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Showcasing Music Artist like the Steve Miller Band, Katy Perry, Al Green, Korn, Elvis Costello, the Roots, Los Lobos, and Snoop Dogg The Beale Street Music Festival is just one part of the month-long international festival of the arts known as Memphis in May.

Once as rooted in the Scottish soil as this city’s famous castle, the Royal Bank of Scotland ventured far during the era of globalization — pumping billions of dollars worth of credit overseas as it expanded into markets as diverse as Kazakhstan, China and Rhode Island.

The floodlit cream shells of the famed Opera House dimmed Saturday as Sydney became the world’s first major city to plunge itself into darkness for the second worldwide Earth Hour, a global campaign to highlight the threat of climate change.

The news media’s online shift has begun to claim the print editions of some fairly large players like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. If print media is to survive at all, it needs a new business model. Perhaps large dailies like the New York Times should consider weekly publication, writes E-Commerce Times [...]

Dear FileFront User: We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to [...]

Thelasko writes “In an effort to knock Buster’s socks off, the Mythbusters accidentally created an explosion so large it shattered windows in a small town over a mile from the blast site. The Mythbusters had the broken windows replaced the very same day. The Esparto, California fire chief says that several firefighters were on hand [...]

Biz Stone, Co-Founder

A roundup of media stories on the news today that Twitter will offer paid premium accounts to businesses.

From SF Business Times

Twitter founder Biz Stone said that the company has hired a product manager to develop accounts for businesses that would have more features but would cost a fee to use, the Wall Street Journal [...]

iPhone is no stranger to competition. Just like its Mac cousins, it’s constantly in a market share race against a wide-open field of contenders, and it knows its way around a courtroom, where Apple’s lawyers have a habit of schooling the opposition. However, it might be games of a more casual nature that will really [...]

Project Hope near Duck Hill, Mississippi desperately needs contributions. An article this week in the Grenada Daily Star profiles their work in rescuing abused, abandoned, and disabled animals in Mississippi.

The sanctuary is in need of community support in order to stay open, according to Stanley. We are facing an animal crisis in this area. The [...]

American workers — whose taxes pay for massive government health programs — are getting squeezed like no other group by private health insurance premiums that are rising much faster than their wages.

ThinSkin writes “Imagine playing bleeding-edge games, yet never again upgrading your hardware. That’s the ambitious goal of OnLive’s Internet delivered gaming service. Using cloud computing, OnLive’s goal is to ‘make all modern games playable on any system,’ thanks in large part to OnLive’s remote servers that do all the heavy lifting. With a fast enough [...]

Thanks to the nation’s lowest jobless rate among large cities, Oklahoma City’s office market has not headed down the all-too-familiar slippery slope of rising vacancies and lower rents that many other metro areas have experienced over the past year. Not yet, anyway.

Vacancy in downtown Oklahoma City’s Class-A office submarket, the city’s largest, registered 9.6% at [...]

The popular Twitter tool HootSuite has been down most of the afternoon. They are updating restoration status via their Twitter account.

JIM CONRAD’S NATURALIST NEWSLETTERWritten and issued from the woods near Natchez,Mississippi, USA

March 23, 2009

*****

SAVANNAH SPARROW APPROACHABLENESSAt St. Catharine National Wildlife Refuge just southof Natchez this week I was way out on a levee barelyrising above vast, silvery-surfaced, flooded fields onboth sides of me. I was the most conspicuous featureon the landscape for miles around, so [...]

The Obama administration is hoping it has finally come up with the right formula to resolve the nation’s worst banking crisis in 70 years.

Lifesavers President Jill Starr says she and other shelter operators are witnessing an equine crisis.“People have lost their homes, their jobs, their hope,” she said. “And they are giving up their animals.”

The same week that Cisco Systems rolled out its ambitious Unified Computing System data center initiative, a startup is coming out with its own integrated network infrastructure designed to address the complexity, cost and scaling issues within data centers as the demand for online services and cloud computing grows.

InteliCloud is prepping its InteliCloud 360 offering [...]

When Ben Schreiner, a 62-year-old retired Bank of America executive, found out last year he would need surgery for a double hernia, he started evaluating possible doctors and hospitals. But he didn’t look into the medical center in his hometown, Camden, South Carolina, or the bigger hospitals in nearby Columbia. Instead, his search led him [...]

Popular online sites such as Facebook and Twitter have created huge followings, prodding companies to harness social networks for business uses.

Social networks let users share updates on their activities in online settings. This goes beyond instant messaging and other features of in-house corporate computer networks. Users can easily access related materials in these shared spaces, [...]

After announcing it would lay off 18 employees earlier this month, The Commercial Appeal has laid off a group of long-time staffers including Jimmie Covington, the paper’s most senior reporter; copy editor Mark Watson, who was also president of The TriCouncil which represents union employees at the paper; Bill Day, editorial cartoonist; and reporters Jim [...]

Super-strong artificial muscles, telephony iPods, and a Twitter that makes money? The future looks brighter–especially if you listen to President Obama’s plans, as he laid them out for Jay Leno on Thursday. And with Gmail’s new “Undo” feature, even the past got a facelift this week.

U.S. regulators seized control on Friday of U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, a huge wholesale credit union with $34 billion in assets that provides services to nearly every other credit union.The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) also took control of Western Corporate (WesCorp) Federal Credit Union with $23 billion in assets.

The regulator said both institutions [...]

After Josh Crandall lost his job, a friend helped him turn a Web site called The Clever Commute into a business. It now has up to 5,500 participants.

From 1968 to 1975 in Lubbock, Texas, C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield ran a barbecue joint and roadhouse that was the late-night gathering place for a group of local musicians who were below-the-radar and rising: Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall.

“I’ll never forget when Linda [...]

Just in time to take on the Palm Pre and whatever new iPhone model Apple dreams up this summer, word is the latest must-have BlackBerry smartphone will hit in May.

The long-rumored BlackBerry Niagara doesn’t have an exact release data or pricing model, but The Street this week quoted analysts who said the Niagara will [...]

Music startups sure don’t seem to have it easy these days. Lawsuit after lawsuit is raining down on some of them, and legal threats, fierce competition but evidently also the economic downturn and the decline in digital advertising spending is forcing some companies to shut down altogether. The latest company to suffer that fate is [...]

Americans fear home prices will drop more sharply in the coming year, despite government efforts to resuscitate the battered real estate sector, according to a poll released on Friday.

U.S. homeowners surveyed by Reuters and University of Michigan predicted their home values would fall by 2.2 percent in the year ahead, the biggest anticipated decline in [...]

The pulse of commercial real estate is barely detectable, but the fact that it’s still registering a beat is remarkable considering the trauma it’s suffered over the past year.