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

Dont let a natural disaster spell ruin for your business. Learn from the experts how to protect against and recoup financial losses. When Hurricane Katrina struck the gulf coast in 2005, it left an estimated $75 billion in damages in its wake.

How one Inc. 5,000 CEO coped with losing his largest customer, and why it helped his company grow Losing a big client can spell disaster for a start-up. For Tiempo Development , it spelled opportunity

Rather than fundraise, a famous philanthropist plays the market. Cousteau's newest adventure won't require such a puffy jacket. | Courtesy of CNN For the past few years, Philippe Cousteau Jr

With its banking and financial infrastructure still in tatters, a new mobile service that allows Haitians to make and receive payments via text message is taking off and allowing commerce to flourish. Last year, Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake that caused widespread devastation--a tragedy that puts yesterday's quake, which sent shockwaves of worry up and down the East Coast despite little damage, into stark perspective. The impoverished country is still recovering--but slowly, as several reports have indicated

While it may seem that people want to cut back on spending, companies that shape up inefficient buildings and get paid back via the energy savings are doing booming business. What's the ideal economic environment to get a free high-efficiency upgrade worth tens of millions dollars

Why can't anyone tame the social stream and just give us the good stuff? Illustration by Debaser Every minute of every day , the more than a half-billion members of Facebook collectively create almost 1 million photos, wall posts, status updates, and other bits of ephemera. The firehose at Twitter looks tame by comparison--the network sees more than 125,000 tweets a minute, only half of them about (or from) randy congressmen.

If your franchiser declares bankruptcy, it might not be the end of the line for your business. Here are some tips to give you some ideas about what to do next. Bill Burris , owner of Rent Your Boxes in Washington, D.C., a franchise that rents and delivers heavy-duty moving boxes, got the bad news in an e-mail.

From online deal sites and gamification to digital marketing and online payments, these Internet companies are reaping all of the benefits with none of the brick and mortar overhead. Paul Hurley, CEO New York City No. 1 2010 Revenue: $77.7 million Three-Year Growth: 40,882% Founded in 2006 and based in New York City, ideeli has pioneered the idea of the flash deals site and is the Inc.

LONDON (Reuters) - Volkswagen will within two weeks unveil one of the first single-seater cars, with the potential for zero emissions, the Financial Times reported on Monday. VW's one-seat concept car will illustrate the carmaker's ambitions to build electric vehicles that generate no carbon dioxide, the FT said, citing the company's head of research, Jurgen Leohold. [More]

Last month we told you the best options for front office software. This month we asked the experts to weigh in on back office software to improve your business operations. Never have there been more software choices for the small business.

By 2015, $144 million will be spent annually on cybersecurity tools for electric vehicles. Hacker attacks on electric vehicles couldn't just spoof credit card numbers or power a car for free--they could also potentially take down the grid. Electric cars can go fast, have increasingly impressive battery lives, help drivers save money, and help wean economies off of oil.

Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function --a bell curve--would predict that such extreme dips and rises would be exceedingly rare and not prone to following one after the other on succeeding days. Gaussian functions might be able to describe the distribution of grades in a big college class, with most students getting, say, B–/C+, and enable you to predict how many students will get A's or fail.

Are you as effective a CEO as you can be? These seven steps will help you hone your style

Sure, the soccer uniforms, piano lessons and college tuition add up--but there is nothing like being a parent.

But they'd like to do it with as little risk as possible. A majority of female business owners expect their companies to grow over the next two years, but most don't want to raise prices—and they'd like to avoid risk, says a new report. Four in five women hope to grow their businesses "substantially" or "at least a moderate amount" by 2013, according to a survey of some 700 female business owners done by PNC Financial Services Group.