Weather Trends International won a Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year - Up to 100 Employees - All Services in The 2009 American Business Awards. Bill Kirk will Chair the Judging Committee for the Company categories of the 2010 ABAs.

What book are you currently reading? 
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O’Reilly.

What was the last movie you saw, and would you recommend it?
The Lovely Bones.  A little depressing, but justice prevails in the end—and the special effects were surprisingly good.

What is your favorite sport or hobby?
Kayaking on a lake in the Poconos and then hanging out on the dock with my wife Roberta and our two dogs.

Who is your favorite historical figure?
Ronald Reagan.  I think he genuinely cared about people and the American Dream and less about himself or politics.

Who is your favorite living person?
Mom!

If you could choose another profession, what would it be?
Landscape architect.  They didn’t need those when I joined the Air Force, so my fallback was meteorology to help crazy F-16 fighter pilots avoid killing themselves during the Florida thunderstorm season.

What quality or qualities do you most value in your business associates?Contagious passion.

What do you think is the worst bad habit to have at work?
No passion!

Is there anything you'd like to improve about your own work practices?
Learning to be more patient—some would say a lot more patient …

As someone at the top of your profession, what keeps you inspired or makes you hit the ground running in the morning?
Loving what I do.

What do you consider has been your greatest achievement in business? 
Making heroes out of clients and early adopters of our year-ahead business weather-forecasting technology.  Imagine going to your boss and saying you just bought a long-range weather-forecasting service for $100,000 a year to help the company better plan retail or seasonal businesses. One of two things will happen next: A good boss will compliment you for being a true thought leader and promote you (which happened to many of our early clients); a not-so-good boss might ask what kind of medication you’re on before showing you the door (which happened to some prospects who never became clients).

What advice or useful tip would you give to someone who is just starting out in business? 
Have a passion for what you do and do what you were born to do.  If you don’t know what that is, keep your day job and figure it out before you go into business for yourself.  The greatest idea in the world will flop if it’s not something you love to do every day.  Once you’ve figured it out, give it everything you’ve got and believe you can achieve anything.

About Bill Kirk:
Bill Kirk is the CEO and co-founder of Weather Trends International (WTI), based in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. He has 20 years experience and a contagious passion when it comes to applying weather intelligence to business strategies in retail, manufacturing, utilities, media, consumer products, the financial sector, and the military.

Kirk helped WTI win six national and international business technology awards in 2009, including a Red Herring Technology Award and a Stevie Award; and WTI appeared at #5 on the Forbes Most Promising Companies list.  This is the second company Kirk has founded. (His first sold for a 28X return on investment.)  Kirk has worked with executives at many Fortune 500 companies to help them minimize their weather exposure by utilizing proprietary year-ahead global-forecasting technology. 
 
Earlier in his career Kirk served as a Captain in the United States Air Force.  He worked with NASA and the Space Shuttle Columbia ferry flights, briefed thousands of F-16 fighter missions, and saved the government millions of dollars in the procurement of a multi-million-dollar Satellite Data Handling System. 

As CEO of WTI, Kirk has published several business-weather and technical reports identifying winning strategies to capitalize on how weather influences retail sales and the overall economy.  Kirk is regularly featured and quoted as an expert in weather and retail sales on media and financial outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, ICSC, and Citigroup. He is named on four U.S. and U.K. patents as the inventor and co-inventor of business weather-forecasting technology. 
 
Kirk graduated from Rutgers University as an Air Force Distinguished Graduate with a B.S. in Meteorology.

About Weather Trends International
Weather Trends International offers businesses the competitive advantage of proactively planning for the weather over a year in advance. Its reports use proprietary forecasting methodology built on math, statistics, dozens of weather variables, and topography. This is combined with a formula to accurately predict weather trends week by week for 52,000+ locations in all 195 countries across the globe. The year-ahead reports and long-range forecast data feeds allow retail, manufacturing, consumer product, and financial clients to plan advertising schedules, determine where to allocate more or less seasonal merchandise, plan or reduce markdowns, and better estimate overall sales a year ahead with high confidence and low risk.  Additionally, Weather Trends International offers short range and year-ahead global forecasts and analytical assessments for grains, sugar, energy, and other weather-driven commodity markets across the globe.  For more information go to www.wxtrends.com.

Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts received the Stevie Award for Innovation in Customer Service in the 3rd annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Here we look at how the company is putting its knowledge of the Internet to good use.

Akamai Technologies, a leader in powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online, regularly produces white papers on trends and statistics based on information gleaned from its global server network. One of the most useful of these is their State of the Internet report, published quarterly.

The company recently released its 3rd Quarter, 2009 State of the Internet report, providing fascinating insights into key Internet data such as the origin of attack traffic, network outages, and broadband connectivity levels across the globe.

For the first time, this report also examines the average connection speeds of the top 10 fastest cities per continent/region. (Sandy, Utah; Beersheva, Israel; Wellington, New Zealand; and Lausanne, Switzerland are apparently cities that possess the top average connection speeds in their respective regions.) The report also begins to measure the connection speeds from major mobile providers. You can download the full report from the Akamai Technologies website, but following is a short summary of the topics covered:

Fastest Cities
The report introduces a “city view” of connection speeds, which reveals that a number of cities around the world have access to particularly high-speed connectivity. In Asia, Europe, and North America, for example, even the slowest cities in the top 10 saw measured speeds in excess of 10 Mbps. Other trends revealed at the city level show that Slovakia, for example, has four of the top 10 fastest cities in Europe, with average speeds between 11-14 Mbps. Brazil has four of the top 10 fastest cities in South America, with average speeds between 1.6-1.9 Mbps.

Global Average Connection Speeds
The majority of countries within the top 10 (based on average measured connection speed) saw average connection speeds increase on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Globally, the average connection speed increased 18 percent to 1.7 Mbps–a level consistent with the first quarter of 2009. Among the top 10 countries, seven of them saw flat to higher average connection speeds in the third quarter.

Romania, Sweden, and the Czech Republic all saw quarterly declines in their average connection speeds, though they all maintained positive yearly growth. The United States (ranking 18th overall), on the other hand, saw a small quarterly gain in average connection speeds, increasing to 3.9 Mbps, but declined slightly from a year-over-year perspective.

Also during the third quarter, 103 of the 226 countries measured had average connection speeds below 1 Mbps, down from 125 countries in the prior quarter. Akamai also measured average connection speeds below 100 Kbps in seven countries during the third quarter–half as many as last quarter. The lowest average connection speed seen in the third quarter was 43 Kbps on the island of Mayotte, located in the Indian Ocean between northern Madagascar and northern Mozambique.
 
Fastest U.S. States
Quarterly changes in average measured connection speeds within the United States were mixed in the third quarter. Of the top 10 states measured, 3 states and the District of Columbia saw speeds increase 15 percent or more, while New Hampshire and New York saw nominal decreases. Among the top 10 states, Massachusetts has seen the greatest yearly increase in average measured connection speed, growing 21 percent. In contrast, New Hampshire's average of 5.9 Mbps is 10 percent slower than in the third quarter of 2008.

Attack Traffic
During the third quarter of 2009, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 207 unique countries, nearly consistent with 201 unique countries in the second quarter. In a shift from prior quarters, Russia and Brazil unseated the United States and China as the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting for nearly 22 percent of observed traffic in total, half as much as was seen from China and the United States in the second quarter. Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at more than 3,800 unique ports, with the top 10 ports seeing nearly 95 percent of the observed attack traffic, up from 90 percent in the second quarter.

Internet Connectivity
In the third quarter of 2009, slightly more than 444 million unique IP addresses, from 226 countries, connected to the Akamai network–a 4.5 percent increase over the second quarter of 2009, and a 17 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. For the sixth consecutive quarter, the United States and China continued to account for nearly 40 percent of the observed IP addresses. The Top 10 countries continued to remain the same quarter-over-quarter, although Brazil moved up one spot (passing Spain to move into the ninth spot).

Mobile Connectivity
In response to the growing amount of Internet content being accessed through mobile devices, such as smartphones and laptops equipped with mobile broadband connection technologies, Akamai plans to begin publishing insights into metrics collected from connections to Akamai identified as coming from networks associated with mobile providers. Over time, the number of metrics and mobile providers examined in the State of the Internet report is expected to expand.

For the third quarter of 2009, Akamai analyzed the average connection speeds from 3 of the leading mobile providers within the United States. Initial observations show that the average connection speeds across the 3 U.S. mobile carriers approached or exceeded 700 Kbps. Although Akamai observed significant variability in the average measured connection speeds for the carriers over the last year, it appears that all three are converging on average speeds in the 700-800 Kbps range.

Akamai's unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of systems issuing requests to the Akamai network has created a one-of-a-kind view into broadband adoption around the globe. To learn more, and to access the archive of past reports, please visit www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet.

To download the figures from the Q3 2009 State of the Internet, please visit: http://wwwns.akamai.com/q309_soti_figures.zip.

Current highlights and historical trends for average connection speeds on a global basis can be found in Akamai's "Broadband Adoption Trends" data visualization tool, available at http://www.akamai.com/dv5.

About Dr. Tom Leighton
Tom Leighton cofounded Akamai Technologies in August 1998. Serving as Chief Scientist and as a Director to the Board, Dr. Leighton is Akamai's technology visionary as well as a key member of the Executive Committee setting the company's direction. As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications, Dr. Leighton's work behind establishing Akamai was based on recognizing that a solution to freeing up Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. Akamai has demonstrated this through the creation of the world's largest distributed computing platform that dynamically routes content and applications across a network of over 56,000 servers. Dr. Leighton's technology achievements at Akamai earned him recognition as one of the Top 10 Technology Innovators in U.S. News & World Report.

Dr. Leighton is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT and has been a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) since its inception in 1996. He has published more than 100 research papers, and his leading text on parallel algorithms and architectures has been translated into several languages. Dr. Leighton graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.S. in engineering. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT.

About Akamai Technologies
Akamai provides market-leading managed services for powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online.  Akamai pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, and today its services have been adopted by the world's most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai's global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight, and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com or follow @Akamai on Twitter.

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs and web sites that we think might be of interest to you.

Good Experience: Mark Hurst, founder of Creative Good, blogs on customer experience, user experience, human experience …
Leading Blog: A blog from LeadershipNOW which aims to to change the way you think about leadership.
The Talent Code: Author Daniel Coyle looks for ways to explore and improve your talents, with endorsements from Olympic medalists like Apolo Anton Ohno and Shaun White.
KR Connect: Views and comments from Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi.