Although overall confidence has remained largely unchanged since early July, responses in regard to current business conditions, sales strength, and investment in equipment and software have improved in recent weeks.

FORBES: Good News Means No Recession, But Downturn Lingers On The Margins

The same is true in regard to pageant coaching and business consulting.

FORBES: Tips For Choosing A Career Coach (Or Pageant Coach)

In this regard, they are similar to other business that raise capital from investors and seek to generate profits from building and selling a better widget than their competitors.

FORBES: "Villains" of Financial Crisis Wrestle with Misperceptions

It came in response to a congressional report that explicitly pushed the idea of using the financial markets as a way of making sanctions work, particularly with regard to companies doing business in Sudan.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy

It is also an analysis of the increasingly fraught political context in which this business is conducted, especially with regard to three big and longstanding fears: energy scarcity, energy security and, more and more, the environmental ruin that energy can cause.

ECONOMIST: Energy

But consider things from a business perspective, and in particular with regard to intellectual property, and many of these supposed Microsoft advantages could fall away.

FORBES: Microsoft's Kinect For Xbox One: What It Can Do And Why It's Special

Interestingly, in this regard, leadership from business within the conservation community has important role to play.

FORBES: Connect

While accountants, for the most part, recognize the need to stand out from the crowd in order to garner new business, relatively few of them are being successfully proactive in this regard.

FORBES: How to Super-Charge Your Accounting Practice

In that regard, utility deals need approval from the public service commissions of each jurisdiction in which the combined entity is to do business, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

FORBES: Energy Companies Pursue Justice at a Fixed Cost