Houston Tops Forbes Ranking for Young Professionals Relocation

From Forbes.com via the Houston Business Journal:

Houston topped this year’s Forbes list of best cities where a recent college graduate can get a strong start on a high-powered career. The magazine placed the Bayou City at No. 1 for its “business-friendly environment and abundance of oil money,” considering it is home to 14 of the country’s largest companies. Only New York City, fourth on the list, had more big employers, according to Forbes.

Houston also had high average incomes and a concentration of graduates from elite colleges — and not just from local Rice University — but from across the country. Texas fared very well in the studdy, both Austin and Dallas also securing a spot in the Top 10 — Dallas at No. 6 and Austin rounding out the list at No. 10.

To come up with the list, Forbes looked at all of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas across the U.S., and then eliminated cities with fewer than 1 million people, and cities where Moody’s Economy.com predicts job growth will be negative over the next year. Next, each city was ranked based on its current unemployment rate, then criteria was factored in such as what people earn, the ability to stretch a dollar in the city and how many public companies called that city home. Then Forbes counted how many members of the Class of 2000 at Princeton University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Duke University, Rice University and Northwestern University were currently living in each city.

Cities rounding out the list included Washington D.C. at No. 2 followed by Minneapolis-St. Paul, Boston, Seattle, Denver and Atlanta.

Houstonians Spend Far Less on Designer Coffee

From notes and quotes in the Houston Business Journal and the Denver Business Journal:

It seems that Houstonians are fooled by all the hype surrounding designer coffee beverages from Starbucks and other national coffee retailers. Mint.com, an online personal finance website, has posted it's lists of cities that spend the most and the least on designer coffee. Houston made the Top 10 list for Least Amount spent yearly on coffee, coming in at an average of $310/year per person in 2009 and around $27/month thus far in 2010. San Antonio made the spend the most list at an expenditure of $377/year per average person.

"Now, this will come as no great surprise, but Seattle -- Starbucks world headquarters -- tops the list, at $674 spent per person per year. In Seattle in the wintertime, you drive to work in the dark and come home in the dark, so you need something to keep you from running off the road into Puget Sound. Also not surprisingly, Las Vegas comes in at No. 2, with $391 spent on java in a year. After a long night of dissipation, it's a safe bet you'll need a strong slug of coffee."

Rounding out the Top 10 in yearly expenditure(s) comes :Portland, Ore. ($388); San Antonio, Texas ($377); St. Louis ($376); San Jose, Calif. ($366); Tucson, Ariz. ($362; must be iced coffee); San Francisco ($358), tied with New York; Denver; and Phoenix ($352)."

Everyone Grab Their iPhone & add the Houston Zoo Application

This from the Houston Business Journal:

Different kinds of animals tend to exhibit interesting social behaviors. Now the Houston Zoo hopes its human guests will take to a new iPhone application that taps into social networking Web sites.

The Zoo iPhone application — available at no charge — displays guests’ locations on the zoo grounds using real-time GPS coordinates and allows visitors to access photos and videos of exhibits and animals and access daily “Meet the Keeper” presentations. The application home page also includes a link to a live Twitter stream.

The Houston Zoo is one of only two zoos in the world, along with the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, to offer the locator application.

“We wanted the application to be a personalized guide for our guests, giving our visitors instant information about all the zoo has to offer so they can make the most of their visit,” said Kelly Russo, Houston Zoo director of interactive marketing.