Category : Business

New York Magazine has a great slideshow of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things

It’s a interesting time in the Golden State. There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks.

You think times are tough for you? At least you don’t own a mall. Once a bulwark of American economy, culture and probably its soul, the shopping mall has fallen on hard times. And to see the decline close up you should check out the site deadmalls.com. So what should we do with this new surfeit of empty big boxes surrounded by oceans of asphalt? There are a few good ideas submitted to Reburbia, a design competition to re-imagine suburbia. One suggestion from the Alabama-based architecture firm Forest Fulton suggests that perhaps the mall should see a reversal of a function and go from being:

a retailer of food – food detached from processes from which it came to be – to producer of food. The parking lot becomes a park-farm. The inside of the big box becomes a greenhouse and restaurant. Asphalt farming techniques allow for layering of soil, compost in containers on top of asphalt. The big box store’s roof is partially replaced with a greenhouse roof. Other details, such as the reversal of parking lot light poles into solar trees that hold photovoltaics can be implemented. One can imagine pushing a shopping cart through this suburban farm and picking your produce right from the vine, with the option to bring your harvest to the restaurant chef for preparation and eating your harvest on the spot.

See more finalists in the Reburbia design competition.

Calling it the Real Good Experiment, furniture retailer Blu Dot is placing nice, modern chairs around New York City for people to take home and use for free. The chairs, which retail for $129, are undoubtedly a great curbside score. The trouble is the chairs are equipped with GPS tracking devices so their journeys can be monitored publicly. Take a look at where they’ve been placed.

The most beautiful bookstore in the world is the Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, Netherlands. A 700-year-old church refurbished by Dutch architects Merkx + Girod, the Selexyz Dominicanen has a three-story black steel book stack that reaches the stone vaults, and a cafe in the former choir where visitors can sit and admire the restored 14th century ceiling frescoes. Just take a look at this place.

AT&T is making good money thanks to the iPhone. It gained nearly $1 billion in new wireless net income in this past year. But the company’s wireline business is declining so rapidly all the profits are eaten up and third-quarter profit fell 1.2%, year-over-year.

The generous genius behind San Francisco’s best annual live music festival– Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass– is bringing his cash and his penchant for goodwill problem solving to the dilemma of how to fix local news in San Francisco. Warren Hellman is creating a nonprofit news organization in partnership with KQED, UC Berkeley journalism school and the New York Times.

The plan is to create a multi-media group that will link reporters and editors, KQED’s TV, radio and online capabilities, UC Berkeley’s journalism school’s expertise and the New York Times as the partnership’s “print distribution agent,”

–Noelle Leca, chair of KQED’s board of directors, told the San Francisco Business Times. The launch is set for early 2010.

Google has just rolled out a preview of Fast Flip, a new visual way to browse the news. Once you sign in with your Google login, you can flip between readable cached images of news articles without having to wait for them to load. The experience is close to flipping pages in a magazine and over time the site will learn the sites you like. The fast flipping between stories also plays well with iPhones. One significant aspect is the partnership with the three dozen or so news sites and blogs that are partners in the site– the publishers will get a share of the revenue from ads shown near their content. Maybe this is the Hulu for newspapers. Read more and see video of the product introduction.

There’s growing evidence that going to a 4-day, 40-hour workweek has great benefits for workers and the environment. For the past year, more than 17,000 state employees in Utah have shifted to a Monday to Thursday schedule.

For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

With less people commuting on Friday, the state estimates the new hours have reduced air pollution by an estimated 12,000 metric tons of CO2. And after surveying workers over the past year, there were other surprising findings: 30 percent surveyed said they exercised more, took fewer sickdays, and increased volunteerism.

Ottawa-based company, DNA11, has come up with a great concept commercial art concept. For as little as $200 you can hang attractive representations of your actually DNA or fingerprints on the wall. After you order online and choose your color and style, you get a DNA collection kit, send by your sample and wait 4-6 weeks for the art.

I’ve been checking out the exceptional web content of Good magazine more and more lately. And the thing that always pulls me in first is the terrific infographics, they’re usually creative, interesting and fun to look at. Now you can see the entire collection in a Flickr set that gets new updates each Tuesday. The L.A.-based magazine was founded two and a half years ago by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the late founder of Inc. magazine, Bernie Goldhirsh, and it donates its subscription fees entirely to charity.