An investment banker was standing at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The banker complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, "Only a little while."

The banker then asked, "Why didn't you stay out longer and catch more fish?"

A GREAT STORY ABOUT LIFE......RICH BENDIS

After a wild year that saw the emergence of so-called super angels and a surge in valuations for seed-stage start-ups, we caught up with Michael Kim, who invests in seed-stage funds, to talk about what to expect in 2011.

Kim is a former venture capitalist with Rustic Canyon Partners and a former member of the board of trustees for the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System. He left Rustic Canyon in 2009 to start up Cendana Capital, a fund of funds that invests exclusively in seed-stage or “micro-cap VC” funds. He hasn’t disclosed details of his investing or funding, but Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures recently raised a $50 million fund and disclosed Cendana was an investor in the fund.

Ideas and innovation occur in all parts of an organization. There is no on- or off-switch; to a greater or lesser extent, innovation is a natural part of organizational life. Whilst some employees face challenges for which others might already have a solution, others are just sitting on their good ideas. Very often, a large proportion of these good ideas do not become successful innovations because they are never introduced, evaluated, or even heard. In many cases strategic barriers and bottlenecks prevent organizations from developing good ideas into implemented and valuable innovations.

So, what are your big Internet marketing plans for the New Year? Will you be investing more in social media? Will you start blogging? Will you take a more proactive stance with self-promotion? Whatever your online marketing plans, the end goal is likely to attract more people to your website in the hopes that the influx of new eyes will translate into new customers, new leads and new opportunities for your business. However, you won’t be able to do any of that if your Web site is turning people off, instead of turning them on.

Below are some very common reasons SMB Web sites fail to attract customers and how to avoid falling prey to them.

As a new year quickly approaches, make sure you don't miss out on the great information 2010 has to offer.

Get proven advice from experienced entrepreneurs as well as practical marketing techniques and more from these authors.

There are good jobs, bad jobs, and jobs that make you want to gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. Most of us can take the good with the bad, but when things at work are continuously awful, it's time to start thinking about a change.

Listen, I get that we can't all be Lego assembly testers, video game reviewers, or rock stars, but come on...how how much misery should we take before we start planning a job move?

Backed by Silicon Valley and glamorized by Hollywood, peach-fuzzed innovators like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have popularized the image of the successful entrepreneur as a swashbuckling whiz kid in his 20's.

But a group of studies is challenging the widely-held view that it's tech-savvy youngsters who are driving America's startup growth, which reached a 14-year high in 2009. On the contrary, some new data suggests that when it comes to launching successful startups, old guys rule.

We love lists. We love writing things down and checking them off. In our fast-paced lives, lists comfort us. They keep us on track. They confirm that we're actually accomplishing something. They allow us to stop thinking about one thing and start thinking about another.

Right now, people all around the world are hunkering down to set strategy for the coming year. So we offer you a timely suggestion: Instead of making a "to-do" list, why not make a "stop-doing" list? In other words, focus on the essential, not the important.

Five years ago, Staples made it a corporate priority to cut its carbon dioxide emissions. The executives at the office supply giant decided, however, that whatever methods they chose—improving efficiency, changing operations, or buying low-carbon energy—the effort also had to make financial sense. At the time, no one could argue that buying solar panels was a good investment, as payback periods for recouping capital were typically measured not in years but in decades.

For those of you who want to get in on the ground floor of a new venture, but haven’t yet worked up the nerve to start your own, begin with a job at a startup. But first you should ask yourself if you are prepared for the realities.

Working for a startup is not a career choice, but more of a lifestyle. The long-term opportunities may be large, but near-term paychecks will be small, compared to large companies in the same industry. Stock options, if you get them, won’t help you pay the mortgage for a least a couple of years, and the value then is totally unpredictable. Don’t even think about health and dental benefits for your spouse and kids.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” wrote American advertising guru Allen Kay. Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group founder Steve W. Gilbert put it in more action-oriented terms: “Don’t predict the future, build it.”

These sentiments sum up the enduring legacy of the North Dakota Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (ND EPSCoR), a North Dakota University System program launched in 1986 to build an exemplary research infrastructure, develop human resources, and increase technology transfer from universities to the commercial sector.

1. Data‐Driven Healthcare. In 2011 and into this next decade, the rate of data generation from biological measurement will continue to accelerate. Making sense of this deluge of data from sources as disparate as electronic medical records, biometric sensors, population statistics, environmental factors, and genomics will be the interesting part! Nimble start‐ups that can aggregate and analyze these data will create tremendous value and advances in human health without the capital intensity of traditional healthcare companies.

Check out venture capital’s walking dead in the upcoming issue of Forbes Magazine. My colleague Maureen Farrell highlights four venture firms that haven’t been able to raise a new fund since 2005 and are basically running on management fees.

Among the “zombie funds” called out: Prospect Ventures’ $500 million 2005 fund; Sanderling Ventures’ $421 million 2004 fund; Healthcare Ventures’ $378 million 2005 fund; and Alloy Ventures’ $368 million 2005 fund.

Africa: Open for Business,’ is the report outcome of the Global Innovation Outlook (GIO), an initiative of IBM, which held in New York about two years ago when this article was initially published. The report featured some frightening indices of why Africa may not get it right in its struggle to join the information society. But it ends on an optimistic note that Africa’s challenge may well be a viable opportunity to activate growth on the continent particularly in the area of infrastructural development.

But some hard facts would suffice to press home the dismal presence of the continent in the evolving information society. The report, quoting from the Economist of London, notes: "When it comes to computing power, the gap between Africa and the broadband world is still a Grand Canyon. Only 4 per cent of Africans have access to the Internet. They pay the most in the world, around $250-300 a month, for the slowest connection speeds. E-commerce barely exists. Nigeria’s 140m-odd people have but a few hundred decently trafficked Websites in their domain. Blogging is a vibrant but peripheral activity.

It's a scene that's been played out all over America in the past few years: companies handing out severance checks, often to their most highly paid, experienced employees. For some laid-off workers, it becomes the push into entrepreneurship they've needed -- maybe even wanted. Those severance checks can be used as seed money, funding everything from one-person consulting shops to retail franchises. Here, four tips to help you launch your dream business, while minimizing the risk to that sudden stash of cash.

No. 1: Don't leap before you look.

More than anything else, severance provides money to live on while you answer basic questions for your business plan: What will it cost start? What will revenues be? Who is your customer and how will you reach him? When will you pay yourself a salary?

A homeless man with a "golden radio voice" turned into a viral sensation yesterday and has now received a full-time job offer and a house from the Cleveland Cavaliers, according to the New York Post.

Ted Williams, the soon-to-be former panhandler, reveals in the viral video that he went to school to develop his incredible radio voice before drugs and alcohol became a part of his life. He's clean now, however, and his hopes of radio and TV stations calling upon him for voiceover work have seem to come true.