RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — Wake up and smell the latte – in Beijing. Way to go, Starbucks.

Even as the mega coffee shop operator and creator of all drinks exotic moves to close 600 stores in the U.S. (including one in Chapel Hill and nine others across North Carolina), it is making plans to expand in China.

Twelve thousand Americans will soon be out of work as the Starbucks outlets close. Meanwhile, Starbucks is following the yellow brick road of dollar$ and Chinese yuan to the Middle Kingdom, just as most other American companies are as they look for profits.

Hey, I have nothing against free enterprise. But the media are saying very little about Starbucks’ own version of “off-shoring.”

“Starbucks Corp., the world's largest coffee-shop chain, will expand in China after announcing plans to close underperforming U.S. stores and slash jobs,” Bloomberg reported today.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — Recent polling data about which presidential candidate would be the better “commander in chief” is lopsided in favor of John McCain. Does Barack Obama’s race have anything to do with that?

A new – and disturbing – study from Duke University about America’s expectations of business leaders ( “The White Standard of Leadership” ) may help answer that question.

Americans simply expect business leaders to be white. Further, they expect white leaders to be successful. And this bias is found across racial boundaries.

So say researchers at Duke, the University of Toronto and Northwestern University. In other words, prejudice remains when it comes to beliefs about who should occupy the executive suite.

“Our results challenge a common explanation for racial

Editor’s note: Dean Takahasi covers high tech for Silicon Valley-based VentureBeat. He is covering the E3 show this week in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — Earlier this week I wrote that Sony finally got serious about the console war by cutting its price by $100. Well, it wasn’t true.

To word it that way makes it seem like consumers are getting a great deal. They’re not. Rather, Sony is unloading an expensive albatross it has had around its neck.

To his credit, Jack Tretton, president of Sony’s game division, didn’t call it a price cut. That would be true if Sony cut its price on the 80-gigabyte machine it now sells for $499 down to $399. At first glance, that is what it looks like. But it’s not true. It takes me a while to catch on to these things, but eventually it sinks in once I talk to people who are more observant than I am.

Sony’s bold price cut turns out to be a rather

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Did you have any idea that government can end pollution with a simple command/edict/law? Well, the Chinese government thinks so.

Air pollution in Beijing will be largely gone before the Summer Olympics open – because the government has decreed it.

The air in China’s capital is among the world’s dirtiest. But as Time magazine notes: “Beijing Orders Pollution to Vanish.”

As we in the U.S. grapple with soaring energy costs and environmental concerns of our own, perhaps we should follow the communist example: Government-decreed industrial and traffic “crunchdowns,” as Time describes them.

Kyoto goes mandatory for the Games that Beijing calls “One World One Dream.”

Factories are being told to cut emissions by 30 percent. Others are being shut down. And, starting July 20, traffic will be sharply curtailed.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Creativity unleashed is a wonderful thing. Just ask the organizers of “RTP Startup Weekend.”
When organizers and about 40 other people launched the event Friday evening the stated goal was to produce one working company concept in 54 hours of brainstorming. So what happened once the interaction started? The group came up with FOUR ventures. As promised, the event produced “pure entrepreneurial adrenalin.”

By Sunday night when an exhausted but exuberant group left for home, the companies complete with web sites and promo videos were online. Participants paid a whopping $40 to be part of the action. How often can someone start a company for that little?

Here’s the list and how the organizers describe them:

• Bars for Us (http://barsforus.com) “is