Mixergy has some great suggestions on ideas for starting a new company.

Here are some other means to find ideas:

1. Keep a list of things that bother you or other people every day. This could be big or small  – your commute, the way your brush works. Try and fix that problem

2. Brainstorm with friends on things that need to be fixed.

3. Review large company balance sheets (This is the follow the money approach). Then find out where they make money the most or where the spend money the most. Keep asking questions on how you can increase their revenue or reduce their cost.

Your turn. But remember to take a break once a while.

Welcome recession. Thanks to you we actually have people not wanting to focus on money, instead working to do good for this world.

A record 112 teams submitted business plans for a social
entrepreneurship competition, Social E-Challenge, during the spring
semester.

Microsoft Money is dead.

Long live Intuit Quicken?

No. I disagree that Quicken beat Money.

What beat Money was not marketing from Quicken either.

People prefer automation. It takes time to fire up Quicken or Money or any other program to keep track of your expenses and log your checks. Only the geeks or ones with OCD went to get checks that could be printed from Quicken.

The rest of us wanted something or someone to automate it. This “rest of us” is a very small fraction of folks, actually. The rest (greater than 50%) dont care how much they spend since they have a good enough “feel”.

What killed Money was the effort to reward ratio was too little.

If you want to live safely.

1. New Zealand
2. Denmark
3. Norway
4. Japan
5. Canada

The Board of Supervisors passed new recycling and mandatory composting
rules on Tuesday in a 9-to-2 vote.

The city already diverts 72 percent
of the 2.1 million tons of waste its residents produce each year away
from landfills and into recycling and composting programs.

The new
ordinance will help the city toward its goal of sending zero waste to
landfills by 2020, said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s
Department of the Environment.

Anil Dash has a very funny post on the facebook vanity URL. I wish I was this accurate in my predictions.

A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

8 percent returns for venture capital over the last 10 years,

compared
with −27 percent for the S&P 500 and

−28 percent for the Nasdaq,

the
Russell 2000, an index of small-cap stocks that returned 18 percent
over the same period.

only about 0.2 percent of the estimated 600,000 new businesses created
in the United States each year are financed by venture capital and
about 16 percent of the fastest-growing companies are, he found.

Another problem he cited was that information technology has matured to
the point that new innovations will not be hugely profitable and it
costs a fraction of what it used to to start an I.T. company.

Leaders may know exactly what they want to see happening.

They send out messages down the management line. Employees ought to
understand. But between the top table and the shop-floor something goes
wrong. Leadership teams can be scarily ignorant of how badly their
wishes have been distorted, and how much unhappiness there is among
those on the receiving end.

There are four things in particular that managers need to provide if
they want to avoid this false anxiety syndrome:

predictability
(over-communicate);
understanding (keep it “Sesame Street
simple”, advises Procter & Gamble’s AG Lafley);
control (break down
big challenges into manageable ones); and
compassion (show that you
care).

Not every leader can–or should–be an innovative leader. Full article.

Newsweek finds yet another person to blame for this recession – Baby Boomers. See graph below of US population by age.

“The Baby Boom lasted from 1946 to 1964, and
some 78 million American children were born during that time. As this
cohort ages, its sheer size overshadows the rest of society.”

The worrying trend:
What happened in Japan in the 1990s was
a demographic shift into retirement, where a large portion of the
population went from a lifestyle of earning, saving and spending to a
lifestyle of not earning, living off assets and spending less. This
resulted in less demand for investments like stocks, less demand for
housing, and less demand for material ‘things’ — and the prices of all
these fell.

In one of the comments a user says “Let’s see, both my husband and I started working for cash before we
were even in junior high (he had a paper route, I babysat). Funny, I
don’t see any kids working in stores now, or many doing paper routes
either.”

The thing is there is no more of the paper route job. And the “working in stores” job is being done by adults out of college since there are no more jobs for them.

I dont think kids these days are slackers, or obsessed with navel gazing on twitter. They just dont have the opportunities that existed, since those jobs are gone.