Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit View more presentations from karl long . After the video of my presentation at Inverge 2 years ago has failed show up I have finally put an audio track on this presentation to provide a bit more context around my thinking and ideas. Amazingly, 2 years later the majority of the presentation…

“Dirt” (2008) by David Montgomery deals with the relation between soil erosion and civilization collapse. It is neither the first nor the only book that examines this subject. It is, however, written by a soil scientist, and it brings to a deeper level the understanding of how soil disappears and how this affects agriculture and, in turn, society. Was…

Global shift sees Europe oil refineries on the block Asian refiners want to take advantage of the crisis in European oil refining to buy up capacity from the majors, battered by 15 year-low margins, and shift the power centre of the industry to state-run firms. Europe’s BP and Royal Dutch Shell reported billions of dollars of losses from their…

Time management tips can successfully manage your projects too. One of your best strategies is to talk yourself through any resistance, as you implement all the action steps necessary to make your plans a reality. True to the maxim, it is easier said than done! And so it has been throughout history, as this ancient saying confirms: “Talk doesn’t…

Some folks don’t think so. The administration’s National Export Initiative calls for a 20 percent increase in next year’s budget for the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, bringing it to $534 million. This would enable ITA to hire up to 328 trade experts to help U.S. companies find customers in foreign countries, with a particular focus on high-growth…

The excitement is rising. The games will soon be here. I can’t wait. As someone raised in the ice and snow of Minnesota, the Winter Olympics are my favorite spectator event. They are a spectacle that is part world sporting competition, part cultural festival, part global media extravaganza. There are so many fascinating angles to these games. As a…

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that searchers are typing longer queries into the search boxes on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The evidence I’ve seen in the analytics for the four hyperlocal blogs that my wife and I write support that: On our Richland Real Estate blog , for example, seven of the top 10 referring keywords in…

The dictionary defines entrepreneurship as the process of managing an enterprise that involves considerable initiative and risk, and anyone who is familiar with this term knows that to be an entrepreneur, you must be willing to take risks and do business boldly and on a large scale. But that is not all that being an entrepreneur involves; true entrepreneurship…

We love talking dogs. Even more specifically, we love to impose excitable yet simple-minded dialogue on dogs. Who didn’t giggle at Dug the talking dog in Pixar’s Up, who was prone to moments of dimwitted cuteness with lines like “I was hiding under your porch because I love you”? In the absence of a multilingual translating collar like Dug’s,…

Typography by Julie Teninbaum Infographic: Let the Games Begin!