Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Many things come to mind when you think about transportation: Traffic, congestion, mass transit and the cost of fuel, to name a few. You might also think about the economy, urban planning and the environment. Yet one thing often is left out of the discussion: Civil rights.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights lays out the case for transportation as a civil right in a report, Where We Need to Go: A Civil Rights Roadmap for Transportation Equity.

The way the Conference sees it, access to transportation is key to connecting the poor, seniors and those with disabilities to jobs, schools, health care and other resources. It is essential to widening opportunities for all. Many of us take our mobility for granted, but getting around can be a real challenge for millions of Americans.

This is a key issue as Congress considers the surface transportation reauthorization bill, which essentially maps out federal transportation spending and priorities for the next six years.

“Smart and equitable transportation systems connect us to jobs, schools, housing, health care services — and even to grocery stores and nutritious food,” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Conference, said in testimony presented to the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee. “But millions of low-income and working-class people, people of color and people with disabilities live in communities where quality transportation options are unaffordable, unreliable, or nonexistent.”

According to the report, the average cost of owning a car is just shy of $9,500. That may not sound like much until you realize the federal poverty level is $22,350 for a family of four. One-third of low-income African-American households do not have access to an automobile. That figure is 25 percent among low-income Latino families and 12.1 percent for whites. Racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to use public transit to get to work.

Yet the federal government allocates 80 percent of its transportation funding to highways.

“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it,” the report states. “Traditional nondiscrimination protections cannot protect people for whom opportunities are literally out of reach.”

Americans in the lowest 20 percent income bracket — many of whom live in rural communities — spend roughly 42 percent of their annual income on transportation, according to the report. That figure is 22 percent for middle-income Americans.

Land use patterns contribute to the transportation divide. By focusing so much spending on highways, we’ve created decentralized communities. This is not, by itself, a problem. No one’s arguing everyone should live in cities. But we’ve underfunded mass transit and built minimal infrastructure for the 107 million people who walk or ride bikes to work each day.

(That’s a whole ‘nother issue: Americans make about 10.5 percent of all trips on foot, and only 1.5 percent of federal transportation funds are allocated to retrofitting roads with sidewalks and crosswalks even though pedestrians account for nearly 13 percent of all traffic fatalities, according to a study by Transportation for America.)

The report argues that inadequate mass transit creates barriers to employment. It notes that three out of five jobs that are suitable for welfare-to-work participants are not accessible by public transportation. It also cites a Brookings Institute study that found 45 percent of jobs in the nation’s 98 largest metro areas lie 10 miles or more beyond the urban core.

To combat these issues, the Leadership Conference outlines a plan similar to that offered by other transportation advocacy groups, including Transportation For America. In a nutshell, the Conference calls for greater spending on mass transit and multimodal systems that foster comprehensive transportation networks that include pedestrians, bicycles, mass transit and automobiles.

The conference also says its ’s time to give those directly impacted by transportation policy a voice in the debate.

“When decisions are made about transportation resources and funding, those decisions are rarely made in consultation with or in consideration of low-income people who tend to rely heavily on public transportation as their main access to services,” Henderson says in the report.

We are at a pivotal time in transportation funding. The transportation reauthorization bill will decide how we spend our dollars for the next six years. As lawmakers hash out what will be spent where, they will do well to remember that transportation is about more than reaching destinations. It’s also about reaching opportunities.

Photo: elrentaplats/Flickr

Apple has recently released Mac OS X 10.7 or Lion, but – as is usual with new releases – we’ve heard many stories about bugs from people who’ve upgraded to the new version of the OS. Apple seems to have noticed some problems as well, which prompted it to release an update to Mac OS X 10.6.8 which fixes migration issues.

Interestingly, Apple chose to call this update a “supplemental” one, which will probably confuse users as now you can effectively have two different versions of Mac OS X 10.6.8 (the latest one is called Mac OS X 10.6.8. v1.1.). If you’re still running 10.6.7, you need the entire new 10.6.8 update; if you’ve upgraded to 10.6.8 before, you just need the supplemental update.

The easiest way to figure out which update to install is, as always, to simply run Software Update from the Apple Menu.

Apple’s description of the update says it resolves issues with:

- Transferring personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion

- Certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete

- System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out

That first bullet point seems like a rather important one, so we recommend Snow Leopard users to install this latest patch before migrating their data to a Lion machine.

via MacRumors

Putting the likes of the super-funded aside (Color, anyone?), most early-stage startups operate on tight budgets and spend their dollars sparingly. A bevy of web services have made start-up costs all the more affordable, but now there’s the conundrum of nearly too much choice.

The folks at BestVendor surveyed 550 startup staffers — most in marketing and executive administration positions — on their favorite tools for email, accounting, web analytics, CRM, productivity, design, storage, payment processing, operations and so forth.

Their answers, in aggregate, speak to the growing trend in startups moving toward predominately cloud-based operations. The most popular selections also highlight the rising stars (Dropbox) and impressive veterans (Paypal and Salesforce) in the business-to-business services sector.

So what’s hot among startups these days? Google Apps, Google Analytics and Quickbooks each garnered a majority of the votes in the email, accounting and web analytics categories respectively. Salesforce bested its CRM competition with 59% of respondents selecting it as the application of choice, and consumer-friendly Evernote proved hot with startup types too in the note-taking category.

Check out the infographic below for even more insight on the web and business services that today’s startups are selecting en masse.

Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as social media and technology updates.

Google has finally made a public statement about the recent wave of controversial Google+ account suspensions designed to enforce the company’s “common name” policy.

The policy is outlined in section 13 of the company’s User Content and Conduct Policy. It’s designed to stop users from creating fake profiles and to set a positive tone. Section 13 reads as follows:

“To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.”

This weekend, Google started enforcing the policy, deleting a large number of Google+ accounts. While some of the suspended accounts were indeed fake profiles, others like Limor “Ladyada” Fried and lifestyle blogger A.V. Flox were accidentally deleted and quickly restored.

SEE ALSO: GOOGLE+: THE COMPLETE GUIDE | VIDEOS | REVIEW

Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra admitted to Robert Scoble on Sunday that the company has made some mistakes with its first attempt at cracking down on fake profiles. And in Monday, Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz wrote a more detailed post in an attempt to clear the air and set the record straight.

“We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing,” Horowitz said in his Google+ post. “So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process, specifically regarding how we notify these users that they’re not in compliance with Google+ policies and how we communicate the remedies available to them.”

Among the changes Google intends to implement:

- Google will give users more warning and the chance to comply with the common name policy.

- The company is improving the signup process.

- Finally, the search giant is exploring better ways to support nicknames, maiden names and pseudonyms.

Hotowitz also took time to dispel the rumor that a suspension of a Google+ account means that a user loses his or her access to Gmail, Google Docs or other Google services. “When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed,” he said.

Google+, which will hit its one-month anniversary on Thursday, has clearly been suffering from growing pains. It has received strong criticism for its handling of Google+ brand pages.

The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit.

After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you’ll make more money. Problem solved.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t have much wiggle room here.

If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem.

As the world gets more complex, as it’s harder to see the long-term given the huge short-term bets that are made, as business gets less transparent (“which company made that, exactly?”) and as the web of interactions makes it harder for any one person to stand up and take responsibility, the happy theory begins to fall apart. After all, if the long-term effects of a decision today can’t possibly have any impact on the profit of this project (which will end in six weeks), then it’s difficult to argue that maximizing profit and doing the right thing are aligned. The local store gets very little long-term profit for its good behavior if it goes out of business before the long-term arrives.

It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in, doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially. Pointing to the numbers (or to the boss) is an easy refuge for someone who would like to duck the issue, but the fork in the road is really clear. You either do work you are proud of, or you work to make the maximum amount of money. (It would be nice if those overlapped every time, but they rarely do).

“I just work here” is the worst sort of ethical excuse. I’d rather work with a company filled with ethical people than try to find a company that’s ethical. In fact, companies we think of as ethical got that way because ethical people made it so.

I worry that we absolve ourselves of responsibility when we talk about business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Corporations are collections of people, and we ought to insist that those people (that would be us) do the right thing. Business is too powerful for us to leave our humanity at the door of the office. It’s not business, it’s personal.

I learned this lesson from my Dad. Every single day he leads by example, building a career and a company based on taking personal responsibility, not on blaming the heartless, profit-focused system.

Please stop worrying about your Klout score, or your stock price on Empire Avenue and on all kinds of other measures that don’t have much to do with anything related to your real world. This is akin to still being in the Matrix, but thinking you have free will. Worrying about whether or not you’re an influencer by someone else’s measures is like having a toy steering wheel and thinking you’re driving the car.

Influence

One definition: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

If you just pause for a moment and re-read that last sentence, it’s really worth it.

Now, contrast that with how many people tweet you or don’t, who posts links to your stuff or who doesn’t, whether such and such replies to you or doesn’t, and tell me that online influence has a lot to do with real world influence. No matter how much I’d like to believe that telling you how much I love my Chevy Camaro will influence you to buy cars, it won’t. (And if it did, I’d want a cut.) It just doesn’t work that way. You might have a slightly better opinion of something because I say it’s interesting or great or whatever, but I rarely influence someone to take an action of that nature.

However, most online scoring systems would suggest that I have the potential to influence that kind of change.

Where Influence Comes From

There are a few ingredients to influence:

• Outward signs of success.
• Earned social capital.
• Persuasive nature/demeanor.
• Perception of power.
• Sheer volume.

Those are just a few. Of these, which do you think I possess the most of at any given time? Maybe a bit of the first, definitely some of the second, and definitely some of the last. I don’t make efforts to be persuasive. I don’t have much power. What I have, however, is a lot of social capital that I can exchange to make new and useful relationships, which then yield some kind of value for me, and hopefully, for the person with whom I’m connecting.

And in that way, I have influence, but I earned it by making good/useful relationships and by connecting with people perceived to be above my level of influence and by nurturing relationships with people at my peer level and with people working on developing their own influence. (And of these, I’d say the latter is the most important of the groups to pursue and build up.)

Pick Your Influence

Maybe you don’t have sheer volume, but you’re persuasive. Great. Use it. Maybe you’ve not yet earned the social capital from the people “above” (and I use that loosely) you, but you’ve built out a strong network of supportive up-and-comers and peers. Perfect! The point is that the formula for influence has precious little to do with a few statistical data points and everything to do with understanding leverage.

Use Your Powers For Good

Where I see people throw away their ability to be influential is often at the same point: the moment they use it for strictly personal gain. Note, I don’t mean that it’s bad to sell. Selling isn’t strictly about personal gain (if done appropriately). It’s about delivering something of value to someone with a need.

When people use influence for something personal is when they try to influence frivolous votes, when they ask people to pump them up in relationship to something, when they use their leverage to try and climb upward and meet others through connections, without having earned the introduction. There are many other examples, and I know at this very moment that YOU are nodding your head and remembering the time when someone asked you to do something like that.

The best way to grow your influence from where it is to where you hope it will be is to use your influence as often as possible to help someone that could use that help for something of relative good. For instance, I often ask my Twitter followers to support causes like Skip1, but I never ask for votes. (Or if I have, it’s pretty darned rare.) Why? Because it just seems like a jerky way to use influence.

Influence Marketing

Marketers are trying very desperately to figure out how to use social networks to affect sales. Most often, they’re seeking the Holy Grail of someone influential. They equate numbers with influence: number of followers, number of views, number of likes, etc. Great, except that likes don’t equate to influence, either. You and I both know that.

Yes, there’s a way to use influence for marketing, but it’s much more to do with understanding the above leverage points than it is to understand how many shares something got on Google+. And if YOU figure out how to build that leverage, and if that matters to you in marketing your products, or in helping others succeed, then I feel you’ll be further ahead than folks who are worried about stats and scores kept by web companies who stand to benefit from measuring those same scores and reporting on them.

You follow?

I’m in a bit of a bind. I’ve taken on a lot of favors. I’ve picked up some projects. And I’ve got a very rush job project that just came to contract Friday. Suddenly, I’ve gone from wondering what I’m going to do to about the next few months to wondering how I’m going to survive them. You’ve probably had that happen before too, haven’t you? You’ve gone from worried to crushed with work, and then back again, right? Because it’s what we all do, especially those of us you who own your future. It’s at those moments where you start thinking about all you have.

All You Have

On one side, all you have is yourself. You hear this a lot. Sometimes, it’s comforting. Other times, it’s what you do to counter the ouchy feeling that others can inspire in you.

On the other side, all you have is the love and support of those you’ve come to count on as your friends, and those people who nourish you. But even then, they don’t actually do the work. They can support you, but even that will be very strange and squishy and not always befitting of the situation.

So really, when you come down to that moment of execution, all you have is you.

No one writes your book for you (unless you pay them to, I guess). No one makes the hard decisions for you. No one actually helps you put your butt into the chair to do the work. That’s all you.

And yet

And yet, if you think you do it all by yourself, you’re fooling yourself. There are many people who got you to where you are now. There are many people who care for you, who love you, who support you and put a lot of energy into helping you get where you’re going. And if you doubt that, even for a moment, things go awry. Some of this might take the form of whatever spirituality or religion you believe. But some of this is real, honest, wonderful people, right here on our little blue marble.

And both matter in the equation, no matter what.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: GuideMe

Quick Pitch: GuideMe helps you build a local to-do list and get deals on the places you care about.

Genius Idea: Matching deals to places you love or want to try.

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Daily deal services send you local deals via email, but you might be more inclined to buy if deal offers were matched up against the venues that you already like and the ones you know you want to try.

That’s the idea behind GuideMe, an early stage startup that lets you build a list, called a “GuideList,” of the places you want to go and the locales that you’ve already been to and love — for sharing with friends and finding savings.

You can manually look up and add places to your GuideList, or use the feed of activity to find places that your friends are trying and recommending. If you’re a Foursquare user, you can automate the list creation process and connect your account to import checkins.

As you add places to your GuideList, the catalog becomes a comprehensive collection of spots you’d like to visit, the venues you’ve already tried and the locales that you love. You can then view and filter locales on a map and even book takes via OpenTable.

Your list also doubles as a directory of places that GuideMe then uses to track down relevant daily deals. The startup, with the help of Yipit and other deals partners, monitors daily deal sites to alert you when there’s an active deal at one of the places on your list.

GuideMe intends to do more than serve targeted daily deals offers to users; it hopes to tackle the larger problem of helping people find things to eat, see and do whether at home or traveling.

“We’re on a mission to provide tools to make discovering, saving and sharing those recommendations easier, while also providing users with as much value as we can along the way,” GuideMe CEO and co-founder Pat McCarthy says.

GuideMe does have a clean and crisp interface, but the product may be lacking a magical element that keeps users coming back. There’s also no mobile applications yet, which means referencing your to-do list while on the go will not be an easy task.

Launched to the public in late June, GuideMe is the product of Yahoo and Right Media alums. The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, thesuperph

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Greg Steen currently serves as a trendspotter for Moxie, discovering and assessing marketing implications for global trends. He has over five years experience in analyzing trends and creating strategic campaigns for brands such as Verizon Wireless, Marriott and the Alzheimer’s Association.

Capture the flag. Hide and seek. Marco Polo. These location-based games brought hours of fun to many of us as children. Then video games came along and suddenly the only location you played in was the living room. Now this shift is coming full circle as innovative mobile games are using geo-location, image recognition and augmented reality technologies to combine the real and virtual worlds.

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Location-Based Games Are Already Starting to Emerge

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For example, the popular Finnish iPhone game Shadow Cities, which recently made its debut in the U.S., uses the city of each player as a game board, allowing them to roam their neighborhood casting spells and taking over city blocks. Players can engage with others nearby by either teaming up or fighting over territory.

Angry Birds will soon include location-based features that give players access to new characters and content. Players will also be able to compete with one another on a unique leader board tied to each location. This feature will turn coffee shops, bars and apartment buildings into proving grounds for the next Angry Birds champion and could serve as a great ice breaker for players that compete in the same spot at the same time.

Paparazzi is an Android game that layers digital animation on top of the real world, a technology known as augmented reality. The game challenges players to take photos of a 3D character standing on a table. The character becomes agitated and will throw tea cups at the player. He’ll even jump onto the phone itself if given the chance.

Games such as these can be a great fit for marketers looking to connect with customers. Logos, buildings and products can all be incorporated into the gaming environment through barcode scanning, image recognition or GPS. Such games add more depth to social check-ins, a field where developers are still trying to figure out how to create worthwhile experiences. MyTown is an early example of how this can work. Players buy and sell the locations they check in at, much like Monopoly, and products are integrated through barcode scanning, which can unlock virtual goods and manufacturer promotions.

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The Location-Based Gaming Market Is Poised for Growth

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A confluence of smartphone adoption and interest in gaming has laid the foundation for mobile games to become a cultural touchstone and an extremely profitable industry. eMarketer estimates that 31% of mobile users have a smartphone and projects that 43% of mobile users will have one by 2015. That’s 101 million people. Interest in gaming has grown rapidly as well. According to Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, 183 million Americans report playing a game for an hour a day. That’s more than half of the population.

All it will take is one breakout success and the market will explode with new players and more innovative games. Marketers should look for successful games to partner with rather than creating their own, since building a player base from scratch is difficult. But marketers would do well to think about how these integrations can enhance the gaming experience. Developers have been known to turn down partnership dollars if they fear the in-game additions won’t add something meaningful to the game.

A good example of a brand integration that improves the gaming experience is the Dreyer’s Fruit Bars campaign that is running in FarmVille. Players have the opportunity to plant Dreyer’s branded crops, which are more profitable than comparable plants and create the possibility of receiving recognition as a top grower. Dreyer’s is even bringing the promotion into the real world by selecting a few players to travel to Farmville, Virginia, and plant an actual fruit orchard for the community.

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Conclusion

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The market is primed for the right game to galvanize interest in experiences that combine the real and virtual worlds. Just as FarmVille put social gaming on the map and Angry Birds brought attention to mobile gaming in general, we could see a wave of smartphone owners flood the application markets looking for similar experiences. This will present a valuable opportunity to marketers that want to foster emotional connections with their audiences, so keep a close eye on new releases and brace yourself for the next big thing in mobile gaming.

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