Ontiveros @ Textdriven

One of the best ways to stay abreast of national trends is to monitor the information that the government provides us. Pre-internet, this would have been a pain. Now, a simple table full of great job data is just a click away at the US Department of Labor’s website. Check out the hottest growing jobs through 2014. I’ve quickly formatted a spreadsheet so you can take the information with you. Stay employed.
File is here

What better resource for our state is there than Michigan.org?

The website is a cornucopia of information that is relevant to anyone who lives in, or is from, Michigan. A State initiative which has had great success is the SmartZone initiative. What is a SmartZone you ask? Please take the time to read this description SmartZones from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) website. Read the rest of this entry »

Decades ago, consumers visited traditional brick and mortar storefronts in their cities to see what new products where coming to market. The staff at Sagnasty.com are admittedly not historians, however, this presumably is the time when downtowns across the country flourished. Perhaps some of you actually remember the “glory” days of Saginaw’s very own bustling downtown.
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The concept of technology clusters has always intrigued me. I wondered why so much development was focused on the coasts. What was wrong with the rest of the country? Why couldn’t new technology development be setup in states that need a new economic overhaul, say Mid-Michigan for example?

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What does it take to run a successful web-application business during the Web 2.0 growth era? Can you just build it? Will they come? As we know, the barriers to starting web based businesses are at an all time low, due to hyper competition in the hosting industry among other factors. As such, web-applications are being introduced at a very rapid rate. While these “new” services are very exciting, the economics of web 2.0 have not been tested yet. Many have tried to quantify the economic validity of some of the more popular on-line picture and web storage providers.

What they don’t understand is that none of these new business “start-ups” will matter, let alone succeed, if they cannot manage the value chain. Ah yes! Sound management techniques and practices have their place with Web 2.0. Why write about 37signals? Because they have a deep interest in solid management techniques as is evident on their “Signal vs. Noise” blog.
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