5 Ideas Digital Marketing effectiveness, Your Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Succeed

under the jobs Act, small companies now have two methods of equity crowdfunding to boost tens of millions of greenbacks in capital online from the general public. sadly, most of the people think that each one a company needs to do is publish a fab video, some fancy portraits and a few attractive text, and the funding cash will begin pouring in. mistaken.

As some of the most effective experts on crowdfunding, i've seen this again and again. When corporations question me why their fairness crowdfunding campaign failed, the answer is almost all the time the same -- they did not market the offering appropriately. Crowdfunding shouldn't be the "field of dreams." just because you build it, does no longer imply traders will come. companies need to drive investors to their fairness crowdfunding campaign with effective advertising and marketing.

Ever surprise why you checked out that system on Amazon, and for the following two weeks you might be all at once bombarded through ads for that system or equivalent merchandise each time you are on-line? Welcome to the wonders of digital promotion. any person is paying to serve you these commercials, realizing you're a extremely possible purchaser according to hidden bits of information referred to as pixels and cookies some company was type sufficient to attach to your computer when you browsed. by having a look at anything on-line, you may have transform a hot result in any person seeking to promote you something.

the identical logic works for fairness crowdfunding. If your organization is funding a new product, for example, it’s easy and cost effective to place commercials in entrance of attainable buyers, according to data of their prior on-line habits. A crowdfunding marketing plan includes many elements, but these 5 guidelines associated to digital advertising and marketing are very important to fairness crowdfunding success.

1. Use Facebook Advertisements.
an efficient fb advert campaign allows a company to successfully target possible buyers in line with fb customers’ region, demographics and pursuits. Stephanie Heinatz, CEO of The Consociate crew, just isn't only a public members of the family guru with a unique expertise in the digital advertising area, but has additionally successfully marketed a couple of equity crowdfunding campaigns. “fb is the #1 platform in social media advertising and marketing where which you could goal a personalised target audience. No extra wasting cash on a megaphone of messaging to who-knows-who. fb is like selecting up the cellphone and selling immediately to any person.”

2. Use “lookalike” Audiences.
in case you have an email database of consumers or traders, you can create a lookalike audience and serve ads to them on fb. Delray Wannemacher of First seem to be Equities is a financial trade veteran whose success in driving buyers to equity crowdfunding offerings comes from turning in ads to lookalike audiences produced from his proprietary investor database. Wannemacher exemplifies this with a case learn about displaying the influence that a well-designed, targeted target audience advert campaign can have on a crowdfunding providing. “One facebook ad campaign we ran showed an improvement on the amount of investments per day of 252 %, with the typical funding being three times greater than ahead of the campaign.”

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
essentially the most basic form of SEM involves deciding to buy sure search terms and having Google power traffic to your crowdfunding marketing campaign in accordance with what you paid for. Heinatz explains "With SEM, we all know any individual is a potential investor in response to their search phrases, so you're in an instant achieving out to individuals who have already recognized themselves as someone having a look to make a purchase or an investment.”

4. Twitter and LinkedIn ads.
With these two common social media web sites, Heinatz emphasizes context over content material. “Twitter is a fast moving headline supply, but you should use Twitter promoting to promote and develop your group. LinkedIn advertisements work very best in a B2B context and can be used to pressure folks to a lead generation web page for the correct crowdfunding choices.”

5. Email advertising.
whereas e mail marketing may not be as attractive as newer marketing ways akin to social media and video, it may well nonetheless be an enormous factor in using a a success equity crowdfunding providing. Rob Clarke and Andrew Eckard of Lin Digital have spent almost a decade crafting successful digital advertising strategies for native, regional and nationwide companies, and both agree that e mail is a an important think about driving conversions. Eckard explains, “there are plenty of digital systems to be had to deliver your message, but just right old skool e mail advertising continues to provide one of the best opportunities to construct relationships and drive sales.” Clarke delivered, “Early momentum is a very powerful in any crowdfunding marketing campaign, and constructing your e-mail listing to engage folks in what you might be doing earlier than asking them to invest or contribute will put you at a huge benefit on launch day.”

Digital advertising and marketing is an essential a part of each equity crowdfunding offering, just as it has been for rewards-based totally crowdfunding. Working with the suitable professionals with the right strategy and realizing who to target is the important thing to success. One closing tip out of your favourite crowdfunding knowledgeable: Digital advertising and marketing is a process that takes time. Most say it takes a potential investor seeing a standard of five commercials earlier than they make a decision to take a position. converting digital merchandising is a process, so begin early within the crowdfunding campaign.

Hackers Exploited Word Flaw for Months While Microsoft Investigated

To understand why it is so difficult to defend computers from even moderately capable hackers, consider the case of the security flaw officially known as CVE-2017-0199.

The bug was unusually dangerous but of a common genre: it was in Microsoft software, could allow a hacker to seize control of a personal computer with little trace, and was fixed April 11 in Microsoft's regular monthly security update.

But it had travelled a rocky, nine-month journey from discovery to resolution, which cyber-security experts say is an unusually long time.

Google's security researchers, for example, give vendors just 90 days' warning before publishing flaws they find. Microsoft declined to say how long it usually takes to patch a flaw.

While Microsoft investigated, hackers found the flaw and manipulated the software to spy on unknown Russian speakers, possibly in Ukraine.

And a group of thieves used it to bolster their efforts to steal from millions of online bank accounts in Australia and other countries.

Those conclusions and other details emerged from interviews with researchers at cyber-security firms who studied the events and analysed versions of the attack code.

Microsoft confirmed the sequence of events.

The tale began last July, when Ryan Hanson, a 2010 Idaho State University graduate and consultant at boutique security firm Optiv Inc in Boise, found a weakness in the way that Microsoft Word processes documents from another format. That allowed him to insert a link to a malicious programme that would take control of a computer.

Combining flaws
Hanson spent some months combining his find with other flaws to make it more deadly, he said on Twitter. Then in October he told Microsoft. The company often pays a modest bounty of a few thousands dollars for the identification of security risks.

Soon after that point six months ago, Microsoft could have fixed the problem, the company acknowledged. But it was not that simple. A quick change in the settings on Word by customers would do the trick, but if Microsoft notified customers about the bug and the recommended changes, it would also be telling hackers about how to break in.

Alternatively, Microsoft could have created a patch that would be distributed as part of its monthly software updates. But the company did not patch immediately and instead dug deeper. It was not aware that anyone was using Hanson's method, and it wanted to be sure it had a comprehensive solution.

"We performed an investigation to identify other potentially similar methods and ensure that our fix addresses [sic] more than just the issue reported," Microsoft said through a spokesman, who answered emailed questions on the condition of anonymity. "This was a complex investigation."

Hanson declined interview requests.

The saga shows that Microsoft's progress on security issues, as well as that of the software industry as a whole, remains uneven in an era when the stakes are growing dramatically.

The United States has accused Russia of hacking political party emails to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, a charge Russia denies, while shadowy hacker groups opposed to the US government have been publishing hacking tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.

Attacks begin
It is unclear how the unknown hackers initially found Hanson's bug. It could have been through simultaneous discovery, a leak in the patching process, or even hacking against Optiv or Microsoft.

In January, as Microsoft worked on a solution, the attacks began.

The first known victims were sent emails enticing them to click on a link to documents in Russian about military issues in Russia and areas held by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, researchers said. Their computers were then infected with eavesdropping software made by Gamma Group, a private company that sells to agencies of many governments.

The best guess of cyber-security experts is that one of Gamma's customers was trying to get inside the computers of soldiers or political figures in Ukraine or Russia; either of those countries, or any of their neighbours or allies, could have been responsible. Such government espionage is routine.

The initial attacks were carefully aimed at a small number of targets and so stayed below the radar. But in March, security researchers at FireEye Inc noticed that a notorious piece of financial hacking software known as Latenbot was being distributed using the same Microsoft bug.


FireEye probed further, found the earlier Russian-language attacks, and warned Microsoft. The company, which confirmed it was first warned of active attacks in March, got on track for an April 11 patch.

Then, what counts as disaster in the world of bug-fixers struck. Another security firm, McAfee, saw some attacks using the Microsoft Word flaw on April 6.

After what it described as "quick but in-depth research," it established that the flaw had not been patched, contacted Microsoft, and then blogged about its discovery on April 7.

The blog post contained enough detail that other hackers could mimic the attacks.

Other software security professionals were aghast that McAfee did not wait, as Optiv and FireEye were doing, until the patch came out.

McAfee Vice President Vincent Weafer blamed "a glitch in our communications with our partner Microsoft" for the timing. He did not elaborate.

By April 9, a programme to exploit the flaw was on sale on underground markets for criminal hackers, said FireEye researcher John Hultquist.

The next day, attacks were mainstream. Someone used it to send documents booby-trapped with Dridex banking-fraud software to millions of computers in Australia.

Finally, on the Tuesday, about six months after hearing from Hanson, Microsoft made the patch available. As always, some computer owners are lagging behind and have not installed it.

Ben-Gurion University employees in Israel were hacked, after the patch, by attackers linked to Iran who took over their email accounts and sent infected documents to their contacts at technology companies and medical professionals, said Michael Gorelik, vice president of cyber security firm Morphisec.

When Microsoft patched, it thanked Hanson, a FireEye researcher and its own staff.

A six-month delay is bad but not unheard of, said Marten Mickos, chief executive of HackerOne, which coordinates patching efforts between researchers and vendors.

"Normal fixing times are a matter of weeks," Mickos said.

Privately-held Optiv said through a spokeswoman that it usually gives vendors 45 days to make fixes before publishing research when appropriate, and that it "materially followed" that practice in this case.

Optiv is now comparing the details of what Hanson told Microsoft with what the spies and criminals used in the wild, trying to find out if the researcher's work was partly responsible for the worldwide hacking spree, the spokeswoman said.

The spree included one or more people who created a hacking tool for what FireEye's Hultquist said is probably a national government - and then appearing to double-dip by also selling it to a criminal group.

If the patching took time, others who learned of the flaw moved quickly.

On the final weekend before the patch, the criminals could have sold it along to the Dridex hackers, or the original makers could have cashed in a third time, Hultquist said, effectively staging a last clearance sale before it lost peak effectiveness.

It is unclear how many people were ultimately infected or how much money was stolen.
refer from gadgets 360

85% enterprises will adopt Windows 10 by 2017 end

Nearly 85 per cent of enterprises are expected to adopt the Windows 10 operating system by the end of this year, market research firm Gartner predicted on Tuesday. According to the survey that involved six countries including India, most of the organisations are recognising the need to migrate to Windows 10.

“Large businesses are either already engaged in Windows 10 upgrades or have delayed upgrading until 2018. This likely reflects the transition of legacy applications to Windows 10 or replacing those legacy applications before Windows 10 migration takes place,” said Ranjit Atwal, Research Director at Gartner, in a statement.

Forty nine per cent of respondents said that the security improvements in Windows 10 drove them for the migration, while 38 per cent of the respondents said that it was cloud integration capabilities that prompted them to adopt this OS.

However, budgetary approval is not straightforward because Windows 10 is not perceived as an immediate business-critical project. “It is not surprising that one in four respondents expect issues with budgeting,” said Atwal.
The survey further noted that respondents’ intention to purchase convertible notebooks increased as organisations shifted from the testing and pilot phases into the buying and deployment phases.
Reffers from financial express

Microsoft Windows 10 Cloud minimum specs requirement leaked ahead of May 2 launch

Microsoft's rumored Windows 10 Cloud-based notebooks will compete with Google Chromebooks.

Microsoft is gearing up for an event in New York on May 2 where the company is expected to make some major announcements. While the company has been tight-lipped about the announcements it is going to make, the invite sent to media hinted at the unveiling of products aimed at the educational market. Ahead of the event, a leaked document is doing the rounds on the web that claims Microsoft is working on a cloud-based version of its Windows 10. It further reveals the company will be launching a reference hardware that will be competing with Google’s Chromebooks.

Microsoft’s much-anticipated Windows 10 Cloud is believed to be a stripped down version of the main operating system, built specifically for students. A leaked screenshot from Microsft’s document titled “Windows 10 Cloud performance”, published by Windows Central, reveals details about minimum specifications required by a hardware to run Windows 10 Cloud and the same have been compared with Chromebook specifications as well.

The benchmarks for a device, conveniently dubbed as ‘CloudBook’, running Windows 10 Cloud includes a battery life of over 10 hours and a quick 20-sec boot-up time. Other noteworthy minimum specifications required are a quad-core Intel Celeron processor or above, 4GB of RAM, 32 GB or 64GB internal storage and Fast eMMC or Solid State Drive (SSD) for storage. It also includes an optional pen or touch-support.

Refer from BER

Best Chrome Extensions to Block Ads

All publishers need to run ads to keep the lights on, but sometimes we can go too far. Opera CTO Bruce Lawson recently quoted a report to say that over 50 percent of all Internet traffic is just ads. That means that half of your limited FUP is probably wasted on advertisements. If you want to take control of this and lower your bills, then you've probably thought about installing an ad-blocker.

If you're wondering about how to block ads on the Internet, the best option is to just install an ad-blocker on your browser. For this article, we're specifically looking at ad-blockers for Google Chrome since it is the most popular Web browser, but the options and steps are pretty simple and pretty similar even for other browsers such as Safari, or Firefox.

On your phone, many popular browsers such as the Opera browser and UC Browser come with built-in adblockers, but on your PC you'll need to install an extension. We looked at some of the most popular adblock extensions available by seeing what all was being recommended by others online, looking at user reviews, and then trying out the extensions ourselves.


Here are the ad block extensions for Chrome that we liked, and why we liked them.

1) AdBlock Plus
One of the best known ad blockers on the market is AdBlock Plus or ABP. It's available on most browsers and has its own Android app as well. Setup is fast, and after that you can forget about it altogether.

ABP does allow some ads through - the advertisers have to meet some requirements to be 'non-intrusive' but you can change this in the settings. ABP also blocks video ads in YouTube, and all noisy ads, and you can set it to block tracking, malware, and social media buttons.

Get AdBlock Plus on the Chrome Web Store.

2) AdBlock

Both AdBlock, and then AdBlock Plus, came up as two separate adblockers for Firefox. When Chrome came along, AdBlock was launched for Chrome by another developer, before the AdBlock Plus team started to support the browser. And so, despite not being connected, the two most popular adblockers ended up with similar names.

AdBlock works a lot like AdBlock plus. Install, leave the defaults on and just get browsing. With AdBlock, malware protection is on from the start. You can also disable AdBlock on individual pages, not just sites, and you can see all the resources it is blocking. It also allows you to whitelist specific YouTube channels, so you can support the creators you want to.

Get AdBlock on the Chrome Web Store.

3)  Ghostery

Perhaps the most comprehensive tracker blocker available, Ghostery has a slightly involved setup process. Once you've added it to your Chrome browser, you're taken to the setup page, and shown all the different types of trackers that it can watch for, and given the option of choosing which ones to block.

Most users will typically opt to block all, but do note that this can also disrupt some site functionality, such as chat assistance on sites, or comments sections. Ghostery is extremely popular, not just for the blocking, but also the analytics it does - at any time, you can click on its icon to see how many trackers are on the site you're visiting, and get updates on what these trackers do.

Get Ghostery on the Chrome Web Store.

4) Privacy Badger

Created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group based in the US, Privacy Badger isn't exactly an ad-blocker. Instead, it focuses on disallowing any visible or invisible third party scripts that can track you over the Internet. As it happens, most of these trackers are used for advertisements.

This means that Privacy Badger does not block ads that are not otherwise harmful or tracking you. As a result, some ads will still show up. But at least you'll know that companies you've never heard of aren't spying on you through ads.

Get Privacy Badger on the Chrome Web Store.

To install any of these extensions, just go to its page on the Chrome Web Store, and click on the + Add to Chrome button. Follow the on-screen instructions (if any) and you're set. Once again, publishers depend on advertising to stay in business, and if there's a publisher whose content you like, whitelist it in your adblock.

Refer from gadgets 360 

Yahoo Hack: information on some 500 million people were stolen

Yahoo hack analysis shows little evidence of foreign involvement

Last week, Yahoo owned up to the largest hack known to have occurred in computing history. Passwords, logins, and other account information on some 500 million people were stolen in the heist. At the time, Yahoo claimed that the hack was the work of state-sponsored actors — but independent analysts working on analyzing the hack have begun pushing back that assessment, while current and former Yahoo employees say security was a distant priority at Yahoo.

InfoArmor has published a timeline and history of the attack against Yahoo. The first offers to sell Yahoo-derived data appeared on April 3, 2016. According to InfoArmor’s analysis, the individuals attempting to sell the Yahoo data (and other major data sets for websites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Dropbox, MySpace, and Tumblr) are fronting the data sets for criminal groups, as opposed to acting directly on behalf of government agencies in foreign countries. It’s not always easy to tease these relationships apart, since criminal hackers sometimes sell data to nation-states, or could be hired to work directly on their behalf.

The graphic below shows the proposed relationships between a set of professional, Eastern European black hats in green, English-speaking threat actors (in red), and a potential group of state-sponsored actors who purchase data from the digital fences but weren’t directly involved in the hack itself (purple).

YahooPIC8

It’s generally considered difficult to prove that any single government was responsible for a hack. But these attacks tend to be extremely sophisticated, with carefully crafted malware that goes after specific targets. If conventional malware attacks are WW2-era carpet bombing, targeted, state-sponsored malware are modern, self-guided ‘smart’ weapons with precision strike capabilities and advanced munitions. The InfoArmor analysis also revealed the scope of what was taken from Yahoo: login ids, country codes, recovery emails, date-of-birth records, MD5 password hashes, cell phone numbers, and zip codes were all stolen.

Yahoo: Too terrified of losing users to protect them
An investigation by the New York Times doesn’t paint a flattering picture of Yahoo’s security infrastructure. While Yahoo created a dedicated security team after high-profile attacks took down other services, it rarely listened to its own experts, dubbed the “Paranoids” internally. Yahoo didn’t implement a bug bounty program until 2013, three years after Google debuted its own. In 2013, the Snowden leaks demonstrated Yahoo was a frequent target of hack attempts, but it took the company a full year to even hire a chief information security officer.

Yahoo’s security team pushed for end-to-end encryption for all Yahoo products. They were shut down by protests from the senior VP overseeing email and messaging services, Jeff Bonforte, who claimed end-to-end encryption would limit Yahoo’s ability to search and index email or offer new services to customers. When Yahoo’s new chief security officer went to bat for user privacy and security, he found little support from CEO Marissa Mayer. The Paranoids were starved for resources, and their suggestions for improving security through superior intrusion detection were denied as well, according to the report. Even a request to automatically reset passwords for all users in the wake of a major breach was denied.

Why? Money and reach. Mayer and other executives were concerned that any disruption to service — even something as simple as a password reset — could trigger more users to leave the company and seek service elsewhere. Yahoo notified its customers that a hack had occurred, but took no other action to protect its customers. Between the lack of evidence for state-sponsored activity, and growing awareness that the company’s lack of concern for security played a significant role in its own downfall, Yahoo is looking like a worse acquisition for Verizon all the time.

Yahoo management could have used the Snowden leaks to justify a new round of spending and consumer-centric, privacy-friendly changes. After all, it was thanks to Snowden that we found out Yahoo had challenged the government’s right to spy on its customers in multiple secret court battles. Yahoo could have built on that record and appealed to more customers in the process. Instead, it refused to implement best practices because it was afraid of losing market share at an even faster rate.

Reffred: extremetech.com