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

01 / Zynga > > For dominating--and monetizing--the social-gaming industry. The largest social-games developer in the world touts hundreds of millions of monthly active users on FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and more

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today

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.

What do guns, burglar alarms, and condoms have in common?

You give a clean, mean, 30-second elevator pitch. Then what

It's the biggest deal Google has landed yet, an event to be watched by billions of people around the world--many of whom will check it out online.

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.

Dough Boys: “I love OpenTable,” says David Steele (center) of the restaurant Flour + Water, flanked here by his partners David White and chef Thomas McNaughton. | Photograph by Toby Burditt The inevitable push-pull between a platform and its customers. Network Effect: OpenTable CEO Jeffrey Jordan says his service’s attrition rate is “tiny,” less than 1%.

1. Wal-Mart just handed over around $300 million for Kosmix, a topic-curated social media platform that's just six years old. The new firm will join the @WalmartLabs division, trying to build-out the retail giant's online shopping experience--which is now set to get a big injection of social media thinking, and will probably leverage Kosmix's smart semantic interpretation code to come up with purchase suggestions 2

This article is Part 3 of an 8 part series. Read Part 2 to learn about Geoffrey Moore’s new book.

And it did it all without spending a penny on advertising. Dropbox, the cloud-based file-syncing and file-sharing startup, is clearly one of this year's "it" girls among tech startups. Dropbox has climbed from four million to 25 million users since January 2010.

We've already seen Manhattan swallowed by surging waves as glaciers collapse and drive sea levels sky-high--on video screens and in nightmarish daydreams about human-driven climate change. But what will sea level rise really be like for a coastal metropolis of the future? It's actually easy to answer that question yourself, not with a ride in a time machine but simply with a trip in a car, boat, or plane

Walmart, that bastion of cheap food, clothing, and everything in between, has corporate-responsibility goals that put every other big box retailer to shame . When Walmart asks its 60,000 suppliers to shape up, the world listens; a demanding packaging goal will have companies the world over scrambling to fit the requirements (for both Walmart and the inevitable copycat retailers that jack up their requirements later). In Walmart's 2011 Global Responsibility Report , we get a glimpse at just how far along the company is in meeting its ultra-ambitious goals

It would be a disaster economically, upsetting family budgets and making the transporting of goods potentially next to impossible. But according to a new survey by Deloitte, it could take something as extreme as $5-per-gallon of gas to persuade most U.S.

In an era when cars drive themselves and algorithms predict traffic , the robot as a guardian figure is rising: 'Bots are being used in Japan to measure radiation levels from the crippled nuclear reactors, and the video games Rating Board is using automated systems to decide what rating a game gets.