e-commerce & social media

Staples today announced the launch of its Quick Wins app to help small businesses succeed and grow in the New Year. The Quick Wins app offers business-specific ideas, metrics and community support in one easy-to-access place.

Most small businesses (72%) want assistance getting their business metrics on track, yet two in five (41%) are not sure what business metrics they should focus on in order to ensure their success.

Through Staples Quick Wins app, small businesses will sync their most important business metrics such as Facebook and Twitter engagement, site traffic, sales and tools such as Google Analytics and QuickBooks to pull in key financial, website and marketing metrics that can be tracked daily and weekly. Instagram and MailChimp will be available at a later date....

Via Jeff Domansky

...Over the last few days I’ve been playing with Truth, a similar app for iOS that lets you send anonymous text messages to people in your phone’s contacts.

The interface is a close facsimile of Apple’s default Messages app, so there isn’t much of a learning curve. There is a bit of friction to get started with the app, however: besides the expected popups asking for permission to access your contacts, Truth also makes you register with an email address and password.

...That quibble with the setup process aside, Truth works as advertised. You can choose any contact in your address book to send an anonymous text, and in several tests, messages arrive in about as much time as they would via a regular text. Messages begin with “The truth is” by default, which is meant to inspire compliments or hard truths that might be too awkward to express openly....

Via Jeff Domansky