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

%excerpt% More here: Running a Mom-Friendly Business

If you see this dog coming for you, run. Thanks to his extensive training--and customized body armor that can cost upwards of $30,000--he's bulletproof, can hear through concrete, and can record high-def video of missions, even in the dead of night

The CrowdOptic app for iPhone overlays statistics in real-time, enhancing performers, players, and songs. Imagine watching a basketball game and seeing all of the vital statistics surround your favorite player without taking your eye off the game. CrowdOptic aims to visually enhance the event experience through a heads-up display on an iPhone .

Dear Norm, I have a company that works with people who have credit problems. We offer a free initial consultation and then suggest ways that our clients can improve their creditworthiness

The U.S.

I have been in the trenches of both tactical and strategic corporate finance for over 25 years, including being a CFO of a $2-billion company.

How do great managers cultivate excellent performances so consistently? Sometimes it's about moving a star into a supporting role. We continue our Leadership Hall of Fame series, a year-long look at the top business books and authors, with an excerpt from First, Break All the Rules (1999) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

Starting a small business takes a lot of hard work and talent. Keeping a small business going takes even more of the same. According to labor statistics, more than 80 percent of businesses fail within the first year—but very few reports explain why.

"What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?" says a senior VP of Applied Predictive Technologies, which runs data analytics for Starbucks and Subway. "You've got your Groupon and Living Social , and your Foursquare and Facebook Places," says Jonathan Marek. "What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?" That's the question on the mind of most every marketer and retailer--and Marek might finally have an answer

"Every 30 seconds, a Latino turns 18 years old." Marketers, take note. Univision, the Spanish-language network, outperformed NBC in primetime last week, which makes twice in four weeks that it achieved the feat against the so-called "Big Four"--ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS.

If every company institutionally implemented innovation practices, we might all be just as successful as Pixar, Apple, or 3M.

Greg Tseng, CEO of the social networking website Tagged, had just landed in Manila, on Saturday, June 6, 2009, to kick off a long-awaited vacation. As soon as he dragged his jet-lagged body up to his hotel room, though, an onslaught of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages from his co-founder, Johann Schleier-Smith, and other Tagged employees began: Something was seriously wrong with the site. In the 24 hours since Tseng had left his office in San Francisco, thousands of complaints had been filed by users—who claimed that Tagged's new registration process had somehow tricked them into spamming all of the contacts in their e-mail address books

Every entrepreneur faces the common challenge of writing a business plan at some point as they develop their fledgling venture. But while there are vast resources available to help tackle the task, most books, websites, and templates take a generic approach in helping entrepreneurs transcribe their visions onto paper. The truth is, however, that writing a generic business plan won't do you much good.

By the end of this year, around a billion people across the globe will be mobile workers, according to IDC, a global market research firm. As virtual work becomes more accessible to small businesses on a tighter budget, some CEOs and entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize that a virtual sales force not only can cuts down on costs, but can also add a competitive advantage for the company. "As organizations become more geographically distributed, they're going to try to access the best talent wherever they may be," says Richard Lepsinger President of OnPoint Consulting, a virtual consulting company based in New York, and co-author of Virtual Team Success: A Practical Guide for Working and Leading from a Distance

Technology has greatly aided our lives and made several previously difficult tasks easy. But technology has also brought some negative changes.