Free Republic

WASHINGTON, May 24, 2008 – An entrepreneur who has moved around with her Marine Corps husband and now calls Camp Lejeune, N.C., home is using her small-business success to help other military spouses get started with businesses of their own. “Being a military spouse breeds an excellent opportunity for reach and really working with a community that shares the same love and support that you have as a business owner,” Roxanne Reed -- founder of the All Fired Up Candle Company, Jane Wayne Gear and Marketing to Military Group – said in an “ASY Live” interview on BlogTalkRadio. “I...

NOVY URENGOI, Russia: As Viktor Seliverstov works in his makeshift studio in this hardscrabble Siberian town he is enveloped in a cloud of ivory dust. His electric carving tool whirrs over the milky surface of teeth and tusks, as he whittles them into key fobs, knife handles and scrimshaw figurines. But these are not whale bones or walrus tusks he is working on. The ivory in this part of the world comes from the remains of extinct woolly mammoths, as they emerge from the tundra where they have been frozen for thousands of years. It is a traditional Russian business...

Small businesses are the backbone of America’s economy. This is especially true in South Florida, which according to last year’s bizjournals.com study is one of the top five small business markets in the nation. So it seems natural that one of the most innovative organizations dedicated to the needs of small business owners throughout North America would originate in South Florida. What is anything but natural is the scope and depth that this organization, the Association of Entrepreneurs, seeks to provide. Marc Gilenson, founding President of the Association, is the author of “The Entrepreneurial Way, Strategies and Tactics for Entrepreneurs.”...

Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business. Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known. It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze...

VALDOSTA, Ga., Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. today celebrates the grand opening of the fifth store to open under the Little Caesars Veterans Program as U.S. military veteran and Little Caesars franchisee Patricia Evans opens her doors for business at 1650 F Baytree Road in Valdosta, Georgia. "The Little Caesars Veterans Program has provided me the opportunity to transition to a new career as my family and I begin the next chapter in our lives," said Evans. "I am proud to be the first woman to open a store under this program, and I'm excited to be...

Abstract: The founders of the United States considered intellectual property worthy of a special place in the Constitution - “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In today's knowledge-based economy, capturing value from intellectual capital and knowledge-based assets has gained even more importance. Global competition is no longer for the control of raw materials, but for this productive knowledge. This paper is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants' contributions to the competitiveness of the U.S. economy....

An RCMP sniper fires at Darren Shulte's non-ceramic bullet-proof vest to see if it can withstand the shots. Darren Shulte of St. Albert, Alta., created the plate five years ago for a junior high school science fair. Defence Minister Peter MacKay speaks with Shulte while looking over his plate on Saturday, Nov. 24, 2007. CTV.ca News Staff   Updated: Sun. Dec. 2 2007 7:28 AM ET RCMP snipers took aim at Darren Shulte's Grade 9 science project this week, firing at his non-ceramic bullet-proof plate to see if it could save lives. Shulte, of St. Albert, Alta., created the plate...

The birth of modern aviation probably lies in Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic, which won him a $25,000 prize and a ticker-tape parade down New York's Fifth Avenue. By showing the world to be just a little smaller than before, Lindbergh fathered the 20th century's transportation revolution. The airship named after German entrepreneur Ferdinand von Zeppelin took its maiden flight the next year, and by the early 1930s both Boeing and Douglas were selling passenger planes to fledgling airlines including TWA, United and American. Not long afterward, the famous Douglas DC-3 made transcontinental flights practical. Compare the rapid...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Arab countries are nearing the point where they will join the ranks of the world's most competitive economies, but entrepreneurs still need access to venture capital funds to bankroll their ideas, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Monday. "The next story in the development of the Arab world will be the unleashing of the power of the Arab entrepreneur," Schmidt told a gathering of hundreds of political and business leaders from the Middle East and elsewhere. "Huge new non-oil businesses can be created here that are global and export-oriented." Schmidt, speaking at the opening session...

It would be great to think that intelligent and ambitious Iranian women could escape the fate of Parvaneh Majd Eskandari, stabbed sixty times for her work as a dissident. And, of course, they can. Anousheh Ansari, who left Iran as a sixteen year old to escape the Ayatollah's revolution, has been such a success as an entrepreneur in America that she is now worth an estimated $180 million. Certainly she was able to afford the price of a ten day trip into space, likely to have been around $20 million. CNN suggested that she originally wanted to wear both the...

US telecommunications entrepreneur, Walter Anderson, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud Friday in relation to what authorities said was the nation’s largest-ever criminal tax case. Anderson was indicted in 2005 on charges he evaded $210 million in federal and local taxes. Prosecutors said Anderson used offshore corporations and bank accounts to hide income from tax collectors. He pleaded guilty to two counts of tax evasion and one count of fraud Friday. He admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in income from the Internal Revenue Service and from Washington, D.C., tax collectors during 1998 and 1999. Under a plea...

by Edward Hudgins Norway recently lost its wealthiest citizen. No, he didn't die. Rather, he left or, to be more accurate, was driven out of the country for the sin of wanting to remain wealthy. John Fredriksen has made a fortune in shipping and aqua-business. But in past years he's spent less and less time in his homeland in order to avoid its confiscatory taxes. Recently the Norwegian government decreed that the only way to avoid those taxes was for citizens -- Fredriksen was the target -- to spend no more than 90 days a year in the country. In...

SAN FRANCISCO — A University of California-Berkeley team known as the Harmonic Devices has taken home the $25,000 grand prize in the Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge, according to the university's Haas School of Business. The team's work is based on technology created by Gianluca Piazza and Philip Stephanou at UC Berkeley's Sensor and Actuator Center. The team is planning to introduce what it claims is the world's first chip integrating RF filters for multiple bands, targeting wireless phones and mobile devices. The technology promises to deliver new levels of miniaturization, longer battery life and lower cost, the university said....

Otilio Fernandez has no interest in his electrical business being known as a "minority" contractor. Fernandez, 55, who immigrated to Milwaukee from Mexico at age 19 in 1969, decided to distance himself from such designations shortly after starting his electrical contracting firm, Fernandez Electric Inc., out of his Milwaukee home in 1987 with his wife, Mercedes. Fernandez once declined a loan guaranty from the U.S. Small Business Administration, a traditional source of minority-business financing -- opting instead for a personal bank loan he obtained. He also bypasses jobs that specifically seek "minority" participation. He avoids many of the meetings by...

Beside the war in Iraq and the scrap over the President's Supreme Court nominee, last month's announcement of the Rocket Racing League--the what?--came off as comic relief. What's this, a new Jetsons movie? Or could George Plimpton be risen from the dead and writing spoofs? The Rocket Racing League, though, is no put-on. It's real, the brainchild of Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., the private-space-travel entrepreneur, and Granger B. Whitelaw, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and two-time Indy 500 team winner. Diamandis was the force behind last year's Ansari X Prize, won by Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne for kissing the boundary of space...

The theme of Stanford University's Asia Technology Initiative India Program 2005 Conference, to be held in August, is 'The Idea of Silicon Valley in India: Feasibility, Lessons and Trends'. The objective of the meet is to analyse the key components of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and their applicability in an Indian context from the perspective of related opportunities, barriers and experiences. The tracks to be covered in the meet include Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs: Insights, Advice, and Parallels covering the thought processes of these two groups in Silicon Valley and in India and promoting discussion between the two camps on the...

LONDON: On the strength of a samosa, Lakhubhai Pathak, late of Kenya and Britain, turned five pounds into £50 million and a 40-country empire. Starting from a five feet by six feet kitchen, his sons and heirs now rejoice in an 18-million-pound factory, hailed as the largest Indian food manufacturing plant in the world. In 2002, Cherie, wife of British PM Tony Blair, cut the ribbon to declare the factory open. Then, ecstatic British parliamentarians told the House of Commons that Lakhubhai's real baby, his company Patak's Pickles, was a "startling British success story". What they really meant was an...

Chicago, May 12 : Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian American serial entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love - commercial space travel. Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation called PLANETSPACE.

The party now favored to win parliamentary elections wants to make Poland a "cheap state," and has outlined an ambitious economic plan that it believes could pull GDP growth up to seven percent per year. Law and Justice (PiS), the current leader in both the parliamentary and presidential polls, has outlined its economic plan which, if realized, could save the Treasury billions, eliminate state involvement in over a thousand companies, and make setting up a business in Poland possible in just three days. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, PiS' economic point-man and current leader of the Parliamentary Treasury Commission, told the Polish-Swiss Chamber...

Jailed and held without bond in the nation's largest alleged personal tax-evasion scheme, telecom investor Walter Anderson says the federal government has got it all wrong. He isn't a tax cheat, he said Wednesday night in a conference room at the D.C. jail. He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year. (snip) Yesterday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay ordered Anderson held at the D.C. jail until a March 11 hearing. He...

The government announced the indictment and arrest of space tourism and telecommunications entrepreneur Walt Anderson, accused of evading $200 million (euro151 million) in federal and local taxes, the largest U.S. criminal tax case ever filed against an individual. Anderson, chief executive officer of Orbital Recovery Corp., was accused of hiding income by using offshore corporations in the British Virgin Islands and Panama and a mailbox in the Netherlands. The indictment announced Monday charged the 51-year-old Anderson with hiding income from tax collectors through offshore corporations and bank accounts and claiming to be a resident of the state of Florida to...

An American businessman alleged to have hidden nearly half a billion dollars in earnings in offshore accounts has been arrested by US authorities and charged with tax evasion, obstructing the Internal Revenue Service and fraud. It is the biggest criminal tax fraud prosecution in US history. Walter Anderson, a telecommunications entrepreneur who used the pseudonym Mark Roth, was arrested on Saturday at Washington's Dulles airport after arriving from London. He was charged with evading more than $200m in taxes over five years and faces up to 80 years in prison if found guilty. He reportedly pleaded innocent. An art collector...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Assistant Attorney General Eileen J. O'Connor, of the Justice Department's Tax Division, Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein of the District of Columbia, Mark W. Everson, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner; and Daniel J. Black, Deputy Chief Financial Officer for the District of Columbia's Office of Tax and Revenue, jointly announced the indictment and arrest of Walter Anderson, 51, a local telecommunications entrepreneur, on tax evasion and related charges. A federal grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C. returned the 12-count indictment last Wednesday under seal. Anderson was arrested Saturday, February 26 and will be presented this afternoon before a U.S....

RUSH: Here is Heather in Burbank. Hi, Heather. Welcome to the EIB Network. CALLER: Hi, Rush. I just want to let you know that I am the complete opposite of all those stories. You and my husband have inspired me to do two things. First off, I am a former liberal, daughter of a public schoolteacher, and family of feminazis and I was really laid off so what I've done last year is I converted to being a Republican and voted for Bush, whereas in 2000 I voted for Gore and I just recently started my own business so I'm...

Management courses in the US, micro credit programmes and an extraordinary desire to start over are behind Afghan women’s revival of the country’s economy. Kabul (AsiaNews/Agencies) – More than three years after the collapse of the Taliban regime women are spearheading Afghanistan’s economic revival. The civil war and the US intervention have created a gender gap in the country. Women now constitute 55 per cent of the population. In Kabul alone there are 70,000 widows. NGOs and the academic world have responded by setting up programmes designed to help women get back on their own two feet. Almost 10,000 of...

Scorsese's "Aviator" Reflects Randian Lessons Reviewed by Edward Hudgins Ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org In "The Aviator," a bio-pic about Howard Hughes (1905-1976) starring Leonardo DiCaprio with script by John Logan, director Martin Scorsese projects on the screen a moral message that is rarely found in philosophy books much less in movies: the path to joy in life is loving one's work. Scorsese portrays Hughes as a true, can-do American pioneer and visionary in both the motion picture and aeronautics industries who fights the forces of censorship in the one realm and government control in the other. Elements of "The Aviator" find their closest...

The Web: New wave of online entrepreneurs Published 11/10/2004 11:35 AM CHICAGO, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Enthused consumers take to the streets, singing a schmaltzy tribute to an online retailer to the tune of a famous Frank Sinatra song. The cable TV spot ends with the consumers proudly proclaiming they went shopping "eBay," with the same intense emotion old Blue Eyes sang that he lived life "My Way."The technology that powers the online auctions at eBay.com -- and other online sites -- actually is creating a new way of life for many. Online entrepreneurs are springing up once again, as...

OK, I have a great line of products, a comprehensive business plan, initial markets worth ~ $17 - 20 Billion, patent protection, and a decent marketing plan. What I don't have is the capital for tooling, initial production run, and workspace.Does anyone have any experience with ACE-NET (a federal program for financing start-ups), or "Angel" sites? IF there are any freepers with VC experience, I would very much like to hear about your successes, failures, what did and did not work. All suggestions and comments are appreciated.

Editor’s Note: The commercialization of space is often considered a relatively contemporary idea. However, for decades people have proposed ways to go into space not in the pursuit of knowledge or glory, but to make money. One such person was Austin Stanton, founder of Varo, Inc., a company that, several decades ago, developed aerospace electrical systems. Stanton was a strong proponent of spaceflight in general and commercial space ventures in particular. At the national meeting of the American Astronautical Society in San Diego in February 1966, Stanton gave a speech titled “Commercial Development of the Resources of Space”. That speech...

Pots of soybeans don't bubble on Stan Gasperson's stove anymore. The creator of a soybean-based hair dye has cooked up something else -- a product made from corn, rosemary and other herbs that Gasperson claims grows hair. RestHAIRation is actually an entire hair care system featuring shampoo, conditioner and spray gel. The owner of Creative Cuts at 813 E. Grove St., Bloomington, took more than two years to develop the products. He tested RestHAIRation on about 2,000 willing participants, including himself. "Rogaine is the only hair growth product approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Because FDA won't approve...

A company that has sent paying tourists to the International Space Station said on Tuesday it was scouting locations for a spaceport to send travelers on suborbital flights. Sites in Australia, the Bahamas, Florida, Japan, Malaysia, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Singapore and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates are all under consideration, the Arlington, Virginia-based firm Space Adventures said in a statement. Operations at the spaceport will include suborbital flights, a space flight training center and other activities. "Securing the location of a spaceport will be a progressive step for Space Adventures in its evolution from a space experiences provider...

Overview and Goals for Centennial Challenges . What Is Centennial Challenges? - Program of contests in which NASA will establish prize purses to stimulate innovation and competition in technical areas of interest to space exploration and ongoing NASA priorities. . Program Goals for Centennial Challenges - Stimulate innovation in ways that standard federal procurements cannot - Enrich NASA research by reaching new communities - Help address technology pitfalls - Achieve returns that outweigh program investment - Educate, inspire and motivate the public "Prehistory" of Centennial Challenges . Long History of Prizes for Technological Innovation - 18th Century: British Longitude Prize...

Business is smokin' for Liberty City Cigars Business owner Vernon Patrick has started his own line of cigars aimed at urban African-American hipsters. BY NATALIE P. McNEAL nmcneal@herald.com Liberty City Cigars is a different type of tabaquería. Though there's a ''Learn to Speak Spanish'' CD-ROM on the table at this ''urban'' cigar shop, it doesn't have much in common with your typical Hispanic tobacco store. Walk-in customers make purchases in front of a bulletproof glass. Vernon Patrick, 51, who opened Liberty City Cigars in April, is one of just a handful of African-Americans in the cigar business, and he has...

Small Israeli processor as fast as a super-computer Oct. 14 - Lenslet, a small Israeli company from Herzliya Pituah, will next week reveal a revolutionary development by its engineers, which has already aroused much interest all over the world: an electro-optic processor, which operates at the imaginary speed of 8 tera (8,000 billion) calculation operations per second. Yediot Aharonot reported that the new revolutionary processor will be used for intelligence, for the analysis of intelligence, weather forecasting, airport security, and for multimedia, cellular and video compression purposes. Next week the new optical processor will be revealed at the Microtech 2003...

This guy makes sense -- too bad he won't win By Phil Yost Lurking among the little publicized candidates for governor may be legions of talented and sensible people. Or maybe only two or three. One lurking in semi-plain sight on the Web, if you Google ``recall,'' is Garrett Gruener. Gruener is one of the founders of the Internet search engine Ask Jeeves, and of the venture capital firm Alta Partners. He's astute in business, informed about state government, and comes across as someone with both the confidence to be a chief executive and the modesty to understand his own...

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryAugust 30, 2003 President's Radio Address      Audio THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. On this Labor Day weekend, Americans pay tribute to the spirit of hard work and enterprise that has always made this nation strong. Every day, our workers go to factories and offices and farms and produce the world's finest goods and services. Their creativity and energy are the greatest advantage of the American economy. Worker productivity accelerated last year at the fastest rate in more than a half century. This higher productivity means our workers receive higher wages, our nation's exports get a...

While many celebrities prefer passive and extremely conservative investments, Schwarzenegger's 100-plus ventures — 19 of which are valued at more than $1 million — include individual stocks, managed stock accounts, private investment funds, venture funds, bonds, a number of direct stakes in operating businesses, and even a high-end mutual fund company overseen by Nobel laureates.

MOCHNACZKA, Poland (CNS) -- When the economy went bust in the Polish towns of Krosno and Krynica, the surrounding villages suffered greatly. But one village's parish priest worked to try to pick up the slack. Father Jan Godek, pastor of the Catholic church in Mochnaczka, has introduced several small-enterprise programs to help jump-start the local economy. Using grant money from the Caritas Project, a U.S. foundation, the priest plans to buy 30 cows, which will be shared by the village's 1,000 residents. He said he hopes a new dairy farm and calves will provide additional income. He also has encouraged...

Quad/Graphics was founded on July 13, 1971, by Harry V. Quadracci, president, who initiated operations in an abandoned millwork factory in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, using a $35,000 second mortgage on his home and capital raised from a handful of associates. Our beginnings were humble: 11 employees, a rented press and a borrowed binder housed in a 20,000-square-foot building.   As with most new concerns, the first years were lean. Establishing rural Pewaukee as a printing mecca was no easy task. An occasional customer would trickle in, but usually only because no other printer would take the work. "We were pretty much...