Are you an enterpreneur with a green idea? "The Good Entrepreneur" is a new TV series that will be screen on CNBC later this year. It's a new business competition that's backed by business and financial news channel CNBC. Also backing the competition are Allianz a global financial services provider. The aim of "The Good Entrepreneur" is to find the entrepreneur with the best sustainable, responsible and innovative eco-business concept.

Budding entrepreneurs across Europe with a green idea or business plan for a product or service are encouraged to enter online at www.thegoodentrepreneur.com.

The winner of ‘The Good Entrepreneur’ will receive a prize package worth more than £220,000 which includes financial support, advertising on CNBC and business support from Allianz. The competition closes on 31 July, with three finalists named in August and ‘The Good Entrepreneur 2009’ winner announced in November.

Support for entrants on the website will be offered by star business names including Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com; Stelios Haji-Ioannou, chairman of easyGroup and Nandan Nilekani, co-Chairman and co-Founder Infosys. Top business leaders from Allianz, General Electric International, LinkedIn and Microsoft International, alongside a leading professor from University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, will choose three finalists and select the winner.

The TV series will track the progress of the finalists as they receive mentoring and advice from leading entrepreneurs. The series, which will culminate in one of the finalists being announced as the winner, will be broadcast across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia on CNBC in the autumn.

The Good Entrepreneur website will engage leading business schools, business leaders and entrepreneurial organisations to create a new on-line community that helps entrepreneurs take great ‘green’ ideas and transform them into solid, responsible business plans.

Quote source : Yahoo! Finance

Rising gas prices are inspiring drivers to find new ways of protecting themselves against future increases--including buying gas in advance and investing in stocks that tend to rise along with the price of gasoline.

At MyGallons.com, the company makes those investments itself. Founder Steve Verona says that the company protects itself against future gas price increases through taking positions in the stock market. That way, customers can enjoy the simplicity of purchasing and redeeming gallons for an established amount and avoid experiencing market fluctuations themselves. Verona says the company doesn't plan to make money on gas, but rather from the annual membership fee (about $30), the interest float on the money that is paid before the gas is redeemed, and advertising on its website.

It looks tempting on the surface, what with fuel prices hitting an all time high everyday. People want relief and want it quickly. However what bothers me is the very volatility of the stock market itself. Obviously this is a question that comes to mind sooner of later and here's what they say :

Of course, gas prices could come down, which could turn any of these investment ideas into losing propositions. As with all investments consumers need to be prepared to stomach volatility.

But what if prices are currently at their peak and don't go up again? They say that's unlikely. "Very few analysts expect prices to come down...because current demand is increasing, while supply has stayed steady. We're talking years, if not decades, before [proposed] solutions have any impact. In the interim, prices should continue to rise," Verona says. He adds that if customers opt to drop out of the program, they can get a refund for their purchased gallons.

Now if rising fuel prices hasn't already given you a scare, that last statement should. At the time of writing this post, oil prices have reached an all-time high of $144.00++. At the rate that it is increasing, it's more than likely we'll see it touch $200 by the end of 2008.

When (optimistically, I should say "IF") that happens, I'd say MyGallons.com is going to be a very popular website indeed and we'll see many similar services being set up in the near future.

For more answers to your questions about how this system works, visit MyGallons' FAQ page.

Quotes from :
Google Adsense Blog
Image from :
Business Week

Google Adsense announce that they will be retiring their Referrals program by the end of August :

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

In asking publishers to remove the Referrals code from their websites, Adsense has also suggested the following monetization programs :

• Google Affiliate Network : As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
• AdSense for content ads : If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.

So if you have Adsense Referrals ads running on your website, best to make yourself a cup of coffee and get down to removing the code. Some of you will need to make yourself a pot of coffee if your site(s) are large.

I think it's about time the Referrals program was laid to rest. Google's implementation of the program wasn't very good. I was very hopeful during my first couple of months with the Referrals programs - getting regular clicks and earnings - but that soon deteriorated to downright irritation. For those of you who have been publishing Adsense' Referral Ads, you will know what I mean :

• If the ad that you chose is not available, there would be a big white empty space in your webpage.
• The solution to the problem above is to select the "Automatically choose fallback referral ads" option. However, this would likely result if lots of non-relevant ads showing up instead.
• The last I checked, there was still no way for publishers to create a list of preferred advertisers that Google would refer to when displaying Referrals ads. This meant that every time you wanted to select a new advertiser, you would have to go through the whole set up process which to me seemed like a total waste of time.
• Google's Referral categorization was downright pathetic. You would see "Exercise equipment" ads in "Business services" and other totally mismatched advertisers and categories, which made it a real pain trying to find on-target advertisers

In any case, one thing I like about Google is that they're not afraid to lay non-performing programs to rest. With Google's purchase of Doubleclick, I'm sure they have lots of plans in store so as publishers, we shouldn't really worry too much.