It helps to have “a friend in the business.” When I’m selecting tech tools, that friend is
Doug Dixon, a colleague of mine at U.S. 1 Newspaper (we’re both freelancers now). He writes an annual December “Tech Toys” issue, and I depend on this easy-going fellow, to an embarrassing degree, for advice on which tech toy to buy which favorite uncle.  An ex-Sarnoff guy turned independent technology consultant, Dixon wrote four books and runs a blog at www.manifest-tech.com, “for people who are interested in using the cool technology but need help figuring it out.”

Speaking at the Princeton Regional Chamber breakfast on Wednesday, November 16, at 7:30 a.m. at the Nassau Club, he’ll answer questions like — can one smartphone do it all, or do you still need a camera, media player, and e-Reader. And can a tablet really replace a laptop for serious use?

I’ve seen him do his show-and-tell demo of all the latest goodies, and it’s an eye-opener. Plus you get to ask your questions. Like having “a friend in the business.”

Another “friend in the business” who has been very helpful to me is Eileen Sinett. Sinett is giving a breakfast workshop on Tuesday, November 15, at the Wyndham. Having taken workshops with her, I can vouch for how she “helps you help yourself” to be a better public speaker. “Memorable speakers connect with their material, with their listeners, and with their inner selves,” says Sinett. The $149 registration fee includes a copy of her excellent new book, Speaking That Connects.

While trying to find the online version of a particular book, edited by someone I knew, I happened upon a potentially useful resource for e-Patients — the free 24-hour trials available at Elsevier. (Does every medical publisher offer this?)

If you buy the $400 book at Elsevier, you get the online resource, Expert Consult, for free. An e-Patient could use this access to find doctors who are publishing in her specialty, or to discern the latest discoveries. Would she spend $400? No. But she could email Expert Consult to get the 24-hour free pass to those pages. One day is enough to find what she needs — and the online version even has clickable links to the footnotes.

It’s better than an index search of the print version, because you can search on phrases.

I tried it. I asked for access to the fourth edition of Fetal and Neonatal Physiology, by Polin, Fox, and Abman and got it, no questions asked.

When I asked my own questions, the customer service rep said that access is generally granted for whatever books you asked for, as long as you are not trying to get the whole catalog.

Other cool things Elsevier is doing — it has an iPad app for anatomy students in dissection labs, Elsevier has offices in St. Louis and used to have a couple of locations in the Princeton area, but it has decamped to Philadelphia.

Tips on common basement flooding causes and how to fix them 
Guest post by A&E; Construction

Checking Your Basement’s Flooding Capacity

Most basement flooding problems are simply drainage problems on the outside of your house. Therefore, the first step is to start on the outside by examining the exterior perimeter. Check that you have a good slope in place to direct water away from the foundation walls.

Also check your gutters to make sure that they are not clogged and that downspouts are directed away from the house so that discharged water will flow away, rather than towards your home.

After observing the perimeter of your house, if you happen to note any ground depressions or water puddling near the foundation, there are 3 basic steps that you can take to correct this.

How to Correct the Inflow of Water towards your House:

1. Rake back any mulch and then add new top soil that is tamped and sloped away from your house.

2. Install 3” of landscape plastic around the perimeter of your home. Following this, rake back mulch or stone to reduce erosion (this will also add nice curb appeal to the look of your home).

3. Another tip that will reduce drainage issues is connecting your down spouts with underground pipes to lower areas away from the foundation.

Preventing Flooding: A Guide to Sump Pump Installation

If water still accumulates in your basement after you’ve addressed drainage problems, sump pumps will need to be included in your drainage strategy.

What to be Aware of Before Installing:

In order for your sump pump to work well, there must be good communication under and around the basement concrete slab. Most houses today are currently built with the sump pit installed before the basement concrete slab is poured so that the crushed stone and perimeter pipe tie into the sump pit.

Older homes often have sump pump problems because their basements do not include either open or closed perimeter drains (sometime referred to as “French Drains”).

An open French drain is simply a slot of concrete cutout to the subsoil level around the outside of the basement that routes water to the sump pit for pumping to the outside of the house.

A closed French drain is designed the same way but may include drilling of the lower wall block to relieve water pressure. Closed French drains are also effective because they contain corrugated plastic that captures and directs water into the trough slot. Another non-drainage benefit of the closed French drain system is that it contains possible radon gas.

A basement without the French drain system is prone to poor drainage under the concrete slab. The concrete slabs in older basements generally lack good communication to the sump pit because they are poured directly on top of subsoil.

Setting Up your Sump Pump System:

If you have good drainage to the sump pit, we have a few steps to guide you in setting up your system. For an emergency backup system to be effective, it requires a consistent setup.

We recommend 2 submersible pumps, set at 2 levels with 2 separate discharge pipes and on 2 separate electrical circuits. Setting up your system like this can protect your basement from the many pitfalls that result in sump pump failure.

How this Works:

Installing 2 sumps at different levels protects your house against single pump failure and doubles the pumping capacity if flooding should occur.

Putting 2 separate discharge pipes in protects against possible line blockage from snow, ice or leaves. These pipes will also increase the water discharge volume by reducing back pressure in the case that flooding occurs and both pumps are running.

Plugging each pump into a separate electrical circuit protects your home against electrical failure. If your pump should fail, you run the risk that it will likely trip the circuit breaker. Should this happen when your pumps are connected into just one circuit, you will lose both pumps.

Purchasing a portable electric generator and several long extension cords are key to being able to run your pumps and refrigerator during a power outage. A portable generator is often a better idea than a battery backup system because most battery backup systems don’t have the same longevity or amperage required to pump water for a significant amount of time.

Once you install your sump pump, a final recommendation is contacting your homeowner’s insurance company and having them add “Backup of Sewer & Drains Rider” to your policy (costs approximately $50-$75 more each year). This added insurance covers your house in the event that electrical power goes out and/or your sump pump fails due to some mechanical failure.

Rita McGrath offers a free webinar on Wednesday, September 28, at noon on Learning to Live with Complexity. Princeton Regional Chamber members met McGrath, when she spoke at a lunch in October. 
McGrath, a Columbia Business School professor who lives in West Windsor, most recently co-wrote, with Ian Macmillan,  “Discovery Driven Growth: a breakthrough process to reduce risk and seize opportunity.”  


note added at 11:45 Click here to try to sign up for the webinar  Apparently the link I has posted expired.


“Business has always been unpredictable and surprising, and the systems in business have always been complex,” suggests the press release. “But due to the IT revolution, complexity affects everything–products, supply chains, organizations. This makes managers’ jobs far more difficult. It is harder to make sense of what is going on, make predictions about the future, and place bets.”


In a recent HBR article, McGrath suggests four fundamental changes. One (hold your breath, all you gurus who use fancy algorithms to make predictions) is to mitigate your risk by reducing the need for accurate predictions. If the environment is unpredictable, why try to predict?


HBR. I am careful to note, does not endorse this position of “no predictions please,” and in fact a prediction guru will speak at a free webinar next week. On Monday, October 3, Tom Davenport (a business analytics expert) will tell how to gain advantage by using analytics to predict the future. 


Another person who makes his living with predictions, however precarious, is Charles Steindel, chief economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury. He will speak at the Princeton Regional Chamber meeting on Thursday, October 6, at 11:30 a.m. at the Princeton Forrestal Marriott.


Sorry for the late notice about McGrath’s webinar — we’ve been on a road trip to Vermont. I’ve not had time to figure out why HBR is doing these webinars for free. Somebody who can figure that out, please let me know. 


**** Late breaking announcement ****


I just read in today’s Times of Trenton — but can find no notice of it anywhere else — that Princeton Power Systems is having a demo today from 10 to noon at 201 Washington Road (that’s Sarnoff/ SRI) with a workshop and openhouse from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at 3175 Princeton Pike, Lawrenceville. I think this must have been arranged by the NJEDA because it’s not even on the company’s website. I just called and it’s on. The founder, Darren Hammell, spoke at the Princeton chamber in February, 2010. 


Also, Dan Conley asks for publicity re the Marconi Foundation Scholars and Heroes Festa Italiana event in Somerset on October 7, $50, so here it is http://www.marconilanding.org/. 

If you hear music as you stroll down Nassau Street at about 5 p.m. today, it’s coming from Princeton United Methodist Church, at the corner of Nassau and Vandeventer. The church has launched a series of Saturday Evening Worship Gatherings,  non-traditional services in the Sanford Davis Room (pictured left) and the door opens onto Nassau Street.

Meet everyone and their sister at the 30th annual Princeton Regional Chamber trade fair and culinary showcase at the Princeton Westin on Monday, September 26.  free to all with a business card. Schmooze or lose! 


That night, Monday, September 26 at 7 p.m., Tom Pitts tells the Princeton Public Library crowd how to promote yourself (lots of us have trouble with this) by selling your strengths. Also at the PPL on Thursday, October 6, at 6:45 p.m, Alan Yarnoff reveals the secrets of promotion and advertising for small business. 


ACG New Jersey meets at the Westin on Tuesday, September 27, to talk with Soren Hastrup, CEO of Telestro Group about his “Successful Entrepreneur Marriage” (his wife is the COO). 


On Friday, September 30, for a breakfast, meet with Eileen Sinett’s “Speaking that Connects” group to discuss “Connecting with Clients,” RSVP needed. .


Looking forward to October, NJEN begins it with a lunch on Wednesday, October 5 on Strategic Alliances: Partnering for Profit. 


The Princeton Regional Chamber hears from Charles Steindel, Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury for its lunch on Thursday, October 6, and from Dale Caldwell, CEO of Strategic Influence, at the breakfast on Wednesday, October 19.  Caldwell uses influence-based strategies to  help people attain success in work and life and help corporations maximize their profitability. 


On the evening of October 6, New Jersey CAMA tells how to use social, mobile, and local marketing to drive customers and profits. 


Princeton University’s Keller Center opens its admirable series that juxtaposes two e words, entrepreneurs and engineering, with a lecture on Tuesday, October 11, at 5 p.m., followed by, as always food and networking. Stanford’s Stephen Barley will discuss virtual work. Another free lecture, open to the public, is Wednesday, October 26, at 4:30 p.m., with Ricardo Levy (’67), founder of Catalytica, on “The Essence of an Entrepreneur.” 

 The NJEF session on Thursday, October 13, 4 to 6 p.m., will focus on accurate pre-money enterprise valuations. In other words, before you get any investors, how much is your business worth. Market research is supposed to help you build accurate assumptions. 


On Wednesday, October 19, as part of  Trenton’s Small Business Week, the Mercer County chamber holds its fall expo and the Princeton chamber co-sponsors a forum on how your company can benefit from tapping Trenton’s appeal as a tourist magnet.  

The Montgomery Township Economic Development Commission will hold its annual Fall Business Networking Forum on Oct. 25, 6 to 8 p.m., at the newly opened Tusk Restaurant located at 1736 Route 206 South in Montgomery.


If that’s not enough places to go, check out U.S. 1 Newspaper or its database on the Princetoninfo.com events page or the Einstein Alley event page. And there is also an unpublished event on October 6 open only to techie entrepreneurs. If you think you are one, contact Marion Reinson, who wrote this guest blog.

After I talked to Bill Martin for U.S. 1 Newspaper five years ago — he’s in the news now for his Raging Hedge Fund — I met him at a social function. So I asked him for some free advice. “Stay out of the options market, don’t buy commodities,” he said. Good advice.

This week’s U.S. 1 story by Scott Morgan tells of another high-roller, John Frankel, who speaks in Whippany on How to Survive and Even Gain from the Coming Internet Bubble on Tuesday, September 27, at noon at the Marriott Hanover. Cost $75. Visitwww.vanj.com.

Green 2.0 – Green Building in the Alley
Notes on the May 10, 2011 Einstein Alley Entrepreneurs Collaborative Gathering
by Marion Reinson with Steven Georges

The Einstein Alley Entrepreneurs Collaborative is a community of Central Jersey entrepreneurs established by Steven Georges and John Romanovich in 2003 as a grass roots effort to bring “entrepreneurial-minded” people together. The goal is to provide a fertile ecosystem for the germination of ventures in Central Jersey (similar to Silicon Valley and Rt. 128) as well as a venue for those interested in helping entrepreneurs to grow successful businesses. Meetings are informal and provide a safe haven for entrepreneurs to share their ideas. 

Over the seven-year history of the Einstein Alley Entrepreneurs Collaborative, we’ve hosted about 37 gatherings. At times we’ve measured the success of an event by the number of members in attendance. By that measure, our last event “Green 2.0 – Green Building in the Alley,” which attracted 16 human (and one canine) participants to the Green Living and Building Center (GLBC) in Lambertville, NJ, was not one of our greatest successes.

However, the powerful and thought-provoking presentation those attending witnessed and the feedback that we’ve received since tells a very different story. One member of the EA leadership commented that the gathering might have been the best ever. An attendee from the financial sector, who had been skeptical about the economics of Green, said this event was eye opening. A third, who came thinking that the Green economy might be dead, now believes that we are only in the early pioneer stages of the game. Given this feedback, I thought you might enjoy learning about what was discussed and my own takeaways from the meeting. Why take the time to read on? Because, I have seen the future and it is green.

The evening’s three presenters co-founded the GLBC with the shared belief that cost effective green living, building and commerce is achievable today given the right leadership team working with an integrated approach. Their focus is primarily upon green buildings because, 1) People spend 90% of their time in buildings, 2) buildings use 65% of all electricity, and 3) buildings are responsible for 39% of all green house gas emissions. Collectively, they presented a compelling argument that the transition to a green economy has already begun, and it has a positive ROI.

To get a real sense of these optimistic business sentiments I strongly recommend that you view this short film “High Performance Building – Performance and Practice” prepared in a partnership between the Rocky Mountain Institute and the U.S. Green Building Council. The GLBC partners gave a copy to the EAC attendees at the gathering. I watched the DVD and was blown away to see senior executives of Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Toyota, Cushman and Wakefield and many other corporate giants powerfully promoting the business case for their companies’ investments in new and retrofitted-LEED-certified facilities. The 18 minute film , which can be viewed on YouTube, (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYeoDHE38eg) ends with the following powerful statement by the late Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface Inc:

“I believe businesses will be left in the competitive dust if they don’t respond as the public, as the market demands. The power is with the people and there is not a CEO worth her or his salt who will ignore the voice of the marketplace.”


The evening’s first presenter, Lia Nielsen is the day-to-day manager of GLBC and runs Gaia’s Way Inc, a consulting firm providing Product/LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) expertise. Her presentation, “What Makes A Business Green,” provided a case study of Method, a privately-held home cleaning products company started in 2001. Method is one of now 416 certified “B Corporations” that use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.

Jason Kliwinski, a LEED-certified architect and co-founder of the NJ Chapter of the US Green Building Council, is Director of Sustainable Design at the Spiezle Corporation and founder and president of Designs for Life. Citing specific case studies from a number of recent LEED-certified buildings that he has helped to design, Kliwinski stated that construction does not have to cost any more to be Green and, in fact, such buildings can provide an annuity of ongoing operating cost savings to the building owners and net energy to the grid.

To achieve a positive financial return several pre-conditions must be met: 1) green elements must be integrated in the design and not added as an after-thought, 2) available incentives and financing must be fully-taken advantage of, and 3) the architect must collaborate with the builder and subcontractors throughout the project. Jason said that many contractors would like to build green, but don’t, only because they have
never done it before. Consequently, he spends much of his time both on the job, and as a frequent speaker at industry conferences educating contractors as well as the public about cost-effective environmentally-responsible design. Jason strongly believes that green building is the future and not just a fad and provides the numbers to back it up. Between 2005 and 2010, a period when many architectural and construction companies went out of business, he showed that expenditures on Green building increased from
$10 to $60 billion.

The GBLC presentation continued with Robert Politzner, president of Greenstreet Building and early pioneer in the field of green building, speaking from the point of view of the general contractor. Robert is a passionate believer that the cost of a unit of carbon-based energy sources has been kept artificially low when compared to renewable energy sources. This is a result of continuing government subsidies to fossil fuel energy sources along with powerful industry opposition to a carbon tax that would seek to include the cost of externalities, such as pollution, in the price of a unit of gas. Politzner agreed completely with Kliwinski’s assertion that the most critical requirement for successfully building green on a budget is integration.

Politzner also mentioned several additional reasons for the generally accepted, but no longer accurate, notion that green building is expensive and a luxury that only the affluent can afford. These reasons included, until recently, a shortage of building trade workers with experience using green materials; combined with the fact that a general contractor typically has a three-week period in which to bid on a construction job. As a
result of this lack of experience and compressed time frame for bidding, the contractors are tend to be conservative about making what could be a costly error, especially if they are not well versed in green construction.

Politzner believes that over the past several years a critical economic tipping point has occurred. The recession and the resulting surplus of unemployed trade workers has increased the supply of skilled providers of solar panels and other green products. This has increased the willingness of contractors to take a risk and build green. Combined with improvements in solar panels and efficiencies that have lowered the cost of their manufacture, the cost of solar energy production has decreased from $8k-10k to $4k-5k per Kw over the past five years. As a result, in the past two years Politzner and Kliwinski reported seeing a market shift where the cost of solar in the northeast is now cheaper than traditional sources. Kliwinski said there are regional cost differences, but in the northeast, integration of geothermal, solar, green roofs and rain water catchment can and do make strong financial sense.

Jason and Robert concluded the team’s presentation saying that that the cost of building new green buildings will continue to fall, but ultimately, if climate change is to be reversed the existing building stock must also be made more energy efficient. Jason said that we know how to do this cost-effectively today with a short payback period. However one big problem is financial because the “cap-ex and op-ex people do not
speak to each other.” He said investors who understand this are making returns of 5-6% per year.

In addition to designing and building high performance buildings, the three partners kept stating that the primary purpose of the GLBC is education and collaboration. I believe that there are a number of opportunities for EAC members to collaborate with the GLBC leaders, and the resulting entrepreneurial opportunities may be among the most financially rewarding available today, So If you are an EAC member who is working to develop businesses offering CHP or other alternative energy cost savings to building owners, I strongly recommend that you explore collaborating with the founders of GLBC. I also believe there is a big financial reward awaiting the financial/banking entrepreneur who develops and successfully markets the investment mechanism to finance the green retrofitting of the existing commercial building stock.

Acknowledging the left-leaning political connotation that the word “green” has acquired, Politzner suggested that the word, “smart,” should be substituted for “green,” because the emerging business case for building green is “as American as apple pie.”

Don’t let the e-Patient movement take you by surprise. If you are a patient, know your rights and your opportunities. If you are in the pharma or health field, get with it.