I love America. There is so much talent here and we have so many tools to unleash our talents.

And, unlike so much of the world, we are so different; American to American, city to city, race to race, circumstance to circumstance, yet connected.

Forbes reports on the best places for immigrant minorities to launch their start-up in America. Full article. List below:

America’s destiny is tied to minorities, who already constitute a third of the nation’s population and who will account for roughly half of the population by 2050. Younger and more heavily represented in the labor force, minorities are poised to become the primary source of entrepreneurial growth.

The clear advantage with minorities, particularly immigrant minorities, lies in their own self-selection. Risk-takers by the very act of emigration, they are more likely to start small firms than other Americans. In fact, a recent Kauffman Foundation study found that immigrants  were unique in boosting their  entrepreneurial activities since the onset of the recession.  Overall the share of immigrants among new entrepreneurs has expanded from 13.4% in 1996 to nearly 30% this year.

But based on rates of self-employment, housing affordability, income growth and migration, immigrant entrepreneurs tend to prefer sprawling, heavily suburbanized regions, many of them clustered in the South and Southwest.

I saw this a couple days ago in the TED channel. It's worth watching (obviously, or I wouldn't post it).

I learned of SCVNGR's new spin-off, LevelUp, via TechCrunch. I am interested in LevelUp because it crosses a number of the new business models that I believe point toward the future of commerce and which can *only* thrive in a world filled with smartphones.

Briefly, LevelUp:

The goal of LevelUp, says SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch, is to offer the immediate distribution and new customers afforded by the daily deal sites, while simultaneously maintaining the long-term engagement that location-based games are usually better at. Priebatsch says that the big deal sites will often lead to a “one-and-doner” phenomenon, where businesses attract a flood of new customers eager to get in on a deal, and then watch as those customers never come back. LevelUp wants to fix that.

Clever. In the various smartphone business models I track, this cuts across several:

• Boring is Death: we are turning everything into a game. Everything. Shopping (and business discovery) will be no exception.
• Virtual is Real: back when magazines like Wired were getting started, you had these cyber-Rastafarian type dudes telling us we'd all be jacking into some "virtual reality." Wrong. We are porting the virtual into our reality. Not the other way around.
• Think Locally Scale Globally: LevelUp is a great example of this concept. Build a business that can satisfy a particular need, via the smartphone, in this case coupons and business location and commerce, and figure out a means of scaling this globally. Though LevelUp does not have the distribution yet, this concept appears in theory to leverage this business model.

It bothers me when my smartphone behaves stupidly. For example, I have travelled to a number of areas of the world. In the past couple years, however, my travels have been almost exclusively throughout the US and Canada. And probably no two countries on the world are more responsible for consumption, for using, consuming, disposing of the world's resources, on a per person level.

Which we will likely all agree is not a great thing. Sure, it's nice to be in that position, I won't lie about that. I'd rather have more to consume then less. Still, we are hurtling toward a world with 7 billion people and the amount of water, food, coal, oil, energy and other resources I consume are almost certainly not sustainable. To say nothing of any harmful effects such consumption inflicts on our world.

But fear not, I do not come here to preach. I am in no position to preach.

But I am in a position to complain. Because my behavior is unlikely to change without real, real-time and highly personalized data. My smartphone should provide this, but doesn't. Hell, I don't even know if it can -- though it ought to be able to.

I track the food I eat -- what is the 'carbon footprint' of my consumption? My smartphone ought to be able to determine that the Michigan apple I just ate, for example, is 'X sustainable' or has 'Y impact' on the planet. That grass fed beef from Minnesota. Is this overall positive? Is it within an acceptable level? My smartphone tracks my movements -- it goes with me everywhere and knows where I am at any point in the day. It should be easy to instantly input if I am in a car (by myself), or on a bus, for example.

My smartphone ought to be able to communicate with my computer and my television and my house. How much energy am I using? What can be minimized? What is my impact on the world? What are the alternatives if I choose not to alter my behavior? Did I really need a 15 minute shower this morning?

My head is in my smartphone all day, everyday. And I do not think that is a bad thing. Not for me. Without it, while it's easy to claim I could better see the world around me, this is in fact completely false. I could not see the true impact of the quantity and make-up of the food I consume. I could not and would not see the impact of my fresh water usage. Before smartphones existed, I had no idea then of my *actual* impact upon the world from driving to work rather than taking the train.

My smartphone ought to be able to open my eyes. Only it's not smart enough.

For those in the US, the images are not hard to find. On Fox News, angry, typically whiter, older Americans scream at the President and his followers for not ensuring that all the programs, benefits, *entitlements* and, well, middle class life they believe they have earned are not his chief priority. How dare he cut *their* Medicare and use that money for healthcare (for all).

On MSNBC, angry, typically whiter, older Americans scream at state governors and their followers, for not ensuring that all the good government union jobs and, well, middle class life they deserve are not first and foremost in their list of responsibilities. How dare the governor cut *their* good paying, high-benefit union jobs and use that money elsewhere.

Expect these stories, these images, and this anger to continue. Because America, your community, and the world, are all undergoing a *transformational* shift in work and wealth, jobs and opportunity. Only, here's the really scary part. It's not what 'they' do that is under assault. It's what *you* do. From Paul Krugman in today's New York Times:

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated. 

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here. 

And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

And now, cue the 'college education bubble' meme:

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.