Calvin Harris Tops Forbes' Highest Paid DJs List

Calvin Harris is the undisputed King of EDM, according to Forbes’ latest report on electronic music’s big earners. 

The Scottish producer and disc jockey earned $66 million last year to lead Forbes’Electronic Cash Kings list for a second successive year, pulling in nearly double the next-highest earner, Frenchman David Guetta ($37 million).

Taylor Swift & Calvin Harris Are the Highest-Paid Celebrity Couple in the World

Harris has clubland at his feet. He’s enjoyed unparalleled success with his own artist albums and singles (his set 18 Months made history when in 2013 it clocked up an eighth U.K. top 10 song), he earns a fortune for his DJ sets, has seven-figure endorsements with the likes of Giorgio Armani and he’s dating one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Taylor Swift. 

“The rise of dance music has been astronomical… I happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Harris told Forbes.

Rounding out the top five are veteran Dutch trance DJ Tiesto ($36 million), and U.S. EDM  practitioners Skrillex and Steve Aoki with $24 million each.

The list illustrates the enormous pulling power DJs have at the top of the EDM pile. The top ten DJs raked in $274 million over the past 12 months, more than double the $116 million total for the top ten in 2012. Though the pace isn’t as fast as it once was. Following a 108% increase from 2012 to 2013, the figure grew 11% from 2013 to 2014, and only 2.5% from 2014 to 2015.

WITHDRAWAL OF OFFICERS FROM VIPs: Police deploy men to airports, highways to enforce directive

ABUJA—Following President Muhammadu Buhari’s directive that the over 130,000 police personnel attached to unauthorised persons and VIPs in the country be withdrawn and deployed to confront the security challenges, Force Headquarters, in conjunction with the Police Service Commission, PSC, is set to commence the implementation.

Consequently, “the PSC, in collaboration with the Inspector General Police, has concluded arrangements to deploy a high level monitoring team to the nation’s airports, highways and other public places to enforce the Presidential directive of immediate withdrawal of policemen from very important personalities, VIP, who are not entitled to their services”.

Chairman of PSC, Sir Mike Okiro, who confirmed this in Abuja yesterday, said: “The monitoring team will have the powers to stop VIPs on the highways, airports and so on, for confirmation of their status and that of the policemen attached to them.”

A statement by Ikechukwu Ani, Head of Information PSC, quotes Okiro as warning that “any erring VIP or policeman caught in such unauthorised beat, will be prosecuted.”

The PSC Chairman insisted that “the Commission and the leadership of the Nigeria Police Force will enforce the presidential directive to the letter, stressing that henceforth only authorised government officials and VIPs will be entitled to police security.

Continuing, Okiro noted that the nation cannot be battling with an inadequate Police Force, while majority of these scarce officers are in the service of few privileged Nigerians, who ordinarily should have no need for them.

He said the Nigeria Police will now be “structured to do its primary duties.”

- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/08/withdrawal-of-officers-from-vips-police-deploy-men-to-airports-highways-to-enforce-directive/#sthash.4Mv6QiEm.dpuf

Ghanaian man 'joins Islamic State' militants

A 25-year-old man from Ghana is feared to have left the West African country to join the Islamic State (IS) group, his father says.

It is the first reported case of a Ghanaian joining IS.

Abdul Latif Alema told the BBC that his son's disappearance was "like someone in the family has died".

Mohammad Nazir Nortei Alema sent him a text message on 16 August to say that he was joining the group fighting in Syria and Iraq, he added.

He has not been seen since then, Mr Alema said.

The BBC's Sammy Darko reports from the capital, Accra, that he saw the message, sent using the instant messaging app WhatsApp.

It says: "O my Father, O my Mother, do not be worried about the decision of your son..."Mr Alema said his son had earlier indicated that he wanted to live under Islamic rule.

"Nobody's happy and as for his mum she keeps on crying and fasting and praying that her son returns," he told the BBC.

The government has not yet reported on the apparent defection to IS.

Ghana has a minority Muslim population and has not been affected by insurgency involving militant Islamists.

However, IS has established a presence in Africa, with militant groups in Nigeria, Egypt and Libya pledging allegiance to it and carrying out bombing campaigns in its name.

Is Mayweather-Backed Shots the Next Instagram?

While boxer Floyd Mayweather is gearing up for the  “fight of the century,” one of his business investments is also packing a punch. Shots, the selfie app, is gaining traction amongst teens and growing fast.

Founded in late 2013, the star-studded service also counts Justin Bieber as an investor and has celebrities including Kylie Jenner, Tyga and Wiz Khalifa amongst its five million active users. Shots’ anti-bullying theme is resonating with teens -- users can only “like” the photos and videos, with no place to comment.

Brothers John and Sam Shahidi co-founded the service together, with John serving as CEO. The duo have amassed such a strong social media presence that John has been dubbed the “King of Twitter,” with nearly 400,000 followers and each tweet generating thousands of retweets by Bieber fans and other young Shots users.

This social media traction is said to have gained the attention of Twitter (TWTR), which was rumored to be a potential suitor for the service last fall, but Shahidi voiced commitment to keeping the company independent at the time. Shots instead opted to raise a new round of funding last month, with $8.5 million from venture capitalists and Major League Baseball, to help grow the ten-employee startup.

With an average user age of 16, and nearly 80% of them female, John Shahidi told FOXBusiness.com that they have “focused on a specific group and that has spread out to other groups, creating an engaged community.” He said that word-of-mouth is critical to the success of social media startups and that the teen demographic is especially effective at spreading the message.

While some might consider superstar investors a boon to the service, Shahidi has downplayed their role and even called them “overrated.” Celebrities can help spread the word, but endorsements are most effective when the users like the product enough to stick around long-term.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Shots has reach beyond the United States. Brazil and Mexico are also hotbeds for the app and Shahidi has been working to expand Shots’ presence in China.

It is, of course, a competitive landscape for social media. While services like Facebook (FB) and Twitter have enjoyed several years in the spotlight, others like MySpace and Friendster have fallen by the wayside.

“We want to be the best and fastest social app on your phone,” said Shahidi and he hopes that their positive community resonates with young people everywhere

How I Built a Seven-Figure Business Without Employees

There is a lot to be said for those rare few that possess the ability to create huge companies with hundreds or thousands of employees that are all just ecstatic to be at work. It is exceptionally difficult and equally as impressive, which is why they end up taking up space on the front page of a major magazine or journal.

Although it appears flashy and glamorous, particularly with the amount of celebrity that todays super entrepreneurs wield, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility that is lost, almost by default, once you pass a certain size. Now, not only am I not one of those few, but I really don't want to be..

The good news is that my lack of interest in such pursuits hasn't been a hindrance in building a seven figure-business, in a rather short period of time, with a single co-founder and no employees -- which can be operated from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. As a matter of fact, I’m typing this at a cafe in Copenhagen, Denmark, and will be meandering through Europe for at least the next five weeks -- yet sales will continue to grow and the business won't miss a step. I'm not bragging, just validating.

This model is replicable. Here's how you can do it:

1. Start simple.

Far too often, smart people come up with great ideas then quickly overbuild them, so when they get to the market, there’s no way to test or understand which parts of the product are working or not. There is a lot to be said for Henry Ford’s concept of initially offering one size and one color of a certain product to be able to understand and gauge the customer response, then iterate and improve your product and processes for selling and servicing it.

Included in this “start simple” strategy is to remove complication that comes from selling your product or service to middlemen. What I mean is, you should avoid, at least at the beginning, from overcomplicating your sales pipeline with wholesale or retail scenarios and instead focus on taking your product direct to the consumer. This will ensure that you control the brand and voice early on, will have a direct communication with your customers for super important feedback and will retain full margin on your sales -- allowing you to reinvest and grow faster without taking on the liability of outside funds or debt.

2. Automate early.

Technology is really quite amazing, which is why you must use it to automate everything from the very beginning. You need to build the foundation of your business as if it’s 20 times larger, which can be done for hundreds of dollars per year.

Your automation starts with your sales channels or ecommerce marketplace with solutions such as Shopify, which create a nearly out-of-the box system and will connect to nearly anything. Automation must continue through your marketing and support functions with products such as Facebook video ads, which can work amazingly well and require minimal amounts of oversight. 

Finally, Desk or Zendesk automate your inbound-support requests. These are great because you can write “macros” or canned responses for nearly any inbound question, so that as they come in, you can click a single button to respond and resolve the case or inquiry. You can even set macros to auto-respond once you have a handle on the language or keywords for certain requests, which means that you never even see them.

3. Leverage outsourcing.

There are tons of articles written about whether you should outsource certain things. I’ve even written a few, but here we’re focusing on building a business that doesn’t require employees -- so we’re going to outsource it all. Let’s start with sales and marketing: at the beginning you’ll be doing everything, which is super important being that you’re the only one that truly understands your business and customer, but there will come a time when you’re too busy to create and manage it all.

This is where the use of PR comes in. Where you used to hire a PR team to get press and publicity, which you still can, you should now hire them to manage and grow your revenue-generating social channels. The team should put together a plan and timeline that makes sense, based on your brand and experience, then execute and allow you to focus elsewhere.

Also look to hire a virtual assistant: this is an employee of another company, such as UAssistMe, that you can remotely contract and train to do any list of tasks, with minimal amounts of required time (starting at five hours per week). This will help to keep your free time free and your employer obligations non-existent

Why I Failed as a Student and Succeeded as an Entrepreneur

Donny Zanger is the founder and CEO of All Week Walls, a New York-based pressurized wall company. In addition to All Week Walls, he has started up a number of other businesses too. I talked to Donny recently about his experience as an entrepreneur, and what it took for him to create a successful business.

The words that follow are all Donny’s.

# # #

According to my high school report card, I shouldn't be where I am today. My college GPA will concur. Ask around among my teachers and former classmates and they'll probably recall me as a below average student, at best, and "that kid with learning disabilities," at worst.

Growing up with dyslexia is no walk in the park, and it's an open secret that schools are built to cater to one specific type of student. For the rest of the world--the creative thinkers, the talented artists, the energetic athletes--sitting at a desk for hours on end, memorizing lists and analyzing information in a test-taking format, doesn't necessarily compute with our skill set.

Personally, I found the theoretical nature of school studies antithetical to my own way of thinking. Who cares if Adam has ten green apples and Sarah has four less? The main question is, could Adam get Sarah to buy those apples from him for more than he paid? Now that's my kind of thinking.

I never could pick up on the etymology of obscure SAT words, and doing spelling homework with dyslexia is like trying to sew on a button with your toe--it just ain't equipped for a job like that. But here's the catch, the covert information that no one tells you as you suffer through years of feeling second class: succeeding in business requires completely different areas of proficiency than succeeding in school.

Most of the information that you learn in school is entirely irrelevant when you go out into the real world. I don't even use half the stuff I learned in my business marketing class and I spend all day marketing my businesses.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to know how to market yourself and your product. You have to be able to sell. It's important to be able to manage, so you can keep your burgeoning business afloat. You need people skills because there's a lot of interpersonal interaction. Honesty, integrity and creativity are all major pluses. When was the last time your school tested you on how to give a firm handshake and a genuine smile? Believe it or not, lots of valedictorians can't pull off these two crucial components of a business deal.

After I graduated college, I took my own $3,000 in savings and opened up my first business. I was 23 years old with no formal work experience and no prior knowledge of running a business, but I knew I had the drive and I definitely the determination to make it work. I'm proud to say that, seven years later, I'm still completely self-supporting.

My original business is going strong and I never took outside funding to help it along. I'm now also the founder of a technology company in the process of developing our own mobile apps. We have over five serious investors who have contributed more than $230,000 towards our development costs because they want a piece of what I have to offer. I may not be a millionaire, but I consider myself a success story in the business world.

To those out there who think success in school is a measure of future accomplishment, I am here to say, it is NOT. Don't look at your grades, your test scores, or your teachers' opinions. Don't focus on your learning disabilities or your inability to remember immaterial dates and numbers. Not everyone is cut out for success in school and that's okay: it's not a true measure of what you can achieve.

If you've got drive, creativity, motivation, passion and the ability to push up your sleeves and get to work, then come join the Entrepreneur's Club. We'll be happy to have you and we don't need your SAT scores to let you in; we know you can succeed no matter what number the College Board gave you.

I certainly did.source entreneurship.com

TWEETS NOW PART OF GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS

Users that perform a Google Search on their desktop computers will now also be able to see tweets appearing on the search results, as Google made a quiet update to the service.

When search queries are entered in Google, users will see several tweets regarding what they are searching for appearing near the top of the website results.

The update, which was not announced by Google, mirrors the changes that it made for its mobile search results earlier in May. Upon the release of the update for mobile devices, users searching through the Google app or through any Internet browser within their smartphones or tablets will be able to see real-time content coming from Twitter in the received search results.

The update also comes about half a year after Twitter unveiled a new deal with Google, though this is not the first time that Google and Twitter have announced a partnership. Google is also not the only search engine to include tweets in its search results, as Bing has integrated tweets in its search results since last year's summer season.

Google and Twitter agreed back in 2009 to have tweets be included in Google's search results. However, the agreement was shelved in 2011, as Ali Rowghani, then the CEO of Twitter, decided that he wanted Twitter to have more control over the content being released by its users.

The current partnership between Google and Twitter could prove to be more significant for Twitter than the previous one. While Twitter now already has 316 million active users per month, with the number still continuing to increase, Twitter's pace of growth is now much slower compared to previous years.

Twitter has been criticized recently for its problem on slowing user growth, along with issues in retaining its users and lower-than-expected results from its business strategy of direct response advertising.

Through this new agreement with Google, which includes the inclusion of tweets in Google's search results, Twitter is looking for an extension to its reach. Twitter is hoping that the tweets popping up in Google search results would push users that are not on Twitter to sign up for the service to push further growth in the social media platform's user base.