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One of my New Year resolutions is to read more about business.  But countless business books are published each year,  so how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, without spending hours on end reading book reviews? Or reviewing the reviewer—argh!

An obvious go-to source is a librarian, specifically one with a passion for business. And having some business savvy wouldn’t hurt either. I inadvertently found a weekly column by Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia while searching for IdeaConnection. I like Bell’s advice: “Even if you have no desire to track the world of business, you’ll still want to explore the latest business trends in innovation and creativity,” he said.

In one of his recent columns Bell suggested a number of business publications worth reading, including IdeaConnection’s e-newsletter.

Although I want to stick to my resolution, the idea of reading—and buying—even more books than I do now is daunting. Bell suggests subscribing to RSS feed of pubs such as The New York Times (and check out “The Corner Office”in the NYT biz section), reviewing BW Insider, BusinessWeek’s weekly email summary, or the Wall Street Journal‘s “This Week’s Most Popular“. Granted there are many great business books on the shelves, (check out Bloomberg Business Week’s reading list), but my plan is to also selectively spend time online learning about the latest business trends and ideas. As for authors, Bell recommends Jim Collins, Seth Godin, Gary Hamel, or Roger Martin, to name a few. Phew! And BTW, Happy New Year.

Image credit: Autowitch

Have traditional television adverts had their day? Seethu Seetharaman, professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis predicts that 30 second television commercials and full page magazine ads will wane as more use is made of crowdsourcing, Internet viral campaigns and product placement.

In a story by his university’s newsroom he says, “Traditional expensive advertising is no longer effective given all the clutter, as well as the emergence of technologies, like digital video recorders, that block the ads from even being viewed, much less absorbed, by consumers.”

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Meteorologists and weather forecasters all make valiant efforts to forecast the weather. Sometimes they are spot on and other times you might as well look at a piece of seaweed to find out what’s going on in the atmosphere.

But perhaps the days of hit and miss weather forecasts will soon be a thing of the past, because the Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), a non-profit research and development organisation and Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation (MCTI) are using open innovation to predict climatic patterns. The aim is not so you and I can know whether to pack a brolly when we head out, but the far more serious and valuable objective of developing natural disaster early warning system capabilities for Brazil.

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