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

So you want to change the world? Cynics may send you off to Wall Street or a white-shoe law firm. Those with gumption will look for another way.

A mobile app that lets people send gift cards to friends is not the work of a deals company. But it is using discounts to deliver customers--especially the specific demographics individual merchants want--into brick-and-mortar stores. Daily deals have exploded into a $4 billion industry almost overnight because there’s no shortage of merchants who would like to lure online customers into their real-world establishments.

Terrorist organizations are notorious videographers--particularly when it comes to uploading clips to the web to spread messages or recruit sympathizers. Now private company IntelCenter has assembled one of the world's largest collections of streaming terrorist videos for viewing on demand. Terrorist organizations love making videos and uploading them to the Internet.

You may not see it in your home, but chances are that lithium plays a large part in your life--the stuff is found in laptop batteries, pharmaceuticals, and electric car batteries, and it is considered to be an "energy critical element" by the American Physical Society. There's just one problem: While the U.S.

SpaceX has been the darling in the past few years of the so-called NewSpace movement--private companies aspiring to do the spacefaring work that was once limited to the space programs of the world’s superpowers. [More]

There may be nothing new under the sun, but beneath the sea is a different story. Scientists studying 28 years of data from the Atlantic Ocean have found that climate change is causing drastic changes in fish populations off the European coast--and that's bad news for cold-loving species like cod, which have fed generations of Northern Europeans. The North Sea, a cold wind-swept patch of the Atlantic stretching from Scandinavia to the U.K., is warming four times faster than the global average.

%excerpt% View post: How I Did It: Hartley Peavey of Peavey Electronics

Editor Jane Berentson discusses her recent visit to the headquarters of The Kauffman Foundation, which opened its first charter school in August. For years, my colleagues and I have consumed research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation the way nonfoodies consume fine restaurant meals—appreciative of the product's quality but not especially curious about its source. Kauffman, one of the 30 largest foundations in the United States, fosters entrepreneurship with grants, research, education, and policy recommendations

Consider staging a Comedy Central-style celebrity roast of your top-selling product. Once a year or so, everyone at our company gets together for a week to hang out, work together, and socialize. Because 37signals consists of 28 people located in nearly 20 cities around the world, these get-togethers are rare—and important

What small business owners want out of retirement, how employees feel about work-life balance, what countries are driving global e-commerce sales, and other intriguing statistics. Retirement Share of small-business owners who plan to retire before 65: 25% Portion who don't plan to ever retire: 17% After retirement, small-business owners would like to: Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute Work-Life Balance Portion of employees who say they would lose their jobs if they adopted more flexible work schedules: 16% (down from 28% in 2006) When conflicts arise between work and family, employees typically blame: 2011 Work+Life Fit Survey; Elizabeth Poposki, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Global E-commerce Portion of the world's Internet users who are Americans... ...in 1996: 66%...in 2010: 14% Amount spent in 2010 on American e-commerce sites by customers outside the U.S.: $10.1 billion Increase in the number of Internet users in 2010, compared with 2009: ComScore Social Media Share of small-business owners who say social media is important to their businesses: 66% On average, the portion of a company's Facebook fans who read its status updates per day: 7.5% Social Media Examiner; PageLever

What small business owners want out of retirement, how employees feel about work-life balance, what countries are driving global e-commerce sales, and other intriguing statistics. Retirement Share of small-business owners who plan to retire before 65: 25% Portion who don't plan to ever retire: 17% After retirement, small-business owners would like to: Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute Work-Life Balance Portion of employees who say they would lose their jobs if they adopted more flexible work schedules: 16% (down from 28% in 2006) When conflicts arise between work and family, employees typically blame: 2011 Work+Life Fit Survey; Elizabeth Poposki, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Global E-commerce Portion of the world's Internet users who are Americans...

In the high-stakes corporate tort system, an elite squad of legal eagles handle lawsuits dealing with "World of Warcraft," "FarmVille," and others in the big business of video games. These are their stories. Some lawyers deal with corporate torts

To generate growth, companies seem to love "hard" product innovation--the type of expensive breakthroughs that require engineers and PhDs to toil away deep in the lab. Think Teflon, Viagra, or the Segway scooter. The challenge with this type of innovation is that it's expensive and high risk because it requires a lot of marketing dollars to educate consumers, not to mention the cost of developing the product itself.

Traditionally, gold mining has been a messy, toxic business that leaves scars on the earth and mercury in the atmosphere. But the practice may get a bit cleaner with the growing Fairtrade gold certification, announced last year. successThe new standard , labeled as Fairtrade and Fairmined, sets social, environmenta,l and economic criteria to eliminate child labor, minimize or halt the use of toxic mercury and cyanide, and avoid the havoc mining usually visits upon the environment

John Sculley has had a diverse career by any measure--he has served as president of PepsiCo, CEO of Apple (where he famously championed the tablet computer in the 1980s), and more recently, chairman of Watermark Medical, a medical products company that has developed an in-home sleep apnea diagnostic device). Sculley is also working with Audax Health Solutions , a startup that has developed a personal health management platform with a gamification layer that allows users to compete with friends and collect points and badges. We caught up with Sculley at this year's Body Computing Conference --an event that brings together doctors, designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and members of the entertainment industry to preview the future of high-tech health care--to learn more about his thoughts on the future of health care technology