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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