// I received this question received in email today: I am in the processes of developing a small business around what I have been told is a great idea by friends family and SCORE. I am very near the manufacturing stage which obviously requires venture capital and the manufacturing process. I'd like to present my idea to anyone [...]

BP's controversial-though-legal maneuver of paying Gulf scientists to sign a non-disclosure agreement may not be legal after all.

A House committee has condemned this action and called for an investigation, says CNBC.

BP's scheme involved signing local professors to lucrative $205-an-hour contracts that came with non-disclosure agreements. Professors at Louisiana State University, University of Southern Mississippi and Texas A&M are among those who agreed.

But as we said before, non-disclosure agreements are typical for scientists hired for private research. The government needs to start buying some scientists of its own for the epic legal showdown.

Now see where BP ranks on the biggest quarterly losses in history -->

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According to Bloomberg, Tim Geithner plans to testify in front of Congress next week, hoping to persuade lawmakers that the Bush tax cuts for the rich must expire.

Why?

Well, ostensibly it's about closing America's monster deficit, but that can't really be it, as this won't move the needle much. Only a combination of steep spending cuts (to entitlements, defense, etc.) and a return to robust growth would actually accomplish that.

No, it's all about appearing to be doing something about the deficit.

Remember, this morning, we told you that the phrase of the day was credible commitment. Tim Geithner thinks he has to make a credible commitment to the Chinese, and whoever else is buying our debt, that we're doing something about the deficit. No, we're not going to close it, we just want to do something that's tough and credible. And, to be fair, hiking taxes on the nation's most powerful faction does count as being tough.

Now Geithner is a bond salesman in a sense, so he's gotta do whatever he feels he has to do. But the truth is that there's just not any risk of us going broke due to the Chinese and our debt. The demand for our debt continues to go in one direction, and it's obvious that the Fed has plenty of spare firepower to sop up however much it wants. In other words, Geithner plans to put on a show, and it's not even a necessary one.

And then beyond that, it's bad policy. It's impossible to imagine this tax hike -- especially as it will hit small businesses -- being anything but counter-stimulative.

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See Also:

• Tim Geithner Doesn't Get The Budget Or Our Currency
• Geithner Sounds Like Hoover: Is Anyone Else Scared?
• Tim Geithner: Sorry, We're Letting The Bush Tax Cuts Expire

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In April, Apple dumped location-info providers Skyhook Wireless and Google in favor of its own location databases for its new mobile OSes.

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It's been one hell of a non-recovery in housing, smack in the face of now-expiring $8,000 home tax credits that have proven to be as stimulative and futile as attacking fire ants with a BB-Gun.

Please consider Foreclosure Filings Rise in 75% of U.S. Metro Areas

Foreclosure filings climbed in three-quarters of U.S. metropolitan areas in the first half as high unemployment left many homeowners unable to pay their mortgages, according to RealtyTrac Inc.

The number of properties receiving a filing more than doubled from a year earlier in Baltimore, Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico, the mortgage-data company said today in a report. Notices of default, auction or bank seizure rose more than 50 percent in areas including Salt Lake City; Savannah, Georgia; and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

“Foreclosures are spreading out from areas that had been hardest hit,” Rick Sharga, senior vice president for marketing at Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac, said in a telephone interview. “We’re dealing with underlying economic weakness as opposed to unsustainable home prices and bad loans.”

Continued weakness in employment and efforts to prevent foreclosure may “delay the inevitable” and weigh on home prices, RealtyTrac Chief Executive Officer James J. Saccacio said in a statement.

The company said 154 of 206 U.S. metro areas with populations of more than 200,000 had increases in households with filings from January through June.

Cities in Nevada, Florida, California and Arizona accounted for the 20 highest foreclosure rates. Nine of the top 10 metro areas had decreases in the total properties receiving filings, a sign that foreclosures may have peaked in the states hurt the most by the housing market’s collapse, RealtyTrac said.

Video with Rick Sharga Senior Vice President of RealtyTrac

Bloomberg has an interesting Video Interview with Rick Sharga that inquiring minds will want to play.

Partial Transcript: "There is a pretty direct correlation between job loss and foreclosure. Until the unemployment rates start to go down, and until we actually see net job creation, and importantly until consumer confidence comes back, the housing market has really slim chances of recovery. That coupled with the huge overhang of distressed property, really suggests the housing market is not going to turn around for the next few years."

Flashback Thursday, October 25, 2007

When Will Housing Bottom?

Cycle Excesses Greatest In History

The excesses of the current cycle have never been greater in history. The odds are strong that we have seen secular as opposed to cyclical peaks in housing starts and new single family home construction. With that in mind it is highly unlikely we merely return to the trend. If history repeats, and there is every reason it will, we are going to undercut those long term trendlines.

There will be additional pressures a few years down the road when empty nesters and retired boomers start looking to downsize. Who will be buying those McMansions? Immigration also comes into play. If immigration policies and protectionism get excessively restrictive, that can also lengthen the decline.

Finally, note that the current boom has lasted well over twice as long as any other. If the bust lasts twice as long as any other, 1012 just might be a rather optimist target for a bottom.

The Last Bubble is Not Reblown

In a few locations, the bottom may be close at hand but certainly not everywhere. More importantly, think of tech stocks and remember the creed "the last bubble is not reblown". Ten years after the tech bust, the Nasdaq is still down over 50%.

The recovery in housing will be even slower. There is no need to rush into housing at this point even IF the bottom was at hand.

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"Consumers have a lot of curiosity about our products," says Cathy Dial, head of consumer affairs at Frito-Lay. "They want to know where we get the ideas for our flavors." With flavors that range from zesty taco and fiery habanero, to sizzlin' picante and cheeseburger (seriously), who hasn't pondered what culinary mastermind is behind Frito-Lay's wild-tasting chips and snacks.

Meet Stephen Kalil, executive research chef at the Frito-Lay Culinary Innovation Center. Kalil has been in the business over 20 years, and is now "tasked with bringing culinary excellence" to the snack factory and integrating that with excellence in food science." "We're leveraging a discipline that we call culinology," he told Lay's lovers in a recently released video.

According to the experienced corporate chef, culinology is a blending of the culinary arts and food technology that enables Frito-Lay to bake the best damn flavors out there. Kalil focuses in on Lay's new Tangy Carolina BBQ potato chips, which he says was a product of serious research into regional cuisine. "That flavor was inspired by a traditional Carolina BBQ pulled-pork sandwich," he says. "[We] held that up as a culinary gold standard." What's more, food science enabled a lower sodium count, so chip-lovers can munch more and more on their "flavor adventures."

Check out the video below to see more of Frito-Lay's Innovation Center and to hear Dial and Kalil chat more about "culinology." Easily the best part is the 50 angles of Dial experiencing the Carolina BBQ chip like it's some Michelin-starred gastronomical wonder. I guess that's what you get for investing in "culinology." Nom, nom.

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Solar power took a big step toward becoming the alternative energy of choice with this week's news that energy from sunlight might be cheaper than nuclear power. The analysis, which comes from a Duke University report entitled Solar and Nuclear Costs: The Historic Crossover, claims that, "Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants" in North Carolina.

The reason, according to the study, is a dramatic drop of the price of solar in recent years combined with an increase in the price of nuclear. In 2002, construction cost estimates for new nuclear power plants were in the $3 billion per reactor range. As new design and engineering problems emerge, construction costs continue to rise--now nuclear plants are estimated to cost $10 billion per reactor. And price isn't even the half of it. The study (PDF) reasons:

Solar electricity has numerous advantages other than cost. Rooftop solar can be installed in a few days. Small incremental gains in total generating capacity start producing electricity immediately. One does not have to wait ten years for huge blocks of new capacity to come online. Solar panels leave no radioactive wastes. They do not consume billions of gallons of cooling water each year. There are no national security issues with solar installations. An accident would be a small local affair, not a catastrophe.

This doesn't mean that we should completely ditch nuclear power. The Duke analysis argues that solar's status as an intermittent power source (it only works when the sun shines) is irrelevant because of smart grid technologies that optimize the energy mix. And the upfront costs for nuclear are astronomical compared to the cost of implementing, say, a rooftop solar system, but the fact remains that nuclear plants can pump out energy 24 hours a day. Solar plants can't. A long-lasting nuclear plant will most likely generate more energy per dollar invested than a solar plant ever could.

Solar should always be considered first, to be sure--one report estimates that construction of 100 new nuclear reactors would cost taxpayers an extra $1.9 trillion to $4.4 trillion over the 40-year life of the devices. But writing off any reliable, clean energy source would be a mistake.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

We've called out the e-reader "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing before, noting that it may be a feature of the short lifespan these single-purpose gadgets may have on the average electric store's shelves. Now Amazon's dropping the Kindle price even more.

The new Wi-fi-only Kindle costs a mere $140, $40 less than the Kindle 2's most recent price, and it's definitely a "breakthrough" price for the world's most famous e-reader, which puts it right at the top end of many folks impulse-buy bracket, particularly if you're talking about gifts, or the back-to-school purchasing period.

But it's not alone, and many budget e-readers, lacking Amazon's huge Kindle e-publishing ecosystem, are pushing toward similar prices. Amazon's big competition in the market, Barnes and Noble, are doing so too. And now there's news that a company called Copia, a DMC Worldwide subsidiary, will be offering a 5-inch screen color e-reader at a mere $99 when its products hit the market later in 2010. That's going to smart, since the Kindle is resolutely grayscale, and $99 is below that fictional $100 mental price barrier between something that seems expensive, and something that really doesn't.

The Wall Street Journal notes that it's Apple's aggressive pricing on the iPad that's behind some of this. Before the device launched, skeptics argued it would cost close to $1,000, citing manufacturing costs and the famous, if misleading, "Apple Tax." When the iPad's entry price of just $500 was announced, it shook the mobile device world--and Amazon especially, since the figure wasn't so very far from the then price of its big Kindle DX e-reader, which can do so much less than Apple's gadget. The newspaper even cites a report by researcher company Forrester, which suggests that the price war between e-readers (our famous race to the bottom) will continue to be influenced by evolutions in the tablet market.

So, just as we suspected, the race to the bottom is on, and Amazon's along for the ride. Will it doom the e-reader totally, so much that in a couple of years they'll be extinct? No. It may doom them to being a solely niche-device though, bringing their e-ink displays to situations that most benefit from them, while the tablet PCs mop up the rest of the slate-format e-reader market.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

As a business broker who helps business owners sell businesses, communication is very important to me. In my business or any business, is being "good enough" enough?

Businesses of every size see the importance of adopting a CRM system. The difficult part is knowing where to begin researching the right CRM solution for your business.

Forget Trump. Forget Branson. Forget any other motivational speaker you have ever seen or heard. This guy is less than three feet tall. He's disabled. And he's changing attitudes one person at a time... Once shunned by EVERY company he ever applied to, he now trains the CEOs and staff of Fortune 500 Companies

17 Vote(s)

From Richard Branson:

There is no better way to learn how to succeed in business than to learn from mistakes -- yours or someone else's. I often come across case studies looking into how and why certain companies smashed records, busted budgets and succeeded beyond all imagination. Those studies have their uses, of course, but it's the stories of businesses that didn't turn out so well th

This morning we posted about the mutual fund manager, Steven Romick, who described his style of investing to Bloomberg as being like "free range chicken."

We were intrigued, but confused because the explanation made very little sense, so we emailed Romick.

Here's his explanation:

"Free Range Chicken" is a throwaway comment. "Chicken" because we invest fearful of losing money. "Free range" b/c we don't like to be put in a cage. That is we like our freedom to invest in different asset classes, industries, market caps, etc.

So now you know.

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BP is finally, subtly getting in on the oil spill was overblown meme. @BP_America linked to a photo gallery of pristine beaches on the Orange Beach, AL facebook page.

The oil company has been flamed for hubris in the past. But assuming the photos weren't faked, they do look good for BP.

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"Nearly 30 million BlackBerry smartphone users have downloaded BlackBerry App World and an average of over one million applications are being downloaded each day," RIM boasts.

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We were all iPhone owners here at SAI until about a month ago, when Nick Saint – we call him "Boomer" for obvious reasons – lost his in a cab.

Instead of buying one of those fancy new iPhone 4s like Frommer and Jay did, Boomer decided to free himself from what I've heard him describe as AT&T's awful network and Apple's tight restrictions on its App Store; he bought a HTC Droid Incredible.

Anyway, the thing arrived today, and Boomer was so giddy with excitment, we decided we had to get it on video.

So here's the least sexy-unboxing you'll ever see:

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Today's market was fitting for a day when all the talk was about how we're becoming Japan. It was very quiet, and we drifted lower.

But first, the scoreboard:

Dow: -33
NASDAQ: -13
S&P 500: -4.8

• We're in a bit of a weird spot right now, regarding the relative performance of Europe and the US. What's new is that the news out of Europe in the morning is consistently good, while the news from the US tends to be kind of a drag. So, for example, there were plenty of good earnings/macro reports out of Germany today, but then we got our damp sqib of a jobless report.

• You know it's quiet when the big story of the day was the release of an.. academic paper. Granted, the paper in question was written by Fed Governor James Bullard, and it was about how we're turning Japanese. But still. That seemed to spook the market a little bit, though in the end, it didn't have a gigantic impact in any real sense.

• Most other markets were pretty quiet. No huge moves in currency or gold to speak of.

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Between Draft, Campfire, and Highrise, we’ve been building quite the iOS portfolio of applications. We want to take good care of them and continue building more iOS and mobile applications, so we’re hiring a dedicated programmer for the task.

Think you’re up for it? Check out the complete job posting on the 37signals Job Board.

I don't yet have it in my hands, but I know I'm going to like the latest book from workplace generational expert Neil Howe, Millennials in the Workplace.

According to StreetInsider.com, Howe "turns [the] downbeat message [from the media on Millennials, aka Generation Y] on its head."  Taking the position that Millennials are an asset and opportunity rather than a lazy (insert other adjectives here) liability, the website writes, Howe's new book serves in part as a resource for employee engagement and team building strategies to find and keep them.

Providing a sample of the employee retention tips Howe shares in Millennials, StreetInsider.com links to this pdf from Howe's company, LifeCourse.  At its core is the following list of recruiting and retention strategies tailored to this young generation that, some reports say, became the most pervasive one of all this year: 

1. Treat them like VIPs
2. Co-recuit the parents
3. Find them early
4. Look after them
5. Offer structure and teach them the basics
6. Provide tight cycles of feedback
7. Don't offer a "McJob"
8. Make them part of the group
9. Be active in the community
10. Take an interest in their success

I really like that the pdf includes a section on "What To Do" under each of the above strategies to take them from the world of the ambiguous to the practical.

Given the Millennial workforce's size and its stature as the dominant generation in the work world for years to come, it's no surprise that our Top Small Company Workplaces are already using many of the above strategies to help them tackle pressing issues from process and supply chain improvement to sales lead cultivation and delivery.

Related: Read my 4 reasons why Millennials may be the ones to pull us out of our troubled economy.

To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), President Barack Obama announced Monday the publication of the final rule  that amends the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) regulation implementing Title III of the ADA.  These regulations set standards for making buildings accessible for people with disabilities and applies to private entities such [...]

Justin and Zack are now friends

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Clayton McIlrath and Zack are now friends

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Zack posted an update: Just created a new avatar. let me know what you think.

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India is the second-fastest-growing golf market in the world, after China. Its producing star players and, like elsewhere, has a number of elegant courses where players mix business with the sport.

Learn about three essential local resources for your small business.

Excelling in all three puts your company in "best of class" status.

1985...The fight was on! Fists and elbows were flying and blood was flowing from both of us. Present day...I have learned many great business lessons from rivalries, fist-fighting and burying the hatchet

17 Vote(s)

Carlos Slim was revealed as the mystery man who paid $44 million for the Duke Semans mansion at 1009 Fifth Ave -- right across from the Met -- on Tuesday. That means the World's Richest Man is moving to New York, at least for a few days a week.

Slim's new home is a 1901 beaux arts mansion, owned by the Duke tobacco dynasty until 2006 when it was purchased by self-made fertilizer baron Tamir Sapir. It features a doctor's office in the basement, 12 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and 11 wood-burning fireplaces, spread over 20,000-square-feet.

Unfortunately there are no interior shots on the web, except for a few close-ups of beautiful beaux arts trimming on the walls.

But don't think this means Manhattan real estate is soaring back. Slim was able to knock $6 million off the asking price. And it is definitely not the most expensive home in the city. That honor might belong to Phil Falcone.

Check out the most expensive NYC banker homes -->

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(This guest post comes courtesy of The Mad Hedge Fund Trader)

One of my biggest disappointments with President Obama so far is his continued support of the ethanol boondoggle. The program was ramped up by the Bush administration to achieve energy independence by subsidizing the production of alcohol from domestically grown corn. Add clean burning moonshine (yes, it’s the same alcohol—C2H5OH), whose combustion products are carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), to gasoline and emissions also go down.

The irony is that if you include all the upstream and downstream inputs, the process consumes far more energy than it produces. It also demands massive quantities of fresh water, which someday will become more valuable than the oil the ethanol is supposed to replace, turning it into toxic waste.

Few consumers are aware of how big the ethanol industry has grown in such a short period. Ethanol consumption of corn (CORN) has soared from 1.6 billion bushels in 2006 to an anticipated 4.3 billion bushels this year. Ethanol’s share of our total corn crop has skyrocketed from 14% to 33% during the same period. Corn grown for ethanol now occupies 10% of the total arable land in the US!

Ethanol’s impact on food prices has been huge. It is the sole reason why corn is trading at the $3 handle, instead of $2, and soybeans is trading at $10, instead of $4. You also have to add in the inflationary effects on downstream grain consumers, like the food manufacturers and the cattle industry. While spendthrift, obese Americans burn food so they can drive chrome wheeled black Hummers to Wal-Mart, much of Africa and Asia starve. A global food crisis will be the major international political issue of the next decade.

This ignores the reality that Brazil, the world’s largest ethanol producer, can ferment all the ethanol it wants at one third our cost because they make it from much more efficient sugarcane, which has five times the caloric content of corn. They also have ideal weather. However, protective import quotas and tariffs prevent meaningful quantities of foreign ethanol imports.

Bush financed all of this wasteful pork, because Iowa has an early primary, giving it an outsized influence in selecting presidential candidates, and has two crucial Senate seats as well. Well, it turns out that Obama needs Iowa even more than Bush, where the Democrats are ahead 3-2 in the House, and have a tie in the Senate (1-1), so the ethanol program not only lives on, it is prospering.

Ethanol has become such of big industry that it now commands a fairly large footprint in Washington, fielding armies of lobbyists to keep the subsidies and tax breaks flowing from the appropriate agricultural committees. When you hear people complain about corruption in Washington, this is a classic example. The problem for the rest of this is that once these lobbies become entrenched they are almost impossible to get rid of. Think of an advanced case of scabies. Remember the tobacco lobby?

Shame, and double shame. I say better to drink ethanol than burn it, and damn the hangovers!

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Do pleasant smells encourage spending?

While driving home this afternoon, my wife’s car was rear-ended. The car that she was following stopped suddenly, forcing her to stop suddenly. The next driver in the chain wasn’t quite able to stop in time. Fortunately, nobody in either car was hurt, but, it was pretty traumatic for my wife and kids and my 6 year old son, Noah, was crying.

Enter the North Carolina Highway Patrol. Police officers often get a reputation for being cold or unsympathetic, and I’ve certainly met some of that type. The officer that helped my wife today, though, was the exact opposite. Very kind and patient, particularly with my boys. After the paperwork was completed, she went to her car and returned with a stuffed puppy that she gave to Noah. She explained that she’d been carrying it around in her car for a while but wanted him to have it because he’d had a rough day.

As simple as that, a single small act of kindness turned completely changed the complexion of the afternoon, at least for one little boy. Tears were replaced with a smile by applying a little empathy to the situation. Sure, It will be annoying going through the process of getting the car repaired, but my lasting memory won’t be of the accident. It will be of the compassionate police officer who made my son’s day just a little bit better.

From Erica Swallow, Mashable:

The debate continues on whether CEOs should be fluent in social media or not, but the n

John Gagel, manager of Sustainable Practices for Lexmark International, and John Garn, a green business consultant for Viewcraft, a consulting firm, offer practical suggestions on how to make your business greener and get a good return on your investment.

AllBusiness.com's Paul Kilduff interviews Matt Sarrel, IT expert and executive director of Sarrel Group, about what encryption is and how it works.

Franchisees today face uncertainty about new government regulations, the availability of capital, and how quickly the economy will truly recover.

Learn about the different types of bankruptcy, from Chapter 7 to Chapter 11 to Chapter 15. A look at different bankruptcy options for businesses and individuals

16 Vote(s)

I spent the month of May working with Albert Wenger out of the Union Square Ventures offices and had the chance to dive deep into the New York Consumer Internet scene in the past few weeks.

What I am seeing leads me to believe that this city is developing into a serious challenger of the Valley when it comes to Consumer Internet (and SaaS) activity, combining some of the best VCs and most interesting startups with the incredible energy New York always had.

The city seems to have reached critical mass to a point that some entrepreneurs don’t even travel to the Valley anymore to raise capital or do bus dev deals.

So when I think that New York can beat the Valley in the next 5-10 years and become the place for Consumer Internet, it is mostly for 3 key reasons:

- New generation VCs: New York has very few large “legacy” funds but instead a high density of smaller “boutique” funds, micro VCs and angel funds that have been very successful in investing in the next generation of Consumer Internet companies. Union Square Ventures (Twitter, etsy, Zynga, Foursquare) is certainly leading the pack and the most prominent NYC VC firm by far but there are tons of other very successful investors in this market: Betaworks, FirstRound (with their new NYC office), Chris Dixon’s Founders Collective, Metamorphic Ventures, Wider Wake or Greycroft. As the VC landscape is going through a transition to less and smaller VCs, NYC seems to have a clear head start compared to the Valley.

- Tons of engineering talent: for the past decade Wall Street sucked up most of the engineering talent out of Columbia and NYU but this is largely history. It is now cool to work for a start-up and not in finance and this transition has just started.

- Deep domain knowledge in some of the fastest growing Internet sectors: NYC is the place with the deepest domain knowledge in some of the hottest Internet verticals like advertising, fashion / apparel and big data and it is not a big surprise that most advertising start-ups reside here or a company like Gilt was founded and built in NYC.

So NYC really feels like the most exciting place to start an Internet company at this stage – and it seems that the West Coast crowd has figured this out as well and is increasingly investing here.

This blog post was originally published on the W Media Ventures blog.

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Steve Cohen's ex-wife's lawsuit against him is back.

The main points are the same, but now they're filed within a better, more coherent claim against the SAC hedge fund manager. There is also full explanation of how Cohen allegedly engaged in insider trading in the 1980s.

From the lawsuit, which her lawyer, Howard Foster, sent us:

In 1985 Steven was informed of the imminent acquisition of RCA Co. by General
Electric Co. by Bruce Newberg, a securities trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Mr. Newberg provided the information to Steven in furtherance of their long-standing
friendship which began at Wharton Business School. Mr. Newberg also hoped to
enhance his standing with Steven, who was by then an up and coming trader on Wall
Street.

Steven knew that Mr. Newberg had obtained the information from Dennis Levine, one of
Newberg’s superiors at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and that Mr. Levine had been provided
with the information from an RCA insider. Such privileged information was provided to
Steven as part of his relationship with Mr. Newberg and as part of an effort to “take care
of one another."

The arrangement to "take care of one another" was apparently part of the special treatment Steve Cohen and his Wharton friends had been giving each other since business school, where they called themselves, The Wharton Mafia.

They sometimes referred to their group of Wharton friends as “the
Wharton mafia.”

The insider trading claim continues:

Steven passed on the inside information to Donald and colleagues at Gruntal.

While in possession of the material, non-public information from Mr. Newberg, Steven
and Donald each purchased RCA stock with the intent of profiting from the inside
information.

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Revamped SBA.gov will deliver essential information and services to small business owners Release Date:  July 29, 2010; Contact: Cecelia Taylor (202) 401-3059 WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Small Business Administration announced today that a complete redesign of its website, SBA.gov, will launch this fall. The new SBA.gov will make it easier for small businesses, lending [...]

After he graduated, development major Mark Rembert applied for the Peace Corps, thinking he could help developing countries strengthen their communities. But when his hometown's largest employer shut its doors, Rembert found that rural Ohio needed him most.

DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized five young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants--and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week. Click here to read the other winners' stories.

Getting into the Peace Corps is no small matter. The application process is arduous, and has become more competitive. In the fall of 2008, the Peace Corps said yes to Ohio native and recent Haverford College graduate Mark Rembert. Then 23, the activist and economic-development major was looking forward to traveling to Ecuador, where he would pursue field work helping rural villages with asset-development. But news from his native Ohio sent him in a totally different direction. That November, Rembert read that DHL, the largest employer in his hometown of Wilmington, in rural Clinton County, was shutting down. An estimated 8,200 residents in Clinton County would soon lose their jobs.

Instead of flying to Ecuador, Rembert went home. "When your community has 18% unemployment, its hard to justify going to [Latin America] to help out," Rembert says. In Wilmington, he found Taylor Stuckert, another would-be Peace Corps recruit, and together, they started Energize Clinton County (ECC), a not-for-profit devoted to creating green jobs, investing in sustainable energy, and marketing local industries and businesses. His initiative earned him a $10,000 Do Something award, money that he says will be plowed back into the community.

With ECC, Rembert and Stuckert are doing the same thing they would have in the Peace Corps: They have helped a rural community take advantage of resources it already had. Though Clinton County had been buoyed for years by the massive DHL facility, Rembert saw that his region had many other strengths it had previously ignored, including a charming downtown, an abundance of farmland, and the benefit of Ohio's tax incentives for green businesses.

Forming a group of town leaders charged with understanding the red tape for green industries, ECC designated Wilmington a Green Enterprise Zone, the first of its kind in the nation. The move -part marketing strategy and part zoning ordinance-has helped Wilmington secure Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants from the federal government's Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These in turn have served to attract private capital from solar energy companies in his small town. Part of Rembert's job is simply to understand how Wilmington's utilities work, to make the job easier for investors, he says: "We spend a lot of time working with utilities, so that when [solar] companies come to town we can tell them where to go."

Recently, ECC's efforts landed Clinton County a Purchase Power Agreement with Gaia Energy USA to install solar panels on the county jail. Gaia will provide more than $300,000 in capital investment to install 65 kilowatts of panels. Once installed, the panels could help the county save more than $25,000 a year on energy costs. Meanwhile a project is being seriously explored to make poetic use of the abandoned DHL facility by installing solar farms on its roofs, while another will use farmland in the county for utility scale solar fields. If successful, the later would count as one of the largest solar power sources east of the Mississippi.

To spur green-job creation through construction, ECC has also focused on retrofitting buildings. The organization solicited help from a professor at nearby Dayton University to supply line-by-line energy audits on town buildings. The service is key to helping businesses and public works invest in retrofitting, which saves money and creates construction jobs. "Since you can't see energy and you can't see the money leaving your building, it's really difficult to convince people to invest [in retrofitting]," Rembert says. "When we're armed with data, it has a huge impact."

ECC has also designed an easy-to use and professional-looking online portal that promotes 170 locally owned businesses and sends out a weekly e-mail newsletter read by 1,000 people every week. Thanks to a renewed involvement, the downtown commerce area has been completely tranformed. "When we were growing up, downtown was dead. We went to the strip, to Walmart-that's where everyone was. Now everyone wants to be downtown," says Rembert.

He senses that young American designers, economists, and urban planners have shown a renewed interest in rural areas, where projects are easier to initiate and have a much larger impact than in dense and highly regulated city centers. His own ECC is a remarkable case study of development and planning skills, which he intended for use in third world countries, at work domestically. "We ended up realizing that a lot of the principles used in the Peace Corps-community asset based-development-were what was need in Wilmington."

His epiphany and his subsequent follow-through earned him not just the $10,000 prize but also a trophy given to him live on VH1 by none other than Megan Fox, who grew up in eastern Tennessee. "I think she's really passionate about rural America," Rembert says. Always on-message, he believes he was especially lucky to have been paired with the actress-for exposure's sake: "We have no doubt," he says, "that our video has been viewed many, many times."

More winners' stories: Micaela Connery: Knocking Down Barriers With the Power of Performance Jacqueline Murekatete: Genocide Survivor Embraces Her Ordeal to Educate Others Will Perez: Med Student Pioneers “Political Medicine” in Rural Haiti

Some of us, myself included, use the phrase “forever” a lot. BFF (Best Friends Forever) I have known him FOREVER I’ll love you forever This time, it’s forever And of course in popular song lyrics (“Forever’s gonna start tonight” comes to mind. So many others, of course.) Forever is kind of like happily ever after.  All or nothing. Yes or no. [...]

After the attack on the World Trade Center, Antonio Colon decided to start Combat Training Solutions. This year the SBA picked his company as one of the country's best.

Google today announced new location-aware mobile display ads for both iPhone and Android devices, introducing iAd-like expandable ad-units that incorporate maps for click-to-call and other rich functionality. Advertisers will be able to check a “location extension for display” box and their ads will become geo-enabled when viewed in mobile browsers or apps.  It works by [...]

Who needs sleep when there are start-ups to launch? Between endless e-mail conversations and talkative co-workers, getting actual work done during the day isn’t always an easy proposition. The New York Times has an interesting article about a group of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and software developers who have come up with a nocturnal solution to that problem. Calling [...]

From Antonina Jedrzejczak, Business Insider:

Traveling for business can be exhausting, especially if you have to fly internationally over just a few days, or go straight to work when you arrive.

 

Still, there are helpful things you can do before, during, and after your flight to make the travel and the transition much easier.

The Plug-In 2010 Conference in San Jose was the site of major announcements by major auto manufacturers Nissan and General Motors. During their Tuesday morning speeches, both Nissan North America’s executive vice president, Carlos Tavares, and General Motors vice president of U.S. marketing, Joel Ewanick, announced that their much-anticipated products would be available in only [...]

Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’s Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball by Rafe Bartholomew, on YouTube. HOOPBALL IN THE Philippines? Yeah, baby. Fulbright fellow Rafe Bartholomew has a new book out on the Filipinos' passion for basketball. (Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’s Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball -- great title.) Brings back childhood memories of b-ball on the hot concrete courts of inner-city L.A. If you can't afford golf, tennis or fancy bike gear, there's always pick-up basketball games in the summer sun and winter chill. Asians and Asian Americans can play. Lot of youngbloods excited over Harvard University guard Jeremy Lin's recent signing with the NBA's Golden State Warriors don't know that the first Chinese American to play at a high level was the late William "Woo Woo" Wong, a hot-shooting, 5-foot-5, University of San Francisco guard coached by basketball legend Pete...

As Obama’s budget chief heads for the exits, he spoke to Dayo Olopade about why a bigger stimulus was politically impossible—and the administration’s plans for the Bush tax cuts.

Peter Orszag is the kind of man who gets people hot under their collar. Halfway through his appearance at the Brookings Institution in Washington—an affair otherwise dominated by tie clips and tax policy—a single heckler broke into song: “Peter Orszag and Larry Summers, they’re fascist pigs, they’re fascist pigs,” he yodeled, in a reasonable baritone. The man, who identified himself as a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, was hustled quickly from the room. Orszag flushed beneath his eternal tan. The crowd of budget wonks murmured dissatisfaction: That is not how Washington works.

Then again, Orszag’s “You Lie!” moment may reveal one of the reasons he’s getting out of Washington on Friday. The director of President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget has been an unlikely public face during a year and change of tumultuous negotiations over health-care reform, two annual budgets, deficit reduction and a controversial non-discretionary spending freeze. The wonk who once wrote an obscure blog for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on, among other issues, poetry, became Obama’s high-profile evangelist for reducing long-term federal debt by increasing government spending on health care and job creation.

His tenure in an increasingly gridlocked Washington took a toll on him. “I’ve spent four years in government,” he told The Daily Beast after his Brookings speech. “The government is not a nimble thing.” He described being in the room during heated debates over the size and scope of the 2009 stimulus package—a raw spot with liberals who feel the flagging economy is a result of not dreaming big enough. “I can personally guarantee you there was a 0.000 probability that it could have been any substantially larger.” That decision, he later conceded, was due to political imperatives that had nothing to do with economic ones. “Were I back at Brookings, I would have been writing papers over whether this could have been done differently.”

Despite his good-faith efforts to back the president’s vision for change with charts and numbers, he became a high-profile target of the left and the right.

The liberal Center for American Progress swiped at the Orszag-backed spending freeze (which left education and research intact) as the work of “budget peacocks.” Andrew Breitbart’s right-wing Big Government blog hammered Orszag for his (incorrect) 2007 predictions about American credit and housing markets: “Orszag will move on to another think tank (probably to watch how his bankrupting the country unfolds), completely unaccountable for the financial damage he has done to America.” Andrew Zarowny of Right Pundits, also welcomed the news of Orszag’s resignation: “Given how nearly everything he says or thinks has been proven to be wrong, his sudden departure may be a blessing.”

Despite the drama, Orszag has produced results—and demonstrated surprising influence from a comparatively minor cabinet position. “They’ve done a hell of a lot in a year,” says William Gale, the Brookings economist who introduced Orszag at his farewell. At Brookings, where he had been a fellow before joining the CBO, Orzsag took the time to outline his legacy in government, from working over members of Congress during the health-care debate to assisting the team of top-flight economists who have been working round the clock to fix the U.S. economy. “We did the work of six months in six weeks,” he said, referring to the flurry of accounting that went into the stimulus package.

He cited a new paper from Moody’s economist Mark Zandi and Princeton University’s Alan Blinder, noting that, minus the Recovery Act and the administration of the Bush-era bank bailouts, American GDP would be 6.5 percent lower, and the economy would be short 8.5 million jobs. The signature achievement of Orszag’s time in the spotlight, however, will be the “rapidly growing wedge of deficit reduction” that is the Affordable Care Act. As one of the most zealous and involved members of Obama’s cabinet, he helped drag health reform legislation over the finish line, and didn’t mind gloating about “the most promising set of reductions to future cost growth in history.” He also took the time to lob grenades at his most vocal detractors during the process—specifically Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose ideas on health-care reform, Orszag said, are “fundamentally flawed.”

While Orszag is leaving with a record of progressive change, he exits without knowing whether his ambitious long-term plans for fiscal reform will succeed. In leaving at this juncture—reportedly to spend more time on his tumultuous personal life—he is also ducking some tough battles. Still on the table: the 2012 budget, and questions of by how much and how quickly the government should aim to reduce the deficit (he recommends dropping federal debt from five percent to four percent of GDP); how to ensure health care does “bend the cost curve” as promised; and the conundrum du jour in Washington—whether to let the 2001 Bush tax cuts for rich Americans expire at the end of this year.

“The administration has been very clear about what we favor...which is continuation of the middle class tax cuts and allowing high income cuts to expire,” Orszag said. But from his new gig at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he added, “I am not going to be in a position to advise the president on this.”

That he is bowing out before other senior cabinet members—the embattled Interior and Agriculture Secretaries Ken Salazar and Tom Vilsack, overworked advisers David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, or the underrated Hillary Clinton—is surprising. The 40-year-old, type-A, marathoning bean-counter was the youngest, most energetic member of Obama’s cabinet—and had become a sort of mascot for the city known as “Hollywood for ugly people.” Since working as an economist in Bill Clinton’s administration, he’s charmed economic glitterati like Robert Rubin, Cass Sunstein and Joseph Stiglitz, not to mention Washington fixtures from Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC correspondent and wife of Alan Greenspan, to GQ writer Ana Marie Cox. But for all the fan-girl accolades (See: Orszagasm.com) and attention lavished on his personal life (See: fall nuptials with ABC correspondent Bianna Golodryga), it seems the shrill climate of Washington overwhelmed his sense of progress.

“It’s not quite punting,” said Gale, the Brookings host, but “everyone who wants to be a philosopher-king is frustrated by government.” He wasn’t specifically referring to his friend and former colleague, but Orszag’s four years between Capitol Hill and in the White House left him well acquainted with the gap between smart policy and actual lawmaking. One need only look at the state of reform for unnecessary agricultural subsidies, or the lockstep funding of national security programs now known to be wildly inefficient, for a taste of the frustrations Orszag faced in Washington.

The problem, it seems, is management—also, as the “M” suggests, part of Orszag’s mandate. “Two-thirds of Americans believe that when something is run by government it is inefficient and wasteful,” he said, citing a study from the Pew Center. “And they are right… In too many examples, the government spends money not out of need but out of inertia.” He made a spirited effort to weed out waste, fraud and redundancy with small-ball cuts to the federal budget--and by getting out of town before Washington begins to squabble over its social needs and looming debts, he showed his own allergy to inertia. “As with many things in life,” he said, “it is all in the timing.”

Dayo Olopade is a political reporter for The Daily Beast and a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. This post originally appeared at the Daily Beast and is republished here with permission.

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It's summer and most people just want to have fun. But some spend more on entertainment than others.

Bundle has compiled a new list of the cities that spend the most on leisure time, based on what the average household spends yearly on a good time in these towns.

Click here to see the cities >

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