Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

%excerpt% Excerpt from: Gobble Gobble, Cha-Ching!

It's not a question of which website or app to use to promote your business; it's about using as many methods as you can. Here are some ideas. Most people are in one of two camps when it comes to shopping the day after Thanksgiving.

Here's what's getting in your way when you attempt (and fail) to hit those "reach" goals. Many people fall prey to, “Yeah, but...” thinking. I have a friend who absolutely hates how successful his brother-in-law has become.

Does Twitter's Activity and Facebook's Ticker give you anything you really need to know? Not really. But maybe that's not so bad

So, you’ve decided to do the startup thing, and you’ve told a few people. Turns out everyone and their dog has an opinion about it, regardless of whether or not they’ve ever been in your shoes. Some are flat-out discouraging you, while others are congratulating you and asking some interesting questions you haven’t yet considered

There’s a fundamental difference between the rebels of the past and today: Generation Y are born entrepreneurs. Every generation rebels against their parents. When parents approve, their offspring disapproves.

Google+ has everything you'd expect from a fully featured social network -- except the right kind of users. And that's a big problem

Want to reach more customers?

If you've had it up to here with Ticketmaster's insane fees, or you're looking to buy or sell tickets to your school's bake sale, your band's concert, or a local cooking class, Eventbrite is for you. Ticketmaster, dubbed the " most hated brand in America " by Fast Company, has historically left much to be desired from a user standpoint, with its eye-popping service fees and market stranglehold on large events that makes them damned near impossible to avoid. Meanwhile, a massive part of the ticketing market has been virtually untapped--Ticketmaster will get you into the U2 and Sting megatours, but if you're looking to sell or buy tickets for a knitting class, an obscure music festival, or a neighborhood nonprofit fundraiser, forget it.

In the wake of Airbnb's home-vandal scandal, start-ups in the collaborative consumption space are rebuilding peer-to-peer buying's reputation. Here's how. Airbnb found itself in a public relations nightmare this summer that threatened to undermine its whole ethos of amiable and unique person-to-person connections

How Sweet Spot, a hair removal salon, used Blue Calypso's word-of-mouth solution to generate sales and repeat clients, something LivingSocial had failed to do. The Company: The Sweet Spot, a Dallas hair removal salon that specializes in sugaring, an alternative to waxing The Goal: Attract customers to the newly opened salon The Execution: The Sweet Spot's founder, Erin Cox, noticed links to products and services on her friends' Facebook Walls that looked a lot like promotions. She followed the links and realized they all originated from Blue Calypso, a mobile marketing platform through which businesses reward people for sharing ads via Twitter, Facebook, or text message.

Navigation, thanks to a bunch of innovations, is about to get futuristic in a way Star Trek's Mr. Chekov would be impressed with ..

Movember cofounder Adam Garone describes how to grow a massive charitable community by bringing the fun. Adam Garone never thought a silly beer-fueled bet to grow a mustache would turn into a multi-million-dollar global charity and the largest non-governmental funder of prostate cancer research. Seven years later, Movember expects more than 600,000 men to ask their friends to contribute donations in exchange for growing an artful caterpillar lip in the annual Movember mustache challenge, which starts Nov.

TicketLeap, a online ticket exchange, helps local haunts go hi-tech. In recent years, Halloween haunts have gotten the Hollywood-style treatment, trading up from fog machines and cardboard caskets to CGI and robotics. But there's also been a less glamorous technological boon for haunt proprietors that has helped drive sales: their back-end ticketing systems

The actor led a $4 million seed round and joined the company's board of advisers.