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

People are shopping with a mission, and brands are announcing themselves from behind store walls. The Proximity Era has begun. Mall rats soon may be an endangered species

Funny. Memorable.

This has been an explosive summer--markets in turmoil, cities in flames, politics in meltdown. So it's a relief to enjoy and learn from an explosion of a different sort--the explosion of creativity taking place this August in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival .

Airlines are rushing to adapt to rising fuel costs, but most efficiency gains have already been made. If gas prices continue to rise, it may require a full rethinking of how we fly

Find out what happens when a journalist crowdsources a piece about a crowdsource company to the people who work there. From DARPA soliciting the masses to design aspects of next generation combat vehicles , to

He also announced the SBA will double its investment in rural small business over the next five years. President Barack Obama told an audience in rural Iowa that economic recovery must be led by small businesses and entrepreneurs and "isn't going to be driven by Washington." Obama was opening a forum on the rural economy at Northeast Community College in Peosta on his second of three days travelling by bus through the Midwest. Tuesday he also announced that the Small Business Administration will double its current rate of investment in rural small businesses to $350 million over the next five years.

Looking beyond traditional loans? Learn more about this alternative and increasingly popular lending option

In acting they call it a "cattle call." Hundreds of up-and-coming actors file in to the same audition in hopes of being chosen for a role. It's quite a demeaning process. Kind of hard to tell with a name like "cattle call," but the process goes something like this: The actor stands in the center of a cold, uninviting room and faces a table with what is essentially a panel of judges, similar to a firing squad.

Creatives gravitate to a showy New York hotel lobby to work hard and look good doing so.

With thousands of ad firms wanting your business, how can you choose? Experts explain how to set your goals, put it in an RFP, and snag the best creative team. Long gone are the days of a handful of Madison Avenue firms controlling the advertising world.

Anita* was a model employee. As CEO of my previous tech company, I had hired her to take charge of our bookkeeping and administrative affairs. When Anita came aboard, I asked what she wanted in order to feel fulfilled at work.

Incubators like Y Combinator and DreamIt Ventures are helping young companies get their start. Here's how to make the most of your time at an incubator. Mark Wachen sits in the Manhattan outpost of DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia-based start-up incubator.

One of the perennial pieces of advice I get as a new entrepreneur is to put together a board of advisors or get a circle of mentors. I’ve found this doesn’t really require well-connected folks with the word chief in their titles. What I really benefit from is practical advice on how to do things I don’t know how to do

With a quarter of a million followers between them, the men and women behind a few of the better faux accounts show us how to create and maintain successful, character-driven Twitter feeds. All kinds of quippy characters populate my Twitter feed. There are the "newsies" intent on dishing out the latest info nuggets, the "media-obsessives" grappling with the state of our industry, those snark-laced counter-punchers I'll call "quipsters," and the "newbies" who, with only a handful of followers, are just beginning to find their way.

If you want to build a valuable companyone someone will buy down the roadconsider re-positioning your company out of the "consultancy" box. A lot of businesses start off providing a service and then fall into the trap of using the buzzwords of the consulting world. The problem is, consultancies are not usually valuable businesses because acquirers generally view them as a collection of people who peddle their time on a hamster wheel.