Digital Media News

Finding a reliable company to host your website can often be quite a mission. Finding one that can manage things for you and is flexible enough to provide other services is even harder. But Rackspace manages to tick all the boxes and ExactDrive is excited to have them as an active partner to host our advertising platform software and website.

Rackspace has a great image. They offer a cloud-based hosting solution, but unless you want to know all about how they work, they try and leave all the techie terminology at the door. So this jargon-free company is a bit of a Godsend.

Rackspace offer scalable servers, so it doesn’t matter whether you have a website for a startup or a mid to large business. Importantly, they offer bespoke hosting solutions, so you can rest assured that you’ll always be getting a solution that’s tailored to meet your needs. That means that they offer different solutions depending on whether you’re focused on the retail industry, finance, online advertising, manufacturing, the public sector and much more.

In today’s world, most of us have conducted some sort of business over the internet. There are millions of websites being built every year, many of which need to take payments from customers. But integrating a payment system within a website is tough to do. And with more and more financial transactions taking place, usability, safety and security are hot topics. Enter Stripe, ExactDrive's credit card processing partner.

Stripe is an innovative company that focuses on helping website developers to deliver a website that accepts payments between individuals and businesses. They’ve got a solid background. They’ve received $130 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.

Stripe provides a fantastic alternative to the hassle of setting up a merchant account. And while Stripe’s fee per transaction is slightly higher than that of their more traditional card-based competitors, the cost to the website owner is lower because of the lack of setup fees, monthly fees, validation fees or card storage fees. And due to the fact that Stripe only earns that fee after a successful payment, there’s no charge for failed payments either. With Stripe, you even have the ability to offer coupons and vouchers to your customers. This is a payment solution that’s built with your bottom line in mind.

As the saying goes, people won’t always remember what you say, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel. In today’s business world, every industry is super-competitive and, as such, consumers expect more from brands. In particular, they’ll have extremely high expectations of your customer service abilities - and that’s where Desk.com comes in.

Desk.com offer online customer service software and a support ticket help desk app. It’s a very powerful solution for companies, such as ExactDrive, who are inundated with other demands and perhaps would be better off focusing their attentions elsewhere.

The entire desk.com experience ticks all the boxes. For starters, there’s an easy setup, so if you’re a bit of a technophobe, there’s no need to fret. The software also integrates your business to bring all the relevant support points together. This doesn’t just make it simpler for you to manage your business, but it obviously makes life easier for your customers.

You may have heard of the phrase ‘big data’. Well, Proximic are big data experts and ExactDrive is happy to be an longtime active partner. Big data is in front of our eyes every day, but are you even aware of it? And if you are, perhaps you’re not using it properly? The key to big data lies in having the skill tointerpret it and apply it correctly to your business. Put simply, Proximic will help you get to grips with your data in order to transform your ad campaigns and deliver better results.

Proximic have a company ethos that’s all about handing control back to people. That stance underpins everything they do.

When faced with the prospect of creating a digital advertising campaign, there are so many options these days. Display, mobile, video, blogging and the like. Then there are the demands of assessing a campaign and working out your ROI, not to mention strategic planning for the future. Also, let’s not forget that every business has different market requirements and digital challenges. There’s nothing quite like a million and one jobs to make you feel intimidated, eh?

ExactDrive has enjoyed working with GrapeShot for quite sometime. They offer a powerful technology suite that allows keyword targeting within the World of display advertising. Enjoyable to work with while helping us generating quality results for our clients, we are looking forward to working with Grapeshot for a long long time. Lets learn more about what Grapeshot is all about. 

The official line on Grapeshot is that they’re a software technology company that’s based in the UK and that helps other businesses with their advertising. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The reality is that they’re a pioneering brand in the world of advertising, one that uses some truly innovative technology.

Before partnering with HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing and sales software company, ExatDrive's website was constantly going down, posting a blog was a laborious task, analytics seemed to be stuck in a black box and every aspect of our social media and organic search lead generation was pathetic. 

Then comes our first HubSpot demo in Q1 2012. Our eyes opened wide, we looked at each other with wonder and excitement and whamo blamo we instantly made the decision to migrate over to HubSpot with the intent to immediately start digesting everything they have to offer, which is a significant amount of exciting features. Ranging from social media post scheduling to real-time SEO feedback on new blog posts, easy landing page creation and optimizing your call-to-action, HubSpot felt like it had everything we needed. And we were right.

This article was originally published on a leading professional marketing blog, BloggerIdeas.com.

At the heart of any discussion about a startup’s product or services is the question of value. How much value does your startup’s solution provide for its clients? How many hours of work does it save them? Is it something they could do themselves or are your services unique? These questions determine not only if your startup will achieve profitability, but how much you can fairly charge for your services in the event that it does.

Pricing your company’s services is a delicate process that must take into account a multitude of factors. We spoke to seven successful founder’s at different stages in their careers and asked what their best advice was for accurately pricing a startup’s product and services.

ExactDrive recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by The Startup Journal, which is a platform for Indian startups to showcase their innovation and creativeness to a wide entrepreneurial community. The Startup Journal is dedicated towards fostering entrepreneurial culture.

"He who knows only his own generation remains forever a child." Those were the words written above the library at my alma mater, and while they rang true at University, they have proven exceptionally true in the startup environment. Launching a startup is largely an exercise in trial error, and regardless of how much experience one has, its always advisable to keep learning and seeking the advice of those who came before you.

Often, entrepreneurs become jaded after their first successful launch, and assume that all other entrepreneurial endeavors will follow the same path. In doing so, they limit themselves greatly in their ability to respond creatively when things don’t go as planned, and more importantly, fall behind in an industry where it pays to be well-read. The difference between failure and success in the startup ecosystem often comes down to an entrepreneur’s willingness to keep learning about their constantly changing environment, and as such, its advisable to read as much as possible to stay up-to-date. We spoke with 12 successful startup founders and asked what book all entrepreneurs should read and why. Here’s what they said.

ExactDrive recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by Fresh Infos, who discusses geeky creations, weird incidents, funny LOL stories as well as latest of technology, gaming, gadgematic, and social news. Basically we bring out fresh new ideas to the world wide web, ‘Refreshing Your Mind.’

Its a well-known fact that most startups are bound for failure. Some companies are doomed from the start, with products that are either unnecessary or that do not differentiate from the competition. Other startups meet their demise due to having made certain mistakes, mistakes that could have been avoided if they’d made a greater effort to learn from the experiences of those who came before them. Its often been said that successful people know how to learn from their own mistakes, and really successful people know how to learn from the mistakes of others. We spoke with 10 successful startup founders and asked what the primary reason for startup failure was, and how recently launched startups can avoid it. Here’s what they had to say.

Advertising is the lifeblood of the internet. It funds a lot of the great content that we enjoy on a daily basis, and provides brands with the means to innovate; inspire and entertain. And withcontinual advancements in programmatic advertising technology, online advertising has never been easier, cheaper or more efficient.

You can see for yourself, by test-driving ourmarket-leading self-serve advertising platform, which delivers online advertising solutions that make it faster and easier for you to reach your target audience and generate that all important ROI.

Well-oiled machine

Our ad platform is constantly being refined, but it is true to say that it wouldn’t be the slick, well-oiled machine it is today without the support of our data partners, including Proximic.com, Bluekai.com (Now part of Oracle) Grapeshot, and our ever-growing number of integrated media partners — such as AppNexus.com, who we will focus on in this blog post.

What does AppNexus do?