It doesn’t get more local than this, a 30-minute photo shop in Irvine, California. Same store front since 1990. But this is an international enterprise now.

When I started, customer base was about 3 to 5 miles. Today it’s worldwide. People find us online through searches, through search engine, through twitter searches as well as Facebook.

Mitch Goldstone has tweeted some 32,000 messages. He has 10,600 followers on twitter where he broadcasts his promotions and he’s constantly trying to make a name for his company, Scan My Photos. He doesn’t just self-promote. He shares links and product reviews and blends into a running conversation online about “All Things Photo”.

If you are not into social media, social networking, you will be out of business. I am gonna repeat that you will be out of business if you don’t tweet, use Facebook and social media today.

Smart small business owners are embracing and profiting from this free tool. Just as Ido Leffler, co-founder of beauty brand, YES TO.

Today you don’t need to spend any money at all to set up a Facebook fan page. You don’t need a huge marketing fund to set up a twitter account. You need zero.

When an expensive print ad campaign fell flat, Leffler launched an online contest to find the face of the brand. It attracted 150,000 fans on Facebook. Sales doubled in 6 months. The social media, social butterflies learned to use these free tools to grow their business. But it’s not easy. Experts say the trick is figuring out how to turn posts and tweets into dollars and cents.

It’s great if you have, you know, 10,000 followers on twitter, but how many of them are paying customers. That’s where the strategic piece, a lot of small businesses overlook and the smart ones really focus on.

There are different kinds of natural forces and energies in our environment. We call these natural forces or energies the chi.

Most Hong Kong Chinese believe in aligning walls, furniture, and objects to create a natural flow of energy through their houses. I was curious about Chinese Medicine, so I signed up for a workshop with an herbalist.

In Chinese medicine, everything is considered to have the characteristics of either yin or yang. For example, herbs that are of cold and cool nature are regarded as yin medicines. And herbs that are of hot in nature are regarded as yang medicines.

According to this tradition, human organs and tissues also have attributes of yin and yang. When these forces are out of balance, a person will develop symptoms of disease. Certain herbs are thought to restore harmony.

A legacy of shipping and trade have made Hong Kong the city it is today. An interesting place to learn about South China’s seafaring past is the Maritime Museum in Stanley. Hong Kong’s deep and protected harbor has beckoned vessels since ancient times. But in the 20th century, the shipping industry mushroomed. In 1900, an estimated 11,000 ships docked here. Within 10 years, that number had doubled. Hong Kong continues to impress the business world with its import export prowess.

The single most fascinating thing is probably a present-day statistic that Hong Kong’s little Kwai Tsing container port, about a kilometer by a kilometer and a half, has the annual throughput capacity of every single container port of the west coast of the USA put together.
Wow.

No question, this maritime muscle is not to be trifled with.

Yes, it’s hard for folk to know how big, a really big ship is, and to show them. We took Hong Kong’s tallest building, 420 meters, 86 stories, and stood the world’s largest ship on its stern right next door to it. Big ships are very, very big.

All of the commerce rolling through this port creates plenty of demand for high-end hotels. While Hong Kong is generally inexpensive, hotel costs are on par with major American and European cities. The hottest new place to stay is the Landmark Mandarin Oriental with a great location right in the middle of the central shopping district. The state-of-the-art rooms have sophisticated electronics as well as marble baths. And the oriental spa offers the ultimate in relaxation.

Visitors who anticipate nothing but shopping and crowds are often surprised at Hong Kong’s abundance of open space and natural beauty. If you’re willing to explore beyond the high-rise jungle of downtown, you’ll discover that much of the region is made up of rural countryside and unspoiled coastline.

There are plenty of easy day trips. We are checking out Sai Kung, an enormous country park popular with locals, as well as the culturally rich island of Lantau. Before 1970 Sai Kung Park was a remote area that could only be reached by foot or on ferry. Then development of a huge new reservoir brought in several roads and opened up easy recreation for Hong Kong’s workaholic residents. Relatively unknown by tourists, the park can be reached by a 20-minute taxi ride or by local bus.

Located near the edge of the park, the town of Sai Kung is a busy marketplace and convenient gathering spot for fishermen and local villagers. You can easily hire a sampan boat and take a relaxing ride through the serene waterways. Looking at these little islands, it’s easy to imagine how Hong Kong Island itself must have looked before the British took control in 1842. For thousands of years, this was a quite, remote corner of China, occupied by small settlements of fishermen and farmers, and the occasional band of pirates.

Out there is a river valley that’s been carved into the rock. It’s been carved by running water, just flew down here smoothly off this rock bed and then cascaded down to the valley north there. Six thousand years ago, that was a big river.

Satellite images reveal that the river bed I’m standing in is just one of a network of past river valleys that crisscrossed the Sahara desert. Ten thousand years ago, this dry, empty place was entirely different. Little is known about the early Saharans who lived here then, but we do know that they depended entirely on water. Water formed the lakes in which they swam. Water nourished the plants which fed the animals they hunted. Water filled the clay pots from which they drank, but then the climate changed.

About five and a half thousand years ago, the Sahara began to dry. The rains failed, the river shrank and the lakes dried out. For the early Saharan people, there was only one option – to follow the rains and abandon the desert.

The fortunes of the early Saharan people revealed a universal timeless truth: our fate is inextricably linked to water. The problem is the water never stands still. It’s always on the move across the planet. We think of this as a blue planet, but while water is abundant, most of it is no use. More than ninety-seven percent of the earth’s water is salty ocean which we can’t drink or use to grow crops. Less than three percent is fresh water on which all human life hangs. What’s more, that tiny fraction is often hard to depend on, because fresh water has a life cycle all of its own.

The water seems so familiar, doesn’t it? But to see its remarkable qualities, you have to go to some extreme length.

The fresh water that we depend on begins its life in the oceans. As the sun’s rays beat down on the surface of the sea, they heat the water molecules until some evaporate. It’s the start of an extraordinary journey.

Here as water evaporates, it feels like it vanishes into thin air there. Although we barely notice it, water molecules are suspended around us all the time, just that we are only aware of it when they clump together as clouds.

a journey one time, less than a thousandth of the world’s water is up here in the atmosphere. It may not seem much, but this is what spreads water from the seas to the land.

The water molecule doesn’t hang around up here for very long. It fact, it spends less time up there in the atmosphere than the any other time of its journey, a mere nine days until a typical water molecule crashes the earth as rain.

For most of us, rain is perhaps the most familiar stage of the water cycle, but notoriously the least reliable.

As the water falls as rain, it joins a big system, cascading and carving its way across the land surface as streams and rivers. Look at that, water, absolutely everywhere.

Rivers and rain are of the parts of the water cycle that we depend on and yet they are only a tiny proportion of the world’s fresh water, amazingly two percent of all fresh water on the planet, the rest of the earth fresh water is locked away, down there on the ground.

What a landing.

The vast majority of it is stored as ice. Most of the rest seeps deep into the earth where it’s known as groundwater. Hidden away down here is the planet’s second large store of fresh water, but in the end, all water arrives back in the oceans and the cycle begins again.