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America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs in 2012

Small Business

Bloomberg BusinessWeek : America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs:    2012   Winners

From reader's  suggestions 25 were chosen and 7,500 cast their votes. Top Five:

 1. The Paradigm Project, which sells clean-burning wood or charcoal cookstoves in  Kenya and Guatemala, received the most votes, 15.8 percent.

 2.  (InterSchola turns unwanted assets into cash selling surplus goods for school districts and public agencies on EBay. It got 12.6 percent of the vote.

 3. Sseko Designs helps poor women in Uganda with academic promise earn money to pay for university. Sseko landed 8 percent of the vote.

 4. Retroficiency  makes software that crunches data to find potential energy savings in existing structures,received 6.2 percent of the vote.

 5. InVenture helps microfinance borrowers track their income and expenses and report the data to lenders through text messages  got 6 percent of the vote.

For  full info: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-19/america-s-most-promising-social-entrepreneurs-2012-winners 

 

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Are the BRIC Nations Cracking? *

Brazil, Russia, India, China. Group these developing nations together, as Goldman Sachs’s (GS) Jim O’Neill so presciently did in 2001, and you have the BRICs—perhaps the past decade’s most famous macro investing call.

The bloc’s subsequent ascent has been breathtaking. Its output has grown more than fourfold. China has dinged Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Brazil, which long sported a comparative advantage inhyperinflation, has become such an economic powerhouse that the Economist bestowed upon the nation this classic cover. According to the International Monetary Fund, the BRICs’ combined gross domestic product soared to $13.3 trillion last year, from $2.8 trillion just 10 short years ago. The MSCI BRIC index has gained more than eight times what the S&P 500 index returned during the past decade. Good call, Jim.

But like all fine investment bull runs, this one could be drawing to an end. According to Bloomberg data, for the first time in 13 years Brazil’s real, Russia’s ruble, and India’s rupee are weakening the most among emerging-market currencies, while China’s yuan has fallen the most since authorities devalued it in 1994. The rupee is at a record low against the dollar, while India is being cited byStandard & Poor’s (MHP) and Fitch as potentially the first BRIC country to lose its investment-grade rating.

Last month investors pulled $6.3 billion out of Brazil’s stocks and bonds and $5.8 billion from Russia’s. Brazil’s consumer default rate is at a three-year high; its stock market has round-tripped to where it was in 2009. Even though Brazil’s government has slashed interest rates to a record low while extending tax breaks and subsidizing credit, its economy is growing nowhere near the 7.5 percent clip it enjoyed in 2010; last year it managed a 2.7 percent gain. Russia’s oil exports—its economic mother’s milk—are at an 18-month low. Home values fell in a record 54 of 70 cities tracked by China’s government; growth in industrial production, China’s economic staple, slowed recently to a three-year low.

“In the absence of well-developed domestic consumption, the emerging markets—and by extension, their equities—are heavily dependent upon exports,” says Jason Trennert of Strategas Research. “With Europe in recession and the U.S. flirting with one, many investors might see BRICs stocks as a bridge too far.”

BRIC governments are now working overtime to staunch capital outflows and stoke their citizens’ spending. While all eyes are on the regressing “developed” economies of Europe, will these developing giants find a way to keep growing? Possibly. Still, the BRIC troubles represent another knock against the idea of decoupling—the fantastic notion that emerging markets can thrive, no matter what befalls the rest of the world.

*

By Roben Farzad on June 26, 2012

  

Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Writer Farzad covers Wall Street and international finance.

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Is Your Computer Infected? If So, These 3 Forums Could Be Your Lifeline

• June 24, 2012
• By Craig Snyder

How to Remove Malware Remove all Traces of Malware Fast Follow These 3 Steps Immediately!
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If you’ve used the Internet for a decent amount of time, you will have run into spyware, trojans, and other forms of computer viruses. Don’t you lie! I’m ashamed to admit it as well, but I’ve also went through some incredibly stressful infections that, in the most serious instances, have caused me to toss hard drives and reformat partitions. For casual Internet users who Facebook and Twitter their days away, this is a huge annoyance. For those of us who use the Internet for our work, it can become a serious threat to our financial status. It can get pretty serious.

Although we’ve gone over some great choices for anti-virus software, the “anti-virus” model isn’t and probably never will be perfect. Heuristics are snowballing quickly, as are new instances of trojans. It’s always going to be a sticky situation for us.

With all that in mind, disinfecting our system takes more than the automated tinkering that software like AVG and Malwarebytes can do for us. Sometimes, we have to get our hands dirty. You don’t have to jump in alone though, and I’d like to share with you the three places where you should go if you ever need help securing your system.

BleepingComputer

BleepingComputer is known to be one of the best all-around technical help communities on the web. The website itself includes a huge variety of resources that have helped hundreds of people bring their systems back to life.

Safer-Networking

Safer-Networking, just like BleepingComputer, is the home of one of the most popular tools in this area – Spybot.

MajorGeeks

MajorGeeks is a huge player in tweaking the features and performance of your system. You’ve probably heard of them before.