Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

These new efficiencies have led to what economists call "labor displacement," which is taking place around the country. One business in Rockville, Md., is doing the same amount of work with half its original staff. Two things are noticeably absent from the offices of Mid-Atlantic Builders: people and paper. John Lavery, vice president of sales for the residential builder, keeps a relic in his office of the company's recent past: a binder heftier than a phone book that's filled with sketches and floor plan options of all the homes the company builds.

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An Airline Buys an Oil Refinery; What Took Them So Long?

Fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal, by Susan Carey and Angel Gonzelez: “Delta to Buy Refinery in Effort to Lower Jet-Fuel Costs.” Coupled with the news of Microsoft bankrolling B&N’s Nook business, the Delta deal shows how far and fast existing business models are shifting, and how vertical integration continues to not be dead.

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The Rent-A-Car Jocks Who Made Enterprise #1

Unusual hiring and promotion practices drive much of the company's hustle and rapid growth. Virtually every Enterprise employee is a college graduate; in a unionized, labor-intensive industry that seeks to keep wages low, that's unusual enough. But there's more. Hang around Enterprise people long enough, and you'll notice that despite their informal exteriors, most seem to have the competitive, aggressive air of an ex-athlete. It's no accident. Brainy introverts need not apply, says Donald L. Ross, the company's chief operating officer. "We hire from the half of the college class that makes the upper half possible," he adds wryly. "We want athletes, fraternity types--especially fraternity presidents and social directors. People people."

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Hiring hotties: When can an employer prefer the attractive over the homely?

MARYLOU’S COFFEE, a chain in New England, is renowned less for its coffee than for its staff. In tight pink T-shirts and short shorts, they tend to be young, pretty and female. But is that illegal? In May the press reported that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was investigating Marylou’s for hiring discrimination. (The EEOC cannot confirm any investigation at this point.) Worse, the papers said the investigation comes without anyone having complained about being turned down for a job. Op-ed writers pounced. A writer at the Boston Herald proclaimed: “Yes, Marylou’s ‘discriminates’. Every employer ‘discriminates’. If they didn’t, I’d be working as a Chippendales dancer.”

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Who's Starting America's New Businesses? And Why?

Here’s what Jack had to say about the current entrepreneurial trend, based on calculations and information he’s gathered from the Kauffman Foundation. As of March 2011, there are an average of 320 new businesses launched every month, for every 100,000 U.S. adults.

That equates to 543,000 new U.S. companies every month. (We can’t annualize this number by simply multiplying by 12, Kauffman notes, since some entrepreneurs are in and out of multiple businesses during that time. However, multiple estimates put the total number of U.S. entrepreneurs at 11.5 million, in sum.)

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The Revolution Won't Be Televised; It Will Be Instagrammed

The boom in TV sales in the 1950s and '60s created a wave of innovation in visual storytelling. It gave rise to the now ubiquitous 30-second spot.

Today a similar phenomenon is underway. Visual storytelling is in renaissance -- but with a twist. Photography, rather than video, is fast becoming the lingua franca of a more global, mobile and social society.

This will have a significant impact on brand marketers, but perhaps in some not-so-obvious ways. More on this in a bit.

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Re:Re:Fw:Re: Workers Spend 650 Hours a Year on Email

Unless you happen to get some sort of obsessive compulsive satisfaction from keeping your inbox in shipshape -- and hey, if you do, more power to ya -- dealing with email has got to be one of the most deadening aspects of any office job. And if the tedium of Outlook management wasn't already dreadful enough, consider this: There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails.

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It's OK that China made our Olympics uniforms. We designed the planes that flew them to the games.

"I'm so upset," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile, and burn them....We have people in the textile industry who are desperate for jobs."

Here, Reid demonstrates economic cluelessness. It seems logical that Americans lose if American clothing is made overseas. But that's nonsense. First, it's no surprise the uniforms were made in China. Most clothing is. That's fine. It saves money. We invest the savings in other things, like the machines that Chinese factories buy and the trucks that ship the Olympic uniforms.

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A Radical Way To Build New Companies (Not Just Web Startups), Create Jobs And Boost The Economy

Large companies alone can’t carry the burden. That’s why it’s time to take a hard look at how new businesses—not just the latest Internet fad, but all promising pipsqueaks—get on their feet.

Turns out there’s a better model, and it’s brewing far from Silicon Valley and Wall Street—in Nashville, Tenn. (If you’re not an entrepreneur or a professional investor, keep reading anyway: All taxpayers have skin in this game.)

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Starbucks Invests $25 Million in Mobile-Payment Provider Square

Square's software will similarly let Starbucks customers pay by scanning an enabled phone -- only Square will now process the payments, Mr. Dorsey said. Square typically charges merchants a flat rate of 2.75% to process credit-card transactions.

"We've always built the company and the technology around the idea of it being used by an individual all the way up to the largest organization in the world," Mr. Dorsey said in an interview. "It should scale effortlessly between that range." The market for mobile payments may top $170 billion in transactions by 2015, compared with about $60 billion last year, according to Juniper Research Ltd.

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40% of top brands use Instagram, love image filters

Today, Seattle-based Simply Measured launched its Instagram analytics tool for both the public, and its enterprise customers. In conjunction with that release, the company made public a study that it executed of the Interbrand 100 firms, concerning their usage of Instagram.

The Interbrand 100, for the uninitiated, is a list of the world’s one hundred most valuable brands. At the top: Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Google, GE, McDonalds, Intel, and Apple. The blue chip brands, if you will. Here’s what Simply Measured found out:

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Whole Foods' Unholy Union

“Wegmans team members at every level participate in the culture of experimentation… ‘They let me do whatever comes into my head, which is kind of scary sometimes,’ jokes Bill Garner, a part-timer in the meat department of the Pittsford, NY store. One day some twenty years ago, Maria Benjamin, who worked in the bakery at the same store, told [owner] Danny Wegman about the amazing recipe for ‘chocolate meatball cookies’ her Italian ancestors had left her. ‘Let’s sell them here,’ he urged. They’re a customer favorite to this day.”

Gummi brats. Chocolate meatball cookies. Hard as it can be to swallow sometimes, this is what innovation, continuous improvement and free markets are all about.

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Progressive robo-tweets spark social media crisis

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Pro tip for big brands: When talking on Twitter about how you handled a customer's tragic accident, the phrase "contractual obligations" is unlikely to play well.

Progressive Insurance is the latest company to spark a fiery online backlash to a tin-eared series of tweets and other online postings.

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IKEA to build hotels across Europe

IKEA AB, the secretive but hugely successful budget furniture retailer, is looking to build and develop at least 100 budget hotels across Europe in its latest push into the property market.

Inter IKEA, the company that owns the intellectual property rights of IKEA – which were last week revealed to be valued at €9-billion by the company – is considering sites across Europe for what it calls “budget design” hotels.

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Doughnut app arrives: Dunkin' Donuts accepts mobile payments

This week, Dunkin' Donuts released a new app that lets you pay for doughnuts with your iPhone, iPod touch or Android smartphone.

I'm not sure anyone in America needs the act of buying doughnuts to be easier -- but that's not Dunkin' Donuts' problem.

The Dunkin' app works like the Starbucks mobile payment app. Download it from Google Play or the App Store, then load it up with money. The card supports American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Discover and PayPal.

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre Entrepreneurs

I’m pretty mediocre. Particularly as an entrepreneur. I’m ashamed to admit it. Many of the readers here are great visionaries. I’m not even being sarcastic. I have reason to believe Larry Page reads all of my articles. Elon Musk prints out my articles and tapes them to his bathroom wall just in case he forgets to bring a book in there. Jerry Yang and his wife discuss over breakfast the merits of the points I bring up. You can say, “Hey, Jerry Yang should’ve accepted Microsoft’s buyout offer.” Ok, but Jerry Yang has made a few billion dollars just by getting a bunch of links together and assembling them by what category they are in. That was pretty cool back in the day. You and I should’ve thought of that.

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Stores banking on personalized loyalty programs

"Firms are always interested in charging different customers different prices," says Paul Ellickson, who teaches economics and marketing at the University of Rochester.

Ellickson says some people just don't notice price very much. They'll pay full price for what they want. That's profitable to supermarkets. What's even more profitable, however, is if supermarkets can offer a discount to the other folks, to nudge them into buying as well. Ellickson says we're already used to paying different prices for some things.

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"The big-data explosion is driving a shift away from gut-based decision making. Marketing in particular is feeling the pressure to embrace new data-driven customer intelligence capabilities. No wonder a strong appetite for data is one of the most sought-after qualities in new marketers. And yet, a recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition — while the few who do use data aggressively for the most part do it badly."

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Restaurants Fire Chefs as Robots Take Over Kitchen

Web Sites Accused of Collecting Data on Children

"A coalition of nearly 20 children’s advocacy, health and public interest groups plans to file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, asserting that some online marketing to children by McDonald’s and four other well-known companies violates a federal law protecting children’s privacy."

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