FuelCell Energy and Alliance Power have formed the joint venture, Alliance Star Energy, and entered into an energy agreement with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. The agreement provides the framework for fuel cell power plant projects for Starwood's hotels and will streamline the process for business opportunities between Starwood and Alliance Star Energy.
As the traditional model of health care continues to become unwieldy, with some patients enduring long waits to see a doctor for a few minutes, concierge practices are becoming more common. Some doctors are reducing the size of their practices in order to be available, on call, to concierge patients. With minor issues, much of the consulting can be done over the phone.
Wendy's is an example of a company built around a brand that understands the changing nature of the brand after Wal-Mart Stores(WMT, news, msgs). The traditional brand is dead, I argued in my recent column "A brand-name survivor in a Wal-Mart world." But the savviest brand managers at companies such as Procter & Gamble(PG, news, msgs) have figured out how to increase the value of traditional brands by turning themselves into innovation factories. In a Wal-Mart world, a company that can push its brands to the top of the heap by keeping customers buying through constant product innovation that adds real value for the customer can charge a premium price and win an expanded share of the available distribution space at the expense of second-tier brands.
"Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. We see this happening all around us: you don't need a 20th century industrial base to build a 21st century bio/nano/information economy.
Rather than following the already-developed nations in the same course of "progress," leapfrogging means that developing regions can experiment with emerging tools, models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas).
A daisy-like plant known as Feverfew or Bachelor's Button, found in gardens across North America, is the source of an agent that kills human leukemia stem cells like no other single therapy, scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center's James P. Wilmot Cancer Center have discovered. Their investigation is reported in the online edition of the journal, Blood.
If it were not for the willingness of Chinese and Japanese central banks, along with their smaller Asian counterparts, to finance our trade deficit, we would be in perilous circumstances. If Asian currencies saw the dollar fall by 33%, they stand to lose over $600 billion in buying power due to their massive $1.8 trillion US dollar reserves. That is a massive amount of confidence.
Yet it works both ways. Exports to the US alone accounted for about 12% of China's GDP, and that was up from 9% in 2000. At current growth rates, US imports could be responsible for 20% of China's GDP by 2008. It may be that China is depending upon the kindness of strangers, in this case US consumers. Other Asian countries have similar, if not as dramatic, dependence upon US consumers. And many of them ship materials to China which eventually find their way to the US.
In the case of “working remote” it’s already happening. There’s even a name for it, its called “Homesourcing”. Rather than companies “outsourcing” their work to far off parts of the world, they are learning that it’s often just as cheap if not cheaper to allow their employees to work remotely rather than coming to an office. The company doesn’t require as much office space (and thus real estate) and employees get a tremendous benefit of being able to work without the added cost of commuting.
The Russian government's grip on the country's oil industry is becoming ever tighter. The latest pinch comes by way of comments from Russia's Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev, who effectively said last week that foreigners would be barred from bidding for the country's biggest mineral deposits in auctions.
China is simulataneously the source of the World's Deflation and Inflation -- at the same time.
How can one country simulataneously cause both Deflation and Inflation? The source of Deflation is due in large part to the labor arbitrage China has engendered, along with a commensurate extremely low cost production of goods. Call it the Wal-Mart effect. Inflation is simply due to the insatiable appetite China has for raw materials, as they industrialize what was a mostly agricultural nation of 2 Billion people (2010 projected, present: 1,298,847,624) into an industrial power house.
HOUSE, N.M., Feb. 10 - With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else.
Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.
