SD Certification offers complete home inspection management services.

 SD Certification offers complete home inspection management services.

SD Certification offers complete New Jersey home inspection management services for homeowners, realtors, investors and contractors. We do everything needed to get homes ready for inspection, thereby ensuring a smooth and quick municipal inspection process. We also take care of inspection application, scheduling and are present during inspections. Enjoy peace of mind by leaving the entire process up to our professionals.

Did you have a failed inspection? Just give us a call; we'll review the 'Corrections List' and take all necessary steps to make the property ready for re-inspection.

We do the following inspection management:

• Resale inspections
• Rental CO inspections
• Construction final inspections

Rubberband Company Jumps onto the Bandwagon and Manufacturers Quality Loom Bands

With Loom Bands being the hottest toy for 2013 Holiday season, a USA based rubber bands manufacturer shifted production to producing this colored rubber bands. Crazy Loom Bands is manufactured by the known WT Rubber company. It's CEO has announced this month that since it has entered this lucrative market and is producing these cute mini rubber bands, sales has gone up by 400%.

Loom Bands was originally started by Rainbow Loom, formally known as Twists Bands. It later changed it's name to Loom Bands at about the same time that Crazy Loom Bands got launched.

This year when scratching your head to come up with the perfect holiday gift for your toddler, grandchild, niece or neighbor, this fad has made things simple; Just get them a pack of colored mini rubber bands and watch the glee on their faces. It's the best thing you can get for this price.

Jackets on Sweltering Summer Days Might Soon Be The Norm, If an Indian Inventor Gets His Way.

An Indian inventor is developing clothes which keep the wearer comfortable in extreme temperatures.

Kranthi Kiran Vistakula started with a jacket and is now applying his idea to shoes, scarves and even dinner plates.

The clothes use Peltier light-weight plastic plates with a thermo electric device.

The device is powered by rechargeable batteries which can be topped up by vehicles or even solar panels. They can last up to eight hours on one charge.

Mr Vistakula works with an enthusiastic young team in an isolated building near Hyderabad city, the capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Outside, the summer temperature is more than 40C. But Mr Vistakula looks as comfortable as if he is in a cool climate.

He is wearing a state of the art ClimaWare-jacket based on his own patented technology.

Continue reading the main story

Thermal layers

The jacket works by
 controlling the electric
current into the layers of the
 heat sink (3) and the cooler
(5) which changes the
temperature for the wearer

A Peltier plate consists of a junction between two metals. When an electric current passes through the junction, metal on one side heats up and on the other side it cools down, he explains.

The climate-controlled jacket, which weighs a little more than 1kg, has been successfully tested by the Indian army in Siachen glacier where temperatures are as low as -40C in winter.

Mr Vistakula's company, Dhama Innovations, is now developing a range of other products using the same technology.

"We have also developed shoes and they have been immensely liked by the army personnel in Siachen glacier," he says.

Frostbite is a big problem for the army and the shoes have really helped, he said.

Jacket for cows

Mr Vistakula is now setting up a manufacturing facility near Hyderabad for the mass production of his products, which include jackets, shoes, scarves, gloves and ear muffs.

He is even considering a special jacket for cows.

"Basically when the cow is cooled, it gives more milk in summer," he explained. "So we're working on a jacket like that - a huge one."

Mr Vistakula says he started to develop the idea when he moved from his home city of Hyderabad to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of technology.

The difference in temperature came as a shock to him.

His first attempt weighed about 5kgs and had wires and fans. Everybody joked that he looked like a bomber. Then he started using Peltier plates.

There may also be a medical application for the technology. The team is working on a product called Haemosave which can freeze blood oozing out of a wound.

It is described as a potential life saver. It uses cryo or ice therapy to stop the blood flow and contract the blood vessels.

Other medical products include knee, neck wraps and elbow wraps. These devices can go instantly from 0C to 50C and help in controlling pain.

Article source: BBC

What Motivates Big Companies to Help Small Companies; Are they Altruistic?

One question frequently comes up when The Agenda discusses the recent story about how the employees of Boston Beer Company sometimes spend hours helping small companies tackle the myriad problems of managing and building a business.

The question is this: Don't those employees have enough to do in their own jobs? Shouldn't they be solving Boston Beer's problems?

Companies that borrow money through the Brewing the American Dream program, which Boston Beer runs in partnership with a microlender, Accion, are presented with an extraordinary opportunity.

They often get media exposure, and Boston Beer goes to some length to provide market opportunities, too. Not only does it sometimes become one of its borrowers' biggest customers, it often works with them to develop new products based on its brews. Carlene O'Garro, for example, incorporated Boston Beer's seasonal Harvest Pumpkin Ale in a pumpkin bread.

Most important, though, is the intensive, hands-on mentoring that Boston Beer employees undertake. As we described in the story, one staff member helped Ms. O'Garro, a nascent entrepreneur, figure out how to price her products for Whole Foods by actually going to Whole Foods and studying the competition. Then that employee, Mike Cramer, wrote a spreadsheet to report his findings. "Mike has spent hours with me," Ms. O'Garro said.

So what exactly is in it for Boston Beer, besides good publicity and possibly good karma? The motives of Jim Koch, founder and chief executive, aren't wholly altruistic. As a law and business school student at Harvard in the 1970s, Mr. Koch wrote a paper arguing that companies that are more socially responsible earn higher profits.

"If you're the only person who benefits from your success, you're not going to have very much of it," Mr. Koch said in an interview. "If more people benefit from your success, you're probably going to have more of it."

Plus, he said his employees' often-extensive work with borrowers can have a direct impact on his company as well. "Brewing the American Dream is a way to expose our people to what it's like to be a very small company struggling to survive," he said. "Because that is essentially our situation."

With close to $600 million in sales, Boston Beer is hardly a small business. But its competitors are multinational giants dozens of times larger. "Inside the company, it seems much more stable," he said, "but from the larger picture it's not. We are always on the edge of survival. When you're one percent of the market, dominated by people with global scale, you've got to keep that spirit alive."

All of which raises other interesting questions: At what point is a small business big enough to stop worrying about its own survival? When should it start to give back to its community?

What are your thoughts?

Aticle source: NBC

Some Economist Claim Advertisements have a Bad Effect on the Economy.

It’s impossible to escape advertising. Truck ads on billboards, beer ads on television, pop-up ads for credit cards on the Internet. It’s everywhere. Last year, U.S. companies spent about $144 billion on commercials and other forms of marketing—about 1 percent of the GDP. So what effect do all these ads have on the economy?

Economists have been debating this topic for a century now, and a couple of broad camps have formed. Many argue that ads are ultimately beneficial, giving people more information about products and boosting competition. Others suggest that ads are essentially a psychological ploy, persuading people to buy things they wouldn’t otherwise want or need. And a few economists, notably Arthur Pigou, have argued that there’s too much advertising in the world, with rival companies merely bludgeoning each other to a standstill.

So which view is correct? Over at VoxEU, Ferdinand Rauch of the University of Oxford describes a fascinating natural experiment he studied to shed light on this question. It turns out that many camps are correct. Advertising does appear to make some products cheaper on the whole—presumably because the ads are informative. But for other products like alcohol or restaurants, ads do seem to persuade people to buy more than they otherwise would.

In his recent paper (pdf), Rauch examined Austria, which has eight regions that all once taxed advertising at different rates. Then, in 2000, the central government stepped in to harmonize this tax across the entire country, setting it at a flat 5 percent. That meant the advertising tax went up in some regions and down in others.

This change, Rauch notes, had an immediate and large impact on the amount of advertising in each region. In other words, an ad tax really does discourage ads.

The change in advertising seemed to have a noticeable impact on consumer prices in Austria. In some areas, prices actually went up as the amount of advertising on these products increased. That suggests that the ads were convincing people to buy more of these products than they otherwise would. 

But in other areas, such as food and education, prices went down as more ads appeared. This seems to suggest that ads were giving people better information about products and allowing them to make more discerning choices. (Indeed, Rauch found that the types of ads in industries where prices went down tended to be more informative.) 

Now, obviously in many areas ads are both informative and persuasive, in which case it’s difficult to untangle the effect on prices. But on the whole, Rauch found that advertising tends to lower consumer prices across the board. If Austria’s 5 percent tax on ads were repealed entirely, he estimated, consumer prices would decrease about 0.25 percentage points on average—though it would vary from industry to industry.

This isn’t a totally theoretical argument. Over the years, a few U.S. states have considered taxing ads. The Florida legislature passed such a tax in 1987, though it was repealed six months later after an outcry. In 2006, Pennsylvania mulled a 6 percent sales tax on advertising. And France has occasionally flirted with the idea.

The merits of this idea depend a lot on whether advertising does more harm than good. And, as economist Timothy Taylor sums up, “Advertising may be that rare case where economists are less cynical than the general public.”

Article Source: Washington Post 

Optimistic Report on Economy: Consumer Confidence in November Highest in 4 and a Half Years.

Today readers will be exposed to another one of these boring reports of numbers and percentages on economic improvement. Yet being the optimistic nature of this report; it's worth reading it. The following is today's report from Reuters:

(Reuters) - Consumer confidence rose to a four-and-a-half-year high in November as consumers became more optimistic about the outlook for the economy, according to a private sector report released on Tuesday.

The Conference Board, an industry group, said its index of consumer attitudes rose to 73.7 up from an upwardly revised 73.1 the month before, its highest since February 2008. Economists had expected a reading of 73.0, according to a Reuters poll.

October was originally reported as 72.2.

"Over the past few months, consumers have grown increasingly more upbeat about the current and expected state of the job market, and this turnaround in sentiment is helping to boost confidence," Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said in a statement.

The expectations index rose to 85.1 from 84.0, while the present situation index edged slightly lower to 56.6 from 56.7.

Consumers' labor market assessment was little changed in November. The "jobs hard to get" index was flat at 38.8 percent, while the "jobs plentiful" rose to 11.2 percent from 10.4 percent.

Article source: reuters.com 

Bored of that Song? New App Keeps Music Fans Listening; Songs Always Different.

Since the advent of digital music we’ve seen a number of artists trying to offer something different to their fans. Last year we saw Bluebrain release The National Mall, a location-aware album that aimed to hand control over to the consumer. In a similar way, UK musician Gwilym Gold’s Tender Metal is a downloadable piece that mutates each time the listener plays it.

The album is being released solely for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch to take advantage of software called Bronze, which has been developed by Gold and producer Lexxx. When using the app, the components of the tracks of Tender Metal are seamlessly and subtly reconfigured each time they are played, meaning that each listening experience is different from the last. Users can choose to loop tracks in order to hear it constantly shift, or shake the phone to ‘regenerate’ the piece from its current permutation. The album is available to buy for GBP 8.99 on the App Store.

The innovation allows for endless reinterpretations of the music without it being performed live, ultimately offering a more immersible experience for fans. How else could musicians set themselves apart in the market?

Article source: springwise.com