But all that's sort of icing on the cake, the meat of the pack was about how the Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act offers a sizable incentive to video game companies for producing games there. Devs and publishers get as much as a 12 percent tax break.

Industry: Georgia is Gaming - Kotaku

A new, innovative business networking event for the southeast startup community: Geeks V Suits Bowling Match.

Geeks V Suits Bowling

Atlanta Seed-Stage Second Office

AS3O is an open coffee group for entrepreneurs, freelancers, renegade venture capitalists, creative types, developers, etc. – anyone who would like to get together outside of the office/house on a laptop – to work. We looked around Atlanta for a community of startups, artists, small businesses, etc., and not finding the exciting, entrepreneurial nexus of our dreams, we figured we’d start one of our own.

We now meet every Friday at Inman Perk at 11AM. Feel free to show up, introduce your startup and get down to co-working.

http://www.as3o.org

Atlanta Seed-Stage Second Office

There are only a few ideas that really pop out at me and make my jaw drop. When Allison Rhodes of OpenDNS asked me what I thought were some of the best recent innovations at dinner a while back, I really didn’t have anything to say and have been thinking about it ever since. Now I have my answer: Startup Weekend.

Atlanta gets its own Startup weekend.

Why I’m Enthused About Startup Weekend - PaulStamatiou.com

Build your own Shoe from Puma.

NEAT!

PUMA MONGOLIAN SHOE BBQ

The photograph on the above right shows 244 locks collected from under an airport baggage handling conveyor belt (where two belts come together), over a one-month period at a single New York airport. Depending on the bag design, the strategic use of duct/gaffer's tape (to prevent locks from dangling) can reduce the likelihood of this sort of mishap.

One Bag: Checking Bags: Lost Locks

At first the easy credit is funnelled into investment (because investment is already a habbit of the old savings-based society). Businesses do amazingly well with all of the new capital and a bunch of new products appear on the market.

Then, people realize that there's even more credit to be had and start spending it on a few luxuries here and there. Seeing that a few luxuries didn't lead to immediate bankrupcy, people go out and buy more and more things on credit. At some point, the loans come due and since people aren't usually willing to get rid of their stuff they pull their investments out of businesses and use them to pay the loans that have come due. Businesses suffer, wages don't go up and prices don't go down as fast as they should, people go get more loans to support their new spending habbits.

The spiral continues until many of the jobs have been outsourced to cheap foreign labour (since the locals are demanding higher wages which businesses can't/won't provide - especially when they face the threat of having their share price go down). Desperate politicians resort to pork-barrel spending and random wars to prop up the economy, but the inflation these actions cause hurts the middle and lower classes more than it helps the businesses that sustain them, forcing them further into debt. The random wars make foreign suppliers leery of said nation (they're afraid said nation might spend all its money on bombs and end up unable to pay for the last shipment of cheap stuff, let alone the next one) and the price of imports starts to go up - forcing people even further into debt yet again.

At some point the banks realize that nobody's going to be able to repay their loans because nobody actually owns anything of value and the cheap credit dries up. This breaks the consumption cycle and plunges the nation into a depression. Small banks go out of business. Big banks, naturally, forclose on everything and find that they now own the place. They sit tight and wait for the economy to pick up again so they can sell (well, loan, really) all the stuff they just acquired for free back to the people they took it from.

This lasts until people figure out that being able to produce goods is actually important and shouldn't be neglected in favor of rampant consumerism. The banks regain their confidence in the economy and start mortgaging all the assets they foreclosed on back out again, and businesses start working hard to earn a proffit and repay those loans. At this point we come back to a thrifty, productive, society that saves its money and invests in its own enterprises.

A few generations go by. People forget all about the crash of 'whenever. The cycle repeats.

Slashdot | New Explanation For the Industrial Revolution

14 May, 2007
Life is a game

Oleg Boyko managed to become one of the country’s most prominent bankers, lose everything, get a serious injury, set up a gigantic gaming company and make one and a half billion. Now the government is going to destroy his business but Boyko knows how to get out of the situation.

Ritzio.com - Press Center - Forbes on Oleg Boyko

What company is the most effective for stock manipulators to work over? The Street doesn't invent Microsoft products or set unrealistic expectations for Xbox uptake. The only reason for covering the Zune at all is to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Apple's iPod business. Nobody cares about Microsoft's stock price; the company can't even goose it itself. It's dead, and no amount of fake information will cause it to dance up and down in ways that short term speculators can exploit.

"Crazy" Jim Cramer's entire business is to create false information to invoke a calculated reaction, then profit from others' fear or credulity. It's not a closely held secret.

The floating news items picked up by rumor sites, reports based on scraps of papers found on trading floors, and all of those ghosts whispering news that pretends to be of great import for Apple's stock price are all lies generated by a few sources, intended to exploit the trust of investors and get them to sell off or buy up stock.

[More Absurd iPhone Myths: iSuppli, Subsidies, and Pricing]

Unprofitably Scandalous News.
This explains why nobody reports on Microsoft's six billion dollars of losses in consumer electronics, or its inability to expand into new markets. That information can't be used to manipulate stock prices and subsequently make a profit on it, because Microsoft's stock is stuck in a rut.

It explains why Microsoft's president of its Entertainment and Devices division, Robbie Bach, could dump $6.2 million of stock just before announcing another billion dollar loss related to Xbox failures, but not face any media coverage regarding his insider trading. The news was only a minor curiosity because Microsoft's stock is as flat as a frozen lake.

10 FAS: 9 - Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal

Chart of Delta fare classes.

Delta Airlines Fare Class Chart