World Legal Information Institute

worldlii.org -- Without access to the standard legal fee-based services, there have been countless situations when I have made use of the World Legal Information Institute's site at <http://www.worldlii.org/>.

Web Fortune Teller

umich.edu/~brady:

It's a short web site, but interesting look at several leading opinions of where the future of reaching a market will be. Easy reading.

With the promise of a brighter fiscal tomorrow, corporate American stands ready to pounce on internet users and inundate them with product information on demand. The future holds a new digital marketplace in store for Americans. An existence in which everyday errands are underaken not in the family Caravan but through the modum and mouse.

Shopping, paying bills, entertainment, and banking are all ready to enter the American home through a more efficient channel, offering their services to the world for nominal cost in advertising. Interesting, many have noted, but how soon are we to see these changes appear on the net? The harbingers of change are already in place and they promise to redefine the lifestyles of every man, woman, and child on the planet.

Just-In-Time Junk Employment

Vend-A-Temp is proud to offer services across the entire continental USA. Now companies such as Microsoft, McDonalds, Subway, and many others may take advantage of this lucrative cost-saving employment system. Staffing your business has never been so easy! Swipe your credit card in their reader and a temp appears!"

Gartner's "Future of Money"...

an interview with Bernard Lietaer: "Few people have worked in and on the money system in as many different capacities as Bernard Lietaer. He spent five years at the Central Bank in Belgium, where his first project was the design and implementation of the single European currency system. He was president of Belgium's Electronic Payment System, and has developed technologies for multinational corporations to use in managing multiple currency environments.
He has helped developing countries improve their hard currency earnings and taught international finance at the University of Louvain, in his native Belgium. Bernard Lietaer was also the general manager and currency trader for one of the largest and most successful offshore currency funds. He is currently a fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources at the University of California at Berkeley and is writing his seventh book: The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity.

He argues " the malaise Japan has suffered since the early 1990s reflects an economic challenge the whole developed world has begun to face. Today, European and U.S. factories, too, suffer from overcapacity. The vaunted productivity growth spurred by the digital revolution has raised the economy’s stall speed. If the natural growth rate of the U.S. economy has risen to 4% annually, anything less than that rate will cause firms to trim capacity. A firm’s revenue growth often must come at the expense of competitors as well as its own profits because companies have trouble raising prices. In response, companies cut costs any way they can, usually by laying off employees and squeezing suppliers, which causes further layoffs. For developed countries, the safety valves that limited damage during contractions in manufacturing may not work. In past recessions, laid-off factory workers in the Great Lakes states, for example, could migrate to the growing Sun Belt to find new jobs. In the present transition, areas with job growth may lie overseas." The long heralded rise of the information economy, the death of distance and the rise of the global knowledge workers is paradigm shift that our goverment leader's seem ill equiped to handle."

It's Me! Don't Drop the Bomb

wired.com: "In the history of American warfare, around 15 percent of the country's casualties have been caused by so-called friendly fire. In recent wars, sophisticated U.S. weaponry and increasingly confusing battlefield situations have propelled that number to more than 20 percent. But now a team from Sandia National Labs is leading a field of contenders in the creation of small radio tag sensors [RFID] that could be mounted on U.S. and allied tanks and other ground vehicles, allowing friendly aircraft to recognize them and lessen the chance of an unintended aerial attack.
'We're trying to give the guys on the ground something to identify themselves with"

Microbes in wastewater make a handy household battery.

nature.com: "Flushing the toilet could help supply your home with electricity, thanks to a device developed by US researchers. They have shown that electricity can be generated from domestic wastewater, which is full of organic matter from cooking, cleaning or sewage. As a bonus, the dirty water is made cleaner by the process, making sewage treatment easier. By turning wastewater into a valuable economic resource, Bruce Logan and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University think that their system might help make basic sanitation more affordable in developing countries. The process relies on bacteria that are already present in most wastewater and munch on household organic matter. These bugs burn anything from sewage to left-over cabbage, mainly turning it into carbon dioxide: as they oxidise their food, they strip electrons from the organic matter. Researchers can harness these electrons, generating an electric current that can be tapped for power generation. Devices in which bacteria burn organic fuel and convert it to electricity have been made before. They are called microbial fuel cells, and many researchers are now exploring them as potential sources of cheap power - sometimes in unusual places. Electrodes stuck into the sea bed, for example, can harvest the energy released by bacteria that live in mud at the bottom of the ocean. Although the amount of power that can be generated this way is typically small, it should be enough to drive underwater environmental monitoring equipment. Logan's device is just one such fuel cell. It consists of a plastic tube 6.5 cm wide and 15 cm long. Eight graphite rods running lengthwise through the tube act as negative electrodes. The positive electrode is a central rod made out of plastic, carbon and platinum. When wastewater is pumped through the chamber, bacteria stick to the graphite rods and channel electrons into them as they eat organic material. The electrons travel through wires to the platinum rod, completing the circuit.
"

Trends

trendwatching.com's free monthly newsletter brings you the latest and greatest in consumer trends and related new business ideas. Scan the archives, add us to your favorites, and subscribe to the free newsletter. It's all you need to be in the know forever! "

Teabucks

springwise.com/newbusinessideas: "A Starbucks for tea-lovers. Now that Starbucks and dozens of similar coffee bar chains are spreading the smell of roasted coffee beans in cities all over the world, it shouldn't come as a surprise that a small but growing number of companies is eyeing the market for coffee's alternative (or nemesis, depending on your beverage cravings): TEA!

So far, Springwise has spotted three aspiring 'Teabucks' chains: Boston based 'Tealuxe', Taiwan/US based 'Cha for Tea' (which is owned by 'Ten Ren Tea Co.'), and Thai/Indian 'Tea Concepts'."

Proud to be living in...

springwise.com/newbusinessideas We like simple ideas that can instantly be turned into potentially global businesses: check out Brooklyn-based Neighborhoodies, which sells cool, über-local hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with the name of one's very own, very narrowly defined neighborhood. Big cities have always been about neighborhoods or even specific streets, so a Murray Hill shirt says more than 'I Love NY'!

Launched only a few months ago, 300 hoodies a month (source: NYT) find their way to everyone from proud NoLita residents to Carnegie Hill locals.

Which brings us to the very pleasant opportunities that this business idea has to offer glocal entrepreneurs: there are literally thousands and thousands of city neighborhoods around the world, and strongly identifying with your 'hood' is by no means exclusively a New York thing.

Sony Global

QUALIA: "That's where I first saw the word 'qualia'. I thought, This is good, this is exactly the direction that Sony should take.

I keep a record in my head of things that I like. So when I see or hear something similar, I can pull out that file and do a replay. I think it would be difficult for people without a similar kind of reference to take note of the qualia around them. And you know, qualia never come to you when you're feeling irritated. You just sort of feel it - like that - when you're going about your own business as usual.

I began to wonder, what would happen if the pursuit of qualia became a company's objective? I thought QUALIA might provide an answer. Some people think that Sony's QUALIA are for a small group of wealthy people, but this is not right. They are not about a simple economic logic.

From now on, the individual's happiness and delights, in other words, qualia, will become more and more important. I believe that the pursuit of qualia will make people happy, and I am hoping that Sony's QUALIA will help move the world in the right direction."

Global Consumer and Marketing Trends

TRENDWATCHING.COM: "At DropShop in Munich, Germany and AuctionDrop, i-SoldIt, AuctionWagon, and Quikdrop.com in the US, consumers and businesses can now drop off items they want to auction. Staff will evaluate the goods, take professional photographs, and prepare an attractive, detailed listing on eBay. They'll then track the auction, answer questions from prospective buyers, and process payment when the auction closes. Once an item has been sold, they'll ship it to the winner, and send their customer a check minus the shop's commission, which ranges from 20 to 40% of the final selling price. Items that don't sell are returned. Also witness the massive growth of eBay's Trading Assistants Program, which allows individuals to leverage their eBay selling experience by selling and buying on behalf of others. More than 21,000 people worldwide have registered. How's that for FEEDER BUSINESSES promoting re-intermediation?! "

Governing...

governing.comThe Gentrification Surprise -- What’s the one thing you know about gentrification? That, as rents rise, poor people get pushed out of their neighborhoods. You know this because advocates for the poor have said it over and over since the 1980s. But as it turns out, the exact opposite may be true. A study of seven of New York’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods (Harlem, Morningside Heights, Park Slope, the Lower East Side, etc.) has found that poor people are actually less likely to move when their neighborhood is being gentrified. How can that be? The researchers say they’re as surprised by their findings as everyone else. So how could we have been so wrong about the effects of gentrification? Blame it on “observation bias,” the tendency to see what we’re looking for. In this case, it’s easy to see families leaving when neighborhoods gentrify. That’s because families are always coming and going, for reasons that have nothing to do with rents, racial change or the sudden arrival of Starbucks. “What happens in gentrifying neighborhoods,” says one academic, “is that [the coming and going] becomes visible.

BioThinking

biothinking.com: "Be a Jungle Manager -- While researching our approach, the main aim has been to convert the current understanding of the powerful biological forces that shape our world into practical everyday guidance for managers. We have derived the following principles of successful management in an increasingly jungly environment:

Jungle managers are opportunistic and omnivorous
Jungle managers cultivate their system
Jungle managers grow with the flow
Jungle managers actively disorganise
Jungle managers are fearless risk takers
Jungle managers are persistent and patient
Jungle managers have good defences
Jungle managers value observation, knowledge and failure
Jungle managers are playful and put in effort without stress

Jungle management helps you look at the world in a new way:
There is no difference between the natural world and the man-made world -- they both operate according to the same principles. All organisations, products and societies are life forms -- observing how they behave gives a truly realistic picture of business performance. "

Two Dirty Little Secrets Of Blogging

webtalkguys.com: "New figures from the Pew Internet and American Life Project bear me out. Pew finds two-to-seven percent of adult Internet users write blogs, and only about eleven percent read blogs. Eleven percent, you say. Not bad, considering how many people are on the Internet. But think again. Those eleven percent aren't reading every blog, most blogs or even many of the blogs authored by those two-to-seven percent. They're mostly reading blogs of friends. Not yours. Assuming you'll find a mass audience simply by doing a blog is akin to assuming your Great American Novel will reach best-seller status if you throw it on a Manhattan sidewalk."

Giant Crab 'Red Army' Invades Norway

nationalgeographic.comThe Cold War might be over, but a red army of monster crustaceans—marshaled by Soviet-era leaders—is threatening to invade Western Europe, according to environmentalists. First introduced to the Barents Sea off northern Russia in the 1960s, red king crabs (Paralithodes camtschaticus) are now spilling down western Norway by the millions. Some fear these massive crabs, native to Alaskan seas and the North Pacific, could reach as far south as Spain and Portugal, devouring almost everything in their path. Read the full story >>

IN NEED OF A BETTER BUSINESS MODEL

Ex Libris--an E-Zine for Librarians and Information Junkies -- issue 207: "The community place. Many cities and suburbs are sadly lacking in places where all elements of the community can come together. We have the meeting rooms to provide a home for purposeful gatherings, and many libraries now have coffee shops to provide a place for casual friendly encounters. Libraries provide their own occasions for community as well, with book discussion groups, meet the author events, and other library programming. Another way we could bring people together is by creating a databank of the different skills local citizens are willing to offer each other. Such a databank could help local entrepreneurs build their businesses by putting them in touch with people with the skills needed to turn their dreams into practical realities; at the same time it could help workers understand that they have much more to offer than the specific jobs they fill right now, which could disappear. "

How News Travels on the Internet

-- find out who the major players are --