On Monday I posted some predictions from the World Future Society, what I consider to be an interesting list of believable possibilities for the next 25 years.

Today I want to add another view. I've heard several interviews with Thomas Friedman lately, and over the last week bought and read his latest book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  This looks and feels to me like another very valuable view of the future, also very reasonable, well documented, and...

Dow Jones announced last week that it would partner with EFE, the world's fourth-largest news agency (and the first one in the Spanish-speaking world) to develop an exclusive joint Spanish-language news service. The aim is to reach financial professionals, corporations, media, and private investors in Spain. It is not yet clear whether the service will also be offered in the U.S. Hispanic market.
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One of the big contrasts between Germany (where I grew up) and the US has been the approach to infrastructure such as highways, railways and power lines. In Germany these are all ‘gold plated’ with the Autobahn surface so smooth you could run a drag race on it (and people do accelerate almost that fast). In the US on the other hand I never cease to be amazed at the potholes on major routes such as I95. Germany is of course a fraction of the size...

Talking Trash is a great article from Foreign Policy magazine covering trash statistics.  According to the article the world throws away roughly 2 billion tons of garbage every year and the average high income country resident generates 3.1 pounds of garbage per day.  That's a lot of trash.

The good news is recycling rates are at historic highs.  Interestingly enough low income countries tend to do a pretty good job of recyclin...

We've been getting quite a few questions lately about the number of small businesses in the European Union (EU).  The quick answer is 25 million.  Also, European SMEs employ roughly 95 million Europeans (53% of the EU's workforce) and generate about half of the EU's private industry sales.

Read on for the longer answer.

The EU defines small businesses slightly differently than the US SBA does.  Their categories are:

• Smal...