How tech can transform your business

Over the course of an hour, @MashBusiness covered an array of topics, from industries with the biggest need for change, to how technology can transform the creation and execution of a business idea.

Several influencers took part in this compelling conversation: Erica Kochi, co-founder & co-leader of UNICEF’s Innovation Unit; Halle Tecco, founder & managing director of Rock Health; Jessica Richman, co-founder of uBiome; Jessica Scorpio, founder of Getaround.com; Mike Karnjanaprakorn, CEO of Skillshare; Paul Menta, co-founder of Dock to Dish; Peter Gerard, director of audience development & content operations at Vimeo; and Susan Feldman, co-founder of One King's Lane.

Check out highlights from our chat in the Storify, below:

The Idea Economy. Not many professionals or business leaders are aware of what it is, despite the fact that it's perpetuating almost every aspect of business. As a result, the Idea Economy has helped produce some of the most successful startups and business' to date. In an ever-changing world that's developing and embracing new technologies faster than we can keep up, it's crucial for business owners to break out of the mold of "traditionalism", and jump on board the Idea Economy train, that will catapult you to make bold choices, calculated risks and rewarding experiences.

@mashbusiness and several tech experts and entrepreneurs participated a #BizChats Twitter chat, sponsored by HP Matter, to discuss how businesses in danger of becoming outdated can prosper in a tech-friendly market.

New Apple Watch Sport band colors revealed in Italy

What's This?

The Apple Watch on display In Milan, Italy on April 17, 2015.

Image: Jacopo Raule

Brand new colors for the Apple Watch Sport band emerged during an event in Italy on Friday.
Posted to the Instagram account of Umberta Gnutti Beretta, the new Apple Watch Sport bands colors include red, yellow, light pink and one that appears to be either purple or dark blue.

A photo posted by Umberta Gnutti Beretta (@188e76) on 2 days ago

Retired professional rugby player Will Carling showed off what looks like the red version of the Sport band on Friday via Twitter, just hours before the other colors emerged.
The reveal of the new styles came at the same time Apple was in town to showcase its wearable at the Salone del Mobile event in Milan.
We've already seen several custom Apple Watch designs on the wrists of Tim Cook and some celebrities, but this is the first look we've had at an array of new band styles that may eventually be made available to the public.

Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs: A Look Back at the Man Who Changed Tech

Today would have been the 57th birthday of Apple co-founder and visionary Steve Jobs, who died on Oct. 5, 2011, after a long battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Social media users have been extremely active in wishing the late media mogul a happy birthday, and "Happy Birthday Steve Jobs" is currently trending worldwide on Twitter. A tweet from the official General Electric account this morning read, "Happy Birthday Steve Jobs. Innovation wouldn't be the same without you."
Another popular tweet from numerous users read, "3 Apples changed the world: Adam and Eve's forbidden apple, Newton's apple and finally Steve Jobs's Apple. Happy Birthday Steve Jobs."

How to get 2GB of free Google Drive storage right now

Google is offering a super easy way to get 2GB of extra storage on Google Drive.
By completing the company's Security Checkup, users will get 2GB of storage space added to their accounts. The offers runs until Feb. 17.
Users with Google accounts should be running the checkup regardless. It's a quick and easy way to review your account's security settings. The checkup tracks recent activity, showing which devices the account has used to log in, and users can manage account permissions on their devices. They also have the option of adding a phone number to their Google account for recovery purposes.
Google is offering the storage bonus to raise awareness about Safer Internet Day, which took place on Tuesday. "We have many protections in place to keep people, and their information, secure, but there's also a lot that you can do to protect yourself," the company said in a blog post.
For just a few minutes of your time, 2GB of Drive storage is a pretty good reward for something you should be doing anyway.

Yahoo versus the hedge fund billionaire: A Silicon Valley soap opera

As Yahoo! struggles to stay relevant to a changing Internet, hedge-fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb is vying to take control of the company.

Yahoo!’s homepage was, until recently, the most heavily trafficked website on the planet — although its titular portal, Yahoo.com, recently fell to number 4 — behind Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Yahoo!’s search engine — monstrously popular throughout much of the oughts — is still competing with Bing for the number 2 spot. And its news website is the most visited in the world, maintaining an average of 110,000,000 unique monthly users — compare that to the venerable New York Times, which got about 59,000,000 uniques in March. The steady decline of the once-pioneering tech company, however, can be attributed to many things, depending on whom you ask: A failure of leadership, improperly sizing up competition, lack of innovation — but the sudden announcement last week that Yahoo! had laid off 2,000 of its nearly 14,000 employees was an ominous signal that the Sunnyvale, CA company may have more problems than ways to solve them.
Enter Daniel S. Loeb. He’s a New York hedge-fund guy that couldn’t fit the mold of the cocky, 1 percent, Wall-Streeter any better if he jumped off the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. He bid up the asking price for his company’s Madison Avenue office space so that he could claim the 4,000 foot terrace, “perfect for walking Biggie, his miniature pinscher,” according to a New York Magazine article.
Loeb started his hedge-fund, Third Point LLC, in 1995 with a little over $3 million from family and friends, and even though you’ve likely never heard his name before this moment, he has since turned that business into one of the most successful on Wall Street — he and his partners now manage nearly $9 billion. Among the various complicated financial instruments, bonds, shorts, and everything else that Loeb uses to continuously generate astonishing amounts of capital for himself and his clients, Third Point also happens to own 5.8 percent of Yahoo! stock, making it the single largest shareholder in the web company, with an estimated value of over a billion dollars.

Is Spotify a viable app platform? Brings 100,000 users to Songkick

Songkick says Spotify's app platform has helped it gain 100,000 users in the past three months.

In late November 2011, Spotify unveiled its new app platform. Now, any Spotify user can install apps that enhance their music experience in different ways. Is it working? Well, we know that 100,000 people are using it. Songkick announced on its blog that Spotify has helped his service gain more than 100,000 users in the past three months. 

“We’re both focused on changing the music industry for the better,” CEO Ian Hogarth told Forbes. “Whenever you launch something, it’s always a question of whether it’s going to catch … and this is really promising.”

Songkick is the only concert-finding service currently available on Spotify and was available at the launch of the company’s platform. It scans users playlists and compiles a calendar of possible concerts they could attend in their area. Other notable apps at launch included Billboard, Last.fm, TuneWiki (provides lyrics), Rolling Stone, Soundrop, and others. 

Of course, Spotify’s platform is a bit of a chain itself. The idea was likely inspired by Facebook’s own incorporating of Spotify and other music services into its platform, which helped the music streaming company become a much more visible name in the United States, while also helping Facebook earn some music cred. Spotify hopes it will have a symbiotic relationship with its own app providers. Once it gets enough subscribers, maybe Songkick can open up its own platform and give some other service 10,000 new users, and so on. 

Not everyone is happy with the Swedish start up. The Black Keys were very vocal about their distaste for the service, which they say doesn’t give nearly enough money to artists and record labels. Their anger was also fueled by the fact that Napster co-founder Sean Parker is on the Spotify board.

How to transfer your contacts between iPhone and Android

Learn how to how to transfer your contacts between iPhone and Android with this simple how-to guide.

One of the most annoying aspects of changing phones is making sure all of your contacts are transferred to the new device. In the olden days, this meant manually typing in countless names and phone numbers, but our smartphones can now do most of the work for us. This guide will focus on moving contacts from iPhone to Android, but the main principles of this guide will help out other platforms.

Setup

The first thing you will need to do is to make sure you have a Gmail account, which will make moving contacts to any platform very easy. If you don’t have one, sign up here. Before you even touch your new Android phone, you will want to plug your old iPhone into your computer and open iTunes. Once plugged in, you want to visit your contacts page in iTunes. This page will give you an option of where you want to sync your contacts. You want to select Gmail, and then type in your Gmail account information. This allows Gmail and Apple to update your contacts so that all of the names, numbers, and emails from your phone’s contacts are now in Google.

We suggest that you then login to Gmail to modify those contacts before syncing them with your new phone. If you had a Gmail account prior to this process, you will notice that your contacts list is now much larger, and most likely will have several duplicates. If you have duplicate contacts, you can go through them one by one and modify or delete extra contacts. Google also has a “merge contacts” tool that can attempt to do the same thing. To merge your contacts, you will want to click the “more” button with the downward arrow (near the upper-left portion of the window) while on your Gmail contacts page, a drop-down menu will give you the option to “find and merge duplicates.” Selecting this option will have Google automatically search your contacts for duplicate contacts so you don’t have to.

Transferring contacts

Now that you have your contacts in Gmail all organized exactly how you want them, it’s time to put them on your phone. If you haven’t started up your new phone yet, this process is easy. If you have, it’s still easy, but with an extra step.

When you first boot up your new phone, it will ask you if you want to sync your phone to a Google account. Enter in your Gmail info, and you will be all set. Your phone will automatically import all the contacts from your Gmail.