situations — not all will be, of course, but eventually I’m sure you will find someone like you here), get to know the frequent commenters on the site, and hear some financial wisdom/challenges from people other than me.If you’re interested in contributing to this series, then drop me an email. The series seems to be very popular with readers and I need a steady stream of new ones to keep it going.Also, please leave constructive comments, questions, and so forth. Simply telling …

via Free Money Finance:

The following is the latest post in my “Reader Profiles” series. Each post in this series details the financial situation and challenges of an FMF reader. The purpose of this series is to help us all identify with people like us (in similar situations — not all will be, of course, but eventually I’m sure you will find someone like you here), get to know the frequent commenters on the site, and hear some financial wisdom/challenges from people other than me.

If you’re interested in contributing to this series, then drop me an email. The series seems to be very popular with readers and I need a steady stream of new ones to keep it going.

Also, please leave constructive comments, questions, and so forth. Simply telling someone what a mess they have, how they have made poor decisions, and so forth is not helpful. There is a way to say, “That was a mistake, but here’s what you can do to correct it” that both acknowledges the problem and offers a solution. It’s this sort of feedback that this series is intended to solicit.

Next in the series is FMF reader JV. She answered my questions (in black italics below) as follows:

Please tell us a bit about yourself.

I am married, 25, and I work in sales in Pennsylvania. My husband is 25 and is a graduate student. We are college sweethearts and have been together for 6 years but only combined our finances about 2.5 years ago when I graduated from college, we got engaged, and we moved in together.

My husband will graduate with his Ph.D. soon so we both are in the process of finding new jobs for our next stage of life.

Describe your financial situation (who works in your family, how your income is (general), how your expenses are, etc.).

Both my husband and I work. My husband’s parents paid for his college, and my college was covered through a significant scholarship, some parent money, and part time jobs. Because of this, we do not have any student loans. We are in the lucky position to be able to focus on wealth building as soon as we have started our careers.

When I first started making money, I did want to buy nice furniture, kitchen gadgets, and clothes — all things that I had a little but not a lot of growing up. However, since then, I’ve started to value freedom more than stuff and we have reduced our expenses dramatically. In August, we moved to a crappy student apartment and reduced our rent by $400 a month. Our friends and family thought we were crazy for moving somewhere without a dishwasher, but being within walking distance of my husband’s job has been fantastic so we are happier here than we were at the other place. We’ve also sold our second car in the last few months.

On to the numbers:

Income

• My paycheck: $2,938 (after tax and health insurance, though we normally get a small refund)


• Husband’s paycheck: $1597.70


• My company 401K deposit: $119.17


• Average extra income- TA work, bonus: $100

Total: $4,754.87

Expenses

The housing expenses are for our new place. Everything else is averaged over 10 months, which is how long I’ve been tracking all of our expenses.

• Rent: $845 (gas heat is included)


• Renter’s Insurance: $8


• Electricity: $30 (no AC)


• Internet: $47


• Phone: $70 ($50 per month family plan with the in-laws, plus amortized phone cost)


• Fuel/Parking: $203


• Car Maintenance/ Insurance: $212 (new tires this year)


• Medical: $46


• Groceries: $625


• Eating Out: $218


• Alcohol & Entertainment: $47


• Personal Care (Gym, Massages, Haircuts) : $100


• Personal Allowances: $220 (includes clothes, lunch money, fancy coffee money)


• Gifts: $30


• Educational Spending: $65


• Household Spending: $94


• Misc Spending: $200 (books, electronics, or couldn’t figure out otherwise)


• Travel & Vacation: $330

Total: $3,390

Difference: $1,364.87 (29%)

Having affordable housing and no debt makes a huge difference in our ability to save while affording some pleasures. We have participated in multiple weddings and travel to see our family often but are glad to spend that money while cutting back elsewhere. We spend way too much money on food and it required constant attention for us. Also, I’d like to start giving to charity but I haven’t figured out where I’d like to give yet.

Assets

• Car: $6,000


• Checking/Cash Savings: $7,893 (subtracting credit cards used and paid off monthly)


• Roth IRAs: $21,147.52 (allocated in Vanguard 2060 Retirement Fund, 90/10 split)


• 401K: $4,396.11 (split between large cap, medium cap, small cap, and international index funds)

Net Worth: $39,436.63

We don’t keep much money in cash as my husband’s job as a graduate student is very secure and it’s just the two of us. However, we do anticipate needing to build up our cash reserves for moving expenses in the next year. I am also considering redistributing the investments to reduce the fees by choosing a cheap S&P 500 fund in my 401K and then distributing the rest of the money according to my ideal asset allocation of 90% stocks and 10% bonds.

Also, getting life insurance and wills has been on my to-do list since we’ve been married and I still haven’t done it yet. It is worth it for ~$40 a month.

What are the current financial issues you’re facing (saving, paying off debt, etc.)?

We are focusing more on keeping our expenses in check than on our investments. I’ve tried to keep our investments simple since our net worth is still small and the savings rate matters more at this point.

What are your plans for the future (retire early, build your career, etc.)?

We have a big life transition coming in the next year as we both switch jobs and hopefully increase our income (and savings rate) substantially. This is our top priority.

Also, I plan to grow my career by getting an MBA in the next few years as I hope to transition from technical sales to a more finance heavy role.

We hope to accumulate savings quickly over the next 5 years or so. Our goal is at least $400,000 by age 30. At that point, we hope to dial our careers back a bit to have a family. Even though that number isn’t enough for retirement, it is enough to give us many, many options with our careers and our family over the years.

What’s your best piece(s) of financial advice and/or your general philosophy on personal finances?

Focus on saving and avoid overwhelming amounts of debt. To reduce expenses, look at the big expenses like cars and housing, and the repeat expenses like phones, entertainment subscriptions, and internet. It takes once to address it, and you reap the benefits over time. Even though we personally do not have debt, we have many friends that have large amounts of student loans or car loans and it makes for a tight and stressful budget.

Also, focus on growing your income. The $4,000 in raises I’ve negotiated have been small but good practice for negotiating. I believe in increasing our income and that is why we plan on moving very soon.

But most of all, I’d like for people my age to know that having expenses much lower than their income makes life so much less stressful. The flexibility and increased financial security is worth so much more than what I’ve given up, even if it means I wash my dishes by hand.

For more info: Reader Profile: JV

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Reader Profile: JV

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Personal Finance, eating, insurance, internet, king, medical, personal, spending

Online Colleges That Offer Free Laptops

With burgeoning rates of technology adoption, colleges, universities and trade schools are integrating online learning into their curriculum at a rapid rate. In such cases, a computer is an obvious requirement for online coursework. Some schools have gone so far as to require students to have a computer before enrolling in classes. In some cases — even today — this requirement can be an obstacle for enrollment in certain courses. In order to address such concerns, some accredited online colleges actually offer laptops to students who enroll in the schools’ online classes. Some schools give you ownership of the laptop or tablet, while others just lend the technology to students during their enrollment. Both options put into students’ hands the equipment needed to take online college courses…

via Affordable Schools Online:

With burgeoning rates of technology adoption, colleges, universities and trade schools are integrating online learning into their curriculum at a rapid rate. In such cases, a computer is an obvious requirement for online coursework. Some schools have gone so far as to require students to have a computer before enrolling in classes. In some cases — even today — this requirement can be an obstacle for enrollment in certain courses.

In order to address such concerns, some accredited online colleges actually offer laptops to students who enroll in the schools’ online classes. Some schools give you ownership of the laptop or tablet, while others just lend the technology to students during their enrollment. Both options put into students’ hands the equipment needed to take online college courses and earn a degree.

Online Education Is Becoming More Popular and Accepted

Recently, a survey by the polling group Gallup showed that most of the Americans polled feel that online college courses are at least as good as their brick-and-mortar equivalents. Inside Higher Ed reported that the poll’s results were an important step in lending greater validity to online education programs in the eyes of employers, educators and students’ peers.

According to the poll, a majority of Americans — at least those included in the survey — feel that online instruction is at least as good as on-campus courses when it comes to providing good educational value. Respondents also felt that online delivery offered a format that in which most students can succeed, as well as more individually-tailored instruction.

Respondents rated online versus in-classroom courses on seven criteria that particularly honed in on the courses’ reach and quality. The survey defined online education as “classes conducted entirely or partially over the Internet,” and did not differentiate between courses taken for credit, personal enrichment, or professional development. A majority of the respondents found online courses to be at least as good or better than face-to-face courses on all but one of the factors — “providing a degree that will be viewed positively by employers”.

The past year was particularly big for online education because of the explosion of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Among the higher ed community, there is fairly broad-scale agreement that MOOCs and other technology-enabled education will be truly transformative in higher education only at the point that they give educators the tools to do two things: (1) expand access to the low-income students who are disproportionately excluded from today’s higher education system, and (2) provide instruction that is more targeted to an individual’s educational needs — a goal, several argued, that might ironically be achieved sooner precisely because technology enables education to be delivered to so many students at one time.

Reasons Online College Offer Free Laptops or Tablets

It is because of this transformative quality of technology that schools’ are moving to get laptops and PCs in the hands of their students. Not only does it keep the school on the cutting edge of course delivery, it also offers a leg up when students are choosing an online college from which to earn a degree. A student with a laptop is a student that can study and do homework wherever they may be; and if the student has to return their machine to the school, they may be less inclined to transfer to another college before graduation.

Online schools know that students need a laptop or PC in order to do any online work. Since all the classes are online, it only makes sense that this needed utility be provided by the school. Offering a free laptop to their students allows students to not have to worry about another big, out of pocket expense in order to enroll. By removing this barrier of entry, online colleges give students a chance to enroll wherein they may not have before–all due to the fact that the student could not afford a laptop. There is also the monetary benefit to both colleges and students.

A “free” laptop with your enrollment is also a great marketing strategy. Colleges are happy to provide a student with a laptop in exchange for the student spending their tuition dollars with the school. The higher ed market is intensely competitive these days, especially among the online players in the sector. The cost of furnishing a free laptop or tablet is a far better prospect than potentially losing several years worth of tuition dollars. Thus, many of the schools are trying to remove any objections or barriers you your enrollment in their online degree programs or courses.

Online Colleges That Offer Free Laptops

At this time, only a dozen or so schools provide free laptops or tablets to their students. But, as online education becomes more popular and readily accepted, the number of schools — online and on-campus — offering technology to their students is growing. Some of the accredited online colleges that provide students with free laptops or tablets actually give students ownership of the devices. Stevens-Henager College is one such example. Meanwhile other schools, including well-respected institutions such as Wake Forest and Villanova Universities, lend you a laptop or tablet to use during your enrollment. However your school does it, the bottom line is that you will have the technology you need to earn your degree without having to spend additional money on a laptop or tablet.

When Do I Get My Laptop and Can I Keep It?

Most schools will ship your laptop or tablet on the day you become an official student of and enroll in your chosen online college. Generally, the laptop will remain the property of your school. Some universities allow the students to keep the laptop. Others require the laptop to be returned. The majority of online colleges that offer laptops allow students to keep the laptop upon successful graduation from their college. If you somehow lose or damage the equipment, or if it is stolen, you will likely be on the hook for the cost of the laptop or tablet, but at a reduced rate. If you believe someone else took your device, be sure to report the stolen laptop to the police. Once the report is filed by the police, the school can file an insurance claim and you will probably be able to buy a replacement laptop be at a discounted price.

A handful of the online schools that are currently offering free laptops or tablets to their students are listed below. The schools listed either include devices in their tuition, or offer great discounts and financial aid purchase eligibility for their enrolled students.

Full Sail University

Students who are enrolled in Full Sail University’s degree programs must have a computer for their studies. Fortunately, the school supplies the necessary equipment upon enrollment. As part of your college costs, Full Sail will charge you a computer fee that will vary based on the program in which you’re enrolled. Because each course of study requires a unique set different hardware capabilities and software, your laptop will be customized to fit your major. This ‘Project Launch Box’, as the school calls it, is offered at a considerable discount off standard market prices for the laptop and software.

Bethel University

Tennessee-based Bethel University uses tablet technology for its online coursework. All full-time online students are issued iPads, which arrive pre-loaded with applications that the school feels are most relevant to “your business life.” The iPad is yours upong graduation from Bethel. The school’s site is unclear as to whether the iPad is included as part of the tuition or whether a separate technology fee is assessed.

Stevens-Henager College

Undergraduate students in Stevens-Henager College’s online hybrid course programs can take advantage of the school’s laptop program. While you’re enrolled, the computer remains the property of Stevens-Henager — if you transfer or drop out, you’ll be required to turn it back in to the school. Upon graduation from the college, though, you’re allowed to keep the laptop as a gift from the Stevens-Henager.

Long Island University — C.W. Post Campus

The CW Post Campus of Long Island University, which offers a wide range online courses, furnishes enrolled, full-time undergraduate students with an iPad Mini. Full-time students pay a technology fee to defray the costs of the iPad. Interested part-time and graduate students may also be eligible to purchase a tablet at a discounted price of $250.

University of Phoenix

Students at the University of Phoenix can take advantage of a broad array of technology discounts to help them complete their online degree programs. The discounts include software and peripherals, as well as devices such as smartphones, tablets and, of course, laptops.

CollegeAmerica

Undergraduate students enrolled in CollegeAmerica degree programs are offered laptops with their paid tuition. As with most other schools on this list CollegeAmerica owns the laptop while you’re enrolled, but you get to keep the computer once you graduate, you can keep the laptop.

St. John’s University

Full-time undergraduate students at St. John’s can choose from one of four laptop models that the school offer upon enrollment. The tuition and fees cover the complete cost of the device, unless you choose MacBook Pro, which requires an additional surcharge. While you’re enrolled, the computer belongs to St. John’s, but the laptop is yours to keep after graduation.

Northwest Missouri State University

Incoming, full-time freshmen are offered laptops at Northwest Missouri State University offers laptops to all of its full-time, incoming freshmen. While the school does have a brick-and-mortar campus, several of its programs can be completed online and on a full-time basis.

Liberty University Online

While Liberty University Online doesn’t directly provide its students with a laptop or tablet, it offers a marketplace where students and other constituents can purchase devices and software at ‘deep educational discounts’. Federal financial aid regulations allow you to use aid funds to purchase computer equipment and software. Once enrolled, you could use such funds to take advantage of Liberty’s technology discounts.

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Breaking bad…habits

This Reader Story comes from Brian. Brian blogs at Debt Discipline, where he writes about his family’s personal experience with debt and paying off over $109k in debt. You can follow Brian on twitter @debtdiscipline. http://www.debtdiscipline.com/Some reader stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success or failure. These stories feature folks with all levels of financial maturity and income. Want to submit your own reader story? Here’s how.We didn’t accumulate our debt in one night, it just felt that way. It took years of overspending to rack up over $109k in consumer debt, but in the summer of 2010 we were out of cash and had maxed out all five of our credit cards. …

via Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance That Makes Sense.:

This Reader Story comes from Brian. Brian blogs at Debt Discipline, where he writes about his family’s personal experience with debt and paying off over $109k in debt. You can follow Brian on twitter @debtdiscipline. http://www.debtdiscipline.com/

Some reader stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success or failure. These stories feature folks with all levels of financial maturity and income. Want to submit your own reader story? Here’s how.

We didn’t accumulate our debt in one night, it just felt that way. It took years of overspending to rack up over $109k in consumer debt, but in the summer of 2010 we were out of cash and had maxed out all five of our credit cards. Our debt-to-income ratio had ballooned and there was no more borrowing that could be done.

As a husband and father of three children and the one handling the finances in the house at the time, it felt like the debt appeared over night as I told the family we couldn’t afford a family vacation that summer. They were disappointed and I was embarrassed that I let it get to this point.

Out of borrowing options (which was the best thing that happen to us), it forced us to look for other options. I hit the Internet looking for information, hoping to find a get-out-of-debt-quick scheme that I had been overlooking for all these years and would still be able to salvage our summer vacation.

What I found was a number of personal finance blogs and a guy named Dave Ramsey. I read as much information online as possible and picked up a copy of Dave’s book at my local library, which I read over a weekend.

I was shocked to find that there was no secret to being debt free, that the basic principles were common sense. Spend less then you make, keep a budget, have an emergency fund, and communicate with your spouse. These were all new to us. We typically spent more than we made, using credit cards to pay for things. We never had a plan and did not discuss our finances as a family.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

That changed in June of 2010. We changed our bad habits, we stopped overspending, and we began communicating and began to work a debt snowball.

We made changes in our daily lives, as a family, to help repay our debt. We gave up items that I would call luxury items, things that were wants not needs. For example, I gave up Sirius satellite radio, my wife cut back on salon visits, and my children gave up GameFly.

We made changes in our food budget. We stopped eating out — even fast food would cost a family of five between $30 and $35 and a chain restaurant was a minimum $75 bill. Now when we do eat out, we enjoy it much more. We made better choices when grocery shopping. We don’t buy as much food each week and wasting food is throwing money away each week.

We learned to say “No” often, to family, friends, co-workers, etc. If it wasn’t in our budget, we politely said no. If someone pushed back, we would explain what we were working on with our finances.

We have made a point to include our three children, ages 14, 14 and 11, in our budget discussions. We want them to understand why we are making these changes and prepare them for their futures. We don’t want them to make the mistakes we have made.

Paying it forward

We began to talk about our finances with family and friends. I’m surprised at how often people respond with their own tales of debt issues when we share our story. We often share as much information as we can, supplying resources like websites and books, also suggesting that they look at their own bank or credit union for additional information. Most financial institutions offer free debt/credit counseling.

We have purchased many copies of Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover” and have given them away as gifts. I have seen various reactions to people receiving the book. Some read it in just a few days and start making changes. Others have never opened them and the books are now collecting dust. It’s not bothersome to see the book collecting dust; it’s totally up to the individual to take action. For those whom I have helped, I’m glad that I have been able to provide valuable information.

It brings a smile to my face to know I helped them make a change in their own finances. Now they have information that they didn’t have before. All I ask in return is that they pay it forward. When they finish the book, they pass it on to someone else and ask that person to do the same.

Fast forward 42 months and it’s clear to me now that there are no big secrets to personal finance, no get-rich-quick schemes; most of it is common sense. That’s not what I thought years ago.

With a little research and a little help, you can dig your way out of most situations. Taking it a step further, I have sat down with some friends and family to review their finances to give them my expert opinion. I’m half-joking, but I feeling like an expert now compared with where I was three years ago. I continue to read books, articles and blogs as we continue paying down our debt, increasing our knowledge as we go.

We have paid off $84k in 42 months. The repayment of our outstanding debt is just the first step in the process. It feels good to be on the right track and share this information with others. I would not change the last 42 months. The sacrifices have been so worth it. The entire family has managed. It hasn’t always been easy, but we keep the end goal in mind of being debt free. Having a surplus of over $2k per month can really keep your family motivated too.

What have been your personal keys to your financial success? Have you done anything outside of the general/generic guidelines to reach financial success?

Reminder: This is a story from one of your fellow readers. Please be nice. It can be scary to put your story out in public for the first time. Remember that this guest author isn’t a professional writer, and is just learning about money like you are. Unduly nasty comments on readers’ stories will be removed.

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Four ways to secure the nod of angel investors

Four ways to secure the nod of angel investors Angel investor | Business funding | Start Up funding | Investor | Venture Capital | Business PlanHome | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Internet Partners | Contact us | Instant Mortgage Quotes | Related Articles | Funded BlogAll Rights Reserved. Copyright 2011 Funded.com; business funding via Funded’s Blog:Securing an investment from an angel investor is considered as one of the most difficult aspects of establishing a business startup. For many, this is even harder than coming up with a good idea for a successful business venture.Fortunately, there are numerous angel investors out there who can provide financial support to business startups that have potential to make it big in the market. But for entrepreneurs, …

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Four ways to secure the nod of angel investors

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Securing an investment from an angel investor is considered as one of the most difficult aspects of establishing a business startup. For many, this is even harder than coming up with a good idea for a successful business venture.

Fortunately, there are numerous angel investors out there who can provide financial support to business startups that have potential to make it big in the market. But for entrepreneurs, the common problem is not finding them. Rather, they have a hard time securing the nod of these angel investors. Here are some ways to improve an entrepreneur’s pitch in order to be able to secure investments from angel investors:

Know the audience

A business pitch should vary depending on the character of the potential angel investor. Entrepreneurs should not rely heavily on a “standard pitch” and develop something that could connect more to the possible partners. A pitch should vary depending on various factors such as age, gender, background, and knowledge on the specific market, among others.

Be in charge

Business owners must show to their potential angel investors that they are the ones in charge of the startup. One can get the trust – and later on the deal – by showing that he or she can effectively manage the business to make it successful. In order to do this, business owners must show their expertise on the market as well as exude confidence that the venture will succeed.

Entrepreneurs, however, are cautioned not to show too much confidence on the business. After all, potential angel investors prefer realistic figures over imaginary ones.

Present relevant information

During presentation of business pitches, a number of business owners often start by presenting too much information as regards the market and the business operations itself. Most of the time, this approach is seen as a move that often ends the potential deal. Rather than presenting too much information, entrepreneurs must stick to basic data that will inform angel investors about the market and keep them interested.

Among these data include the current status of the market, as well as the basic figures concerning the business such as the capital and potential revenue in a matter of years.

Be practical

Finally, business owners must keep it practical when presenting before potential angel investors. While it is necessary to inform them of the business operations, going through every single detail of the business is not an appropriate content for a pitch. Instead, entrepreneurs should just highlight the said information and ask the potential partners if they want to know more about this.

More detailed information and useful advice can be found at http://www.funded.com Created by Mark Favre, it offers expertise and assistance with developing and funding your concept, including a private forum for queries and discussions. If you need access to investors and funding providers, please do check our website.http://www.funded.com

Copyright2013 Funded.com llc

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What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing?

What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing?Nov 5th, 2013 · 0 CommentWhat’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing? As the Internet, mobile technology, and media continue to evolve at lighting speed, it has created a lot of confusion about what it takes to effectively market a business these days, and as time goes on, more and more questions just keep surfacing.What social media platforms should you use and how? Should you opt for free traffic generation or paid online advertisements? Should your business use mobile marketing? What keywords should you aim for? Should you even worry about keywords? In-bound marketing or out-bound marketing? Self-promotion or paid promotion? On and on…One common question among small business owners is whether …

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What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing?

As the Internet, mobile technology, and media continue to evolve at lighting speed, it has created a lot of confusion about what it takes to effectively market a business these days, and as time goes on, more and more questions just keep surfacing.What social media platforms should you use and how? Should you opt for free traffic generation or paid online advertisements? Should your business use mobile marketing? What keywords should you aim for? Should you even worry about keywords? In-bound marketing or out-bound marketing? Self-promotion or paid promotion? On and on…One common question among small business owners is whether differences exist between B2B and B2C marketing. Looking into the matter, however, reveals a pretty straight-forward answer. Though the basic …

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As the Internet, mobile technology, and media continue to evolve at lighting speed, it has created a lot of confusion about what it takes to effectively market a business these days, and as time goes on, more and more questions just keep surfacing. What social media platforms should you use and how? Should you opt [...]

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Lean Analytics: The Best Numbers for Non-Tech Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Analytics spark more questions and discussion than almost any other aspect of the Lean Startup method. If you’re coming to them from outside the tech sector, the language around analytics can be particularly confusing. Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies. The webcast is this Friday, October 25, at 10a PT and includes live Q&A with participants. Registration is free. For those new to analytics, Alistair and Ben have a free Udemy course well worth checking out. It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use…

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Lean Analytics: The Best Numbers for Non-Tech Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Analytics spark more questions and discussion than almost any other aspect of the Lean Startup method. If you’re coming to them from outside the tech sector, the language around analytics can be particularly confusing. Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies. The webcast is this Friday, October 25, at 10a PT and includes live Q&A with participants. Registration is free.

For those new to analytics, Alistair and Ben have a free Udemy course well worth checking out. It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. And it’s also a great starting point for learning the basic vocabulary and methods for analytics, especially for anyone in non-tech startups, where this kind of language is less prevalent. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. And, Alistair carefully breaks down cohort analysis, a method of grouping users according to a shared criterion (all the users who joined in a given month, for instance, or during a particular campaign), and then demonstrates how you can test with those cohorts to yield actionable information. And, Ben goes over the difference between “leading” and “lagging” indicators–with the former able to tell you how to create growth by creating effective changes.

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly–they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs. It’s here that analytics are important in checking your or your investors’ natural impulses to jump ahead to the next phase.

To help turn the conversation specifically to non-tech companies—the topic of our webcast this week—we asked Alistair to answer a few questions.

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book:

Alistair: We’ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. As operators of an accelerator—and founders in our own right—Ben and I had constantly struggled with what the “right” numbers are for a business. We decided to find out, and talked with around 130 founders, entrepreneurs, investors and analysts. The results were revealing: most people didn’t know what “normal” was, but there were clear patterns that stood out.

While many of the organizations were technical, we also spoke to big non-tech companies, and smaller businesses like restaurant owners. Nearly all of the ones who’d been successful went through a natural process of customer development—what we call the “empathy” stage—followed by a tight focus on stickiness, then virality, then paid acquisition, and finally scaling.

LSC: What’s an example of one metric, other than revenue, that you might look at for a non-tech product?

Alistair: There are plenty. The Net Promoter Score is an obvious one for an established product—how likely are you to tell someone else about the product or service. It’s a good measurement because it captures both satisfaction and virality. Customer support numbers, trouble-tickets, returns and complaints are good too. But they’re all lagging indicators. In other words, they show you the horse left the barn.

Consider a restaurant. Revenue is a good, obvious metric; but maybe the number of people who don’t leave a tip is a leading indicator of revenue. If you could find a way to measure that, and then you understood that there was a strong correlation between tipping rates or amounts and revenue, then you could experiment with things more cleanly. You could try different menus to different tables, and then look at tip amounts, and figure out earlier in the process whether the new menu was better or worse.

The reality, though, is that every company today is a tech company. The dominant channel by which we reach customers is the Internet, whether you’re a small local restaurant on Yelp or a global maker of tissue paper. And the dominant tool we use to measure back-office operations is technology, from inventory to supply chain management to procurement to human resources.

The beautiful thing about this, to someone who’s analytically minded, is that while humans are awful at recording things, software has no choice but to do so. As a result, we’re awash in a sea of data that might yield good insights about the business. The challenge is to know what the biggest problem in the business is right now, then to find a metric that shows you, as early as possible in the customer lifecycle, whether that problem is getting better or worse.

LSC: Here’s a common problem: you start measuring something, and you assume that the results will be clear enough to help you make additional decision about your product (for example, to pivot, persevere or kill an idea)–but then the results are hazy. What’s a good step to take when your measurement Magic 8-Ball says, “Ask again later”?

Alistair: This is why it’s so important to draw a line in the sand beforehand. Scientists know this: you formulate a hypothesis, and then you devise an experiment that will reveal the results. Unfortunately, as founders, we’re so enthusiastic, so governed by our reality distortion field, that we often run the experiment and then find the results we want. This is confirmation bias, and it kills.

We often tell founders that a business plan is nonsense. A business model, on the other hand, is a snapshot of your business assumptions at this moment in time. Once you’ve stated those assumptions clearly, you run experiments to see if they’re valid. We spoke with the head of innovation at one Fortune 500 company who told us his only metric for early-stage innovation is “how many assumptions have you tested this week?”

The confusion isn’t that the results are hazy. It’s that the business model is complex. If I think I can sell 100 widgets at $10 apiece, and they cost me $5 to build and market, that’s a business model. But if my measurements show me that people will only pay $8 a widget, is that a failure? No—it means I now need to revise my assumptions and test whether people will buy 125 widgets instead, so I can generate the same revenue (and adjust my margins accordingly).

The Magic 8-Ball seldom says “Ask again later.” What it often says is “Revise your assumptions and test something else.” That’s why the most critical attribute of early-stage product development is the ability to learn quickly.

LSC: For companies that aren’t used to thinking in terms of metrics, any tips for getting a team on board?

Alistair: As we say in the book, once, the leader was someone who could convince others to act in the absence of information. Today, the leader is someone who can ask the right questions. Data-driven business is here today; it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s changing, slowly. But there are things you can do to hasten it along.

The first is to use a small data victory to create an appetite for a bigger one. Take, for example, David Boyle at EMI. The company had billions of transactions locked away that might reveal how and why people bought music. But there was little support for analyzing it. So David started his own analysis project, surveying a million people about their music. This was brand new data, and he evangelized it within the organization. Everyone wanted some. Once there was a demand for this data, he earned the political capital to dig into the vast troves of historical information.

The second is to treat everything as a study. Many companies like certainty. We’ve joked that if a startup is an organization in search of a sustainable, repeatable business model, then a big company is an organization designed to perpetuate such a model. That’s in direct conflict with disruption and innovation. So how do you deal with a boss who wants certainty? When we spoke with DHL, they told us that they consider every new initiative a learning exercise that might just happen to produce a new product or service. They’ve launched new business ideas that failed—but that failure taught them valuable things about a particular market, which they then shared with customers and used for strategic planning.

The simple reality is that with cloud computing, prototyping, social media, and other recent tools, the cost of trying something out is now vanishingly small. In fact, it’s often cheaper than the old cost of a big study or research project. Companies need to learn that trying something out is how you conduct the study. Let’s say you want to know about the burgeoning market for mobile widgets. So you create a mobile widget MVP. If it fails, you’ve successfully studied it. If it succeeds, you’ve successfully studied it, and built a new venture along the way.

The third is, when in doubt, collect and analyze data. We’ve done some work with the folks at Code for America. In one case, a group was trying to improve the Failure to Appear rate for people accused of a crime. This is a big deal: if you don’t show up for court, it triggers a downward spiral of arrests and incarceration. But there were a lot of challenges to tackling the problem directly, so they took a different approach: they created tools to visualize the criminal justice system as a supply chain, making it easier to identify bottlenecks that showed where the system needed work most urgently.

If you’re an intrapreneur tilting at corporate windmills, you need to embrace these kinds of tactics. Use small data victories to give management a taste of what’s possible. Frame your work as a study that will be useful even if it fails. And when you run into roadblocks, grab data and analyze it in new ways to find where you’ll get the most leverage.

–

Our webcast with Alistair and Ben, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies, is this Friday; register today and come ready with your questions. Alistair will also be giving a workshop at The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11 in San Francisco. Join us there.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Analytics spark more questions and discussion than almost any other aspect of the Lean Startup method. If you’re coming to them from outside the tech sector, the language around analytics can be particularly confusing. Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies. The webcast is this Friday, October 25, at 10a PT and includes live Q&A with participants. Registration is free.For those new to analytics, Alistair and Ben have a free Udemy course well worth checking out. It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. And it’s also a great starting point for learning the basic vocabulary and methods for analytics, especially for anyone in non-tech startups, where this kind of language is less prevalent. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. And, Alistair carefully breaks down cohort analysis, a method of grouping users according to a shared criterion (all the users who joined in a given month, for instance, or during a particular campaign), and then demonstrates how you can test with those cohorts to yield actionable information. And, Ben goes over the difference between “leading” and “lagging” indicators–with the former able to tell you how to create growth by creating effective changes.In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. …

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