A Translator Tool With a Human Touch

HOW hard can it be, as the joke goes, to speak Chinese? (Six-year-olds do it all the time.)
Yes, it turns out that learning languages is one of those skills that humans, even relatively young ones, master seemingly magically. It is all enough to make a mainframe computer jealous.
At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, [...]

Recovery Act Announcement: DOE to Invest $18 Million in Small Business Clean Energy Innovation Projects

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced more than $18 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support small business innovation research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies. In this first phase of funding, 125 grants of up to $150,000 each will be awarded to 107 small advanced technology firms [...]

Marketers Find Web Chat Can Be Inspiring

International Business Machines and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment and software giant Microsoft, are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web.
For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their ads. [...]

Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy [...]

Launching Startups in Retirement

For 15 years, Dorothy Atkins kept a diary during her long train rides back and forth to work as a project manager at a large San Francisco bank. “I always used commuting time to write out my hopes and desires,” Atkins says. She also did a lot of drawing, illustrating “pearls of wisdom” imparted from [...]

Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009 Report Highlights

When compared to other forms of advertising (print, Internet, TV, radio, direct mail), mobile is likely growing at a much faster rate because it is considered more cost effective, personalized, and results-driven. Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009: Challenges and Opportunities examines the current mobile marketing and advertising market, evaluating methods companies are using to effectively [...]

The Rise of the ‘Homepreneur’

More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new research suggests that’s a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based enterprises provide at least half of their owners’ household income. Together these “homepreneurs” employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures [...]

Two Kentucky High-Tech Companies Awarded Funding for Expansions

FRANKFORT, Ky. ‘ The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) awarded two high-tech Kentucky companies, Louisville Bioscience, Inc., and Laboratory and BioDiagnostics, LLC, (LabDx), state funding. The companies are anticipated to create a combined 36 new high-tech jobs at an average annual salary of over $64,000. (Manafacturing & Techonology eJournal, October 29, 2009)
Read More

Small Business Crunches Numbers

Small business has fought the health-care bill as too costly. That made Saturday’s vote bitter to many of the nation’s roughly 30 million such entrepreneurs, if welcome to some.
“With unemployment at a 26-year high, the punitive employer mandates and atrocious new taxes will force small business owners to eliminate jobs and freeze expansion plans at [...]

Blackhawk Composites to Start-up in Morgantown, Kentucky

FRANKFORT, Ky. Blackhawk Composites, Inc., a start-up manufacturer of advanced aerospace composite parts, will begin manufacturing operations in Butler County. The project entails the creation of 20 new jobs initially, growing to 30 within the first year, and a more than $1.5 million investment in the Commonwealth.
Established in September 2009, the newly formed Blackhawk Composites [...]