Japan's economy is struggling to recover from last month's earthquake and tsunami. A Japanese business graduate says entrepreneurship is the answer.
City lights and billboards are turned off in Tokyo

Kai Ryssdal: Emperor Akihito of Japan toured the earthquake and tsunami zone today. He spoke to some of the hundreds of thousands of people who've been displaced by the disaster. Latest total cost estimate for all the damage is said to be about $300 billion. This week Marketplace's Scott Tong has been talking to people who'll be helping the Japanese economy work off that debt.

Today, a would-be entrepreneur and his prescription for kick-starting Japan Inc.

A plethora of industry reports indicates that travel and tourism are back, and, by the end of 2011, will be better than ever. Revenue is expected to reach nearly $1.4 trillion, a record, says Toon van Beeck, senior analyst at research firm IBISWorld. This means the opportunity in the sector will be “the biggest it has ever been.”

Just consider this set of glowing forecasts for 2011: International trips will jump 5.5 percent, to 94.7 million; domestic trips will rise 1.2 percent, to 627.4 million; hotel revenues will go up by 4.4 percent, to $114.8 billion; travel agencies will bring in 3.3 percent more revenue, making the total $12 billion; tour operator revenue will grow 5 percent, to $3.7 billion; and even the RV parks and campgrounds industry will experience a 1.5 percent revenue increase, to $4.5 billion.

The faster things change– the more we adapt to acceleration – the less time we have to think about the other options.

The faster the social web grows and creates widespread influence across global markets the more accelerated the potential disruptions become. Some say this will take ten years to realize the full impact of what we are witnessing while others don’t even recognize the changes happening around the them. When we forget how business is and has been – and instead, focus on what business can be and should be – then we can rediscover and reignite new paths to thinking.

The video for this fill-from-the-bottom beer dispenser has been sudsing up the Interwebs for about a year now. Yet, strangely, it has never reared its frothy head as one of Anthill’s breathtaking (often thirst-inspiring) Beer O’Clock innovations.

Sure, we’ve brought you this beer tossing fridge and Melbourne based Beer Vaults, but not this well-lubricated lubrication machine that can crank out more than 40 pints a minute from a four-tap dispenser.

The BottomsUp system uses specially designed plastic cups with a lift-able cap on the bottom held in place by a magnetic ring. Posts on the dispensers push up the cap, allowing the beer to be pumped in. When the cup is lifted from the dispenser, the ring reseals the bottom.

Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of our portfolio company Stack Exchange, posted an excellent answer to the question in the title of this post on the Stack site OnStartups.

I'm not going to reblog the entire answer here. I'd encourage you to go read Joel's answer. However, I am going to highlight some of the most important points from Joel's post:

* Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake.
* Before factoring in dilution from investors, the founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer. (go read Joel's answer to understand how he sets up these layers)
* It never makes sense to give anyone equity without vesting.
* Ideas are pretty much worthless.
* Nobody who is not working full time counts as a founder.

Each year, the organizers of MIT's CIO Symposium select a set of fledgling companies to demo their wares for the IT execs in attendance. The companies must be start-ups with less than $10 million in 2010 revenues, focused on selling to corporate customers.

The ten companies selected this year include a bunch from New England. (The company descriptions below were provided by the event organizers.)

- Apperian / Boston, MA
Apperian, the leading Mobile Application Management (MAM) company, takes enterprise apps to a new level of productivity

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Mentors tell you what you need to hear. When the message is the same from both, you don’t need the mentor anymore. In that sense, you should think of a mentor more like your advisor who has done all he can. You always need the friend.

Also don’t confuse a business mentor with a business coach. A mentor’s aim is to teach you what to do and how, in specific situations, unlike a coach who helps you develop your generic skills for deciding what to do and how. The mentor helps the entrepreneur fill an experience gap, and a coach helps fill a skill gap. Both may be required.

In what it hopes will be the final push, the European Commission yesterday (April 13) put forward two legal proposals to turn the long-held ambition for a single EU patent into reality, offering the come-on that if agreed, registering a patent enforceable in 25 member states will cost only €680.

One proposal deals with how patent holders obtain unitary patent protection while the other sets out the rules for language translation. The move comes despite ongoing uncertainty about the Patent Court that will be used to enforce EU patents, and the not insignificant fact that Italy and Spain have refused to sign up to the project.

This latest effort on the European Patent is part of a broader effort to revive and enhance the single market in a new act which is intended come into force in 2012 - the 20th anniversary of the creation of Europe’s open market.

In the first quarter of 2011, 140 Israeli high-tech companies raised $479 million from local and foreign venture capital investors, the highest quarterly amount raised in the last two years.

The figure is 39 per cent more than was raised by 100 companies in the previous quarter and 105 per cent above the amount raised by 91 companies in the equivalent quarter of 2010, which was the weakest quarter in the past five years.

The average company financing round in the first quarter of this year was $3.42 million, just short of the $3.44 million of the previous quarter, and sharply above the $2.57 million of the first quarter of 2010.

Sanya, Apr 14: Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa today said that BRICS countries will continue to enjoy strong and sustained economic growth.

In a joint declaration here, the leaders of the five countries said: "BRICS countries will continue to enjoy strong and sustained economic growth supported by our increased cooperation in economic, finance and trade matters, which will contribute to the long-term steady, sound and balanced growth of the world economy."

"We affirm that the BRICS and other emerging countries have played an important role in contributing to world peace, security and stability, boosting global economic growth, enhancing multilateralism and promoting greater democracy in international relations," the declaration reads.

Brad Feld is a fountain of knowledge & wisdom. I had the chance to sit down with him for an hour and ask him loads of questions that I thought you’d enjoy hearing. If you have time check out the video (or download on iTunes – Episode 27 - and listen at the gym or on your commute!).

Or, as always, summary notes available below.

Huge thank you to Steve De Long for the write up. I owe ya’ a 20 minute call (or in person next time I’m in San Diego).

WASHINGTON -- A major foreign policy goal of the Obama administration has been to "reset" U.S.-Russian relations, building ties between the two nations at all levels. Several Russian university presidents on Wednesday said that the closer relationship was helping them build much closer ties to American higher education, with a focus on expanding research collaboration and embracing something close to an American style of technology transfer -- a relatively new development for Russia.

Some 30 presidents and rectors of Russian universities -- all from institutions in the Association of Leading Russian Universities, roughly the equivalent of the Association of American Universities -- are here this week for talks with the AAU, the State Department and individual universities as part of "The Entrepreneurial University Forum," which is also being backed by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, the American Councils for International Education and several foundations. Organizers said that this was the largest gathering in a long time of Russian and American university leaders.

Having a great business idea is only half the battle. You also need to be an effective leader. Even some of the most innovative entrepreneurs can be hindered by insecurity or impatience. Below are some red flags to look out for. But don’t worry if any of them sound like you. If you catch a flaw early on, you can prevent it from doing serious damage.

Self-doubt. Don’t second-guess yourself. If you don’t believe in your business, who will? Worrying is a waste of time and energy.

The final version of the InvestMaryland legislation the General Assembly passed Monday night would give at least $47 million to private venture investors and $17.5 million to the Maryland Venture Fund.

The program had been touted as a $100 million venture capital plan by Gov. Martin O’Malley, but concerns from lawmakers scaled it back to more in the neighborhood of $70 million to $75 million. It had also been proposed to divide its money in half between private investors and state programs, but changes made in the House revised that breakdown to two-thirds for private investors and one-third for state programs.

01 / SolarCity >>

For being the nation's leading installer of rooftop solar panels. In sum, SolarCity has placed more than 10,000 solar rooftops--10% of the total in the U.S. Its major clients include eBay, Walmart, and Intel; it has also signed a deal with Home Depot to become the chain's in-store vendor for home panels at 400 stores.

02 / Enerkem >>

For finding the hidden power of trash. Its proprietary thermo-chemical system uses pressure, chemicals, and 800 degrees of heat to recycle 15 different kinds of trash into renewable electricity, chemicals for plastic, and ethanol that can run cars. The Montreal-based company is currently building two commercial-scale plants that turn trash into fuel.

In the post 7 Ways to Write a Better ‘About Us’ Page, I asked readers to submit their About Us pages for a possible rewrite in a future post. (LOTS of you responded.) I’ll get to that post in a week or so, but in the meantime here are words and phrases you should remove from your website — not just from your About Us page but from many other pages as well.

Since the only (human) audience that matters is your customers, let’s pretend I’m a customer. Here are my reactions to the following words or phrases that appear on your website:

1. “Innovative.” Just about every company claims to be innovative. Most aren’t. You don’t have to be innovative to be successful. But if you truly are innovative, show me. Describe products you developed. Describe processes you modified. Give me something real — then I’ll know you’re innovative.

2. “Service provider.” Everyone who meets a need is a service provider. When I fill up my car the gas station is a service provider: I need gas, the station provides it. “Service provider” says nothing. If you sell gas, tell me you sell gas. If you design commercial office spaces, tell me you design commercial office spaces. If you’re an Internet Service Provider, fine — otherwise, use plain language and tell me what you really do.

We’ve all seen this problem: 99 percent of the project is complete, but a last-minute hiccup prevents you from getting it across the finish line as planned. Perhaps there was a missed communication with a delivery service, or your documents file format was incompatible with that the Web site or client needed. Maybe you were missing a cable to plug something in. Whatever the issue, it happens time and time again. Enough so that there’s a name for it: The Last Mile Problem.

It’s not always just a case of bad luck or terrible timing. As Dan Pallotta explains in the Harvard Business Review, it’s more systemic than that. Often, we just communicate badly and make assumptions that virtually guarantee a glitch at the last minute, when we assume things should be smooth sailing. Here are some of his suggestions for creating a more rigorous environment to avoid last mile problems:

Question everything. If someone says something that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t assume the other person has a handle on things and it will be all right. Dig in, and you might find that’s the weak link that almost torpedoed your project.

The Facebook application High School Memories lets people share recollections of their teenage years. It might surprise some users to learn that the app’s creator isn’t old enough for high school himself.

Cyrus Pishevar, a 13-year-old resident of Palo Alto, California, developed High School Memories after seeing how popular it was for his friends to “tag” photos of one another on the social network.

“The big idea is to make memories a social thing to do,” said Cyrus, who learned entrepreneurship from his dad, the founder of five startups. “When you type in your memories, it speaks more than just pictures can, especially when your friends help you through.”

It looks like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might be joining the 21st century after all, and in the process, it may solidify social media as a legitimate media channel, and not a here today gone tomorrow fad that shouldn't be taken too seriously. The SEC is said to be considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks to raise funding using a new technique known as crowd funding.

On the surface, the idea sounds simple enough, tap into thousands of investors for small amounts of money, to help fund your business venture. If you're a small business owner, coming from a good place with a pure heart, and in need of funding, you're the ideal candidate to tap into a large pool of people and inspire them all to give you small amounts of money. Crowd funding works in a similar fashion, and the consideration is to allow social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to be the platform used to reach a lot of people in hopes of raising a lot of money.

It was credited with bringing US President Barack Obama into power in 2008. Crowdfunding attracted lots of relatively small campaign donations that amassed to make the biggest-ever election war chest for a presidential candidate.

In the current tough lending environment, UK businesses looking to find other avenues of finance can now implement the same strategy – or so the theory goes.

Growth creators
Luke Lang, co-founder of Crowdcube, which launched in March, says the business has taken the notion of crowdfunding ‘a step further’. Rather than backing social or arts projects – the main goal of similar sites such as Kickstarter in the US – Crowdcube offers ‘ordinary people’ a shareholding in high-growth businesses.