Instead of scrapping the design altogether, Ford has been thinking up ways to bring it back to the market. The new Ford Explorer won’t exactly measure up to fuel-efficient minivan standards, but it will become the most fuel efficient vehicle in its segment at 28mpg for highway driving.

Although Ford doesn’t expect the once-Goliath to reach its former glory in sales, the company has done research that suggests that a more fuel efficient version of the Explorer has a niche market. This is despite the fact that many former Explorer owners have been forced to realize that they don’t really need a four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicle (SUV) that seats eight.

The bold move might have been spurred by the fact that the Ford Explorer was once the top selling SUV for 10 consecutive years. Sales peaked even at almost 450,000 units in 1998. However, only 52,190 were sold in 2009.

In any case, the overhauled version will be a 2011 model. The Ford Motor Company is not releasing much more information on its specifications apart from the expected fuel consumption already mentioned.

Ford may be banking on sentimentality for the familiar Explorer name, but they should also consider all of the bad memories of those who owned the gas guzzling SUV when its resale value took a dive.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Clean Energy.

The UKIIF was announced by Brown last June and will target slow growing businesses, start-ups and spin-outs including those in the pre-profit and pre-revenue stages of development.

It was announced last month that a total of £125m from the UKIIF will be invested in clean tech and low carbon sectors.

The UKIIF has now completed first closing on the first £200m UK Future Technologies Fund with fund managers the European Investment Fund (EIF), who have in turn raised £100m.

Gordon Brown said: “This fund, seeded by the Government, is bringing private venture capital to growing enterprises. It is already providing £125 million of funding to high tech, low carbon businesses. From today, a further £200 million will be available for life sciences, digital and advanced manufacturing.”

I personally believe the leveraging of the UK government’s funds and expertise coupled with the European Investment Fund’s experience in the EU venture capital market will help the next generation of high growth, high-tech businesses.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about overseas markets

Donors have already contributed more than $150 million to major U.S. relief groups for the catastrophe in Haiti. By comparison, such charities had only raised around 25 percent of that amount – $30 million – in the week following the 2004 Asian tsunamis, and $108 million in the week following Hurricane Katrina.

Many groups are raising large sums of money on the Web and through text messages. To date, the American Red Cross has received over $12 million through its campaign to encourage $10 gifts through texts. That’s a record for the group in terms of text messages; by contrast, it raised only $200,000 from texts after the 2008 hurricane season. Overall, the Red Cross has raised nearly $90 million to date.

But, due to the immense devastation caused by the earthquake, many nonprofit leaders fear the response will not be enough.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Gail McGovern, chief executive of the American Red Cross, said that while the current focus is on immediate needs, the organization expects that relief will be needed in Haiti for many years.

“Make no mistake,” she said. “This is going to be a massive long-term recovery.” McGovern said she would go to Haiti this week to work directly on the relief effort.

I am personally grateful for how generous Americans have been to the Haitian cause so far, especially given the economic stresses so many of us face because of the economic downturn. The aid pipeline is beginning to open up, and the Red Cross will be distributing large amounts of desperately needed food and other supplies beginning this week.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about philanthropy

Inspired by Cisco CEO John Chambers and to support this effort, Donahoe has been personally visiting many of eBay’s strongest sellers, interviewing them using little more than a Flip video camera and his own questions. He has called the process “eye-opening,” saying “it’s incredible how they make a business out of nothing, really. They find inefficiencies in the supply chain and are able to create businesses around them.”

The kind of business 101 that you wouldn’t expect a successful CEO to need, but this feedback has taught him how to make improvements in the eBay operation. Insights that he has gladly shared with his own employees. While he might not be the first corporate decision maker to undertake this kind of first person fieldwork, it’s still stands as a powerful example of what getting back to your roots can bring to your company at any stage.

[image via Aaron Escobar]

Regardless, of the how the foundation moves forward, the potential benefits for Microsoft are numerous, given that many of the early projects will likely focus on the their product ecosystem, despite claims that the foundation will be platform agnostic. Ultimately, the possibility of delivering a better product to consumers was perhaps too good to pass up, in spite of the financial outlay. Think of it as money invested in R&D with greater leverage. Depending on the spin, this announcement can also go far in bolstering Microsoft’s standing in the eyes of the general public as well, the very same people that could be buying their software down the road.

Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server, explained the decision on his blog:

“The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft’s open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab’ on campus – now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source – development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities – and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.”

[image via schoschie]

Instead, doctors Jan Medlock and Alison Galvani argue that “it would be better to concentrate on vaccinating those most likely to spread the virus—both schoolchildren and people between the ages of 30 and 40, who are likely to be the parents of those children, and who are, at the moment, at the bottom of the vaccination priority list.”

I found the model on which they based the research to be of particular interest. While conventional thinking would have approached the study from a micro-physiological perspective, these doctors chose to examine it from the standpoint of economic impact. They used the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and the less deadly 1957 flu as case studies to ascertain what “adjusted” death tolls would have been if vaccination standards were different.

With the H1N1 virus purportedly making a comeback in the Fall, we will see how much credence the Center For Disease Control will give to this study. Coincidentally, “the new advice agrees more closely with the recommendations of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices about the best approach to the epidemic of N1H1 swine flu that is now circulating.” Regardless of the official vaccination protocol, experts agree this flu season could be a particularly serious one.

[image via jothenomad]

As noted on Market Watch, Housing 21 saw the move as an opportunity to leverage Claimar’s capabilities and bring the caregiving aspect in-house: “Pushpa Raguvaran, deputy chief executive and commercial director at Housing 21, said the group had already been looking to grow and build economies of scale when Claimar’s advisers raised the idea of a deal in May.”

Obviously, the biggest challenge going forward will be how well the non-profit integrates the company into their pre-existing strategy and finds ways to streamline a model that clearly wasn’t successful in the for-profit world. While I don’t expect this buyout to start a trend within the charitable world, it does set an interesting precedent for other successful organizations ponder in the future, particularly given the extremely unpredictable nature of the marketplace. As in this case, sometimes the price (balanced by risk of course) is too good to pass up.

[image via Diego Cupolo]

Having an identifiable and vocal face of a company has been a very successful strategy for many companies – Richard Branson of Virgin and Jeff Bezos of Amazon readily come to mind – but it becomes problematic when the opinions of a business leader fail to match up with the perceived message and values of their companies and/or brands, as noted above. Now imagine that situation amplified throughout the entire culture of a company. Social media is doing just that.

As this shift towards openness takes place on both an individual and organizational level, aided by the emergence of social technologies, the feedback loop is getting shorter and shorter. This can be a boon to corporations looking to connect with consumers in an effort to build meaningful relationships and communities around their brands, but it can also backfire. While there’s little doubt that social tools are an effective means of communicating to and reaching out to customers, how much sharing is too much? After all, bad press arguably travels faster than the positive kind, particularly in a culture of almost real time.

While it’s easy to place the onus on our employees and consumers to know the difference between business and personal, these lines are blurring more and more every day so we need to be extremely mindful of how we approach these interactions. There may be no single answer that is applicable for all situations, but leading by example is good place to start.

[image via markus941]

As Fast Company reports, the industry will “most probably see Office productivity apps being included on cellphones made by Nokia, which is the world’s largest maker of cellphones, albeit not necessarily the world’s hottest-selling smartphone maker.” RIM currently holds that distinction.

Microsoft plans to implement its new Mobile Office software in new Nokia smartphones, a move reminiscent of the particulars within the fine print of the Yahoo! agreement. Under that contract, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine would power all Yahoo searches, in exchange for Yahoo! keeping 88% of the ad revenue generated on those searches.

This announcement sheds further light on Microsoft’s new strategy in the technology market. Rather than trying to compete head-to-head with the leader in each specific technology sector, the company is attempting to leverage its software within the framework of already established brands. Arguably a blueprint for survival, given Microsoft’s well publicized losses during the recession.

The partnership could also be viewed as a preemptive strike on Google’s expansion into new sectors. According to the Financial Times, “Google’s Android operating system for smartphones is gaining ground, and giving the US technology company the chance to put its web-based software on handsets.” This would loom large on Microsoft’s bottom line.

RIM’s success in the smartphone market has been “partly because the Canadian handset maker’s Blackberry devices have user-friendly e-mail.” But with Microsoft’s Mobile Office platform, Nokia phones – which now operate with Symbian operating systems – will be able to perform word processing and spreadsheet functions. This fact alone should make the combination an appealing option within corporate space.

Smartphones are the fastest growing section of the mobile phone market, and have proved to be resilient in the face of economic trouble. In fact, smartphones are “the one part of the mobile phone market that continues to grow in the recession. Mobile phone sales fell 6.1 per cent in the three months to June 30, to 286.1m units, according to figures released on Wednesday by Gartner, the research firm. But smartphone sales increased 27 per cent to 41m units.”

Only time will tell how Microsoft’s new partnering strategy works to combat Google’s rapid rise to the top of the technology heap, but it’s not unlikely that there will be more partnerships in the future. It will be interesting to see if these recent developments impact Google’s long term plans or if the juggernaut will simply stay on course.

[image via Tjeerd]

The short answer is yes. Bloomberg reports that with the existing infrastructure, most cities wouldn’t be able to tap into these alternative sources. This problem is a function of distance – much of the power would be generated in remote locations – and capacity – the current grid isn’t built to handle the increased load which could lead to frequent blackouts.

The country’s electrical network is a patchwork of 211,000 miles of of high-voltage power lines, connecting substations and transformers owned by utilities and federal agencies. Under the current stimulus, $6 billion has been allocated to expand and upgrade the transmission system over the next two years, a figure that represents only 5 percent of the $130 billion that the US Energy Department, among others, say is needed. “By contrast, China is spending 23 percent of its 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) in stimulus to make its grid ready for alternative sources.”

So why is the government continuing to fund alternative energy projects – recent loan guarantees from the Dept. of Energy show “as much as $30 billion for renewable projects, compared with $750 million to increase the reliability of the nation’s power network” - without the infrastructure to back it up?

Part of the reason, is that the government is hoping that private utilities and transmission developers will step up to the plate to complement their investment, but even if they do, we shouldn’t fall under the illusion that they’d contribute out of any sense of national pride. In fact, their willingness or lack thereof, will fall primarily on the backs of consumers.

Under the current plan, the Obama administration “targets 25 percent renewables by 2025, more than five times the current amount, excluding hydroelectric, the Energy Department says. That would add about 272,000 megawatts to the grid’s capacity of 830,000, further straining a transmission system largely built more than five decades ago.”

While I applaud this bold strategy, without seeing significant improvements to the energy grid first, this strikes me as a perfect example of putting the cart before the horse.