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URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (85%); ARCHITECTURAL SERVICES (78%); INTERVIEWS (77%); CONSTRUCTION (76%); HOTELS & MOTELS (76%); REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT TRUSTS (71%) Architecture
COMPANY: RATNER COS (63%); VORNADO REALTY TRUST (52%)
TICKER: VNO (NYSE) (52%)
PERSON: DONALD TRUMP (84%) Robin Pogrebin; Costas Kondylis
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (58%) NEW YORK, USA (94%) UNITED STATES (94%) New York City
LOAD-DATE: February 5, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: The architect Costas Kondylis, in the sales office of Atelier, with a model of the building, which he designed. (Photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company



1165 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 5, 2007 Monday

Late Edition - Final


Internet Boom In China Is Built On Virtual Fun
BYLINE: By DAVID BARBOZA
SECTION: Section A; Column 5; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1438 words
DATELINE: SHENZHEN, China
When Pony Ma, the 35-year-old co-founder of China's hottest Internet company, sends a message to friends and colleagues, the image that pops up on their screens shows a spiky-haired youth wearing flashy jeans and dark sunglasses.

That is not how Mr. Ma actually looks or acts, but it is an image that fits well with the youthful, faintly rebellious nature of a company led by somebody who may be China's closest approximation to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young founders of Google. In the two years since Mr. Ma's company, Tencent, went public in Hong Kong, it has grown into a powerhouse that has crushed everyone else in the field.

No other Internet company in the world -- not even Google -- has achieved the kind of dominance in its home market that Tencent commands in China, where its all-in-one packaging of entertainment offerings and a mobile instant-messaging service, ''QQ,'' www.qq.com has reached more than 100 million users, or nearly 80 percent of the market.

''Everyone talks about eyeballs,'' said William Bao Bean, an Internet analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities. ''Well, they've got all the eyeballs in China. And now they're beginning to cash in on that.''

But the rise of fast-growing companies like Tencent is also worrying the Chinese government, which strictly regulates the Internet and is wary of the Web's ability to mobilize huge online political communities or perhaps to nurture underground economies.

A few weeks ago, China's Central Bank -- which oversees the country's $2.6 trillion economy -- even went so far as to issue a warning about Tencent's virtual currency, Q-coins, which allow customers to shop online for games, music and even virtual furniture.

A Central Bank official said the agency was studying whether Tencent's online tokens were a threat to China's currency, the yuan or renminbi. He also said the authorities would crack down on the coins if they were used to engage in money laundering.

That is far from Tencent's intention. Already one of China's wealthiest entrepreneurs -- worth an estimated $850 million -- the soft-spoken Mr. Ma says he simply wants to let people in China use the Web the way they want.

''I think every Internet user likes personalization,'' Mr. Ma said during an interview here. ''In 2005 and 2006, we came up with a new strategy: 'Online Lifestyle.' ''

While America's Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China's online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around -- 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

''They have what I call the largest virtual park in China,'' said Richard Ji, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. ''And in China, the No. 1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it's information. That's why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China.''

Tencent's rapid rise is one reason America's biggest Internet companies, like Yahoo, Google and eBay, have largely flopped in China. Analysts say the American companies struggle here partly because of regulatory restrictions that favor homegrown companies, but also because foreign companies often do not understand China's Internet market, which is geared primarily to entertainment and mobile phones.

Google has lost market share to the search engine Baidu. Yahoo recently transferred its operations to a Chinese company, Alibaba.com. And eBay, even after buying one of its biggest competitors in China, has continued to lose ground; last December it handed its Chinese operations over to Tom.com, which is based in Hong Kong, in a joint venture.

Chinese youth prefer instant messages to e-mail messages; they play games, form communities and even adopt virtual personas, or avatars, which requires selecting an online image or personality and then buying that character virtual clothes, hairstyles, furniture and perhaps even a virtual pet that must be fed with virtual pet food.

It is a world that now dominates the life of Li Meixuan, a 21-year-old college student in Beijing who became hooked on Tencent's QQ offerings in high school.

''I play with QQ about three to five hours a day,'' said Ms. Li. ''I usually play QQ games, buy game stuff from the QQ Game and buy decorations for my QQ show.''

Tencent will not release statistics on how its Q-coins are doing, but analysts say the currency is so popular that an underground economy in Q-coins has emerged, even though the coins are not redeemable for cash. Mr. Ma dismisses talk about the coins harming the Chinese currency.

''The media has misled the public,'' he said. ''A Central Bank official said that Q-coin did not affect the renminbi; it adds vibrancy to the economy. Our competitors raised this to intentionally cause panic.''

The controversy has done nothing to dim the company's stock price, which has soared about 200 percent over the last year, giving the company a market value of roughly $7 billion. The rally was fueled by Tencent's rising profit, which jumped 221 percent through the first three quarters of 2006, to $100 million.

Tencent was founded in 1998 by college buddies here in this southern China city, led by Ma Huateng, or Pony Ma, as he is known in English.

Mr. Ma has a boyish face and a quiet demeanor. But he is one of China's most respected entrepreneurs. And when he shows up at Internet conferences in China he is mobbed by young people eager to have a picture taken with him or to shove their name cards into his pocket.

Mr. Ma earned a degree in computer science in 1993 from Shenzhen University, where his professors remember him as a diligent student who always stood out.

''He left a deep impression on me,'' said Wang Jingli, the former chairman of the university's computer science department. He recalled how he once assigned Mr. Ma to solve a classic chess problem called the eight queens puzzle. ''He gave me all the answers in graphics, which was very rare among the students I taught.''

Later, Mr. Ma worked as a software developer for a paging and telecommunications company. But after making a lot of money trading stocks in his free time, he founded Tencent with his boyhood friend Zhang Zhidong. It was one of the first companies to offer instant messaging in China. But in the early days, profits were hard to come by.

''They didn't really have a revenue model, and they didn't know how they were going to make money,'' said Shirley Yeung, who was among the first to invest in the company for PCCW, the Hong Kong telecom operator. ''They were a bunch of young techies working in a crummy building but passionate about creating something new.''

In 2001, the company got a big infusion of capital from MIH, a division of a South African media company called Naspers. MIH paid $35 million to acquire about 50 percent of the company.

Tencent's fortunes improved later that year when the company teamed up with China Mobile, the giant state-owned mobile operator, to forward Internet messaging to mobile phones.

''That was our first bucket of gold,'' Mr. Ma said.

By 2004, Tencent was making a handsome profit on revenue of more than $130 million and Goldman Sachs was brought in to take the company public in Hong Kong, where Tencent's offering raised $184 million in June 2004.

Since then, the company has been on a tear. Other big Chinese Internet companies, like Sina, Sohu, Netease and Baidu, are trying to keep pace. And so are the American Internet companies, like MySpace, which is looking to enter China's market.

But Mr. Ma is not standing still. ''There are a lot of opportunities in the market now,'' he said. ''The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INTERNET & WWW (91%); BANKING & FINANCE (88%); CURRENCIES (88%); CENTRAL BANKS (87%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (78%); INSTANT MESSAGING (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); ELECTRONIC MAIL (78%); MARKET SHARE (73%); INTERNET RETAILING (73%); COMPUTER & INTERNET LAW (73%); BANKING IN CHINA (69%); UNOFFICIAL ECONOMY (68%); INTERVIEWS (66%); MONEY LAUNDERING (66%); ONLINE COMPUTER GAMES (73%); MOBILE & CELLULAR TELEPHONES (90%); PERSONAL COMPUTERS (60%) Computers and the Internet; Age, Chronological; Electronic Mail ; Computers and the Internet; Computers and the Internet
COMPANY: INTERNET CO (CAMBRIDGE MA) (92%); GOOGLE INC (57%); DEUTSCHE BANK SECURITIES INC (55%); CNINSURE INC (93%)
ORGANIZATION: Tencent (Co); Google Inc; Yahoo Inc; Ebay Inc
TICKER: GOOG (NASDAQ) (57%); GGEA (LSE) (57%); CISG (NASDAQ) (93%)
INDUSTRY: SIC8742 MANAGEMENT CONSULTING SERVICES (92%); NAICS518112 WEB SEARCH PORTALS (57%); SIC8999 SERVICES, NEC (57%); SIC7375 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES (57%); SIC6282 INVESTMENT ADVICE (55%); NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (57%)
PERSON: LARRY PAGE (57%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (54%) David Barboza; Ma Huateng (Pony Ma)
GEOGRAPHIC: SOUTH CHINA (90%); GUANGDONG, CHINA (73%) CHINA (99%); HONG KONG (79%); UNITED STATES (79%) China; Shenzhen (China)
LOAD-DATE: February 5, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Pony Ma, whose real name is Ma Huateng, in front of a projected image of a spiky-haired youth at Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen. (Photo by Natalie Behring for The New York Times)(pg. A4)Chart: ''Net Winner''Tencent is China's leader in the market for online entertainment and virtual communities. Its stock price reflects that success.REVENUE -- In millions3RD Q. 2005TOTAL :$44.8Internet entertainment services (Including online games, music and video streaming, social networking and virtual communities): 25.3Mobile phone services (Including content-based services, mobile chat rooms and instant message forwarding to mobile phones): 15.0Online advertising: 4.3Other: 0.23RD Q. 2006TOTAL: $93.2Internet entertainment services (Including online games, music and video streaming, social networking and virtual communities): 62.0Mobile phone services (Including content-based services, mobile chat rooms and instant message forwarding to mobile phones): 20.9Online advertising: 10.2Other: 0.1Graph tracks Tencent's stock price in 2005 and 2006.(Source by Bloomberg Financial Markets)(pg. A4)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company



1166 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final


Bug? Robot? Cyborg?
BYLINE: By BRENDAN I. KOERNER
SECTION: Section 3; Column 4; Money and Business/Financial Desk; OPENERS: THE GOODS; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 635 words
ARTISTS aren't typically cut out for wage slavery, and Mike Libby, a sculptor in South Portland, Me., is no exception. He has nothing but sour memories of his last workaday job, as a supervisor at a local print shop. ''I was managing lackeys, and I was just a lackey myself,'' he grumbled.

So Mr. Libby was oddly pleased when he was laid off in January 2005. With months' worth of unemployment assistance to tide him over, Mr. Libby realized that he would never have a better chance to start his own business. So he went to work building a stockpile of what he deemed his most marketable artistic creation: a series of dead beetles, wasps and other insects adorned with antique wristwatch parts.

Mr. Libby first tried melding together insects and human technology in 1999, while at a residency at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Interlochen, Mich. He picked up a dead beetle from beneath a vending machine the previous summer, and he had long been pondering its peculiar beauty. One day, for reasons he cannot entirely explain, Mr. Libby was inspired to disassemble an old Mickey Mouse watch and place the gears beneath the beetle's sheathed wings.

''I've always been interested in making a correspondence between things that aren't alike -- making something look one way, even though that's not the way it's supposed to be put together,'' Mr. Libby said, trying to shed light on his brainstorm. ''Picasso's art is a lot like that, to tell the truth.''

Mr. Libby spent a few years polishing his technique, at first working with only beetles, but later expanding to other insect groups. He begins by removing the insect's innards, then darkening the interior with stain, in order to sharpen the contrast with the brass or silver-colored watch parts. He then glues the gears, screws and other hardware in place.

The sculptures may look fragile, but Mr. Libby says they are surprisingly resilient: ''I dropped one once from four feet and a leg broke off, but none of the mechanical parts.''

Rather than scour the Maine woods for dead insects, Mr. Libby started buying specimens from professional dealers, who cater to the sorts of collectors who hang butterfly-filled display cases on their walls. And he haunted estate sales in search of vintage watches to take apart.

Though Mr. Libby dislikes the word ''cyborg,'' that is perhaps the most apt description of the finished products: insects that appear plucked from a future in which artificial intelligence has triumphed over the natural world.

While still working at the print shop, Mr. Libby displayed the gear-laden insects at several of his art shows, but sold very few. Word started spreading in late 2005, however, after one of his friends built a Web site for the nascent business: InsectLabStudio.com. Mr. Libby, meanwhile, constructed around 50 of the creepy sculptures; each took 10 to 40 hours to complete.

Mr. Libby has sold about 30 of them so far, with prices starting at $200 for a butterfly with spotted wings to $500 for a spindly-legged spider with a red light-emitting diode mounted on its back. He has also worked on several high-priced custom jobs, at the behest of clients who pine after a particular species.

The bulk of his customers, he said, have been entomologists or fellow artists, along with a few forensic scientists who -- as fans of ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' will know -- often observe insect activity in order to estimate how long a murder victim has been dead.

Mr. Libby's collection of semi-robotic insects can be viewed on his Web site. But shoppers interested in buying one must send him an e-mail message, rather than clicking on a ''buy'' button. Aside from not being cut out for the 9-to-5 business world, it seems, artists like Mr. Libby aren't good at installing shopping-cart software, either.


URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SCULPTURE (90%); PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS (79%); UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE (72%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (70%); ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (62%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (79%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (79%); PATENTS (68%) Watches and Clocks ; Insects; Inventions and Patents
ORGANIZATION: A BETTER CHANCE (57%); INTERLOCHEN CENTER FOR THE ARTS (56%)
PERSON: Brendan Koerner; Mike Libby
GEOGRAPHIC: MAINE, USA (58%) UNITED STATES (58%)
LOAD-DATE: February 4, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos (Photographs by Mike Libby)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company



1167 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final


Thinks Big About the Little Guy
BYLINE: By MICHAEL FITZGERALD
SECTION: Section 3; Column 2; Money and Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2474 words
IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald's franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each.

One day, the restaurants' owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. ''O.K., Steve, what's your plan?'' he asked.

Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari's life.

''Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,'' Mr. Bigari said. ''He said, 'You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can't, so I hope you have a better plan than that.' ''

Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald's franchisee himself -- eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron's crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.

Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.

Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit -- as, he said, it did for him.

This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don't want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.

MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)

He acknowledged that his employees' pay scale -- an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores -- was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets.

It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned.

Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald's franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America's Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund.

He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron's practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.)

Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover -- the rates could hit 300 percent a year -- by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit.

He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers -- in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level.

Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees.

By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs studied the program.

They found that from 2000 to 2002, turnover rates fell sharply at all of Mr. Bigari's restaurants; three had rates at or below 100 percent. All of the employees who used some part of the programs said they felt motivated to work harder. In the same period, his profit margin rose more than three percentage points.

Debra Powell, a divorced mother of five who managed one of Mr. Bigari's restaurants, said the program helped many of her crew workers, which in turn made her job easier. She herself had money problems, and Mr. Bigari found a budgeting course at a local nonprofit agency; it worked so well for her that she required all the managers in her store take it, partly because many of them had never had checking accounts.

She used Mr. Bigari's program in 2003 to get a loan for a personal computer and in 2004 to buy the first car she had ever purchased, a used Chevrolet Cavalier she still drives.

She says she misses Mr. Bigari at work, though she receives bigger bonuses now that the McDonald's Corporation runs her store. (Franchisees pay rent and licensing fees to the corporation that can total 16 percent of gross receipts, Mr. Bigari said. Company-owned stores do not have to pay, so they can be more generous to employees.)

''I would trade the money to go work for him again,'' Ms. Powell said. ''He's not in it for himself; he's in it for the people.''

Inevitably, some of the people he helps suffer setbacks and cannot honor their obligations. Keeping track of them began to consume more and more of his workday, and those of some of his store managers. ''That's when we knew we had to change the model,'' he said.

In 2002, the same year he remarried (he and his first wife divorced in 2000), Mr. Bigari morphed McFamily Benefits into an independent nonprofit group called America's Family. He chose the name because the goal was to offer the working poor the kind of guidance and support that traditionally came from families.

He arranged for a local car dealer to create a used-car warranty program for participants, and persuaded a local credit union to make loans for things like cars and computers, and to make small, short-term loans so that employees could break free from rapacious payday lenders.

America's Family had to guarantee the loans, but it was helping employees to build credit histories, even though many of them had never before used a bank. He also began working more directly with local charities and government agencies to ensure that employees who needed services got them, sometimes even persuading government offices to change their operating hours to help meet workers' needs.

HE also began talking to local businesses about using America's Family. His first takers were two business owners who went to his church, Springs Community Church, part of the mainline Reformed Church in America. But, as even he has acknowledged, his plan needed a lot of work.

''Steve is a rah-rah-everything's-wonderful-here's-what-we're-going-to-do type of guy, and he's got this vision in his head, but it was difficult to get it boiled down for business owners,'' said Rebecca Kolb, who sells and supports janitorial franchises for a company called Jan-Pro.

Ms. Kolb says that Mr. Bigari has refined his message and expanded America's Family's offerings in the last five years, and that she can now see clearly that it helps her franchisees retain employees. When Mr. Bigari is ready to expand America's Family nationally, she said, she will ask Jan-Pro to adopt it.

He was spending more time on his charity efforts, but Mr. Bigari said he had no thought of selling his McDonald's franchises until he became an Ashoka fellow in late 2004. ''This would've just been a cool hobby if Ashoka hadn't come along,'' he said. Ashoka International finances social entrepreneurs worldwide.

Trabian Shorters, a co-director of Ashoka U.S., said the group was drawn to Mr. Bigari by the unabashed scope of his dream. ''Steve wants to fix working poverty, period, for everybody,'' Mr. Shorters said. ''That's audacious, but he means it.''

Barbara R. Kazdan, Ashoka U.S.'s other co-director, credited Mr. Bigari's nonprofit group with devising a systemic rethinking of how to help the working poor. ''He looked at the whole system that low-income people were caught up in and wanted to create a different kind of system to give them the support they need,'' she said.

As an Ashoka fellow, Mr. Bigari stepped aside from his franchises for a year to focus full time on his foundation. After his fellowship ended, in early 2006, he returned to his business. At one point, he told Mr. Shorters that one of his McDonald's outlets had bested a rival franchisee's record for serving customers at a drive-through -- 371 in one hour. Mr. Shorters congratulated him, then asked, ''How do you top that?''

That got Mr. Bigari thinking about what he was doing with his life. Last February, at Mr. Shorters's urging, he went to a social entrepreneurship conference called the Gathering of Leaders, organized by New Profit Inc., a philanthropic venture fund. He left the meeting convinced that he should become a full-time social entrepreneur, and by June had sold his McDonald's franchises.

That kind of speed reflects how Mr. Bigari likes to move. He jokes that he operates on Bigari Standard Time, which is a bit like life stuck in fast-forward. He is a consultant and a motivational speaker. He wrote and self-published a book about his ideas, ''The Box You Got,'' in three months, after a conference organizer asked if he had a book that it could give to those in attendance.

When Mr. Bigari got a too-good-to-be-true deal on a headquarters building for America's Family in Colorado Springs, he bought it in spite of the fact that it was 135,000 square feet too large. Then he brainstormed with friends and associates to build a mini-theme park called Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, complete with laser tag, Go Kart racing and other diversions, and had it up and running in less than six months. (Biggs is his nickname, and he likes to talk about Bigg ideas; a sample: ''If you are afraid of failure, get over it. Everybody fails.''

Mr. Shorters says it is not unusual for social entrepreneurs to juggle several projects that may seem unrelated. Tom West, an investor who is chairman of Exit41 Inc., a point-of-sale software company that has worked with Mr. Bigari, said in all seriousness: ''You don't want 100 percent of Steve. Ideally, you want maybe 12 percent of him.'' (Exit41 helped him develop a call center that saved money by consolidating the taking of drive-through orders from his McDonald's outlets.)

Mr. Bigari notes that he is using the restaurant in his amusement center to train chefs and other food-service workers, and that his speaking gigs can motivate businesses to pay attention to low-income workers, whom he calls ''the invisible people.''

Mr. Bigari says that he is at a starting point for the foundation, with a long road ahead; Ms. Kolb and others who know him said he has to prove that he can make the ideas work at businesses where the owners aren't part of his social network. He is using a $250,000, two-year investment from New Profit to expand his staff and develop his foundation's business model. He recently hired a sixth employee at America's Family, which has an annual budget of about $500,000.

HE is also starting to sign up celebrity advocates who can help build his foundation's profile. His first is Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, whom he met while negotiating a real estate deal. Mr. Simmons said he, too, had helped employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management. But, he added, ''I've only done a crumb of what he's done.''

For his part, Mr. Bigari says he is inspired by people like Joseph Johnson, who had to drop out of college after a family emergency. After working for a time in Phoenix, he sought a job at a McDonald's in Colorado Springs where Mr. Bigari was then the operations manager, becoming operations manager himself when Mr. Bigari became an owner. Today, at 37, Mr. Johnson owns his own McDonald's, one of the franchises that Mr. Bigari sold in June. (The McDonald's Corporation bought the rest.)

Mr. Johnson says that Mr. Bigari is a genuine leader, one who had no compunction about pitching in alongside minimum-wage workers at a fry station or behind a counter. ''The one thing we could all appreciate about him was he wasn't just the guy who would vision up something -- he'd be the guy who was there to execute it, too,'' he said. ''You weren't calling him in his timeshare in Hawaii; he was right there next to you.''

Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald's franchise has to face -- a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: ''What are you doing? You can't possibly make a difference here.''

Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, ''Did for that one.''



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