It’s said that on Twitter it’s not the number of followers you have that counts, it’s how many times you’ve been retweeted. And there’s some truth to that. While follower counts can be tricked, inflated or simply represent the number of people actively ignoring you, retweets show people actually engaging with what you’re putting out there. Having your content retweeted by your network means adding exposure, additional authority, and, more importantly, that people like what your brand is doing or saying. And that’s a pretty big metric to keep an eye on while participating in social media.

Last month I wrote about 5 ways to track Twitter sentiment. After that post, SmallBizTrends reader Mark Harbeke emailed me looking for tools to help him track retweets. I was able to offer him couple early recommendations, but it made me want to dig deeper to see what was available for SMB owners looking to track retweets.

Here are some of the most valuable tools I stumbled across to help SMB owners measure influence.

Europe could meet at least 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050 without paying more for electricity than it would by continuing with current fossil-fuel based infrastructure, according to a new report by the European Climate Foundation (ECF).

The 'Roadmap 2050' report, published on 13 April, lays down pathways for decarbonising the EU's power sector in order to cut greenhouse gases by at least 80% by 2050.

It assessed the implications of scenarios where 40%, 60% and 80% of Europe's energy comes from renewable sources, complemented with nuclear and conventional power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities.

At the University of Miami a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship class with roughly 40 students. Most of them were juniors and seniors, joined by a small number of law students. The course had so far covered the theoretical literature on entrepreneurship, but on this particular day all the students wanted to talk about was their own futures.

Studying entrepreneurship in the midst of a severe recession and stumbling recovery, and in the months leading up to graduation, has made these students acutely aware that their own economic futures may not be entirely secure. Make no mistake: jobs are front and center in students’ minds. Both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve expect the unemployment rate to remain at relatively high levels for the next few years, falling from the present 9.7 percent to around 8 percent by the end of 2012.

Today at its Mountain View headquarters, Google is holding a special event for CIOs called Atmosphere. The event revolves around cloud-based services like Google Apps and Docs, and Google has an impressive roster of speakers lined up. In a panel called “Google’s Innovators”, some of Google’s most prominent engineers took the stage to talk about the future of the Cloud and a variety of other topics, including HTMl5 vs native applications, net neutrality, and more. My live notes are below.

Panelists:
Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist
Alan Eustace, SVP, Engineering & Research
Jeff Huber, SVP, Engineering
Moderator: Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise.

Q: What are you most proud of seeing during your time at Google?
Alan: Search, Universal search, bringing together images, huge web. Doing that all in one place has been very important to me. And also recency. Our advertising and our publishers — the partnerships we have with them is huge.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the commercialization route chosen by university scientists funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the NIH and how their chosen commercialization path is influenced by whether or not the university technology transfer office is involved. In particular, the paper identifies two routes for scientific commercialization. Scientists who select the TTO route by commercializing their research through assigning all patents to their university TTO account for 70% of NCI patenting scientists. Scientists who choose the backdoor route to commercialize their research, in that they do not assign patents to their university TTO, comprise 30% of patenting NCI scientists. The findings show a clear link between the commercialization mode and the commercialization route. Scientists choosing the backdoor route for commercialization, by not assigning patents to their university to commercialize research, tend to rely on the commercialization mode of starting a new firm. By contrast, scientists who select the TTO route by assigning their patents to the university tend to rely on the commercialization mode of licensing.

Facebook runs a website that gets a quarter of a trillion page views per month. The culture around Facebook has led to many popular videos. Some of the most viewed videos about Facebook are simply music videos and many of those didn't make our list.

While we did consider the number of views in our selection, we primarily focused on videos that illustrate all the ways Facebook has changed our lives. From Farmville, to warnings about losing privacy to what people don't like about Facebook, this list of videos shows society's reaction to Facebook's sudden rise in popularity. Also included are two 60 Minutes interviews with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They're from 2008, back when Facebook only had 10% of the users they have today.

Recently, the blog Grasshopper conducted a survey, "The Entrepreneur State of Mind," and the results have now been summarized in an infographic by Jason Lankow of Column Five Media.

The picture it paints adds some demographics to a fairly amorphous set of people. As you'd expect, entrepreneurs are largely youngish, broke, hungry--and probably far more optimistic than your average bear. The weirdest thing was that 70% are male. Which sounds like a sampling error, but looking around at today's businesses, it does seem like almost all were started by men:

Innovation is the key to developing new revenue streams, staying competitive and creating jobs. Adam Richardson, creative director at global innovation firm frog design, inc., where he has worked with companies such as HP, Intel, Motorola, Logitech, and Yahoo!, has come out with a new book entitled Innovation X, published by Jossey Boss.

Mr. Richardson writes regularly on design and business, and speaks at conferences worldwide. In addition to teaching design and user research, he is a guest lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris and at the IESE University of Navarra in Barcelona. Mr. Richardson earned his BFA in Industrial Design from the California College of the Arts, and a multi-disciplinary MA from the University of Chicago.

Back in my [Jonathan Fields] corporate lawyer days, there was one guy who everyone hated. Not because he was mean or underhanded or cut-throat. He was actually quite nice and always willing to help. People hated him because he was good. Superstar good.

While everyone else fretted and froze under the dizzying pace and pressure of the job, he seemed to always keep it together, to thrive and even come alive as the fire got hotter.

He wasn’t an adrenaline junkie or cowboy. He was actually a pretty level-headed guy. But he just seemed to process things faster, do things differently and see things everyone else missed. And that gave him an edge. An edge everyone else wished they had.

I used to wonder what he was doing differently. Whether he was just wired that way. Maybe it was genetic. Or perhaps there was something else going on. All I knew is I wanted an answer.

The Middle East, North Africa region is emerging as a resilient growth market with promises of renewed market growth and technology innovation.

The MENA region, extends from Moroco in northwest Africa to Iran southwest Asia and includes all the Arab Middle East and North Africa countries, as well as Cyprus, Iran, Israel and Turkey.

Five Easy Ways To Shave Business Energy BillsThink “energy efficiency” and high-priced upgrades like replacing the office lights or installing a fancy energy-efficient heating system often spring to mind. In reality, though, many of the most effective energy-saving strategies for small businesses require little or no upfront cost, meaning you can reap real savings almost immediately.

Here are five low-cost energy-saving opportunities to consider:

Unplug equipment (or use power strips). Office equipment, battery chargers and electronics continue to draw energy from the electrical outlets even when they’re turned off. This “phantom energy” or “vampire power,” as it’s called, can account for up to 30% of your electricity bills. To prevent that, unplug equipment when it’s not in use. Or if there are too many gadgets to unplug individually, plug everything into a power strip and flip the switch off.

Set the sleep mode on computers, printers and copiers. Most office electronics these days offer a “power-saving” or “sleep” mode. What it does: When the equipment isn’t used for an extended period, it will automatically go into a low-energy-consuming mode. You can simply shake the mouse or hit a button and the equipment springs back to full life. For each computer in your business, setting the power-saving mode on the monitor and system drive can save up to $50 a year on electricity bills. Enabling power-saving modes on copiers or printers can save even more.

Life is full of ups and downs. If you're an entrepreneur, there are a whole lot more of them. The ride many entrepreneurs take is so bumpy that many have dubbed it "the entrepreneur rollercoaster." As you struggle to launch and grow your business, you'll experience those highs and lows over and over again, sometimes with the same venture, and most definitely with each new business you launch. To give you just an idea of what an entrepreneur goes through, I brought together some resources to create this animated video, "The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster." It provides a brief snapshot into what life is like for an entrepreneur, and how cyclical the process is. Enjoy the ride.

In the year 100,010, some evolved species will be digging through ancient digital rubble and find a strange visual iconography made of tiny colorful squares with rounded corners. They will diligently attempt to decipher what we meant by "I am T-Pain," "Doodle Jump," and "Zombie Farm." Finally, they will conclude that our native tongue was something called Apps.

Every day new apps are introduced for the iPhone, iTouch, and now the iPad (not to mention Android apps). Each represents a new business and the touch-screen icons serve as their "logos." With over 100,000 apps to date and more on the way, this is a creative gold rush for graphic designers and fuels our insatiable lust for designing logos.

The importance of firm formation to net job creation raises the question: Over time, are newly formed businesses employing more or fewer people? Given the number of net new jobs created from firm formation, a decline in startups’ average employment could pose problems for our economy’s ability to generate the jobs we need to reduce current levels of unemployment.

To figure out what has been happening to the initial employment of new businesses, I took a look at data from the Longitudinal Business Database of the U.S. Census (see figure below). The vertical axis measures the average number of employees per new business in its founding year. The blue bars show the average number of employees in new firms by year. The black line shows the five year moving average of that figure.

Just when I think that something is dead it surprises me with a new way which is creative and comes back to life. Offlate Ive felt that banner advertising is dead. But I guess after today I would say creative banner advertising is rare and not dead. Today I came across a banner ad that I not only interacted with but I am also writing this blog post about it.

I went to Youtube today morning and came across this banner ad (Check screenshot below)

If you click on the above you will know that it asks you to click on the banner. Once you click the attributes given to the girl start changing after she starts having sprite. Check each time you click the banner changes on attribute. At the end she gets her match.

Check how banner looks at the end of 4 clicks:

"Changing the game" is the motto of Sportvision, a company that takes pictures of sporting events.

In baseball, at least, Sportvision is doing exactly that.

Sportvision's primary business is selling "enhancements for sports television." The images it captures are used to create neat graphical overlays shown on TV.

But the data Sportvision collects is doing a lot more than that. The company's baseball analytics tools, PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and FIELDf/x, capture the precise flight of the ball and movement of the players at every stage of play, giving teams, analysts, and fans far more information about the game than would have been possible just a few years ago.

A few weeks ago I [Arno Harris] flagged a story in the Christian Science Monitor titled "Stimulus Funds for Clean Energy Largely Unspent" because I thought it deserved a clarifying 'blog post. The story repeats several big misunderstandings about the status of renewable energy programs included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The general thrust of the story is that the lack of immediate and large uptake of stimulus funds is a sign that the program isn't working or having its intended result.

The reality is that despite the low outflows of ARRA funds to date, the stimulus program is playing an important role in maintaining business continuity for developers of solar and wind projects in the US. In fact, the expiration of the program at the end of this year poses a major disruptive threat to the progress that's been made in renewable energy in the US over the last few years. It's critical that we get the program extended for a couple more years to enable the industry to recover fully.

ARRA was passed in the early days of the Obama administration as the magnitude of the financial crisis began to unfold. Among its many provisions was a section intended to support continued development of renewable energy projects--particularly wind and solar projects. The provision allows wind and solar developers to receive a cash grant in lieu of the Investment Tax Credit (ITC).

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told a group of editors Sunday that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the Internet.

Media executives have accused Google of draining readers and advertising from newspapers' Web sites. But in a speech to open the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors, Schmidt said Google recognizes that newspapers are vital to democracy and provide a critical source of online content.

"We understand how fundamental your mission is," he said.

Schmidt predicted that the news business will find a new model, based on a combination of advertising and subscription revenue. He said Google hopes to facilitate that, but he offered no specifics.

Go ahead, LOL. A sense of humor is an under-rated tool for entrepreneurs, innovators, and change agents. And that's no joke.

To keep the recovery going and put people back to work, imaginative entrepreneurs must start new businesses and revitalize old ones. Creative leaders unlock ingenuity and build support for change by lightening up. They are willing to consider new possibilities that seem absurd, even ludicrous, at first. They shake up thinking as though shaking a kaleidoscope, allowing surprising new juxtapositions to emerge. This is exactly what humor is all about: playing with ideas, challenging assumptions, and poking fun at tradition.

Some entrepreneurs thrive on humor. Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor went on both to start new Internet ventures and crack jokes as a part-time radio disk jockey. Former BBC head Greg Dyke produced a wave of creativity, including development of the BBC hit comedy, The Office, by going to ridiculous extremes that gave others permission to float "silly" (and often successful) ideas. For example, he printed yellow cards resembling penalty cards in European soccer marked "Cut the crap, make it happen" that could be tossed on the table during ponderous meetings.