It’s amazing how a $200,000 education often neglects the business basics that really make a difference. Unless you have your GPA tattooed on your forehead and a t-shirt with all your knowledge, your “brand” is more frequently broadcast by your appearance, interactions and demeanor.

I wanted to explore some business dining etiquette while dining in the professional world. Some of this guidance may seem a bit subjective but none the less, is what many seasoned, top notch professionals will take note of.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Two venture capital deals involving West Michigan companies follow a national first quarter trend of investors funding businesses in the later stages of development that have greater capital needs.

Grand Rapids-based Varsity News Network Inc. and Ablative Solutions Inc. in Kalamazoo were among the 14 deals made from January to March in Michigan for a collective $37.3 million, according to the quarterly MoneyTree report from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Image: http://mibiz.com 

As the founder of WP Engine, I receive weekly emails from startups proposing a “win-win” deal.  So far, approximately zero have resulted in an successful deal.

Here’s the problem, and how you can change your approach to business development so that it can succeed.

Distribution is the hardest thing for a young startup, defined as “getting in front of potential customers.” Large companies, on the other hand, have solved the distribution problem (proof: 100,000 paying customers).

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Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s when he began noticing a strange pattern among his patients.

When Dr. Maltz would perform an operation — like a nose job, for example — he found that it would take the patient about 21 days to get used to seeing their new face. Similarly, when a patient had an arm or a leg amputated, Maltz noticed that the patient would sense a phantom limb for about 21 days before adjusting to the new situation.

Image: http://under30ceo.com 

Only two percent of people can play Angry Birds, answer texts, and listen to NPR all at once without breaking a sweat. The rest of us can hardly multitask at all.

“The ninety-eight per cent of us…tend to overrate our ability to multitask,” claims University of Utah professor David Strayer. But in a new study, Strayer found a few participants who could multitask incredibly well — e.g.: drive and browse apps without ever losing focus, the New Yorker reports.

Image: Wikipedia 

The Israeli government is taking bold steps to integrate Israeli Arabs into the ‘Start-Up Nation’ by offering promising entrepreneurs and scientists 200 hours of free business consulting, plus research and development grants of up to 85 percent of the funding required to produce their new ideas in the lab.

Image: Israeli Chief Scientist Avi Hasson at the World Economic Forum. Photo: Screenshot / Flickr 

Ready to put an end to a devastating disease, Maryland-based biotechnology company Sanaria launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to eliminate the threat of malaria. The company is aiming to raise $250k to develop of SporoBot, a robot that will dissect mosquito salivary glands and to accelerate vaccine development.

The hardest part of my business failing was not the loss of the business. It was the loss of the identity that came with being a successful entrepreneur.

I had become so attached to this identity that when others asked how the non-existent business was doing, I said, “Great!” The chasm between the image of being financially set for life and owning a failed business was painful. I felt like a fraud.

Image Courtesy of Jeroen van Oostrom / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Alexis Horowitz-Burdick is the founder and CEO of online cosmetics store Luxola, which has raised US$10 million from investors. But before she was able to get to that stage, she adopted a brute force approach to raising money. Soon after starting Luxola, she created a list of 500 investor email addresses and contacted all of them. Half wrote back expressing interest in learning more, while the other half either turned her down or gave no reply.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

In recent years the power and potential of entrepreneurship has become more and more entrenched in public debate and the attention on this particular field of human endeavour has increased exponentially. This shift was well captured by Jonathan Ortmans, CEO of Global Entrepreneurship Week, when commenting that, “Entrepreneurship has been transformed from a subject of narrow commercial significance into one of substantive cultural consequence that signifies the potential of human endeavour for the benefit of all.”

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/63207726@N05/5752537230 

Two resumes reach your desk: One from Kevin Jones, and the other from Yevgeni Dherzhinsky. Their qualifications are identical. Which candidate do you hire?

According to a recent study, pronounceability correlates with trustworthiness--at least in the mind of the person struggling to put too many consonants together. Which is why you probably sent Yevgeni a rejection letter.

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In today’s business climate, your ability to sell is your ability to lead. Companies’ stock prices climb and plummet based on leaders’ ability (or inability) to sell their day-to-day decisions to shareholders, and college sports programs live and die by the head coaches’ ability to sell the program to student athletes, boosters, and fans.

Leaders are constantly in selling mode, promoting their ideas, their company, and their vision. All eyes are on the leader, and what those eyes see had better be impressive.

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Looking for volunteers for a good cause? You’re most likely to have success if you head to Utah.

That’s according to a new survey from Gallup, which breaks down by state where Americans donate the most time and money to charity.

 Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

In 1891, a physical education teacher named James Naismith invented the game of basketball when he nailed two ordinary peach baskets to the wall of a gymnasium. His students loved the game. But, there was a problem. Every time a player shot the ball into the basket, somebody had to get up on a ladder and take it out. That wasted a lot of time and it ruined the flow of the game.

Image: http://www.innovationinpractice.com 

Entrepreneurs are all about firsts, and the most important is you making a great first impression – on investors, customers, new team members, and strategic partners. Poor first impressions can be avoided, but I’m amazed at the number of unnecessary mistakes I see at those critical first introductions, presentations, and meetings.

The key message here is “preparation.” People who think they can always “wing it,” bluff their way past tough questions, or expect the other party to bridge all the gaps, sadly often find that what they think is a win, is actually a loss which can never be regained.

The era of real cyborgs has begun. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its first approval for the sale and marketing of a prosthetic arm that translates signals from a person’s muscles on Friday.

Informally known as the "Luke" arm (a reference to Luke Skywalker's robotic arm in Star Wars), the Deka Arm, which is controlled by electrical signals from electromyogram (EMG) electrodes connected to the wearer's muscles, can now move from research experiment to full-fledged commercial product. That's right, bionic limbs are about to go mainstream

 Image: http://mashable.com

One of the biggest challenges that wearable gadget makers like Google, Fitbit, and Jawbone face is convincing people to don their devices in the first place. A startup called OMsignal thinks the key is to fit the technology into something you already won’t leave the house without: a shirt.

Image: Holy shirt: Electrodes knitted into the fabric together with a small attached gadget lets the wearer of an OMsignal shirt track his heart rate, breathing, and activity.   

When it comes to tech, India is a country of contradictions. It’s home to massive companies like Wipro, Infosys, and TCS, it’s responsible for educating new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former Apple CEO John Sculley wants to launch a smartphone there.

At same time, however, the number of people with access to the internet in India remains relatively small. While it can now lay claim to the world’s third-largest online population, with nearly 200-million users, that number only represents a fraction of the country’s massive population. The same could be said of the its 100-million plus smartphone owners.

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