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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Retailers Checking 'Nice' on Energy Savings List

The following was gleaned from a newsletter from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory.


Retailers Checking 'Nice' on Energy Savings List
December 27, 2011

NREL's Jennifer Scheib checks lighting levels as Rois Langner records them in the grocery section of the SuperTarget in Thornton, Colo. Target is a DOE Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) Partner.
Credit: Dennis Schroeder

Residential and commercial buildings account for a staggering 40 percent of energy use in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working with the nation's commercial building owners to discover new and innovative ways to reduce commercial building energy use.

DOE's Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) program is a public/private, cost-shared program that pairs selected commercial building owners with DOE's national laboratories and private-sector technical experts. The goal is challenging, yet simple: new commercial construction is designed to consume at least 50 percent less energy than today's code allows (ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-2004), and retrofits are designed to consume at least 30 percent less energy.

The potential energy savings means a financial benefit for companies and consumers alike.

Good for the Earth and the Bottom Line



NREL Engineers Michael Deru, left, and Ian Doebber examine rooftop units at the Thornton SuperTarget. Through its CBP partnership with NREL, the store could potentially save more than 2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity.
Credit: Dennis Schroeder

"An underlying idea with CBP is to demonstrate that energy efficiency makes good business sense," NREL Senior Engineer Greg Stark said. "We are helping the companies develop better stores that use significantly less energy than their current prototypes — and for roughly same cost as their current buildings."

Coming up with energy saving solutions that can be repeated throughout the U.S. is a key CBP goal.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

For Start-Ups, Sorting the Data Cloud Is the Next Big Thing



The following excerpt is from the Business Section of the December 26 New York Times.


For Start-Ups, Sorting the Data Cloud Is the Next Big Thing

By MALIA WOLLAN

SAN FRANCISCO — The idea of big data goes something like this: In a world of ever-increasing digital connectivity, ever larger mountains of data are produced by our cellphones, computers, digital cameras, RFID readers, smart meters and GPS devices. The huge quantity of data becomes unwieldy and difficult for companies and governments to manage and understand.

“My smartphone produces a huge amount of data, my car produces ridiculous amounts of really valuable data, my house is throwing off data, everything is making data,” said Erik Swan, 47, co-founder of Splunk, a San Francisco-based start-up whose software indexes vast quantities of machine-generated data into searchable links.

Companies search those links, as one searches Google, to analyze customer behavior in real time.

Splunk is among a crop of enterprise software start-up companies that analyze big data and are establishing themselves in territory long controlled by giant business-technology vendors like Oracle and I.B.M.

Founded in 2004, before the term “big data” had worked its way into the vocabulary of Silicon Valley, Splunk now has some 3,200 customers in more than 75 countries, including more than half the Fortune 100 companies.

The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting firm’s research arm. And while Splunk has a lead in selling software to analyze machine data, big data is big enough to create new opportunities for a multitude of start-ups, many of them using the open-source software Hadoop.
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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Interview w/ Dick Heckman on Domestic Energy


Last night, CNBC's Jim Cramer had a very interesting interview with Dick Heckman, founder of Heckman Corporation.  Heckman Corp. disposes of or recycles the wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations.

Mr. Heckman is very bullish on domestic energy.  I loved this interview.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000062303

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Russian Tycoons Find Tougher Times as Money Flees

The New York Times (The New York Times Company)
Added on Sunday, December 11, 2011

Russian Tycoons Find Tougher Times as Money Flees 
By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW

NIKOLAI MAKSIMOV, one of the richest men in Russia, was sitting in a grimy jail cell in the Ural Mountains.

Through the murk, Mr. Maksimov saw his cellmate — a man, he says, who appeared ill with tuberculosis, a scourge in Russian prisons. “I had the feeling that I was put in this cell on purpose,” Mr. Maksimov, now free on bail, recalled recently.

Mr. Maksimov, who was arrested in February on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, is hardly the only Russian tycoon who has run into trouble. Among the six men who have topped the Forbes rich list here in the last decade, one, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is in prison, and another, Boris A. Berezovsky, is in exile. They, like Mr. Maksimov, maintain their innocence.

Even before the authorities here acted last week to quash protests against the government and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s rich were growing agitated, too. Evidence is mounting that conditions are deteriorating for the maintenance and investment of their vast wealth — and while this development may gladden populists, it may become an economic threat.

Post-Soviet privatizations shifted state-owned factories into the hands of a coterie of well-connected businessmen — the oligarchs. Partly as a result, Russia has 101 billionaires, behind only China, with 115, and the United States, with 412, according to Forbes.

Only now, capital flight, a problem in the 1990s, has re-emerged. Money is flowing out of Russia faster than it is flowing in. The net outflow is expected to reach $70 billion by year-end, and the figures suggest that the bulk of that will be from large investors.

Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank here, notes that “the scale of capital flight has more than compensated for the rise of oil prices.”

Even if oil output is maintained and crude prices stay relatively high, according to Russian finance ministry estimates, the nation’s current account will slip into deficit by 2014. Then Russia’s economy, like that of the United States, will depend on an inflow of investment, economists say.

The Russian government has recently made modest gains in attracting foreign investment. The problem is that for every foreign company that invests — from Exxon on the Russian Arctic Shelf to Cisco Systems in a high-technology park going up outside Moscow — far more Russian entrepreneurs head for the exits, gauging the risks too great.

Officials understand that oil can take Russia only so far and are eager to lure investment from all quarters. “The amazing thing is that they are doing far better with the foreign investors than the locals,” says Clemens Grafe, chief economist at Goldman Sachs here.

It’s hard to know how big a role cases like Mr. Maksimov’s have played. Mr. Maksimov, 54, is withering in his criticism of the authorities. The suggestion is that his business enemies enlisted the police to try to persuade him to resolve a dispute.

“I was on the Forbes list; now I’m going to jail,” he says. “It’s normal. It’s Russia.” His troubles began three years ago, when he sued Vladimir S. Lisin, another steel tycoon, touching off the dispute that eventually led to Mr. Maksimov’s arrest.

The two had made a deal, which quickly soured, for Mr. Lisin to buy 50 percent plus one share of Mr. Maksimov’s company, the Maxi Group. Maxi was estimated at the time to be worth $1.2 billion after debts. Mr. Lisin’s company, Novolipetsk, paid Mr. Maksimov an advance of $317 million. It was to pay the remainder after an outside auditor estimated the extent of the company’s debt, within 90 days.

Executives of Novolipetsk declined to pay. In an interview at its headquarters here, lawyers for Novolipetsk accused Mr. Maksimov of transferring large sums out of the Maxi Group to the bank account of his girlfriend. He denied the accusation, saying he had been buying out shares that his girlfriend, who was also a business partner, owned in business subsidiaries.

Whatever the case, such disputes were supposed to be settled by an international arbitration panel under the terms of the agreement. By February, Mr. Maksimov felt that he was close to winning. He said he had rebuffed informal discussions of a $100 million settlement and was holding out for the full balance, $287 million. He called a news conference at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Moscow on Feb. 14.

Along with the media, men toting Kalashnikovs showed up.

“Russia is always interesting,” Mr. Maksimov says. He was whisked out of the hotel in a Russian version of a “perp walk.” Soon enough, he was handcuffed to a chair in a dingy police station on the city’s outskirts.

FORMALLY, he was held on charges related to the payment to his girlfriend, which had in any case been repaid to the Maxi Group. But Mr. Maksimov says the investigator also discussed with him the arbitration with Novolipetsk. As Mr. Maksimov recalls it, the investigator sat on the edge of the table during the questioning and asked: “’You were offered $100 million. Why didn’t you take it?”

Mr. Maksimov says he was then escorted to the airport to fly to a prison in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals. Awaiting the flight, he says, he was again urged to make a deal with Novolipetsk.

“You won’t like people in jail,” he says he was told. “They aren’t your type.”

Anton Bazulev, director of external relations for Novolipetsk, said in an interview that it had never made a settlement offer to Mr. Maksimov and denied that it had orchestrated his arrest. Mr. Bazulev said Novolipetsk handed evidence to the police of possible fraud and was obliged to do so under Russian law as a publicly traded company.

Five days after his arrest, Mr. Maksimov was released on bail. A month later, in March, a Moscow International Commercial Arbitration panel awarded him $287 million in a ruling that, under terms of the chamber, is final and not subject to appeal.

When capitalism and democracy arrived in Russia in the early 1990s, many people thought a new industrialist class would become a pillar of the state, substituting for the Communist Party, the Red Army and the K.G.B. But under Mr. Putin, a K.G.B. veteran, the security services resurged as a force in society and business. Last Sunday’s poor election showing for his party, United Russia, suggests some Russian voters are cooling toward Mr. Putin, who intends to wage his own three-month campaign to return to the presidency.

In 2000, when he first ran for president, he vowed to eliminate the oligarchs “as a class,” but that didn’t happen. Some who seemed to clash with him directly, like Mr. Khodorkovsky, lost fortunes.

A loose system of patronage, in which security services and big business overlap, is still pervasive.

In one prominent case, a hedge fund called Hermitage Capital, once the largest foreign money management firm in Russia, accused several dozen midlevel police, tax inspection and judicial authorities of abusing their offices to steal $230 million in a fraudulent tax refund. After the fund’s lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky, testified in the case, he was arrested and held 10 months in dank cells before dying, possibly of a heart attack or pancreatitis.

Novolipetsk says it has litigated the failed deal with Mr. Maksimov in 141 separate cases in Russian state courts, winning 90 times. Such a proliferation of hearings is common in Russian business law, as all sides typically jurisdiction-shop for sympathetic judges by filing similar lawsuits in dozens of courts.

Importantly, lawyers for Novolipetsk have obtained rulings suggesting that even if contract parties specify arbitration to resolve disputes, Russian courts can claim jurisdiction, a precedent that could damp foreign investment, too. Russian civil courts have refused to enforce the arbitration panel’s ruling.

After the favorable ruling in March, Mr. Maksimov’s lawyers successfully appealed to courts in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Cyprus to freeze shares in six European steel mills. Novolipetsk has appealed on jurisdictional grounds and won a ruling against him in Amsterdam in November, though the court left in place the restriction against selling the European assets.

Mr. Maksimov has put what remains of his wealth into a British-domiciled holding company.

WHILE his money has escaped from Russia, it is less clear that he will himself. The police are now investigating him in a separate fraud case. They argue that because Russian courts do not recognize the arbitration panel ruling, presenting that ruling, even to a foreign judge, is fraudulent — even if a European court accepts its validity.

“We understand this as blackmail,” says Vladimir Melnikov, a lawyer for Mr. Maksimov. “If you receive the money in Holland, you go to jail in Russia.”
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Friday, December 9, 2011

IRS Announces 2012 Mileage Rates


IRS Announces 2012 Standard Mileage Rates, Most Rates Are the Same as in July 

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today issued the 2012 optional standard mileage rates used to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes.

Beginning on Jan. 1, 2012, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:
  • 55.5 cents per mile for business miles driven
  • 23 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes
  • 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations
The rate for business miles driven is unchanged from the mid-year adjustment that became effective on July 1, 2011. The medical and moving rate has been reduced by 0.5 cents per mile.

The standard mileage rate for business is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile. The rate for medical and moving purposes is based on the variable costs as determined by the same study. Independent contractor Runzheimer International conducted the study.

Taxpayers always have the option of calculating the actual costs of using their vehicle rather than using the standard mileage rates.

A taxpayer may not use the business standard mileage rate for a vehicle after using any depreciation method under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS) or after claiming a Section 179 deduction for that vehicle. In addition, the business standard mileage rate cannot be used for more than four vehicles used simultaneously.

These and other requirements for a taxpayer to use a standard mileage rate to calculate the amount of a deductible business, moving, medical or charitable expense are in Rev. Proc. 2010-51.

Notice 2012-01 contains the standard mileage rates, the amount a taxpayer must use in calculating reductions to basis for depreciation taken under the business standard mileage rate, and the maximum standard automobile cost that a taxpayer may use in computing the allowance under a fixed and variable rate plan.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

E-mail Scammers Target Businesses


From the FBI's website:

E-Mails Containing Malware Sent to Businesses Concerning Their Online Job Postings

01/19/2011—Recent FBI analysis reveals that cyber criminals engaging in ACH/wire transfer fraud have targeted businesses by responding via e-mail to employment opportunities posted online. 
Recently, more than $150,000 was stolen from a U.S. business via unauthorized wire transfer as a result of an e-mail the business received that contained malware. The malware was embedded in an e-mail response to a job posting the business placed on an employment website and allowed the attacker to obtain the online banking credentials of the person who was authorized to conduct financial transactions within the company. The malicious actor changed the account settings to allow the sending of wire transfers, one to the Ukraine and two to domestic accounts. The malware was identified as a Bredolab variant, svrwsc.exe. This malware was connected to the ZeuS/Zbot Trojan, which is commonly used by cyber criminals to defraud U.S. businesses. 
The FBI recommends that potential employers remain vigilant in opening the e-mails of prospective employees. Running a virus scan prior to opening any e-mail attachments may provide an added layer of security against this type of attack. The FBI also recommends that businesses use separate computer systems to conduct financial transactions.  
For more information on this type of fraud and prevention tips, please refer to previous public service announcements at the links below:
Anyone who believes they have been a target this type of attack should immediately contact their financial institutions and local FBI office and promptly report it to the IC3’s website at www.ic3.gov. The IC3’s complaint database links complaints together to refer them to the appropriate law enforcement agency for case consideration. The IC3 also uses complaint information to identify emerging trends and patterns.

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

The 1% Responds

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000052425

Bizarre Greek Situation

I saw something this morning on CNBC's Squawk Box that I thought was rather strange. An important vote on austerity measures is scheduled to take place in the Greek Parliament today. The first report from Athens had the reporter in the foreground and the Greek Parliament in the background. There was a crowd gathered in front of the Parliament Building. The crowd was demonstrating peacefully. There were members of the Communist Party armed with big sticks standing guard between the crowd and the Parliament Building. Apparently, the Communists were trying to prevent the storming of Parliament. Riot police were present, but there was no tension in the air. That was the first report.

About 20 minutes or so CNBC checked back in with their reporter in Athens. By then, the Anarchists had arrived. There were now violent clashes between the Communists and the Anarchists. The Communists were using their big sticks and, apparently, the Anarchists responded by throwing petrol bombs. A number of people had been set on fire. The Greek riot police were trying to contain the melee and keep it away from certain areas.

I guess I am not used to seeing Communists engaged in violent clashes with Anarchists. The two strike me as being somewhat kindred spirits. The Marxists and the Anarchists seem to get along well enough in the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Getting Started

This is my first attempt at setting up a blog.  In time, this interface should have a more professional appearance.  But I think it will do for now.

I hope that this blog will serve as a resource for entrepreneurs (Spanish- and English-speaking).

Please refrain from profanity and treat others who use this blog with decency and respect. Otherwise, please feel free to say or ask whatever you want if it pertains to business topics.

Thank you for your participation.