I haven't watch this, but its supposed to be good.

Michael Blake: Startup Capital in atlanta

The HowTo team at Mahalo has been an amazing surprise effort. We didn't plan on making howto articles, but when we built various how to search pages we realized that many howto articles were, well, lacking. So, we started building select ones where we thought we could help. This one on how to save money is very good.

I kinda like some of these.

How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)

Delta also plans to increase the number of "tiers" in its SkyMiles plan this spring. Instead of offering domestic tickets for either 25,000 or 50,000 miles -- with many more tickets available for 50,000 miles -- the airline will offer 50% of its total seat inventory for 40,000 miles, while maintaining the same amount of seats in the 25,000-mile tier. Most remaining seats will fall into the 60,000-mile tier.

This is better than 25/50, but 50 isn't always available.

Delta's New 3 Tier + Cash Miles

olves a customer need in a way that makes them want to tell their friends about it. And if you have a whole product, a product that has everything that is needed for the customer to buy, you are going to be touching every "function" in the organization. I don't see anyway around this. Taking this course of thought to its logical conclusion you arrive at the realization that every employee is involved in marketing. And in this day and age they are.

Secondly, promotion, which most people think about when they say marketing, is not some isolated activity that can be bolted on at the end. It interacts with all the other elements of the marketing mix and if you try to address it as an afterthought after the product has been created you are doomed to failure. Doomed.

To do successful startup marketing every employee needs to make decisions from the beginning with the potential customer in mind. And not in the back of the mind. In the front.

Marketing is not a department.

Lance Weatherby is doing a 10 part series on startup marketing.

Force_of_Good: Marketing Is Not A Department

In marketing, a whole product is a generic product augmented by everything that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy. The generic product is what is usually shipped to the customer. The whole product typically augments the generic product with training and support, manuals, cables, additional software or hardware, installation instructions, professional services, etc.

Whole product - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.

Australia also faced a real bill much greater than the $2.2billion in military spending reported last week by Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, Professor Stiglitz said, pointing to higher oil prices and other indirect costs of the wars.

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US' | The Australian

Delta-Northwest deal could mean fewer cheap seats
If a big airline combination is approved, frugal fliers could feel the pinch.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It may be time to wave goodbye to some of those discount fares. If Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines complete a merger to form the largest U.S. airline, travelers can expect fewer deals and higher fares on some remote routes.

A combination has been rumored for weeks and reports Tuesday indicated that a deal was close.

Airlines generally try to keep flights as full as possible, and the proposed new carrier would continue that trend. "If all the planes are full," said Rick Seaney, founder of fare search site FareCompare, "they can increase prices and have them stick."

With fewer available seats, airlines cut back on the supply of cheapest seats first.

Well duh, that was the stated goal of a merger from the start: reduce the number of flights overall to make a combined airline (and industry) profitable. Delta eats NorthWest. And then American or United eats Continental. And then they all start charging enough to cover their costs, and I get to keep my silverware in business class.

Delta-Northwest deal could mean fewer cheap seats - Feb. 19, 2008

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear wants 12 casinos in his state that he says will generate $600 million in taxes a year to help pay for education and other key services. This is a game of chance, but it's one the voters of Kentucky should get to decide.

For Kentucky casinos to become a reality, Beshear's proposal must first be passed in the General Assembly, which is expected to take up the measure almost immediately. If it passes there, a constitutional amendment will be placed on the state ballot this fall, allowing Kentuckians to decide if they want casinos. The proposal calls for seven casinos at the state's horse tracks, including Northern Kentucky's Turfway. The other five would be free-standing gambling palaces in various regions of the state, including one in Campbell or Kenton counties. Just where the free-standing casinos would go would require voter approval in the host communities.

Let voters decide on Ky. casinos - The Enquirer

Air France-KLM to invest in Delta-Northwest: report
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Air France-KLM Group , Europe's biggest airline, plans to invest in a combined Delta Air Lines Inc and Northwest Airlines Corp carrier in exchange for a board seat, Bloomberg said on its Website on Wednesday.

The size of Air France's potential stake has not been set yet, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Industry experts have been expecting Air France-KLM, which already has a marketing partnership with Delta and Northwest as part of SkyTeam global alliance, to provide strategic or financial help to the two U.S. airlines.

Delta/NW + Air France/KLM + Alitalia = Mega Airline

Air France-KLM to invest in Delta-Northwest: report

There's just one problem: there isn't going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either. The "coming non-white majority" myth is based on a misuse of the arbitrary racial classification system adopted in the 1970s, which assigns all Americans to the categories of white, black, Asian, native American or "Hispanic." According to the government, "Hispanics" may be of any race as long as they are of Latin American ancestry. So, a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian-American whose grandparents showed up from Germany in Argentina mysteriously in 1946 is a "Hispanic" while an Arab-American Muslim is a "non-Hispanic white."

The myth of the non-white majority is based on treating "Hispanic" as the name of a race. Adding all Hispanics to all blacks and Asians makes it possible to claim that California and Texas already have "non-white" majorities, and that the US as a whole will follow in the second half of this century. But if you don't treat Hispanics as members of a single race, then the picture looks quite different. According to the census bureau, the US population in 2050 will look like this: non-Hispanic white, 50.1 per cent; Hispanic, 24.4 per cent; Asian, 8 per cent; black, 14.6 per cent, with a small residuum in other categories. The non-Hispanic white share of the population will drop from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to a bare majority in 2050.

...

Nor is there any long-term danger of the US becoming permanently polarised between anglophones and Spanish speakers. Among second-generation Hispanics, roughly half speak no Spanish at all, while fewer than 10 per cent speak only Spanish. By the third and fourth generations, Hispanics in the US are almost completely anglophone. In their rate of linguistic assimilation, they resemble the European immigrants of earlier generations. The claim that in a globalised, wired world the incentives for linguistic assimilation are weakened appears to be false, at least in the case of American Hispanics. And they are the only group that count, in this respect, because all other linguistic minorities in the US are negligible, as a percentage of the total population.

If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.

America still works