There may be economic storm clouds ahead, but the folks at Stevie Award-winning E-Myth Worldwide™ believe there are reasons for optimism.

The continuing US. housing decline, with weak prices and stumbling sales, has slowed the US and world economies overall. Fourth quarter 2007 US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased at an anemic 0.6% annual rate. Some economists think that US GDP will be negative for the first two quarters of 2008, and thus believe the US is officially in a recession. The next six months are going to be tough, especially for those in the building trades. Consider:

• Applications for new building permits in the US are down 3% to 1.048 million units, a level last seen in November 1991.
• Although new housing starts in the US were up 0.8% in January, this comes after a 14.8% decline in December 2007.
• The current series of interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve will not exhibit their maximum effect until late in 2008.

According to management guru Ram Charan in a recent article in Fortune magazine, the current economic downturn in the US is largely due to the convergence of three forces:

    * A Federal Reserve-induced housing bubble, created by providing cheap money for too long;
    * Widespread use of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to aggregate low-quality mortgage debt;
    * Failure of investment banks to appropriately downgrade ratings of those “high-quality” CDOs.

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SMART Technologies received two Stevie Awards at the Women in Business Awards in New York City last year: Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 2,500 employees); and SMART CEO Nancy Knowlton for Best Canadian Entrepreneur.

Nancy Knowlton co-founded SMART in 1987 with partner David Martin, and in 1991 they introduced the world's first interactive whiteboard. Since then, more than 800,000 SMART Board™ interactive whiteboards have been installed in classrooms, offices and training rooms around the world.

“Bringing a Canadian innovation such as the SMART Board interactive whiteboard onto the world stage has been most rewarding,” says Nancy Knowlton. “These Stevie Awards recognize the hard work and ingenuity of so many people working at SMART who are contributing to changing the way the world learns and works.”

SMART Technologies is both the industry pioneer and a global market leader in user-friendly interactive whiteboards and other group collaboration tools. SMART products include the award-winning family of SMART Board interactive whiteboards, pen displays, and interactive overlays, as well as response systems, conferencing applications, classroom management, and concept-mapping software.

SMART has maintained its position as global education market segment leader with sales in over 100 countries worldwide, and in 2006 the company surpassed CAD$1 billion in cumulative sales.

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Katy Thorbahn is Senior VP & General Manager of the Philadelphia office of Avenue A | Razorfish, one of the world's leading interactive media and technology services agencies. Katy won a Stevie Award in the category of Best Executive in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women in Business. The awards were announced on November 12 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

We recently spoke with Katy about Avenue A | Razorfish. She shared with us her thoughts on how to motivate and manage a creative workfoce, and what it takes to be a successful manager in the advertising industry.

Listen to our podcast interview with Katy Thorbahn...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Cracked.com : Political humor, parody news, and satire for those who don't believe everything they read but read it anyway. Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.
Millions of Us : Millions of Us LLC is an ad agency specializing in virtual worlds. Their blog offers a fascinating insight into Second Life projects.
Milk and Cookies : A mix of funny ads and oddball video clips from around the world.