Bookmark Futurity…

…but be forewarned that it’s highly addictive.  In a nutshell Futurity.org's akin to the colorful see & be scene watering hole, the one with an amazing happy-hour special where all the hip people go to flaunt themselves.  Only the colorful characters are the top research universities in the US, UK, and Canada, and what’s being flaunted isn’t skin or fashion but research findings.  (Granted, some of those findings could theoretically be about skin or fashion, but I digress.) Now research findings may not immediately sound interesting to everyone, but with highly catchy titles, one-pager lengths, and summaries that aren’t painfully erudite, it’s easy to find yourself thinking, “I’ve got three minutes.  I’ll just click on one more link because I really want to know how they figured that out.”

Futurity breaks its research headlines into four categories: Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, and Society & Culture.  For business researchers, that last category may have the most draw, with tantalizing headlines like: Super food: Shoppers will pay 25% more, or Exports + R&D = competitive edge. The other categories though often highlight emergent technologies that have the potential to form the basis of for new or niche markets, so they are worth looking into as well.  Who knows?  If nothing else you may read a study that’s a nifty conversation starter for the next time you find yourself at your local see & be scene watering hole.

Kids Count

The Annie E. Casey Foundation just released their 22nd annual Kids Count Data Book and now have their data available online through the Kids Count Data Center. "Kids Count is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the U.S. The Foundation provides policymakers and citizens with benchmarks of child well-being and seeks to to enrich local, state, and national discussions concerning ways to secure better futures for all children." With the online tool users can compare individual states or look at indicators across states for comparison and rank and then download the data in charts and maps for presentations. The statistics cover all of what you would expect but you will also find unique factors represented for a complete overview of children's well-being. Research includes information on children's:

• demographics with info on immigrant families
• education including test scores
• family structure
• health with insurance, dental, even mental health stats
• safety with stats on out of home placement

Megaregion Research

Megaregions are massive interconnected cities scattered throughout the United States, e.g. the Houston/Austin/Dallas Triangle, and the America 2050 initiative is putting them under the microscope (metaphorically speaking). Their about page says, “America 2050 is a national initiative to meet the infrastructure, economic development and environmental challenges of the nation as we prepare to add about 130 million additional Americans by the year 2050.”

If you’re doing business research- especially research concentrated around megaregions- then their site is a veritable goldmine of information.  America 2050 features free reports on topics ranging from energy & climate, high speed rail, broadband infrastructure, commuter patterns, etc.

Beyond the sheer concentration of data and analysis packed in America 2050's content, their maps are an excellent highlight.  The main maps page features many versions of the national-level megaregion concentrations, plus proposed passenger transit lines throughout the US.

Furthermore the incredibly detailed region-specific reports found in the Research tab have maps illustrating economic interrelationships among cities, e.g. wood products’ traffic concentrations within the Texas Triangle.

For those who want to keep abreast of the major economic, environmental, infrastructure and transportation trends that are shaping America’s most heavily populated and trafficked areas, this site is definitely one to bookmark.

bizologie Favorite Tools: Historical Value of a Dollar

Ever wonder how much that $20 bill would have purchased in 1950? Or how much that same $20 would be worth today had you invested it in the stock market back in 1970? There are a couple of great online tools and apps that help you do just that. The American Institute for Economic Research has a great cost of living calculator that lets you put in a dollar amount and compare that amount between two years:

Foodtimeline.org is a great source for tracking food prices throughout American history. They've got great lists like "The Hershey Bar Index" and historical prices of McDonald's Hamburgers. In 1955 a Hershey bar was just 5¢ and a McDonald's hamburger was 15¢.

But what if instead of spending your 20¢ on candy and burgers, you had invested it in 1955? Well, there's an app for that, of course. MeasuringWorth.com has an app called The Time Traveler's Investment Calculator. "The Time Traveler’s Investment Calculator is a simple way to go back in time and choose a hypothetical investment strategy and see how you would have done. You can compare your actual investments with what you wish you had done."

But if apps aren't your thing and you want to kick it old school, check out The Value of A Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States. This is a great resource for historical products and services dating back to 1860 and is almost always found in your local public library's reference section.

Can happiness lead to success?

What if everything we've learned about success leading to happiness is backwards? Studies show that happy people are up to 30% more productive. These positive people also suffer from less burnout, and take fewer sick days. What if happiness directly leads to our success and not the other way around? This is becoming a hot topic of research at business schools. Raj Raghunathan is an associate professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and writes the Sapient Nature blog for Psychology Today. I heard him speak at the UT Libraries a couple weeks ago and was intrigued by this idea. So many people define success as overcoming obstacles and reaching goals. But what happens then? We move the finish line. We set more challenges and goals. So that means we put happiness just out of our reach or at the next goal. Can we redefine happiness, and therefore success?

Shawn Achor author of The Happiness Advantage and former teaching fellow at Harvard University is also researching in this field. He explains that we get in a negative mindset and will always look for the negative. Can we change our viewpoint? What about the negative nellies? Is being a pessimist genetic? Achor says it is possible to change the way we think and become more positive. Raghunathan also believes we can get happy-smart and make happiness a priority.

What can you do to become more positive?

• Be grateful - for 21 days write down 3 things you are grateful for and why
• Exercise - get those endorphins flowing
• Stop multitasking - focus and learn to meditate (even for just 2 minutes a day)
• Think of others - volunteer or praise/thank just one person each day

The research shows that happiness is actually contagious. So theoretically as a manager or team member, you could spread positivity to your colleagues and help them become more productive and successful.

When Being Open Is the Benchmark…

…Then you can count on having waffles.  In a great case study of sorts from the Wall Street Journal A-Hed column, writer Valerie Bauerlein extols the virtues of the Waffle House, a humble fast food diner that has carved out a niche by being ahead of the game for quickly reopening after major natural disasters.  Where other restaurants may take weeks to reopen, Waffle House is differentiating itself on a model in which nothing save for total facility destruction will prevent it from being the first restaurant back in business in a devastated community. The planning and effort that goes into reopening so fast has earned the Atlanta-based Waffle House chain its own index from FEMA (yes, the FEMA), much loyalty from its occasionally desperate customers, and money for its pocket books so it can keep doing what it does best.  Take a few minutes to read Bauerlein’s story, and if afterward you find yourself re-thinking your own disaster preparedness plan, then below are some resources with free materials to make sure your business is in ship-shape for weathering storms.

1.  Though their design looks a bit like an old dental office website, Stargazer.org has among other things, a free organization safety kit of downloadable PDF forms that you fill out and save “to organize critical information needed in an emergency”.

2.  The Sunshine State has fielded its fare share of hurricanes, so it comes as little surprise that provides a rich Business Disaster Survival Kit with scads of info, including an interactive Disaster Planning Wizard.

3.  It's good for Uncle Sam when business bounce back after disasters, so the Ready.gov website has a page where you can download all of their preparedness publications, including useful things like a list of costs and a sample plan.

Casual Friday: A Celebration of "Fridays"

Since this isn't just any ordinary Friday, but the sacred Friday before a holiday Friday, we thought we'd celebrate Fridays. If you'd like to take a sip of your adult beverage of choice every time we say "Friday", that might be fun. According to the Interwebs, Casual Friday has been around since 1965 as "Aloha Friday", when employers in Hawaii would allow their employees to wear "Aloha Shirts" on the last business day of the week a few months out of the year. Word spread to California and eventually it became known as "Casual Friday".

The only thing we love more than Friday is pop culture. And pop culture, as you know, loves Friday. Friday Night Lights. SNL wannabe Fridays. The Cure's Friday I'm in Love. His Girl Friday. Below you'll find some of our favorite video clips about Friday.

T.G.I.F.

A Study on Spending

Once again academia has pretty much confirmed one of life’s truisms.  In the 2006 Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, authors Epley, Mak, and Idson, in an article titled "Bonus of Rebate?: The Impact of Income Framing on Spending and Saving," drew on previous research in mental budgeting & accounting, which has demonstrated that where our spending behavior can be predicated on which account we pull money from.  They took another step along this line of research and conducted four experiments, each of which supported their hypothesis that when we spend, we do so with a consideration of how we acquired that money to begin with. Basically, if we receive money that is presented to us in the form of a “bonus” to our absolute wealth, we are significantly more inclined to spend it than if we are told that the money is couched in the form a rebate, or “a return to a prior state” of our wealth.  This behavior, in their words, has important “ implications for the consumption of other commodities, assessments of risk, and government tax policies.”  For example, our government has in recent history (2001, 2009) given Americans rebate checks with the hope that Americans would spend them to stimulate the economy.  Unfortunately for those officials the numbers cited (at least for 2001) reflected that nearly only 22% of us spent that money, and as we know, we still have yet to recover lickety-split from 2009.

UT Business Librarian YouTube Channel

Check out the new UT Business Librarian channel on YouTube. These videos aren't as cute as the surprised kitten or as funny as the talking dog, but they do contain tips and tricks to help you navigate business databases. The short, 2-3 minute videos detail how to use some of the business subscription databases from the UT Libraries Business Information Center. Feel free to use the videos on your website or direct your users to them. And, visit often. More videos will be added each month.

Casual Friday: Everything Ebook

Just like last week’s post about all things concerning green autos, this one features a site that is all things ebook.  If you want to keep on the front lines of the ebook market, then bookmark TeleRead.  This site is packed with blog posts of qualitative industry-related insights and kernels of interesting market news. For example, you can read about efforts to further monetize the ebook market with soundtracks in the Ereader Tab, glimpse into the various international ebook industries through the Around The World tab, and find out the scoop on the latest legal brouhaha in the Copyright tab.  Happy reading!

OESA: Auto Supplier Barometer

The Original Equipment Suppliers Association's (OESA) Automotive Supplier Barometer takes the pulse of the auto suppliers' twelve month business sentiment. The bi-monthly survey of the top executives of OESA regular member companies provides a snapshot of the industry commercial issues, business environment and business strategies that influence the supplier industry. What is the overall sentiment of the suppliers? Are they positive or negative about the future? What materials do they think they will have problems getting? Do you they think they'll be able to get capital? These are some of the questions asked in the survey. The Automotive Supplier Barometer is distributed to vehicle manufacturers, financial institutions, governmental officials and the media to provide an on-going profile of the supplier industry. More Questions answer by the barometer:

• Identify your top three materials, commodities and/or services that have availability risk in in the next year.
• List the top 3 customers (in order) where your company is focusing personnel and financial resources.
• What are the top three actions your company is budgeting for to meet expected volume in the next year increases?
• On a per unit basis, indicate your expected yearly percent increase or decrease in your direct material costs for the following?
• Provide your anticipated North American light duty vehicle production planning volume (in millions of units).

Revving Eco-Friendly Auto Research

Cars in all shades of green are a red-hot topic for the automobile market, and (in my opinion) they make for seductive headlines.  Speaking for myself I’m constantly distracted by news articles featuring shiny auto show concept car images and stories touting the newest manufacturer’s plans to jump on the plugged-in-hybrid-nontraditionally-fueled-gazillion-mpg-bandwagon. If you want to delve beyond the occasionally distracting article breaking up your regular mix of headlines and more closely follow this market, then check out Green Car Reports which, as the name suggests, is a veritable hoard of relevant industry news.  Unfortunately the site is a bit cumbersome to browse, and it lacks an advanced search page, with only a lonesome Google custom search box at this moment, but considering the concentration of all topics related to the green auto business (the News section currently has 270 pages of articles with 15 headlines per page), it’s a forgivable sin.

Navigation tip:  type the keyword infographic in the search box and you can view a handful of reports and articles that include eye-catching high-resolution images of interesting data spreads, for example, people in which cities are spending the most on fuel?  Just like the industry its following, this site may need some tweaks and upgrades, but it’s definitely headed in the right direction.

bizologie Favorite Apps: Google Catalogs

Shoppers and Tech Lovers rejoice! Today Google has launched their  Google Catalogs app which allows you to browse all your favorite catalogs in one spot. I'm really excited to see this service as I recently downloaded the new Ikea catalog to my iPad and it's great to flip through and keeps my counters clear of catalog clutter. Google Catalogs has already partnered with several of our favorite stores including: Anthropologie, CB2, West Elm, Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom, Sephora and many more. And while it's obviously convenient to flip through your favorite catalogs without waiting on the mail, they've incorporated some pretty cool features. There are features you'd expect like the ability to zoom in on products and connect to the website or find them at local stores. But then there are some really cool features like being able to take the products you like all from different catalogs and create a collage of your favorites. You can share your collage with friends or check out collages other people have created. I think this is a great feature, especially if you're looking for design inspiration for your house. You can also search for particular products across all catalogs. Once you've added a catalog to your favorites, you'll be notified every time a new one comes out. So on the one hand, Google Catalog is "green" which is nice, but also dangerous for our pocketbooks!

Google Catalogs is currently available for iPad and coming soon to Android tablets--which seems a bit ironic. Check out the video below for an introduction:

bizologie Favorite Tools: MailTester

In the past we've talked about different tactics you can use to track down CEO email addresses. But unfortunately, sometimes they're just next to impossible to find. So when sleuthing doesn't work, it's time to just start guessing. And MailTester helps you confirm your guesses. If you know the format for a particular company's email addresses, such as [email protected], you can just plug in what you think it might be into MailTester and they'll let you know if you're right. If you don't know the format at all, go to the company's website and check their "contact us" page. From here, you'll at least know the @anycompany.com part and then you can use that to start testing various possibilities. Chances are, you'll eventually hit the right one. Common email formats I've had luck with include:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

MailTester works by looking up the SMTP server responsible for the e-mail address, and trying to establish an SMTP connection."It then tries to send several commands, almost as if an e-mail is going to be sent. When enough information is gathered, the connection is aborted."

MailTester isn't successful every time as "some servers only connect to the internet at specified times to retrieve the e-mails that are queued at a secondary SMTP server" and "some SMTP servers don't give any information about the validity of an e-mail address". However, I'd say my success rate using their service is at least 80%.

Happy sleuthing!

Venture More Than A Guess

Want to know which industry sandboxes the venture capital firms are playing in?  Then download a MoneyTree Report, a three-part match made in free-data heaven among PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thompson Reuters.  Every quarter Thompson Reuters surveys the VC institutions on their cash-for-equity investments in growing private companies, and then PricewaterhouseCoopers packages the data with a neat bow and puts it online for the enjoyment of all. You can download the most recent quarterly report which gives aggregate trends and analysis, and you can custom search historical data by factors including region, industry, financing sequence, etc.  If you want data from the current quarter at the company-name level, the site prompts you to cough up your information on a registration page, but that seems like a small investment when considering the potential for information return.

P.S.  It’s easy to overlook the News block at the bottom of the MoneyTree homepage, but it has a small selection of articles with exciting titles like, “US technology M&A insights 2011”.

Research on Main Street

Marcy Phelps the founder of Phelps Research just released new book Research on Main Street: Using the Web to Find Local Business and Market Information. Businesses need local information about their customers and competitors,  but that information is usually the trickiest to find. Research on Main Street is a guide to finding market information about places—including counties, cities, and even census blocks using free and low-cost online resources. Now those are the kind of resources that bizologie likes!

The book offers techniques and strategies for approaching location-specific research, including advice on how to tap local sources for in-depth information about business and economic conditions, issues, and outlooks.  The author also incorporates advice from her fellow business researchers throughout in the Tips from the Pros sections in each of the 9 chapters.

Be sure to sign up for ResearchNOTES a free monthly email bulletin with more valuable tips and sites for internet research and check out Marcy's blog at MarcyPhelps.com

Is Your Business Good Enough?

Does your business need a moral makeover? Or, are you trying to research issues in business ethics?  If so, then the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE) is a great place to start.  For those considering a makeover, the IGE has a branch devoted to corporations called (unsurprisingly) the Center for Corporate Ethics, which offers an array of services including  assessments, training workshops, consulting, and customized codes of ethics.

For those interested in researching ethical situations, (or if you want to see how your business stacks up), then there are two places on the site to visit:

1) The IGE’s Dilemmas page presents real-life scenarios, excluding their resolutions, to initiate pondering and deep water-cooler conversation.

2) We saved the best for last.  The IGE’s Publications page  includes many free in-dept analytical articles, book excerpts, Executive Briefings, and White Papers to help individuals and institutions gain valuable knowledge to augment their moral compass alignment.

bizologie Favorite Tools: PDFUnlock

So you've found the perfect report, article or chart in PDF format and you'd like to use a section of it in an email. Only problem is, the creator has it locked. To quote Liz Lemon, blurg. Good news! The folks over at PDFUnlock have you covered. Simply upload the PDF you'd like to unlock and they'll take care of it for you. Reports under 5MB are free to unlock. It won't work if the original owner has it locked and password protected, but it's been my experience that most locked PDFs I've come across on the web aren't password protected. PDFUnlock has made my life easier on several occasions. Know about a free tool that's made your work life easier? Tell us about it in the comments.

Small Business Computer Support

Small businesses need computer support but can't afford to hire a full-time IT staff or outsource a full staff. According to Inc. Magazine the average cost of full-time tech person is $80,000 and it's much cheaper to outsource but that can still run $30,000 a year. What is an SMB to do? For just $15-$30 a month PlumChoice provides tech support for one Mac or one PC plus any connected devices like scanners, printers. Users can call in and get phone support and PlumChoice can login to their systems remotely.

Casual Friday: Swanson Vs. Food

Much like Tammy, the Pawnee Library Director, we librarians at bizologie have a soft spot for Ron Swanson. And what better way to start our weekend than with Swanson Vs. Food. You had us at "meat tornado", Ron.