Building a company for the purpose of selling it is a proven strategy for a fast payoff. Like any asset, the more attractive a business is to potential acquirers, the more likely it will be purchased. Focusing on the key elements that larger brands examine when they consider an acquisition is crucial for obtaining the best price and for establishing a corporate brand that distinguishes itself from its competitors as a valuable asset. There is a strong argument that can be made for preparing to sell your company from Day 1 by strategically positioning your company in a growth industry where merger and acquisition activity is likely.

Conducting regular information technology (IT) risk assessments is no longer an optional part of business operations for companies today. However, risk assessments are only as valuable as the processes used to conduct them. In this post, learn five ways your IT security risk assessment can go wrong and what to do to remedy each.

TZ #TechCrawl is back this month and heading to Santa Monica as part of LA Startup Week! Come take a tour of some of the hottest LA Tech companies located in Santa Monica!

Trust can be a fickle thing. As the saying goes, trust takes a lifetime to build but only a moment to ruin. In the business world, trust can certainly be hard to come by, especially when information and data valuable to the success of a company can easily be stolen or misplaced. This is the thought on the minds of many business leaders as they contemplate adopting the cloud for storage, computing power, and big data analysis.

500 Startups officially announced their Batch 15. Among them is one of our very own REACH NeXT alumni Mahmee! We were stoked when we partnered with 500 startup for REACH NeXT and now are over the moon that they selected one of our winners. Congrats to the Melissa Hanna and the rest of the Mahmee team!

After conducting indoor tests for several months, Walmart recently asked U.S. regulators if it could test drones (a.k.a. “unmanned aircraft systems” or UAS) for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories. The news came as no surprise to anyone. Walmart’s been investing heavily in its e-commerce capabilities — too heavily for some investors’ tastes, in fact — in an effort to make up ground on Amazon and Google, both of which are already deep into the drone development process.

Now nearly every conversation about marketing starts with growth. And yet I learned that in 2013/2014, only 24% of companies had real growth. That means that despite being a multi-billion industry to drive sales, fewer than 30% met their growth objectives. Apparently, the key to growth is the relationships that you may have with customers and suppliers.

InVisage Technologies Inc., the camera sensor company, announced the release of “Prix”, a short film shot entirely with InVisage’s QuantumFilm smartphone camera sensor. The film captures a stunning level of detail despite dynamic lighting environments and shooting fast-moving subjects outdoors. This quality is made possible thanks to InVisage’s QuantumFilm, a quantum dot camera sensor technology.

With the 2015 holiday shopping season now upon us, it’s “go time” for retailers across the country — an opportunity to put their carefully crafted holiday plans into action and deliver on their bottom-line expectations. That includes e-commerce retailers, which continue to claim a growing slice of overall retail sales. Last year alone, online holiday sales rose 15% over 2013 figures, including increases of 32% on Thanksgiving, 26% on Black Friday, and 17% on Cyber Monday.

Insurance companies need to adjust their methods for charging for claims in a way that is in line with the current markets. When a company gets hundreds of thousands of records, a system to manage, filter and process those records becomes essential. This is where Big Data comes in. By creating a platform that can quickly analyze large amounts of data, insurance companies can make more effective claims and ensure greater profits.