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The experiment found that on an apples-to-apples basis, posting local content drove stronger levels of shares, likes and comments than global content. 

We found that during the first four months of this experiment, the average engagement rate across all geo-focused posts was six times higher than all global posts.

They identified nine different types of story that drove higher levels of engagement as shown in this infographic.  

Today our largest marketplaces are for website templates as well as Adobe After Effects templates. When you go to the movies and see cool trailers, you are probably watching something that was made in Adobe After Effects. We also have background music marketplaces which is often used in advertising. The marketplaces are very much an exchange. We branched out from Flash into several design marketplaces.

chicken-and-egg

Our approach was to do a grassroots marketing campaign. We started with content we created ourselves, and we commissioned a little bit of content ourselves. Based on that content, we went over to other sites and started chatting with people to get them to check us out.

I realized the Internet does a great job at connecting us with our friends and family, but a terrible job at introducing us to new people and getting us offline.

It’s incredibly difficult and frustrating trying to find like-minded people nearby.

When you look at what people are searching for, they’re searching for people close by who share their interests.

oversharing and status anxiety, the two great scourges of the modern world.

But that would be to debase the word “information.”

Big Data is the vast (and ever-growing) stockpile of information too large for companies to store in-house--let alone analyze.

"For so long, we've focused on human-powered businesses, and now we're transforming into data-driven organizations that are bringing a level of customer centricity that we've never seen before,"

enture capital firms invested $2.47 billion in fields around big data in 2011, nearly 10 percent of all money distributed.

“Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few.” And a lot more will change, very quickly.

In Europe, equity-based crowdfunding allows people buy an ownership stake in your business. That practice is illegal in the U.S., but will likely gain steam in a global marketplace where individuals can use platforms like Symbid to help propel an interesting new business into the marketplace. Social lending sites like LendingClub or Prosper permit you to legally crowdfund your for-profit startup in the U.S., but you’ll have to start paying it back immediately, and you could be left liable for the loan if the business fails.

Crowdsourcing will only grow, and it’s up to you to weigh the risks and benefits of using it to extend your enterprise. It may serve a single, specific purpose, or support a key component of your operating blueprint across your organization, or it may not be the right choice--at least not yet.

What role are public-private partnerships going to have in funding development in cities? Is that just happy talk or is there reality to it? Hsu-Chen: It’s very real talk. And we’re getting smarter and better at it. Right now a lot of the incentives the city offers are around getting the right density at transit nodes. Kate and I worked together on a project just a couple years ago—Kate in the private sector, I in the public—to deliver a new state-of-the-art skyscraper right across the street from Pennsylvania Station.

In Europe you have a strong central government that can come in and work with the private sector to deliver something locally. Here it’s up to the municipalities to figure out how to use those public-private partnerships at the local level to deliver the types of benefits that Edith was talking about.

The two most common laments from impact investing devotees were the enormous difficulty of generating positive impact at the necessary scale, and the related fear that there simply weren’t enough investable projects to absorb the level of capital potentially interested in investing in them.

Look at index after index, and you see SRI funds that consistently outperform their non-responsible counterparts. It's easy to understand why, if you consider companies incorporating sustainable and socially responsible practices are generally also innovative and forward-thinking in other areas -- which tends to lead to better returns.

Cliff Feigenbaum, publisher of Green Money, believes that SRI is gaining wider market acceptance, but still remains niche. As he told me, it's migrated from values-based personal investors to become part of much larger institutional portfolios, but only a minute part of these portfolios. It would appear institutional investors include SRI funds to tick off a box for trustees and shareholders.

Far from being a faddish niche, SRI is now very much part of the investing world, with more than $3 trillion in assets under professional management in the U.S. alone, according to the 2010 Report on Socially Responsible Investing Trends in the United States from U.S. SIF, the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investing. SRI hinges on use of ESG (environmental, social, governance) analysis, shareholder advocacy, and "community investment" strategies.

That $3 trillion in publicly traded securities in the U.S. represents a more than 13 percent increase in assets under management between 2007 and 2010. Over the same period, the broader universe of professionally managed assets grew by less than 1 percent. So, here is the $3-trillion question: Why has the SRI space enjoyed such robust growth, during a period of global economic slowdown?

First, socially conscious investors have benefited from an expansion of quantity and improvement in quality of investment products and services designed to make money and make a difference.

In an article titled "Relevance Achieved" in the fall 2012 issue of Green Money Journal, Amy Domini of Domini Social Investments commends sustainable investors for their successful campaign to pressure corporations into issuing sustainability reports. What was a rare occurrence 30 years ago is now practiced by more than 80 percent of companies, she writes.    As a result, regulators are now more willing to mandate that companies report on issues such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and asset managers are increasingly considering environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) factors in their investment analysis. And academics are reporting more and more examples of outperformance by leading sustainable firms.  "As society sees the full cost of traditional business behavior," Domini concluded, "SRI (socially responsible investing) will be embraced as the single most important lever towards building a better world than the planet has ever seen." 

Contrasting the growth capitalism still dominant today with sustainable capitalism, Joe Keefe of Pax World writes, "The sustainable investment community's role is vital because the fundamental struggle is between a long-term perspective that fully integrates ESG factors into economic and investment decisions and our current paradigm which is increasingly organized around short-term trading gains as the primary driver of capital investment and economic growth regardless of consequences/externalities." 

The CRA was created in 1977 and mandates that banks make credit and capital available to low- and moderate-income communities.

Launched in 1999, the Fund’s CRA Shares are designed specifically for banks looking to receive positive consideration on the investment test portion of their CRA exam. Once a bank makes an investment in the CRA Shares, the Advisor confirms its targeted assessment area(s) and begins seeking CRA-qualified investments in those counties. From a financial standpoint, each bank owns a pro-rata share of the Fund whereby the risks and returns are diversified among all the shareholders. The Fund invests primarily in government-related subsectors of the bond market that support community development such as agency-backed securities and taxable municipal bonds.

The CRA Qualified Investment Fund CRA Shares has provided solid performance throughout its history.

Impact investments are investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the intention to generate measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return.

A rapidly growing supply of capital is seeking placement in impact investments across geographies, sectors, and asset classes, with a wide range of return expectations.

This investment interest is sparking the emergence of a new industry that operates in the largely uncharted area between philanthropy and a singular focus on profit-maximization.

In this new initiative, Ceres and the Tellus Institute will partner on the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR) to seize an urgent opportunity to create a non-commercial, generally accepted sustainability ratings standard that meets the highest standards of technical excellence, independence and transparency.

The last decade has witnessed the rise of sustainability as a defining element of responsible business strategy and performance. In fact, companies like Nike, GE, Unilever, Novo Nordisk, Natura and dozens of others recognize sustainability as integral to their global competitiveness and long-term prosperity.

One need look no further than the BP oil spill, the collapse and taxpayer bailout of the US auto industry, and the Massey Energy mine explosion to understand why financial markets must develop better ways to assess sustainability performance.