Blog – Page 2 – Kindling

Do You Have a Business Idea, and Is It an Opportunity?

In the dynamic landscape of digital entrepreneurship, having a business idea is just the starting point. Transforming that idea into a viable opportunity requires a blend of insight, strategy, and innovation. At KINDLING: Software & Marketing Ideas, we specialize in turning your digital aspirations into tangible successes. Let’s explore how to assess if your business idea is truly an opportunity waiting to be seized.

Understanding Viability: The KINDLING Approach:

The journey begins with assessing the viability of your idea. As Harvard Business Review highlights, understanding your target market is critical. But, what does this mean in practice?

Consider Jane, an aspiring entrepreneur with a passion for sustainable fashion. By analyzing market trends and consumer preferences using KINDLING’s tools, she identified a growing demand for eco-friendly apparel among millennials. This insight transformed her idea from a mere concept to a viable business opportunity.

7 Website Design Features That Are Growing In Popularity

Web design is something that never stands still. Just when you think you might have seen everything there is to see, and have a handle on what is current, along comes another trend, update, or new website design technology that moves everything on once more. We say this not to suggest it is negative. In fact, it is quite the opposite as it means that web design never becomes stayed or boring, which can only be a positive.

Positive as it is that web design is in a constant state of evolution, one problem that does arise is that you can lose track of what is currently popular for designing websites. This is especially so if you work outside the web design bubble and wish to know which current web design trends you should be discussing with the designers creating a new website for your business. To help you, we have outlined 7 web design features currently popular and likely to remain so for some time.

#1: Smaller Logos

Whilst having effective branding on your website will never cease to be important, there has been a move away from ‘in your face’ branding. In other words, huge logos dominating the home and other pages are out. Instead, smaller logo designs that appear more like icons are in, as this frees up much of the prime home page real estate for other, more important design elements.

5 Essential Website Functions That cPanel Enables You To Do

Across the huge array of different website hosting companies, you will find a variety of services and functions which are offered to clients. This will include the control panel that is used to manage the website and in the vast majority of cases that will be cPanel. Although not the only control that can be used to manage websites, it is the one that most website owners recognise and have experience of using.

One of the benefits of cPanel’s widespread use across most hosting companies is it means that should a website owner wish to switch hosting companies, or at least try a different one for a new website, there is not a huge learning curve with respect to managing that website. cPanel looks and operates pretty much the same on all hosting accounts, which means if you are happy with it on one web hosting service, your will be happy with it on any other that uses it.

Who Should I Invite to My Kindling Campaign?

Customers often ask about how large of an audience should they invite to a particular innovation challenge or topic. While there’s no right answer, there is an important consideration to think through when selecting an audience—how size impacts the potential for serendipity as well as the potential for noise for your participants:

Trade-off

As an example, picture your Kindling Campaign where you’re trying to solve a problem that’s been plaguing your business. As you increase the audience size, you increase the likelihood that people’s different perspectives will combine to help inform a potential solution (see this described by Rick Michelman in our Michelman customer video). This is represented by the serendipity axis, where a larger audience increases the opportunities for interactions and creative outcomes.

A Simple Guide To Web Hosting For Beginners

For anyone starting out with their first website, one of the foundations which need to be in place for that website to exist, or more accurately for anyone to be able to visit that website, is a website hosting service. If this is the first time you have planned to launch a website, the functions and jargon that applies to web hosting might not all be clear, and thus we thought it would be useful if we offered some basic guidelines for beginners.

We must make clear that what you are about to read is as generic as we could make it so the information should apply to most of the web hosting services you might be considering. For details on the specific hosting services any provider offers, you will need to speak to them directly, especially if they have various plans available which offer different options.

Marketing by Making Decisions

We spend a lot of time working with our Kindling customers to help them build sustainable innovation programs. And no matter how creative or how forward-thinking the organizations we work with prove to be, time and time again we see that the single biggest predictor of success is management’s active commitment to the program.

Active commitment can be best demonstrated by actively making decisions around participants’ contributions. And we’ve found that by communicating these decisions is the best marketing for the program itself.

Show and Tell
We always emphasize that an internal marketing effort can make a huge difference for the program. On a basic level, this means selecting a name for the program, establishing a visual language, creating posters and other giveaways, and offering encouragement and rewards. The goal for this generalized marketing of the innovation program is to make sure that the participants, who are invariably super-busy, know that the program exists and what the goals and expectations are for participating. We think of this as the broadcasting of a mass message, or as general advertising for your program.

Drive Your Social Media Content with Kindling

At Kindling we use the Kindling application to discuss and evaluate potential product features, to address engineering issues, to develop strategic goals,—we’ve even opened up a Category to our customers so that they can contribute their ideas to the development of the Kindling application. Nice. And we use Kindling to cultivate our brand and develop marketing ideas, including social media content.

Every organization can use Kindling to develop a workflow of ideas for social media which the entire company can participate in. This is how we did it.

Beginning earlier this year one of our key efforts in marketing has been to systematically generate meaningful content that could be useful to people concerned with innovation and tasked with running an innovation program, for which our software is elegantly useful. In this interest I wanted to simplify and make our Twitter content more coherent while providing clear channels for our people to contribute to. I identified 3 hashtags (for these channels) for us to use:

#kindlingapp, about the company and product, including writings about Kindling in relation to innovation best practices;
#kindlingtips, for tips on how to use Kindling, especially in relation to an innovation program, culled from Kindling Academy and our Best Practices guides;
and #kindlingreads.

A Brand New Kindling for Decision-makers

Our mission is to make software that people enjoy using. Historically, we’ve focused much of our energies on the participant of Kindling, making it fun and easy—no training required easy—to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. This emphasis has been very much by design, as the more powerful and complex features useful for evaluating large quantities of ideas are only useful if you first have a large quantity of ideas. And you’ll only ever have a large quantity of ideas to deal with if your community is actively engaged.

(Our approach stands in contrast to our competitors, who have chosen to build advanced features with the associated complexity for evaluating large quantities of ideas, and now are trying to backfill simplicity and usability into their applications. This is a difficult, if not impossible, knot to untie.)

Heartbleed

On Monday, April 7th, a major bug in the popular SSL library OpenSSL was announced, generally known as Heartbleed. The vulnerability, in a nutshell:

Without using any privileged information, authentication codes or credentials we were able to steal the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.

Kindling uses OpenSSL on our servers for HTTPS connections, and as soon as the vulnerability was announced we began working to mitigate our exposure by upgrading our versions of the affected libraries and invalidating any secure keys that might have been leaked. Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, also quickly moved to prevent exploitation of the vulnerability within their infrastructure.

Some Tips on Innovating with Kindling

Companies often come to us looking to solve a particular challenge in their organization or for help with their innovation program as a whole. We enjoy working with them, and they find that Kindling provides a structured approach toward innovation and problem solving, while integrating throughout their organization, increasing communication, and reducing organizational barriers. We’d like to offer some ways in which Kindling can help with innovation in your organization.

1. Find out what your company can be doing better

Ask your employees where they see room to improve. What are the biggest inefficiencies in your company? Where is there room to cut costs? Everyone in your organization has ideas—listen to them.

2. Organize conversations around ideas

Eliminate the email CC problem. Not on an email chain? Getting too many emails? Include all participants from the beginning and reduce the risk of missing someone who might have shared a game changing idea.