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Forget holiday shopping; the online version of Black Friday is a great opportunity to score great deals on wares for your business. The online equivalent of Black Friday —minus the crowds, early morning hours, and badly behaving people—is here. What started as a made-up holiday several years ago has turned into a real event

Inc.

Stop with the excuses, and start off with these low-pressure steps to launching your speaking career, and increasing your brand-awareness. Public speaking is a great way to increase exposure to your brand and your message. Why do so many entrepreneurs resist stepping into the spotlight

In the latest installment of Fast Company’s future-gazing series, Crystal Ballin’, Elena Silenok of Clothia envisions an era of magic mirrors, virtual closets, and the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy by Alicia Silverstone. FAST COMPANY: What is your startup, Clothia

According to industry blog Digitimes , Eastern partner manufacturers are expecting an inventory glut in Android-powered tablets after the holiday--exacerbating what may already be an oversupply problem. Insiders are blaming the iPad and the Kindle Fire, and high consumer expectations for Windows 8 tablets arriving in 2012.

The first Inc. 500 company to go public since August exceeded its IPO expectations, despite that it doesn't look much like other companies going public this year

What's the future of Bump? The popular iPhone and Android app , which enables users to share media simply by "bumping" smartphones together, recently hit 63 million downloads. It's likely one of the few social networks that's actually social, requiring physical interaction to work in most cases, with users sharing everything from contacts to apps to music to pictures (close to 2 million photos are bumped over the network per day)

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Netflix Inks Content Deal With Lionsgate U.K.

How an open-minded approach to negative feedback boosts earnings--and morale. Yesterday, I spent 40 minutes on the phone listening to a customer tell me all the things that could be better with three of the products he received among the many in his order. Why spend so much time listening to someone who is unhappy, and just wants to complain, you might ask?

The makers of Postagram and other photo printing apps want to build their business into a dominant, gift-focused e-commerce venture. But how?

Want to reach more customers? From social to search, here are the 5 big ideas you may have missed at ad:tech this week

Want to reach more customers?

In its press release today American Express revealed explicitly that its new $100 million Digital Commerce Investment Initiative was destined to fund "early stage startups to facilitate the company's digital transformation." If that sounds like a firm that's aware it's got to rapidly pivot, that's because that's exactly what's going on.

[youtube Wr9mtir5648] RIM has a PR problem: A couple of videos, filmed and rendered in the emerging-as-classic "what the future will be like"-style overlayed with electro-orchestral music, have leaked online. They're called Future Visions, and RIM's already issued a couple of copyright requests to YouTube to have some versions taken down.