Spotlight Features

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems. The Butterball Turkey Talk-Line women -- and they are all women -- have bee...

Green IT is not one industry. Instead, it refers to a number of interrelated fields that focus on designing, manufacturing, installing, using and recycling computers, data centers, electronics and other parts and pieces of information systems. And because of its broad reach, it means the possibility...

It might not be as glamorous as some industries, but recycling is booming. The industry supports more than 450,000 jobs for Americans and generates $10.3 billion in revenue for federal, state and local governments -- making it larger than the forestry and fishing industries combined. "It's an incred...

When consumers in California visit the Dunkin' Donuts website hoping to order a bag of their favorite java, they are met with the following message: "Important Notice: We are temporarily suspending the shipment of orders to California while we work to comply with Proposition 65 ... ." Bloggers, comm...

Compared to solar and wind, geothermal energy is still a small fraction of the renewable energy market. It's holding its own, however, and it's likely to become a much bigger player in the not-so-distant future. "The resource is enormous," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energ...

Like other renewable energy resources, wind energy is taking off. The second quarter of 2011 saw more than 1,003 megawatts of wind power capacity installed, and the wind industry has contributed upwards of 35 percent of all new generating capacity during the past four years, second only to natural g...

Solar is no longer on the back burner; it's right there at the front of the stove, demanding that economists and job seekers alike take notice. "It's a tough environment, but I think it will continue to grow," said Gerald Kelly, communications director for Third Sun Solar. "As we move forward as a...

Victims bilked of their money by fake online ads are not the only ones hurt. "Blatant fraud, like the fake-news diet promotions and other online scams that have sprouted in recent years, only serves to undermine consumer confidence and eventually marketers and business as a whole," said attorney Bil...

3D marketing is powerful -- and even more so, when it's delivered to the palm of your hand. Mobile 3D is becoming an increasingly common way of grabbing, holding, and entertaining consumers. From using current mobile technologies to create a sense of 3D, to creating actual images that seem to pop of...

You've seen the ad a thousand times on the Internet: "1 Tip for a Tiny Belly" says the hand-lettered headline above the crudely drawn swelling-and-shrinking belly. "Cut down a bit of your belly everyday following this one weird tip," it goes on to say. If starvation caused by having funds continuous...

You might not care about your friend's innumerable Foursquare updates detailing his stops at a bank, a bookstore, and finally a local Italian restaurant, where he's having spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. You can bet, however, that marketers do. After all, the more businesses know about where th...

You might have seen them without knowing what they are: little black and white boxes with squiggles and lines in the corner of a magazine advertisement, on a band's poster in a coffeeshop, or even on a T-shirt. Those things, called "QR codes," or "quick response codes," are part of a whole new way ...

Thanks to a variety of mobile payment systems, buying and selling goods and services has never been easier. Increasingly, mobile devices are becoming both credit-card readers and stand-ins for the cards themselves. It might not mean the end of cash just yet, but we're moving in that direction. "Ten ...

Consumers are savvier than ever. They're also much less likely to be swayed by traditional, in-your-face advertising and commercials. They want, instead, to be entertained and engaged by marketers. In short, consumers just want to have fun. Marketers and e-commerce retailers are, therefore, looking ...

For thousands of years, auctions remained largely unchanged -- until 1995, when a computer programmer posted a single item online. The result: A broken laser pointer found a home, and Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Unlike its slow-to-change offline predecessor, the online auction has gone through som...