Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Dec. 4, 2009) -The Kentucky Agricultural Finance Corporation (KAFC), chaired by Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer, approved $120,000 in agricultural loans for projects in the Commonwealth during their regular monthly business meeting.

KAFC participates with lenders to provide financing to producers making capital expenditures for agricultural projects through the Agricultural Infrastructure Loan Program. Eligible projects include permanent farm structures with attached equipment that improves the profitability of farming operations. One Agricultural Infrastructure loan was approved for $20,000 in Mercer County.

The Large/Food Animal Veterinary Loan Program is designed to assist individuals licensed to practice veterinary medicine in Kentucky who desire to construct, expand, equip or buy into a practice serving large animal producers, as well as other smaller food animals. KAFC participates with a local lender to provide financing. One Large/Food Animal Veterinary loan was approved for $100,000 in Barren County.

Read More

Facebook Moves to Standardize and Own Customer IDs

Adorning the walls of Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters are multiple prints of Rene Magritte’s iconic painting The Son of Man. The image of a man’s face partly obscured by a green apple is considered a critique of people’s attempts to conceal their true selves. It’s also an apt metaphor for the millions who spend time on the Web trying to keep their own identities hidden, say executives at Facebook, the world’s largest social network. “Part of what Facebook is trying to do is help people take the apple away,” says Facebook Vice-President of Product Chris Cox.

There’s good reason to push people to be up front about who they are on the Web, where million of users enshrouded in anonymity engage in everything from bullying to spamming, identity theft to financial fraud. To help users establish their identities online, Web sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN) and eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal require customers to enter personal information on a site-by-site basis. Yet there’s a dearth of widely accepted identity standards—the online equivalents of a driver’s license or Social Security Number. “There isn’t anything built into the architecture of the Web that lets you verify who you are,” says Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum.
(By Douglas MacMillan, BusinessWeek, December 14, 2009)

Services Tailor Apps for Small Businesses (Programs Are Seen as Good Marketing Tools for Regular Customers, but Less Useful in Attracting New Clients)

Barbara Heinrich says she isn’t computer-savvy, but last month the owner of Local Motion, a clothing boutique in Minneapolis, went online and built her own mobile-phone application.

It was worth a try, she figured, considering how cheap and easy it was to do and how addicted to iPhone apps young people like her daughter were. It also dovetailed with other online marketing efforts —her Web site and e-mail blasts—aimed at bringing regular customers, collected over 25 years, back to the shop. So she built a free app to display her hours, location and pictures of new arrivals using BuildAnApp, a Web site from Mobile On Services Inc., of Minneapolis, and submitted it to Apple for inclusion in its App Store.

“I kind of jumped in and did it, and now I just need to figure everything out. But I think it will be great,” she said. “I think that everybody’s going to be doing it.”(By RIVA RICHMOND, The Wall Street Journal, DECEMBER 9, 2009)

Read More

Tools for Tweets (New software lets small businesses get the most out of Twitter)

Twitter is changing the way small businesses market themselves. Now a host of software companies are trying to change the way small businesses use Twitter.
The Journal Report

These companies are flooding the Web with thousands of tools—many of them free of charge—that simplify a number of common tasks on the microblogging service. Some software, for instance, lets you automatically search for Twitter posts, known as tweets, that mention your company. Other programs let you easily organize the tweets that you follow, or manage how multiple employees use a single Twitter account.

What’s more, Twitter says that by year’s end, it will launch several new features of its own for commercial use, such as a directory of business users.

Of course, companies of any size can use these services. But they can be particularly important for small businesses, which can ill afford to spend lots of time and resources figuring out how to make the most of Twitter. Tools for improved filtering and automation of Twitter tasks are “a particular boon,” says Laura Fitton, co-author of “Twitter for Dummies.” (By RAYMUND FLANDEZ, The Wall Street, JULY 13, 2009)

Read More

Squeezing Web Sites Onto Cellphones (Businesses Try to Shift Online Communities, Consumer Forums to Places Tailored for Wireless Users)

When a group of engineers at National Instruments Corp. modified a 1988 Oldsmobile so it could be controlled by an iPhone, the company was quick to share the project on its online forum for customers.

A spouse “might not care about it, but our community eats it up,” said Deidre Walsh, community and social media manager for National Instruments, a supplier of automation and computer measurement tools.

The Austin, Texas, company has a fostered dedicated online group of 125,000 engineers and scientists with do-it-yourself projects. Its strategy illustrates how companies have increasingly turned to Web communities to build their brand, address customer service problems and unveil new products.

But as people spend more time on their cellphones, many companies are considering taking their message boards, user forums and blogs to mobile devices. National Instruments is considering ways to build a mobile site, Ms. Walsh says but has to resolve issues such as how users can share programming code, which are large files. (By ROGER CHENG, The Wall Street Journal, DECEMBER 2, 2009)

Read More

Business Can Use Twitter to Predict Sales

There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.

Social-media sites such as Twitter have made it increasingly easy to find out what consumers think and want without the limitations and bias associated with older market-research tools such as surveys and focus groups. With Twitter, users broadcast what they are doing or thinking via “tweets,” short messages of 140 characters or less. People can “tweet” about anything at any time—from the long lines at the grocery store to a great sale at the mall to a new restaurant or movie—which allows for word-of-mouth to spread at astonishing speed. Anyone can follow a user’s messages, and tweets are easily searchable using keywords.

We believe executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services, and we have created a model based on Twitter’s keyword-search function to help them do that. (By HUAXIA RUI,ANDREW WHINSTON And ELIZABETH WINKLER, The Wall Street Journal, NOVEMBER 30, 2009)

Read More

Home-Energy Plan Spreads Out Costs

BABYLON, N.Y. — Town employees have fanned out across this Long Island suburb this summer, armed with free water bottles and beer cozies and a simple pitch: going green can save green, especially with low-interest financing from the town.

Empowered by recent changes to local, state and federal laws, municipal governments from Long Island to the Bay Area are launching programs to help residents purchase efficient furnaces, weatherize their homes and put solar panels on their roofs. Homeowners often balk at the upfront costs of such improvements because the energy savings typically takes years to pay off.

These local officials think they can overcome this hurdle by helping residents spread the costs over a decade or more.(By NOAH BUHAYAR, The Wall Street Journal, AUGUST 19, 2009)

Read More

An Internship From Your Couch (Working at Home Opportunities)

Virtual internships, while relatively rare, are becoming more common, career experts say, fueled by improving technology and the growth of social media. They are most popular among small to midsize companies and online businesses. More than one-fourth of 150 internships posted on UrbanInterns.com, a site that connects small businesses with part-time workers, are labeled virtual, where the work typically involves researching, sales, marketing and social-media development.

“In the last 10 years they’ve gone from being almost unheard of to being something almost every college student has at least considered,” says Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a job board for students and recent graduates. Mr. Rothberg says he first saw virtual internships in the late 1990s in information technology and software development—industries, he says, where virtual internships are still the most common today. Other growth areas include the sales, marketing and social-media departments of companies across various industries. (By JONNELLE MARTE, The Wall Street Journal, SEPTEMBER 29, 2009)

Read More

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, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages. (By NOAM COHEN, The New York Times, November 22, 2009)

Read More

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 across the United States.

“Small businesses are drivers of innovation and are crucial to the development of a competitive clean energy U.S. economy,” said Chu. “These investments will help ensure small businesses are able to compete in the clean energy economy, creating jobs and developing new technologies to help decrease carbon pollution and increase energy efficiency.” ( November 23, 2009)

Read More