Business News in the Lehigh Valley, 1/15/13

Good morning, and happy Tuesday Lehigh Valley. We're halfway through January already, if you can believe that!

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett announced on January 11 his plan to award the state's $3.5 billion lottery will be awarded to a private company, Camelot Global Services PA, LLC. This is not a binding contract, but will allow for the disclosure of procurement details during the Finance Committee Hearing. State Revenue Secretary Dan Meuser supported the Governor's plan to privatize the lottery, with the goal of increasing profits from the system.

The House will vote on Hurricane Sandy disaster aid in the next few days, as the multi-billion dollar plan will be put in front of lawmakers this morning. New Jersey and New York lawmakers have been especially adamant in regards to making sure the $51 billion package passed the House.

President Obama recently announced that his administration would unveil a "sensible, common sense" proposal to gun violence this week. The plan would include improved background checks, limits on the sale of high-capacity magazines and a meaningful assault weapons ban.

NJ State Senator Michael Dougherty drafted legislation that would redirect revenue generated from red light cameras tickets into New Jersey's Highway Safety Fund. The potential "hundreds of thousands" in revenue is now directed toward municipal budgets, not for driver safety.




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Business News in the Lehigh Valley, 1/3/13

Good morning Lehigh Valley. On this day in 1959, President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state.

A New York City based brewing company, Ruckus Brewing, has won the right to try to convert the run-down Neuweiler Brewing Company in east Allentown into a multipurpose development. Roughly half of the property would be used to brew the company's different beers and would also house a brewpub, and the other half would be re-purposed into various retail and commercial uses.

On Wednesday, Bethlehem City Council unanimously voted in favor of the amusement tax, which would put a 5% tax on event tickets (concerts, sports, etc.) valued at $10 or more, and the tax would have a cap at $1.50/ticket. The money from the tax will go towards the funding of police and emergency services at such events. The tax will not affect events with fewer than 200 people, or tickets for movies or high school sporting events.

Governor Tom Corbett announced Wednesday that the state of Pennsylvania would sue the NCAA for strict sanctions placed against Penn State University in the wake of the Sandusky scandal. Gov. Corbett alleges that NCAA was "overreaching and unlawful" in their punishment against the University. He also went on to say that the sanctions imposed mostly punish the local businesses and citizens of Pennsylvania.

 New Jersey Governor Christie criticized House Speaker Boehner on Wednesday for refusing to allow a vote on Hurricane Sandy relief to the Northeast. It has been 66 days since the hurricane hit the states, and the delay in congress is much longer than following other natural disasters. Within hours of the speech, Boehner and Republican House leadership announced there would be a vote for an initial round of this week, followed by a vote on the remaining amount on January 15.









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Sandy's Power in Photos

Yesterday, two PSE&G workers came around to survey the damage remaining. They said that the devastation they're seeing in our area is "amazing", and they had no idea when the repair crews would get to our relatively small outage (13 houses, about a third of the block). And they don't have power at their homes, either.

My trip to Vancouver was washed out and I hope to reschedule. The rest of the Unglue.it team is based elsewhere and has been mostly making do without me.

Here are some photos I took in Montclair, New Jersey, on Tuesday, the day after Sandy.

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Business News in Lehigh Valley, 11/2/12

Good morning and happy Friday, Lehigh Valley. There are only 4 days left until the 2012 election.

U.S. employers added 171,000 jobs during the month of October, and the jobless rate inched up to 7.9% from 7.8% last month. Since July, the economy has created an average of 173,000 jobs a month, up from 67,000 a month from April through June.

Several retail stores and malls reopened in Lehigh Valley yesterday, welcoming swarms of shoppers stricken with cabin fever and ready to spend their money. After a few days without power, it's no surprise that the malls saw a larger than average crowd of people. Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem posted a record earning quarter, bringing in $24.3 million in revenue this past quarter, shattering the previous record of $18.2 million.

First Friday festivities in Bethlehem will be postponed until the second Friday, 11/9, when more of the downtown shops will be back up and running.



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Daily Briefing, 11/1/12

Good morning and happy Thursday. Today is the first day of November, and we hope everyone had a nice Halloween yesterday. The 2012 election is just 5 days away.

Lehigh Valley and the rest of the region began the long process yesterday of getting back to normal following the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Many thousands of residents of the area are still without power, and a spokesman for PPL stated that power may not be fully restored until Saturday afternoon, although they expect most power to be restored by Friday night. PPL has more than 4,300 people involved in the restoration effort.

The New York Stock Exchange reopened on generator power after the first weather related two-day closure since a blizzard back in 1888. President Obama visited devastated towns of New Jersey yesterday with Gov. Christie, putting aside party differences to assess damages and begin to rebuild.
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Library Connections to Open Access eBooks

Power refugees at Montclair Public Library

Hurricane Sandy came through the other night and took away power for 90% of my New Jersey town. The one thing we miss, the one thing we ache for, is the connectedness we get from our devices. We're fine as long as we can keep our cell phones charged.

During my month-long tour telling people about Unglue.it, I've been challenging librarians to start thinking of themselves as connectors, not collectors. In an era of information abundance, library systems and processes that focus on managing an inventory of scarce resources are becoming less useful. The ability to connect a library user to the right information is becoming correspondingly more important.

Here's a crime scene we need to eradicate. A student comes into the library with a device, and asks for Moby Dick. It's been assigned reading, so all the print copies are checked out. Does the library have it as an ebook? Too often, there's no Moby Dick ebook listed in the library's catalog. The library depends on a commercial service to serve ebooks to its users, but the annotated ebook of Moby Dick that the library has licensed is checked-out. "Sorry, we don't have it" the student is told.

This should NEVER happen. Melville's Moby Dick: or The Whale belongs to all of us. Project Gutenberg has an excellent version, in formats that work on just about any device. But because it's free, no one has a monetary incentive to make that connection.

The barriers that libraries have put in place that prevent them from making use of open-access ebooks are mostly not intentional, but it will take some work to make them go away; it's something I've been working on since  the September release of the unglued edition of Oral Literature in Africa. I've been talking to the library automation and ebook platform vendors, who I know from my years in the library technology business. Without exception, the people I've talked to are enthusiastic about supporting unglued and other open-access ebooks, but there are lots of barriers. Their systems have been hard-wired to assume that library ebooks will always have digital rights management, or can only be used one user at a time. These restrictions are incompatible with the Creative Commons license we're using for unglued ebooks.

There's not much awareness of the no-DRM provisions of Creative Commons licenses, but it's there, in section 4(a):

When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. 

This clause also serves as a barrier to commercial use by people other than the rights holder, even for the licenses that allow commercial use. For example, the Kindle store automatically applies DRM, so unless you have permission from the rights holder, you can't sell someone else's Creative Commons licensed ebook in the Kindle store.

It will take some time and a lot of work, but eventually the library barriers to Open Access ebooks will fall. But until then libraries need to ask their vendors to give these changes a high priority. Libraries that are investigating new systems for ebook distribution need to add requirements in their RFPs for serving open access ebooks along side print and pretend-its-print books.

Hurricane Roll - by Tony

There are also barriers barriers preventing libraries from using these resources that are created by libraries themselves. Libraries have many processes and workflows surrounding resource acquisition, circulation, and evaluation that overlook the opportunity to serve users with free resources. While academic libraries have been thinking about ways to support open-access academic journals for years now, books are different. Book acquisition is often funded through approval plans and selection committees that don't consider the availability of free resources, no matter their quality. And if a library measures its performance using circulation numbers which don't include connections to free resources, then how often will then resources be supported?

Connections can occur in many ways. Today, I'm connected my laptop power at the library along with more than 254 other refugees deprived of power and internet by Sandy. I know it's more than 254 because my laptop couldn't get an IP address on the WiFi. So I went to the sushi bar/cafe down the street, connected to the wifi, and ordered a "Hurricane Roll". And clicked "publish".


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Don't Take Hurricane Sandy Lightly!

Good morning. As we're sure you are well aware, Hurricane Sandy is due to hit the region within a few hours and we thought it would be helpful to compile a list to help make sure you're fully prepared. Google has created a crisis map to track Hurricane Sandy as it makes landfall in the Mid-Atlantic region.

There's a good chance that many in the Lehigh Valley footprint could lose power, so hopefully you already stocked up on the essential non-perishables to get you through a few days. As far as last minute preparations, here's a video on last minute information you should know from Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate. If you don't absolutely need to be outside, don't go outside. If an area looks flooded, stay away from it. This will be a very slow-moving storm that could affect up to 50 million people.

Please keep in mind that the utility companies have done everything they can to prepare for this storm. Follow @PPLElectric on twitter for outage information if you're on twitter, they have a great response team and work hard to ensure the public is informed.

Most importantly, please err on the side of caution. Your safety is the number one priority. We hope that it doesn't affect the Lehigh Valley like the news outlets are saying it's going to, but it's just better to be prepared and use your head. Be safe, Lehigh Valley!



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