adMarketplace said it partnered with Pencils of Promise (PoP) to build two new schools in Ghana. The initial $25,000 donation goes to build the Adigbokope Primary School, but company executives said it has motivated its team to raise an additional $25,000 for the construction of the Asele Preschool and Primary School. The company said it chose Ghana because the region demonstrates the greatest need.

Eric Enge demonstrates why marketers might want to syndicate content. He shares tips and reasons to consider syndicating content. By association of the higher authority site picking up the content, the site syndicating content also benefits through exposure to anther audience. He also shows how to code the page solving the duplicate content problem in relation to PageRank.

Anyone surprised at Google's Nest hack at the Black Hat security conference is living under a rock. A group of hackers showed how they compromised the device in front of an audience of hundreds, reports Dean Takahashi. The show's theme is focused on hacking smart devices. As long as device manufacturers remain asleep at their job, consumers using the connected hardware will need to get used to it.

The best time to reach prospective consumers continues to change. About 60% of U.S. Internet users are almost always connected, per eMarketer, citing a July study from CivicScience. About 43% never unplug from all personal technology, which includes audio players, ereaders, laptops and computers, mobile phones, tablets, and TV. Some 17% only take a break a few times a year. Overall, 20% of respondents do unplug daily.

Former Yahoo President Sue Decker gives us an insiders opinion on how the Yahoo-Alibaba deal came about and what the Sunnyvale, Calif., company learned from doing business in China. She believes Yahoo's success came from failing fast and recognizing mistakes to quickly correct them. It's about experimenting and learning. Here's how it all went down, per Decker.

Google will give priority to sites in organic page ranking that encrypt pages, content. Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Google webmaster trends analysts, described the change in a post. In the coming weeks, the duo will publish details on best practices to make Transport Layer Security adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. The two also provide tips on getting started.

Brick-and-mortar franchises are typically considered local, small businesses. Smaller targeted areas generate less online traffic, which means less conversion data to analyze -- so it's important not to restrict the data sets to the last 14 or 30 days, per Ed Lew. Marketers may need to look back at last three or six months. Lew provides a series of tips to help franchise owners capitalize on the data in paid-search campaigns running on Google and Bing.  

Foursquare officially introduced its new app with intuitive search features, allowing people to find things based on tastes, places liked, and friends and family. The app aims to learn what users like to lead them to places they love by sharing recommendations from trusted sources.

Google Ventures calls the process a "design sprint." Jake Knapp takes us through the process of how the venture capitalist helps startups solve product design problems in an effort to help others define products offered to customers -- and in turn, improve conversion rates. Knapp gives us an example from the "product design sprint" done with Custom Made, which connects people who want custom-made products with those who want the custom-made product.

Does Google's decision to recognize email addresses containing accented or non-Latin characters change how email marketers need to think about campaigns? While the question does not get answered by Google in this post, the company does explain why it chose to take the first step. It means Gmail users can send emails to -- and receive emails from -- people who have these characters in their email addresses. What does it mean for email marketers?