Animated Dilbert daily

Dilbert, the cartoon creation of Scott Adams, has for years represented the humorous face of business - and now you can enjoy it animated. Through an exclusive agreement with United Media, RingTales has signed an agreement to distribute daily animated versions of Dilbert. The first animations were produced on Dilbert.com and MSN, but starting today, you can see the animates on YouTube and on iTunes podcast.

Appreciation to: The DailyCartoonist.

Weakest Summer Job Market for Teens in Decades

The New York Times reports:

This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.

Little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948, according to a research paper published by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That is a sharp drop from the 45 percent level of teenage employment reached in 2000.

The rates among minority young people have been particularly low, with only 21 percent of African-Americans and 31 percent of Hispanics from the ages of 16 to 19 employed last summer, according to the Labor Department.

Retailers, a major source of summer jobs, are grappling with a loss of American spending power, causing some to pull back in hiring. Restaurants, also big employers of teenagers, are adding jobs at a slower pace than in previous summers, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association in Washington.

“The Giant Pool of Money” - the debt crisis

This American Life, out of Chicago Public Radio, in partnership with NPR News, explains the debt crisis in pretty clear, straight-forward terms.

Appreciation to: Jeff Jarvis

Entrepreneur magazine’s “Hot 100″

Entrepreneur magazine in May features its 14th annual ranking of the fastest-growing entrepreneurial companies, the “Hot 100.” Qualifications include the following: the company should be founded between 1999 and 2003; its sales figure should be no less than $100,000 in 2003 and not to exceed 1 billion in 2007; the company should show a positive job growth. It is an extremely diverse list. Recognized businesses range from self-storage operations to mortgage banking, natural gas distribution, and medical products. Edible Arrangements made the cut. They’ve had a successful, independently owned and operated, presence in Charlottesville for a few years now.

Fasten your financial seatbelt, Thomas Barrack says; the volatility will continue

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Expect the volatility that has socked financial markets for the past several months to continue unabated, Thomas Barrack Jr., the founder, chairman, and chief executive office of Colony Capital, a private equity real estate company headquartered in Los Angeles, told the Principal Investment Conference at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“We’re in the middle of a pendulum swing, and we’re not exactly sure where it’s going,” said the keynote speaker at the February 13 conference. “It’s still unfolding. Anybody who tells you they know what’s going on, it’s inaccurate. This is going to be a very volatile 2008.” [Details With Video]

Emerging technologies 2008

Technology Review presents its annual listing of top emerging technologies in various industries in a special March/April 2008 issue. Two interesting examples:

Reality Mining

Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

 

Wireless Power

Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

 

Apprentice to jeweler Marraccini makes a name in Augusta, GA

Charlottesville native Margaret Lane, former jewelry apprentice to Lee Angelo Marraccini, designer and proprietor of Angelo on Charlottesville’s downtown mall, now makes her home in Augusta, Georgia. C-VILLE’s sister publication, Metro Spirit, writes about her in this week’s issue.

AUGUSTA, GA - Margaret Lane is a woman who clings to life with her bare hands. It’s the way she makes her art and the way she lives and learns. Right out of high school, Lane knew what she wanted and how to get there. And she followed a path to her art that was more traditional than people might imagine.

Even though the University of Virginia was right up the road in her native Charlottesville, Va., Lane skipped the college route. Instead, she began apprenticing with Lee Angelo Marraccini, an award-winning contemporary jewelry artist in Charlottesville who is known for his strong but playful designs …

Business feedback on the upcoming overhaul of the Downtown Mall

Brian Wheeler posts on the Charlottesville Tomorrow blog about MyDowntownMall.com, the City of Charlottesville’s website related to the upcoming overhaul of the pedestrian Downtown Mall.

He notes the City’s release of their Business Impact Survey Report [January 15 - PDF] — highlighting the following comments from restaurants and art galleries found within the report:

• “Everything and everyone comes through the front door: people, deliveries and trash. If the mall is disrupted in front of us, we will close.”
• “Any disruption or closure of the patios will hurt us. Also, any loss of electric or gas for any amount of time.”
• “The loss of the patio in the spring or summer will kill our business.”
• “If they disrupt 5th Street, we are screwed.”
• “We need to have a strong public relations campaign to combat negative media attention.”

The Downtown Mall reconstruction is expected to start no sooner than January 2009. If you have comments or feedback for the City on this plan and process, you can make your thoughts known here. Links for their On-Line Survey and Business Impact Survey are still available as well.

Call for Nominations: CYFS Family-Friendly Employer Award

Children, Youth & Family Services is seeking nominations for two awards to be presented at its annual Community Breakfast in April, 2008. One of those awards is the 2008 CYFS Family-Friendly Employer Award. This award honors an employer with practices that instill a family-friendly work culture. You must be an employee of the organization or business in order to nominate it for this award and only organizations, businesses or other employers are eligible.

Is Your Employer Family-Friendly? Visit www.cyfs.org to download a nomination form. Deadline for submission is February 15, 2008.

The second award is the 2008 John L. Snook Child Advocate Award. This award honors an individual who has demonstrated over time a continuing commitment to the well-being of children and families in the community and to the advancement of children’s issues through volunteer or professional services and/or public advocacy.

Business processes trends to watch

This interesting piece picked up from the Jackson Blog, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Happy New Year:

McKinsey Quarterly reports eight new ways of doing business that will shape the economy in years to come. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

Here are a few highlights:

1. Cocreation — company harvesting talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. For example, the Linux operating system was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. It is estimated that roughly 12% of all labor activity in the U.S. economy could be transformed by distributed and networked forms of innovation.

2. Consumer as innovators — for instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is created by its distributed customers. Another example is Threadless, the online T-shirt store that asks consumer to submit new designes for T-shirts to be voted on by the community at large.

3. Outsourcing — companies parcel out work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks. Topcoder, a company that has created a network of software developers in order that companies can access this talent pool instead of employing experienced engineers.

4. Extracting value from interactions — companies invest in interactions may find smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value that is difficult for their rivals to replicate.

6. Unbundling production — Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. Unbundling enables the supply side to raise asset utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal cost.

Reported in December 2007 issue of McKinsey Quarterly