One of the most critical (and most unsung) roles in an entrepreneurial company is not the founder or owner—it’s the role of that person’s significant other or spouse.  This has always been true, but the challenges (and importance) of these individuals is even greater and more crucial in the challenging business climate we currently face.

There is a somewhat prevalent myth that being the spouse of an entrepreneur is highly desirable—that it’s great to be married to someone who loves their work and is taking creative risks. That “being your own boss” leaves you with a greater income and higher flexibility to take time off for vacations or to attend to family needs.

Do you spend your entire first day back from vacation wishing you were still asleep and mindlessly clicking links from your Twitter feed? Here are 6 strategies for leveraging that week of relaxation.

When we last checked in with Carson Tate, the managing partner of Working Simply was making a business case for taking time off. A real vacation--completely disconnected from technology--she argues, is the key to unlocking real innovation and productivity.

Twenty years ago, I did something that ended up changing my life: I got my first email address. Now, I’m not one of those persons who simply got their first email in high school, or through an AOL account. Instead, email was something rather mythical that I read about when I found a book called “the hacker bible” in the IT department of a local book store. The book largely consisted of photo copies of slightly outdated hacker zines from both the U.S. and Germany, which left me with the impression that I had to build my own acoustic coupler and then somehow get access to something called a VAX to ever use email.

Luckily, I checked with someone at a small computer store first, where I learned that I could just buy a 2400 bps modem instead. They also gave me the contact info of a local hacker club. One thing led to another, and I was soon the proud owner of a 30 character-long email address. Initially, it didn’t get all that much use. On an average day, I’d maybe get one email, likely containing little more than the next move of an email chess game I’d play with a friend from school.

While politicians, financiers and social commentators have been preaching the importance of refueling the nation's innovation engines, university research teams have been turning principles into practice. According to MedCity News, the technology transfer forecast is now looking particularly robust in the academic community.

Educators around the country now seem poised to confront lingering ivory tower stereotypes, according to University of North Carolina business professor Don Rose, and are more focused on pragmatic pursuits.

For the last week we've been asking everyone we talk to in Silicon Valley which startups are working on cool stuff. What follows is a round of what the companies that people are most excited about.

A lot of young people are starting companies. But when you're young and inexperienced, you're more error prone. Nick Tart spoke to many young founders while co-authoring a book, 50 Interviews: Young Entrepreneurs, What It Takes To Make More Than Your Parents. He told us the most frequent business mistakes they made.

Google's layoff of 4,000 Motorola Mobility workers today—just three months after buying the company for $12.5 billion—is the first step in a high-stakes bet that it can reinvent Motorola as a competitor to Apple and Samsung using cutting-edge new technology.

But it will be a challenge to actually come up with a smartphone that makes a dent in a marketplace so heavily dominated by Apple and Samsung—all while convincing the handset makers that use Google's Android operating system that Google won't favor its own device.

When Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai started building their location-sharing startup, Foursquare, in 2008, they chose New York City for their headquarters, and Crowley's kitchen table in the East Village served as their first workspace. "We never even had a conversation about, 'the only way to make it succeed is to go to California—should we pack up our stuff?' " he says.

Given that the pool of Web developers was so much bigger in Silicon Valley, Crowley's decision might have seemed risky. But in the past few years, a growing number of startups have seen the Big Apple as a viable alternative to the San Francisco Bay area. This growth is fueled by a confluence of factors: the rise of several prominent startups, including Foursquare and the crowdfunding site Kickstarter; the arrival of venture-backed accelerator programs to help young startups get off the ground; a pool of engineers who have come to or stayed in the city as companies like Facebook and Twitter built offices in New York; and moves by New York City's government to encourage tech innovation.

OPEN INNOVATION recognises that RD is expensive. In some industries, it can be prohibitively expensive for smaller firms. The idea of open innovation is that other organisations can do the RD – at their risk – and you can pick and choose what parts of it you want as you are ready. Universities are particularly well set up to do RD and not good at manufacturing and selling, so in theory open innovation is a win-win partnership.

In 2011, University of Ulster launched its open innovation platform “Open Ulster” which aims to provide open access to its intellectual property. The university has been licensing the fruits of its RD for many years, but in the last few years had been looking at ways to make the engagement between business and its RD products as simple and transparent as possible.

Recent federal regulations have raised questions about the legality of many unpaid internships, and have put pressure on employers either to pay interns or to be sure the work is closely tied to academic programs, ideally with credit awarded.

For vocationally oriented programs, this is not a big conflict, as many such programs award credit for internships, and view internships as closely tied to the curriculum.

There are so many tangible examples of how online networking, especially LinkedIn can, has and does open doors and connections, not only for me but many others I know who are using it with very good results.

Very good results come from not only understanding how it works technically, but why it works. LinkedIn is a professional platform — not a social platform.  That’s important to know so you use it right and get the best results.

People connecting with each other, making referrals, introductions and recommendations are nothing new really in business. The difference today is how BIG the networking world has become with the web and social media. This is why LinkedIn used strategically can help you make  those smart, qualified connections.

When Kate F. Kitchener set out to design a green-jobs training program at LaGuardia Community College, she began by taking the pulse of local industry, but not in the usual way.

Rather than poring over labor-market reports—the most recent of which are months old—and cold-calling local employers, Ms. Kitchener used software that gathers up-to-date information on hiring trends and job requirements. In just a few minutes, she says, she was able to "see the skill set that

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you?

I’ve hit this before, but I still hear from too many unhappy entrepreneurs. Now is the time to put aside your fantasies, and take a hard look at who you really are, before you commit to the entrepreneurial lifestyle. If you recognize yourself in many of these quotes, you WILL NOT be happy in that lifestyle:

Fleeing from the scene of a violent supernova explosion, a compact runaway star may be the fastest traveling pulsar yet discovered, scientists say. The small but powerful star is rushing away from the source of the blast almost 25 times faster than most similar objects move.

When the dust clears from a supernova, the outer layers of the dying star blow into space, leaving behind a neutron star, which is a city-sized object with a mass comparable to the sun.

When I was interviewed at Google (my Alma mater), most people naturally focused on my technical skills. Not surprisingly, I was asked about search. My favorite question was, “How often do we need to re-crawl the Web, and how many resources will it take?”

“Umm, a lot, and a lot?”

“Wrong answer.”

“Oh.” But several interviews – including the one I had with Larry Page – focused on how I would fit into the culture. Larry had a rule of thumb that we always followed: “Don’t hire anyone you don’t want to have lunch with.”

Improving student achievement through innovation is the latest buzz in education. New test-prep programs, online learning platforms, e-texts, charter school hybrids, and so on are proliferating, but they are only changing the nature of how we deliver the same old content. No one seems to question exactly what students should be achieving beyond better test scores. What matters today, however, is not how much our students know, but what they can do with what they know. None of these innovations addresses this fundamental shift in what our students—and our nation—will need to succeed in the 21st century.

Many German digital and media companies, corporations, and startups alike, see our eastern neighbors more as a source for employees (“they have so much technical talent!”) than as hotbeds of innovation in their own right.

So I was intrigued when the training program I founded, Berlin Startup Academy, was invited to speak at the Bitspiration conference in Cracow, Poland, in June, and mentor at StartupYard in Prague in July.

To read the original article: Dear Czech and Polish entrepreneurs – ditch Silicon Valley, come to Berlin | VentureBeat

As a small business owner, you may think you’ve taken steps to keep your sensitive data private, but it may be more at risk than you realize.  In fact, your customer data, payroll data, banking information, email communications and more may fall into the hands of those it shouldn’t — and all because of sharing files.

When files are shared online in the cloud, there are a number of points of weakness that make those files vulnerable to falling into the hands of third parties, as this graphic shows: