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

What if you didn't send your money to a faceless investment bank, but instead gave it to a local business? We spoke to author Amy Cortese about local investing, where people keep their capital within 50 miles of where they live. "The crazy thing is it’s easier for most people to invest in a company halfway across the world than in their own backyard," says Amy Cortese, author of the recently published Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It.

"July's small business data cheers me up," says an economist. Small businesses across the U.S. added 50,000 people to payrolls in July, continuing the trend of small increases in hiring that started nearly two years ago.

Break a business plan into bite-sized pieces, to focus on what matters most right now. The second of a three-part series. Read part one here.

I hope you had a great time over the weekend and are ready for the work week. [More]

Cities get faster and more productive as they get bigger and last forever. Companies get slower and more boring, and then they go out of business. Can companies change that model?

In my last post, I cautioned about the dangers of learning about venture capital from watching a TV show .

Ancient Lives, a project of citizen scholarship Zooniverse, makes it possible for regular folks with no knowledge of Greek to help with the work of translating important ancient Greek documents. Zooniverse , the citizen-science web portal that asks users to identify lunar craters and spot merging galaxies, now brings crowd-sourced research to the humanities with its Ancient Lives project, in which casual visitors scour images of papyrus fragments, teasing out Greek letters that spell the lives of people who lived in Egypt between the ages of Alexander and Jesus. The papyrus manuscripts come from the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a city that flourished along the Nile between the 4th century BC and the Muslim invasion of Egypt in the 7th century AD

Alice's tips on raising capital for your enterprise--and the best and worst funding experiences from her two decades of working with boards. For most nonprofit organizations, financial success depends on building a board of directors that is generous in helping to contribute and raise the "venture capital" to launch the enterprise, and strategic in working with the CEO to help establish and achieve a financially sustainable revenue model. It's nearly impossible for a CEO to maximize an organization's financial potential without a highly effective board

By Duncan Graham-Rowe of Nature magazine Flexible, transparent lithium-ion batteries have been made by a team of researchers at Stanford University in California, a technological leap that could spawn see-through electronic gadgets such as translucent iPads. Many electronic components can be fabricated to be transparent, but so far this hasn't been possible for the power supply, says materials scientist Yi Cui, who led the work, which is published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Batteries are normally made up of a pair of electrodes separated by an electrolytic solution, with something to conduct the current to an external circuit, and packaging to hold it all together.

So you've found a business partner to help make your idea a reality. Be sure to ask yourselves these eight questions before incorporating. Given the unstable job market, and the risk of going it alone, many people are currently seeking to start businesses together.

Warming in the Arctic is causing the release of toxic chemicals long trapped in the region's snow, ice, ocean and soil, according to a new study. Researchers from Canada, China and Norway say their work provides the first evidence that some persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are being "remobilized" into the Arctic atmosphere.

This week News Corp. execs James and Rupert Murdoch were dragged before a investigatory committee of Parliament over the U.K.'s phone-hacking scandal. Meanwhile hacktivists LulzSec decided to take matters into their own hands, and targeted the website of News Corp

Tired of watching the Hollywood machine engulf the San Diego Comic-Con, two Pixar artists have taken matters into their own hands and opened Trickster, an enclave for comic book fans, right across the street from the convention center. Whatever you do, don't call them Slamdance for Comic-Con. After years of watching the Hollywood machine slowly engulf the San Diego Comic-Con, Pixar story artists Scott Morse and Ted Mathot this year have staked out a creators' enclave across the street from the convention center.

A team of scientists studying the parent compound of a cuprate (copper-oxide) superconductor has discovered a link between two different states, or phases, of that matter - and written a mathematical theory to describe the relationship.

From the twisted mind behind some of the funniest, weirdest, cringe-inducing comedy of the last decade comes a new podcast channel born for Funny or Die. At any given moment of the day, you can be in the front row of your own curated comedy club: Conan sidekick Andy Richter yukking it up with comedian-writer Paul F. Tompkins , for instance, or Patton Oswalt expressing deep disgust about well--does it matter?