In addition to honoring charter leaders, on Thursday, May 10, the Indiana Public Charter Schools Association will honor House Speaker Brian Bosma for receiving the 2012 Charter Champion Award from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.   Across Indiana, there are an estimated 27,000 students attending 65 public charter schools. The number of students attending public charter schools in Indiana have more than doubled in the past four years.

In Indiana and across the country, charter schools are always public schools that cannot charge tuition and must accept any student who applies to attend, as long as space is available. Research indicates that public charter schools increase student achievement in reading and math, while boosting student scores on college entrance exams. Nationwide, there are more than 2 million children attending 5,627 public charter schools.

Celebrate Mother’s Day at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar

For 364 days a year, moms everywhere balance jobs, kids, households and more. This Mother’s Day, give Mom a break and show her how cherished she is with a sumptuous prix-fixe brunch at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. For $34.95 per person*, families can enjoy three courses of classic brunch dishes and Fleming’s favorites. In addition, an eye-opening brunch cocktail, Blood Orange Fizz, will be available, as well as Fleming’s traditional à la carte menu. As thanks for their hard work, mothers will receive a complimentary $25 Dining Card** to enjoy on a future occasion.

“Growing up, my dad and grandparents put extra care into making Mother’s Day dinner at our family restaurant,” said Russell Skall, Fleming’s Excutive Chef, who created the menu. “I wanted to continue that tradition and create a memorable menu for families to enjoy. Our entrées, including Filet Mignon Benedict and New Orleans-Style French Toast, are Fleming’s elegant twist on a classic Sunday Brunch.”

Guests will start brunch with Fleming’s signature Wedge Salad or a Fresh Fruit Medley, followed by one of five delicious entrée choices.

The tender Filet Mignon Benedict is cooked to order, topped with poached eggs and buttery béarnaise sauce with fresh lemon, shallots and tarragon. Fleming’s New Orleans-Style French Toast is made from thick slices of rich brioche bread soaked in Grand Marnier-flavored cinnamon batter, and topped with a generous dollop of housemade chantilly cream and fresh berries. A Sunday favorite at Fleming’s, Prime Rib, is slow roasted and served with a trio of sauces. Shrimp or Filet Frittata and a Steakhouse Filet Mignon Cobb Salad round out the main course offerings. All entrees are served with a choice of Potatoes O’Brien or Sauteed Green Beans.

To bring the meal to a sweet conclusion, guests can enjoy their choice of White Chocolate Bread Pudding with bourbon crème anglaise, Crème Brûlée made with creamy Tahitian vanilla bean custard and served with fresh seasonal berries, or Walnut Turtle Pie featuring housemade caramel, walnuts and chocolate in a chocolate pie crust. A prix-fixe children’s brunch is available for $16.95* for each child under 12 years old, and includes a fresh fruit salad followed by four kid-pleasing entrées, and a sundae or sorbet for dessert, plus a beverage. Blood Orange Fizz, a brunch cocktail bright with citrus flavors, is offered at a special price of $6.95. Maeve Pesquera, Fleming’s Director of Wine, created the brunch cocktail with Solerno Blood Orange Liqueur, Stoli Vodka, fresh lemon juice and a splash of club soda served on the rocks.

Brunch hours on Sunday, May 13, are 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Reservations are strongly recommended.

Fleming’s is located at 8487 Union Chapel Road in Indianapolis. Visit the website at www.flemingssteakhouse.com.

*plus tax and gratuity  ** $25 Dining Card valid May 14 – June 15, 2012

That pretty much sums up how customers want their experience working with a company to be. Whether you’re having a fence installed at your house or ordering dinner online, people want a seamless, quick and reliable result.

In the ongoing marketplace battle between convenience versus quality, convenience clearly has the upper hand. As long as there’s a baseline level of quality acceptable to most people, the majority of consumers prefer fast and easy over slower and better.

Take video. Sales of DVDs have dropped off a cliff, and while Blu-ray has picked up a lot of market share, its gains aren’t enough to offset the loss of DVD. Instead, more and more people are moving to streaming for movies and television, even when they have to pay for it through subscription services like Hulu or Netflix.

I’ve always been a big advocate of a physical medium for video, for a variety of reasons. There are far more choices – only a tiny sliver of what you can buy on disc is available for streaming – the sound and picture quality are unmatched, they usually come with cool behind-the-scenes features, and you have a perfect digital copy that will never degrade (assuming your kid doesn’t use the discs for skates).

But even I have to admit I’m using streaming more and more, simply because you can get what you want with the push of a few buttons and a short wait, and in a wide variety of formats. We often will pull up an episode of “Sesame Street” or “Barney” for our rambunctious toddler – on our big-screen TV, the smaller one in our bedroom, on our iPods or our Android smartphones.

I find I’m putting a disc in a player less and less often. The streaming show may not look or sound as good, but it’s easy. And easy wins these days.

A lot of people have been buzzing lately about the purchase by Facebook of a relatively little-known company called Instagram for the hefty price of $1 billion. Instagram is barely a year and a half old, has just 13 mployees, and makes photo-sharing software and apps.

It has also never recorded a profit, and like a lot of Web start-ups is unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future. Make sure to swing over to The Oatmeal, a hilarious webcomic, to get the artist’s take on Instagram’s newfound success and other 2012 Internet developments.

This, of course, comes on the news about Facebook’s own much-anticipated IPO, with rumors of the value of the young company hitting $100 billion (that’s a b, people) overnight. Somewhere, the Winklevi are crying.

But are those eye-popping numbers really supported by the company’s business model? There’s always been something ethereal about the way the markets treat Web-based company versus traditional ones. If you started a business making stainless steel dog poop-scoopers, and had never turned a profit after several years in business, it’s unlikely many people would want to invest with you. But if you’re making online widgets and never made a dime, all you need is media exposure and social media savvy to parlay that into a huge payday.

Take a look at this article questioning the real worth of Facebook. Analyst Larry Dignan notes that Facebook’s revenues for 2012 are on track to actually be lower than 2011. Worse yet, the amount of revenue they’re generating per user has fallen off.

It’s notable than even in its best year, Facebook has never generated $1 billion in total revenue. So how can a company like that justify spending that much cash on a tiny start-up specializing in sprucing up and distributing your homemade photos?

It’s way over my head, but essentially the Internet is approaching the later stages of the settling of the American west. The days of the early Web pioneers are long over, and people are staking out territory that they can build on later. That’s why companies that have never turned profit can have more value than an old-school ones that does — e.g., Huffington Post vs. newspapers.

“The Avengers” opens in theaters this Friday, and several members of the Coles team are pretty stoked to see the super-hero extravaganza, especially Web gurus Kevin Moore and Vance Vaden. It’s pretty much a national holiday for geeks, myself included. (As a part-time film critic, I’ve already seen the movie — something I haven’t hesitated to throw in Vance and Kevin’s faces.)

I was thinking about the fact that this movie has something that is extremely hard to attain, but is absolutely invaluable when you’re trying to market something in the marketplace, whether it’s a movie or a mobile device app: hype.

Hype can be created and boosted by traditional marketing methods — trailers, ads, etc. But by and large it is something that is self-generated by the audience. In the case of films, it means a campaign via social media and traditional media that can start months or even years before the movie actually hits local cinemas.

Hype is the equivalent of your audience selling your product for you. All a smart company has to do is feed them enough morsels of information to keep them hungry for more. The long tail of the Web will often do the rest.

Think about the movie “Snakes on a Plane” from a few years ago. It was a terrible, cheap exploitation flick, but its ridiculous title and cheesy trailer created a wave of expectations for the film that no regular advertising campaign could’ve matched.

Going back even further, “The Blair Witch Project” managed to conjure up a cauldron’s worth of hype through faux websites that purported to be real explorations of the mythology surrounding a fictional story about three documentary filmmakers who disappeared. Many people didn’t even know they were being tricked.

Apple is one company extraordinarily skilled at building hype for its products — even new version of the iPhone or iPad that instantly put the versions customers paid hundreds of dollars for just a few months earlier into obsolescence.

Hard to define, difficult to fake, and a must-have for products looking to make a big splash in the marketplace, hype is what company wants.

The article goes on to say that people with simple, easy-to-pronounce names tend to have an easier time getting hired. It comes down to basic human psychology, in that names that are harder to say become more difficult to remember, and thus the person is less memorable, too.

In their study, “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun,” published in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, university researchers Simon Laham and Adam Alter found that “easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names.” According to the study, the length of a name, how foreign it sounds, or how unusual it is does not cause disdain from others. Judgment is based solely on how easy the name is to pronounce. Evidently, those with easy-to-pronounce names benefit from their name’s pronounce-ability at work with more positive performance evaluations and higher status in the hierarchy.

Paggi addresses the question more from a Human Resources standpoint — not surprising, considering that’s her professional background. She mentions a case where a company CEO gave an employee with an ethnic-sounding name a nickname and ended up facing a discrimination lawsuit.

I thought it more interesting to look at the argument from a business/marketing perspective. Companies with easy-to-remember names often are the most successful.

Look at Apple, Google, McDonald’s, Ford, YouTube, Coca-Cola, Nike, Honda — their names tend to be short and have sharp, distinctive consonant sounds. Whereas companies like CompuServe and Mukhranskii’s Heating & Air tend not to stick in the mind. (OK, I did make that last one up.)

It’s not just a matter of having a plain name or using real words. Mash-ups of existing words or phrases can stand out, or names that sound like real words, but aren’t — ebay, Zune, iTunes, Zillow, Microsoft.

Take a look at this article via TechCrunch — a great name, by the way — about the pros and cons of different types of company names.

Remember, when naming a business or a product, you want it to be easy to remember and stand out from crowd. Discrimination is bad when it comes to hiring practices, but can be the secret to successful branding in a competitive marketplace.

A lot of people don’t notice the qualifier text and can easily be mislead by the headline. If the headline reads “Best Computer in The World” don’t quickly assume the one listed in the number one position is really the best, especially if the qualifier states “Based on the color of the fibers used in the cardboard packaging.”

Don’t succumb to list dogma. Read the fine print and you’ll see what I mean.

Corning has put together a really cool video of what they intend to use their products for.

Behold the glass of tomorrow.

Let me rephrase – I love the products of technology.

Most of us don’t care what is involved in making a great technological product, we just want to have it, use it and be amazed by how cool the product is. Most technology products involve assembly line production and I, for one, am grateful for the people that spend long, tedious hours making some of the greatest technology products in the world.

I found this video from Marketplace.org via YouTube showing how an iPad is produced. I think you’ll find it interesting.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.