Florida residents are finding out it may be difficult to claim their share of $1 billion in unclaimed property and cash being held by a Florida agency for safekeeping.

Some are finding one of the biggest hurdles to filing a successful claim is verifying their identity and that they lived at a particular address years ago.

Darleen Mawson of Sorrento in Lake County had her claim denied because she couldn’t prove she lived in an apartment back when Ronald Reagan still in the White House.

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Innovation should always deliver on a specific purpose or promise, often it simply doesn’t. It needs to be suitable to our needs; it needs to resolve a given job-to-be done.

In the developed world we are consistently over-delivering innovation for many and there is a given cost to that, which we all pay for even though we often don’t really need it in the first place. Take for example, the software provided by Microsoft for its windows application, in its office versions, they all are over specified for our personal needs. The

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Investors in Whitbread will not be blamed for feeling slightly nervous ahead of its first-quarter figures tomorrow, as both of the group’s last two updates prompted major falls in its share price. The Costa Coffee owner has been hit by increasing fears over consumer and corporate spending, which has resulted in its share price dropping nearly 15 per cent since the start of the year.

With the company already having revealed its like-for-like sales growth had dipped in the first few weeks of the financial year, Numis Securities’ Wyn Ellis believes expectations are “muted”.

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We tend to innovate by going off on an island, with lots of Post-its and flip charts, and we end up stuck on Brainstorm Island. How do we escape from Brainstorm Island?

Paddy Miller posed this question to the audience at the 2011 World Innovation Forum. In a riveting – and often hilarious – presentation, Miller made the case to try a different path for more effective innovation.  He offered four key insights to chart a new approach for innovation architects.

Insight #1: Deal with the Disconnect

The number one reason innovation fails is lack of alignment between senior managers and those on the operational or project management level. As M

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Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know that private equity and venture capital firms have been pouring cash into social networks like it was their job (and apparently, it is). Until recently, however, it was hard to get a handle on just how much money was being invested in social media startups. That’s no longer the case, thanks to a research outfit called Social Media Influence, which just released the SMI Guide to Social Media Funding.

$2.52 billion: that’s how much venture capitalists and private equity investors plowed into social media companies in the first quarter of 2011, according to SMI, including $1.6 billion in social networks.

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EVANSVILLE — Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel and economic development leaders and will hold a news conference “to make a major job creation announcement,” the mayor’s office has announced.

The conference, to be held at 9 a.m. Wednesday at Innovation Pointe, 318 Main Street, will be attended by local and state economic development leaders, according to the release.

This is the latest of several jobs announcements in Evansville this year.

In March, the mayor’s office announced that Connecticut-based SS&C Technologies would open a fund administration and technology center in Evansville, creating up to 500 new jobs by 2014.

SS&C provides software and services to the financial services industry. The compa

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Investors withdrew from the banks last night, as analysts warned that the market was not taking into account the damage that could be caused by plans to force the sector to ring-fence its high street operations.

Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland shifted back 6.6p to 252.3p, 0.31p to 47p and 0.27p to 38.65p respectively following HSBC’s decision to downgrade its advice on all three to “neutral” after calculating that the proposals from the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) could cost them over 10bn.

Saying that the plans, which were backed by George Osborne last week, “could be the biggest structural change to the UK banking sector for decades”, the broker warned it expected “much of the cost of the ring-fencing [to] be borne by shareholders”.

“So far the equity and credit markets have treated the ICB ring-fencing proposal with remarkable equanimity,” said HSBC’s analysts.

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Spirit Airlines announced this week that it plans to lower fares on all nonstop flights by $5 each way beginning Nov. Get full info…