Regional Business News

There’s really not a lot to add to these charts.

Rural co-ops aren’t just for electricity anymore. Now small towns, hospitals, schools — and rural residents, too — are joining forces to save on everything from paper to funeral services.

TechLink won the “Technology-Based Economic Development” award for organizations in communities with populations of 25,000 to 200,000 residents.

Western governors said today that the absence of a cohesive federal policy on the use of biomass for energy production could negatively impact efforts to improve forest health and to increase local and state investments in renewable energy projects, and they called on the Administration to make it a top priority.

The losses add up for cash-starved state and local governments across the country: California alone loses out on more than $1 billion a year.

Founded in 1977 as Advanced Input Devices in Post Falls, then moved to Coeur d’Alene and renamed Advanced Input Systems, the company was purchased in 1999 by Esterline, an international manufacturer of products for the aerospace and defense industries.

Armed with smartphones that allow them to post status updates from a tractor seat, and increasingly comfortable issuing pithy one-liners on the short-messaging site Twitter, they’re going online to tell their own stories, connect to a public they feel doesn’t understand them, exchange information and break the isolation they feel on the farm.

More than 600 CEOs rated states on a wide range of criteria from taxation and regulation to workforce quality and living environment, in our sixth annual special report.

Flip through this slide show to read profiles of each, then vote for the one you consider most promising at the end of the slide show. Voting ends on June 25. We’ll announce the top 5 vote-getters on the Small Business channel on June 29.

StartupNation.com today announced its collaboration with Overstock.com, Inc. to connect small and minority-owned businesses across the U.S. to Overstock.com’s new Main Street store.