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

The book: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, by Peter Sims; Free Press.

LABOR COSTS Average hourly compensation costs (wages, benefits, payroll taxes) for manufacturing workers, out of 34 surveyed countries: 1. Norway $53.89 14.

Several of Lauren Conrad's former castmates on The Hills, which ended last year, have started businesses of their own. Here's a sampling: Kelly Cutrone, founder of fashion PR firm People's Revolution (at which Conrad worked on the show), is set to debut her own sportswear line, the Electric Love Army, this fall

Sachin Agarwal, the founder of Posterous, a blog hosting service, got bogged down in the numbers as his company grew. Then, he writes ( blog.posterous.com ), he got smart: He hired a CFO. "Last month our new CFO came into the office and I transferred all the finance knowledge that was in my head over to her.

%excerpt% Here is the original post: Creating a Smart Export Strategy

%excerpt% See more here: Elevator Pitch: Vozeeme

%excerpt% More here: Would You Take Business Advice From a College Student?

Sometimes it's OK to litter. After unwrapping soap from Pangea Organics, a Boulder, Colorado-based maker of skin care products, customers are supposed to plant the packages in the ground.

A Mountain Man Crusading editor and savvy publisher—Bil Dunaway somehow played both roles during 38 years at The Aspen Times. As editor, he turned the paper into a force for open government and better treatment of local employees. As publisher, Dunaway used the Times's monopoly of the local advertising market to amass a fortune that allowed him to buy or launch television, radio, and other newspaper properties in the region—and acquire real estate—as Aspen became a playground for the wealthy.

The Problem In our December 2009/January 2010 issue, we wrote about Dogswell , a maker of dog treats that got off to a strong start after its launch in 2003. But founder Marco Giannini overreached when he branched out to the pet-food market. The 2008 rollout of two new dog-food lines ran up a tab of nearly $1 million, four times the original budget.

One morning last January, a franchisee of Nurse Next Door in Edmonton, Alberta, sent an e-mail to company headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia. John DeHart, Nurse Next Door's co-founder and co-CEO, clicked on a link in the message, which led to the website of Eldercare, a competing company based in Toronto

%excerpt% Read the original here: Innovation: A Long-Distance Fingerprint Scanner

A new iPhone app from insurance giant State Farm uses the device's accelerometers and other sensors to work out how well you're driving. Perfect timing, as it's just emerged that Apple is the world's second-biggest buyer of these sorts of tiny sensors.

The information age was supposed to usher in a world where we could connect to anyone around the world instantly.

The college-is-a-bubble meme just keeps growing . Student-loan debt surpassed credit-card debt for the first time in history last year