As if the "R" word wasn't bad enough, the "D" word is apparantly being discussed at more than a mere whisper.

A new poll put out by CNN found that 60% of the American public thinks it's likely we're heading into a depression; not a recession, but depression. And I don't mean the kind that can be eased by Prozac.

At the same time, the Small Business Association (SBA) says small business loans have dropped 30% this fiscal year (which just ended on September 30) from a year ago.

Get Smart

Now that I've depressed the H-E-double hockey sticks out of you; here's where technology comes in to help tighten the budget for a bumpy ride. Look for technologies that shave money off the bottomline:

-Software as a Service
-Cloud Computing
-Off-site data storage
-Thin clients

By offloading as much of the IT department somewhere else; businesses can save on lower head count, less money on IT consultants, fewer servers and other racks of hardware taking up valuable office square footage. Less gear means less money. Less gear means less money on utilities to keep all those boxes cool.

Whether we're heading into a protracted recession or depression is up to the economists to call. But, it doesn't take the ghost of Milton Friedman to see our ox is in a ditch.

Three words: simplify, simplify, simplify. What you do with your IT department now could mean the difference between life or death for your company in the months to come.

For businesses with a fleet of delivery trucks or account executives who burn a lot of miles making client calls, the price of gas is obviously taking a toll.

Here's a way to at least budget for the pain at the pump.

AAA has a great little online calculator for tallying the cost in gas from here to there based on mileage, the make and model of the car and the cost per gallon by the region.

For businesses looking to switch out cars and trucks that get lower gas mileage, this little calculator is a good reality check in calculating savings. For example, I compared my mini-van to a Camry Hybrid driving round trip from Connecticut to Florida (Hi Mom!). The savings added up to more than a hundred dollars round trip. Not bad!

Note: there is also a service for cell phone users to search for the lowest gas prices in their zip code from their mobile device. Tip: make sure your drivers know about it. Companies with a dispatcher can look up the price for drivers and tell them where to divert to for a fill-up.

Weird Science

I'm all for thinking out the box. It's why I enjoy writing for this site; a perfect mashup of tech innovation and entrepreneural spirit. But every once in awhile I hear of someone's pipe dream and wonder just how much of the pipe they've been smoking.

CNN is reporting that a conference of scientists from allover the world will be held in Japan next month to seriously (keyword: seriously) discuss the possiblity of building an elevator to outer space. Yes, you read correctly; an elevator.

That's a lot of titanium (Callaway will have to find something else for manufacturing all those Big Bertha clubs).

Questions that come to mind:

1, What happens when the elevator gets stuck on the 76,000th floor?
2. Will this change elevator music as a genre? (Rocket Man, Space Oddity, Love in an Elevator, etc.)
3. Why not an escalator?
4. Is there a food court off the top floor?
5. Is it me or would this mean Earth would look like a ball of yarn with a knitting needle sticking out of it from the other planets? Why don't we just put a goofy sweater on mother earth while we're at it. Isn't global warming bad enough? Must we add insult to injury.
6. If we install an elevator to the moon and one from the moon to Mars, etc.; how long before we've built the universe's largest high school chemistry class molecular model of salt?

But I digress...

Wakcopa is yet another Web 2.0 tool; one among gazillions. But, this one is worth a look.

Wakcopa is a mashup/social network that combines a time management tool to monitor what apps you are using the most on your PC (And I do mean PC, it's for Windows only) and a way to see what other apps subscribers are using and recommending. It's a way to find new apps and add-ons through word of mouth.

I don't really care about the social network part of the site.

Must everything be a social network now?

However, I do like the time tracker that tells me how much time I'm spending using each app on my computer. Let's face it; much of our day is spent tippy-tapping on a keyboard or thumbing away on a little bitty keypad. This is a way to get a reality check on just how much time you're spending on Facebook, dinking with fonts and backgrounds on a PowerPoint file, etc.

There's something about Wakcopa that I like even better. I don't know about you; but my computer is always running much slower than it seems like it should. The culprit(s) slowing things down can usually be found in that little strip of icons in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

Wakcopa also tracks what apps are running in the background and for how long. It's a great way to figure out what needs to be turned off and what shouldn't be there in the first place.

Check it out!

If you have more than 1000 e-mails currently sitting in your inbox, then this posting is for you. Believe me, I've been there.

Here are some of the biggest reasons it happens:

1. I don't have time to read this now. I better save it to read later, just in case. (You probably won't. Ever.)

5. I may need to document this conversation some day. CYA! (question: what are the chances? Solution: folder)

The market went up from 1920-1929, rambled until 1941, up until 1965 and sideways until 1982.

Then it went up for 18 years until 2000. We've been in another sideways motion since 2000 and I've felt this will continue until at least 2010 or even 2020. Contrarian strategies work best when the market is flopping along sideways for decades. CANSLIM works great in bull markets.

What causes these 20 year trends. Human nature. When the market roars for 20 years, inefficiencies are created. People feel they can't lose and bid prices up crazily, as in the dot-bomb bubble. As the NASDAQ retreated from it's March 2000 high of 5000, money flowed into real-estate, creating a bubble there, which ultimately contributed to our current financial issues.

Knocking out the bubbles is like playing wack-a-mole. Greenspan killed inflation of the dollar, so we got dotbomb asset inflation instead. Then it moved to real estate. Each one gets bigger.
This one is $700 billion, the next is $7 trillion, and after that the whole world goes bankrupt.

That's if you try to fix it fast. Let it work itself out and you have what we've had for the last 8 years for another 12. That's my best guess as to what will probably occur here.

Take another look at that graph. Those 20 year cycles are hard to argue with. They seem to
just be a fact of financial life.

Curt is an author and CEO in Texas

IF YOU drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. A group of researchers led by Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University are putting the same accelerometer chip to an intriguing new use: detecting earthquakes. They plan to create a network of volunteer laptops that can map out future quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers manage.

So soon we will have dramatically more interesting data about earthquakes, and you can get involved too at this Stanford website.

Curt Finch runs a project management software company in Austin, Texas.

While Washington fiddles while Wall Street burns, many start-ups and smaller businesses are bracing themselves to see how this is going to play out in the weeks, months and even years to come.

At this site, we focus on technology solutions for small to midsize businesses, entrepreneurs and start-ups.

We're going to need them. I forsee many new problems begging for answers.

Some thoughts on recent events and you, dear reader:

- There's goes your next round of funding. Time to start thinking about "Plan B". For starters, slow down the burn rate. Figure out how to do more with less capitol up front, like pay-as-you go cloud computing and off-site data storage.

- If you're a fledgling eTailer... I won't even finish that sentence.

- I've recently been turned onto USC Professor Jon Taplin's blog. He has some interesting rants about the financial crisis making the case that a recovery will require more than a government bailout. He contends IT and energy technology are our best hope of restoring and overhauling this badly bruised, if not broken economy. IT and ET; that means you folks! Why? How?

"Just recapitalizing the banks is not going to revive the economy, The economy is going to have to be spurred to be a much more production-oriented economy, rather than a consumer-oriented economy. Seventy two percent of our economy is based on people going to the mall. That's not a competitive situation when you have a Chinese economy in which 65% of the economy is based on producing real stuff." - Professor Jon Taplin

That real stuff would be IT and ET products and services.

I'll leave it here for for now.

p.s. Today's headline is, of course, an homage to Bette Davis from the movie, "All About Eve".