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Mark Cuban has been charged with insider trading, apparently because he unwittingly received confidential information and then traded on it.

Cuban is not a insider, nor did he accept a fiduciary relationship.

They say that behind every legal defence is great story.

So here is Cuban's defence.

The change should be seamless, but won't be because technology throws up surprises.

The new BizOp News will have the following features:

a) replies to comments, a sophisticated threading system which allows you to respond to commentators.

b) the ability to register for the site.

c) a much faster load time.  much faster.

d) finally, an easier navigation system.

Retailer Mattress Firm said it plans to buy five of its local stores from a Birmingham franchisee for an undisclosed sum.

The mattress retailer has signed a letter of intent to buy the stores from Blue Ocean Waters LLC, which began opening local retail locations in 2007.

The acquisition brings Mattress Firm’s corporate-owned stores total to 530 in 44 markets in 21 states, said a news release.

Logo from Mattress Firm.

Shares of Papa John’s International Inc. fell nearly 4 percent Thursday, a day after the pizza-delivery company said it will provide loans and offer some cost and royalty rate relief to its franchisees.

After the regular session closed Wednesday, the Louisville, Ky., company said it would provide loans to help “operationally strong” franchisees so they can acquire “troubled” franchise groups.

The fast-food chain said it would convene a “lender’s summit” to bring together regional banks and other lenders to explain its business model in a bid to expand credit to franchisees.

Logo from Papa Johns.

Customer service is more important than low prices when it comes to luring and keeping loyal customers, according to a new survey by Accenture.

More than two thirds of over 4,000 consumers surveyed worldwide said they’ve switched businesses as the result of a poor customer service experience, the New York-based management consulting firm reported this week. By contrast, just over half said lower prices lured them elsewhere.

The difference was even more dramatic among American consumers, with nearly 75 percent saying they’ve switched service providers due to poor service, compared to 47 percent who were drawn by lower prices.

The survey also found that customer loyalty continues to erode as consumer expectations rise.

Most respondents said they demand more from businesses than they did a year ago, and many said they will demand even more in the years ahead. Twenty percent of respondents said they would immediately leave a business as the result of poor service, up seven percent from a similar survey last year, the firm reported.

Photo by thadz.

Read the rest of the Papa John's article here.

They look like pumpkins in the field, and the end product is marketed as “pumpkin seeds,” but technically they are squash and squash seeds.

Despite the elastic terminology, Autumn Seed Inc. has firmed up its grasp on the market in the past 60 years. Howard Ropp’s father started the business back in 1943, producing 100,000 pounds of seeds. Now Howard and his son Greg oversee a company putting out 2.5 million pounds in a good year.

“We’re the only ones in the U.S. doing this,” Greg Ropp said. “Our only competitor is China. And they can’t match us for quality.”

“We build our own harvesters, which handle up to 60,000 pounds a day,” Howard Ropp said. “We’ve got nine of them, and run six at a time, but we don’t sell them.”

“The Chinese would love to have these machines,” Greg Ropp added.

“Our harvest runs from September through about the second week of November,” he said. “We’ve got about 15 full-time workers right now, and four full-time year-round - two full-time fabricators and two in the warehouse. A lot of retired guys come work for us during harvest, driving and whatnot.”

The dried squash seeds are shipped to several roasters, “David and Sons being one you’d recognize,” Greg Ropp said. Once the seeds are roasted and ready for market, then they can be called pumpkin seeds, he said.

Photo by ecstaticist.

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Attention, online shoppers! This may be the last holiday season you can dodge sales taxes by buying presents on the Web. State legislators, retailers and lawyers say 2009 may be the year Internet taxes finally come to pass.

The idea, which would levy sales tax on most goods bought online, has been tossed around for nearly a decade. A perfect storm of factors, including record state budget deficits, a new Congress and continued e-commerce growth, appear likely to rekindle the issue. Experts say that cash-strapped states view this revenue, estimated to be several billions of dollars, as money left on the table.

“States are coming up with huge deficits and looking for places to make money,” says Eric Menhart, the principal of CyberLaw, a Rockville, Md.-based law firm that concentrates on technology legal issues. “All of a sudden, Internet taxation appears a lot more viable.”

Spotting an opportunity, legislators and other proponents of Internet taxation are renewing their efforts. Scott Peterson, executive director of the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, a group that oversees states’ efforts to simplify and modernize sales tax issues, says legislators from Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia, among others, have recently contacted him about the issue.

The plan: to reintroduce legislation as early as January when the new Congress takes office. The legislative route is necessary because the Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that states can’t require out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on online sales. Proponents believe that making their case to Congress would be faster and more practical than wending their way through the courts.

Photo by enimal.

In the fall of 1972, when David Galenson was a senior economics major at Harvard, he took what he describes as a “gut” course in 17th-century Dutch art. On the first day of class, the professor displayed a stunning image of a Renaissance Madonna and child. “Pablo Picasso did this copy of a Raphael drawing when he was 17 years old,” the professor told the students. “What have you people done lately?”

It’s a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday. It surfaces whenever an upstart twentysomething pens a game-changing novel or a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur becomes a billionaire.

The question nagged at Galenson for years. In graduate school, he watched brash colleagues write dissertations that earned them quick acclaim and instant tenure, while he sat in the library meticulously tabulating 17th- and 18th-century indentured-servitude records.

Now, however, Galenson might have done something at last, something that could provide hope for legions of late bloomers everywhere. Beavering away in his sunny second-floor office on campus, he has scoured the records of art auctions, counted entries in poetry anthologies, tallied images in art history textbooks – and then sliced and diced the numbers with his econometric ginsu knife. Applying the fiercely analytic, quantitative tools of modern economics, he has reverse engineered ingenuity to reveal the source code of the creative mind.

What he has found is that genius – whether in art or architecture or even business – is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people.

“Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans.

Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

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Photo by sfjalar.