The State with the Best Education Wins!
	MATR Newsletter - Fri Jun 23, 2006

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"A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit." — John C. Maxwell

Come Home Montana

• Fort Union, Montana Rendezvous attracts worldwide tourists
  Typically drawing a crowd of 3,000 or more, Fort Union’s largest annual event brings together buck-skinners and other traditional time period craftsmen and women exhibiting goods for trading while providing educational opportunities through a variety of skilled demonstrations.


• Oil, lots of it, keeps the Sidney, Montana motel rooms full. $174,000 in Sidney buys you a lot of bedrooms
  Here on the Montana prairie, the search is on to find fuel for your vehicle.


• Featured "Come Home Montana" Community~BUTTE
  


• Montana-Jobs.net Featured Career ~ Director of Biotechnology Business and Product Development
  


• Montana-Jobs.net Featured Talent- Desired Field: Marketing Communications
  

Montana Education Excellence

• New book showcases work of MSU graphic design grads
  Published in May, the book features 75 designers now plying their trade in studios from New York to Los Angeles.

Developing a more Entrepreneurial Montana

• Recommended Reading For New Entrepreneurs
  Looking to learn more about building a new business?

Education

• Young inventors set out to solve old problems
  Teams are encouraged to collaborate with university and business partners. That requires a range of skills, including project management and public relations. The hope is that even students who don't see themselves as math or science whizzes will think more broadly about careers in these fields.

Montana Business

• Montana City/Town Population Estimates for 2005 released
  


• Belgrade, Montana company, Phillips Environmental Products, capitalizes on research, creates jobs in Butte, Fort Benton and elsewhere
  Chance meetings and hard work have grown Phillips Environmental of Belgrade into a multi-million dollar business while creating jobs in Gallatin, Choteau, and Silver Bow counties.

Montana Economic Development

• Montana Rep. Rehberg secures CMC telemedicine network funds for the State
  "Telemedicine is the future of healthcare in Montana's rural communities," Rehberg said. "This funding will help fuel the development of telemedicine technology in Montana and means our rural communities will be better equipped to handle the health care needs of the public."


• Smiling along with Butte, Montana’s success. Butte featured on "The Daily Show"
  Were folks in Butte crazy to cooperate with producers of “The Daily Show” on a piece about turning the Berkeley Pit into a tourist attraction? Yeah, crazy like a fox.


• Jobs for Montana's Graduates Makes the Grade
  Jobs for America's Graduates today announced Job's for Montana Graduates achieves "5 for 5" status in performance outcomes.

Funding and Building your Business

• Does your business understand the "young-people" market?
  It’s one thing to read about how they use technology, and it’s another to hear them discuss it. One student, for example, said that she has thirteen IM chat sessions going at once.


• Web-Design Expert Says Clarity Is Key
  Ways that companies reach out to customers, like blogs, RSS news feeds, newsletters and more.


• Venture capitalists see wealth in health of boomers. Stanford team's cardiac device overshadows other products for aging group
  Those in the know say VCs looking to make it big should be shelling out the bucks for health care, biomedical equipment and anything meant for keeping the mind and body in shape.


• Inside Entrepreneurship: Business tests the best of friends
  Get a written partnership agreement. Hire the best lawyer you can to teach you the subtleties of buyout provisions and corporate dissolutions.

Regional Business

• Key Oregon open source firm moving to California. Software - Compiere Inc. is heading to Silicon Valley with $6 million in venture capital it managed to attract
  Its departure represents a setback as Oregon tries to turn the state's open source activity from a cultural phenomenon into an economic one.

Regional Economic Development

• Connect Northwest Q2 Newsletter
  For those of you who are not yet familiar with our genesis, Connect Northwest became an independent, non-profit organization in July of 2005. The idea for Connect Northwest was based on UCSD CONNECT, which is considered by many to be one of the top entrepreneur development models in the world.

Government Technology

• Audit: State computer system at risk in Montana
  Dick Clark, the state's top computer official, said he agreed with the report, and outlined a series of aggressive changes he hopes to have in place by the end of the October.

Idaho Business

• Idaho Gov. Risch reassures Kraft workers. Governor tells workers who are losing their jobs that he has some 'economic tools' to help
  "Thanks to the Legislature, I have some tools in my economic tool kit," Risch told 140 workers this week at the Rupert Civic Gymnasium.

Incubators and R&D

• Montana Lawmakers question NASA grant spending for INSA
  “It seems to me taxpayer money has been frittered away,” said state Rep. Joe Balyeat, R-Bozeman, during the meeting.

Careers

• June sets grads on a quest for a calling
  College grads aren't the only ones polishing résumés these days. Retirees and older baby boomers are also job-hunting, but with a difference. A survey released Wednesday by RetirementJobs.com finds that job-seekers age 50 and older place a big premium on flexible work conditions - perhaps working only part of a day, a week, or a year. Seven out of 10 respondents ranked flexibility so important that they would be willing to take reduced pay in exchange for a schedule that suited them. As for entrepreneurship, only 30 percent expressed interest.

Non-Profit News

• Wyoming Nonprofits grow in awareness, clout
  As a sector of the economy, nonprofit organizations between 1991 and 2001 grew faster than any other including manufacturing, construction and services Assets during that period grew 234 percent from $366 million to $1.2 billion, and revenues tripled from $179 million to $536 million, according to the report from the Wyoming Nonprofit Support Initiative.

Energy

• With hefty funding, solar start-up takes on big guns
  "For (traditional manufacturers) to build a 400-megawatt facility, it costs $1 billion. It costs us a tenth of that," Roscheisen said. "It is a roll-to-roll process. It is much simpler. There are three miles of solar cells on a single roll" of polymer film, he said.


• Seattle's Imperium Renewables plans to rule biodiesel
  Imperium Renewables, a 2-year-old Seattle company backed by billionaire Paul Allen, plans to control 40 percent of the growing U.S. market for diesel fuel made from vegetable oil by 2009.


• New Fuel Source Grows on the Prairie With Oil Prices Up, Biomass Looks More Feasible
  The idea is to run the nation's transportation system largely on alcohol produced from bulk plant material, weaning America from foreign oil and the risks that go with it, including wars, global warming and terrorism.

Connectivity & Communications

• Wikis Made Simple -- Very Simple
  Wikis have been a popular tool for Internet geeks for about a decade, and now they're beginning to be adopted inside many businesses.


• Advice for Cities Considering Wireless
  Cities have to find out not only if citizens — residential and business — are actually going to use the network, but also for what purposes. "Unless we get out of the mode of 'press release deployment' — that it's got to be 'this kind of network' and 'it's got to be free' — the end users and the business community will get screwed. That's the bottom line."

Community

• Kayaker's legacy lives on in waves. Brennan's Wave is a big draw in downtown Missoula, MT
  Brennan would have marveled at the effort it took to get the project in place. Never great at the ledger end of his business (“I told him so many times he needed a bean counter,” said his dad), constructing Brennan's Wave took five years, more than $300,000 in donated equipment, labor and cash from companies like Envirocon, support and cash from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, rafters and kayakers, the medical community, hours of pro-bono work by Missoula lawyer Trent Baker, and the efforts of many friends and relatives.

Cool Stuff That's Coming

• Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table
  "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."


• Chip could mean huge speed boost
  At 500 gigahertz, the technology is 250 times faster than chips in cellphones, which operate at 2 gigahertz. At room temperature, the chips operate at 350 gigahertz, far faster than other chips.

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