During last year’s presidential campaign, both McCain and Obama endlessly broadcast ads that promised “good middle class jobs.” And whenever an ad intoned that phrase, up popped an image like the one below, which comes from an Obama campaign stop: burly, 50-something (mostly white) guys wearing dirty uniforms.What drove me crazy about these ads is [...]
Home-based entrepreneurs “account for more than half of all U.S. businesses and employ more people than venture-backed companies. Jointly, homepreneurs employ one in 10 private-sector workers, or a total of 13 million people.”(Source: Emergent Research via the Kauffman Foundation)
In a new report, demographer Peter Francese projects that the most prevalent American household in 2010 will be a “married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households.” The supposedly traditional arrangement — a married couple with children (e.g., the Pinks, the Obamas, the Gosselins) will account for only 22% of American households.
I’ve been on the road a lot lately — which means that my posts have been infrequent and that they have a travel theme. Today’s the same. Sitting on the tarmac in O’Hare for two hours tonight, I came across this stunner in today’s Wall Street Journal:“There are an estimated 10 trillion unused frequent-flier miles [...]
“For the first time in history, adults aged 100 or older are a fast-growing population group. Most industrialized countries now average one centenarian per 10,000 residents, but the figure is moving toward one in 5,000.“University of Georgia gerontologist Leonard Poon looked at common threads among the centenarians he interviewed: They exercised regularly, ate breakfast daily, [...]
Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the [...]
Today’s papers are reporting that Twitter is about raise $100 million from venture firms, an infusion of cash that would value the company — which not only has never turned a profit, but doesn’t even seem to have any revenue — at a whopping $1 billion.As the New York Times’s Brad Stone explains:
For context, that [...]
“In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey.”(Source: NYT, 9/13/09)
In 2008, “for the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.” (Source: NY Times, citing a Veronis Suhler Stevenson report)
The U.S. now has more DVD kiosks than video stores.
(Source: Reed Hastings, in the NY Times)
