Each and every Groupon board member stood to gain millions, hundreds of millions, or even more than a billion dollars by accepting Google's $6 billion offer to acquire the company.

Groupon cofounders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky might have made as much as $600 million and $1.8 billion, respectively.

So how in a sane world could these people have told Google no?

How do you turn down hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth?

Everything gets a little busier during the holidays. There are parties to attend, things to bake, decorations to put up, and family to deal with lovingly enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my most favorite time of the year, but it’s also really easy to let productivity fall to the wayside in lieu of more fun winter activities. Even if you’re feeling a bit like playing hooky in the snow, you want to make sure you head into the New Year as productive and motivated as possible. Below you’ll find tips that have allowed me to stay motivated during the holiday season. Of course, I’d love it if you’d share what’s worked for you.

1. Plan Ahead

Be realistic about your time. If you know you’re going to be traveling or skipping out early, schedule those as days off. Don’t assume that you’ll be able to work from the train the same you can from your office or that you’ll be able to find a quiet spot to focus when your house is filled with family. You can’t. Before things get too crazy, take a look at your calendar and decide when it’s realistic to schedule work time and when you should admit you’ll need the day off. If you work those days in now, you’ll be able to plan for them so you don’t fall behind.

Too many entrepreneurs still believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and investors will throw money at you. Every investor I know is frustrated with the poor quality of the business plans they get. This is sad, since “how to write a business plan” is a frequent topic found in every business journal, and a common title in the business section of every book store.

What is the definition of a good business plan? In simple terms, it is a document which describes all the what, when, where, and how of your business for you, your cohorts, and potential investors. Forcing yourself to write down a plan is actually the only way to make sure you actually understand it yourself. Would you try to build a new house without a plan?

Make sure your plan answers every relevant question that you could possibly imagine from your business partners, spouse, and potential investors. That means skip the jargon and include explanations and examples. A plan that generates more questions than it answers is not a good plan.

Diving blue whales can dive for anything up to 15 minutes. However, Bob Shadwick from the University of British Columbia, Canada, explains that blue whales may be able to dive for longer, because of the colossal oxygen supplies they could carry in their blood and muscles, so why don’t they? ‘The theory was that what they are doing under water must use a lot of energy,’ says Shadwick. Explaining that the whales feed by lunging repeatedly through deep shoals of krill, engulfing their own body weight in water before filtering out the nutritious crustaceans, Shadwick says, ‘It was thought that the huge drag effect when they feed and reaccelerate this gigantic body must be the cost’. However, measuring the energetics of blue whale lunges at depth seemed almost impossible until Shadwick and his student Jeremy Goldbogen got chatting to John Hildebrand, John Calambokidis, Erin Oleson and Greg Schorr who were skilfully attaching hydrophones, pressure sensors and two-axis accelerometers to the elusive animals. Shadwick and Goldbogen realised that they could use Calambokidis’s measurements to calculate the energetic cost of blue whale lunges. They publish their discovery that blue whales swallow almost 2,000,000kJ (almost 480,000kcalories) in a mouthful of krill, and take in 90 times as much energy as they burn during a single dive in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

“I have a short five-slide deck to share that provides a solid framework for understanding our business.”

Since moving to San Francisco a little over a year ago, I have spent every day helping to build Socialcast and about.me.  During this time, I have raised more than $10 million combined over 3 funding rounds for both Socialcast and about.me.  Convincing venture capitalists to invest in two startups in less than 365 days was a challenging task, but one that quickly taught me the dos and don’ts of raising money. Here is an overview of the unique lessons I learned during the fundraising process, mostly focused on the initial meeting, which is the most crucial as you are introducing your company and vision for the first time.

"Ultimately, I've decided that the most relevant and generalizable piece of advice I can give to people is to notice what excites you.

I know, not exactly Aristotelian, but I actually think we're not by and large programmed to notice our ideas and inspirations as they pass us by. We're actually programmed to do quite the opposite. We're trained to pick a goal from a set of pre-defined options and then avoid distractions that might divert us from that goal.

The Great Recession has changed many mindsets – and accelerated critical emerging trends.

Do you still believe once you find “just a job” with a solid company, you’ll be okay? That you can then relax for the next decade; life will be fine?

Those days are gone.

Everyone – and I mean everyone – now needs to think of themselves as “talent” to be managed, or as a personal brand to be promoted – either by ourselves, our employers, or our next employer. In other words, we all need to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs.

When do we need to start thinking this way? Now.

Whether you’re in college, already in the workforce, or a Boomer workforce veteran – you MUST be building your personal brand. Your competition is already there – on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn cultivating their online reputations and networks; building their brand.

Not many people have heard of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA for short, much less know what it does. But this little-known government agency was created by the Department of Defense in the late 1950s to ensure the U.S. military's technical superiority. Even more interesting to investors, it also controls about $3 billion in research funds that act like seed capital that is strategically distributed to the private sector in hopes of creating technological breakthroughs that can be put to use by the military.

As the Chief Strategist of Game-Changing Stocks, I'm always on the lookout for "the next big thing." That's why it's a no-brainer to look through DARPA's current projects and ideas for potential blockbusters.

U.S. research universities churn out over 60% of our nation’s basic, game-changing research.  In this era of tight budgets, some universities are offshoring the work involved in bringing on-campus inventions to market, paying companies in India to do market research and low level legal work such as patent prior art searches.  It’s counter-intuitive, but could offshoring  the commercialization process of university inventions help bust out some of the un-used backlog of innovative university technologies, and actually *help* our universities create domestic, high-value jobs?   

Offshoring remains a taboo subject in our faltering economy, but it may not be as simple as we have been led to believe.  I share the same reservations about offshoring work that any American does — after all, I live in upstate New York, the land of decaying manufacturing cities.  However, strange as it may seem, universities that offshore knowledge work such as patent analysis and market research reports report a significant increase in new invention disclosures and happier faculty inventors.  It goes against what most of us believe, but there’s increasing evidence that offshored jobs do not decrease the number of domestic jobs.  In fact, recent research concludes that “an increase in offshoring pushes the average task performed by [U.S] natives toward higher cognitive and non-routine content.” (1)    

Once in a great while, experience teaches us a lesson that that can only be described as an axiom or a truism. It just is. You can try to understand its origins or debate its basis in theory, but if you ask me, that’s just a waste of time. You’re better off just taking it for what it is - an empirical observation - and benefiting from its implications.

Now, I know some of this stuff straddles philosophy and psychology, but there’s a good reason for that. While they are indeed “real world” observations, they were perceived through a subjective filter - my brain - which, for better or worse, includes all kinds of strange and diverse influences.

Mark Zuckerberg is the newest recruit in Warren Buffet and Bill Gates' Giving Pledge Campaign, agreeing to give away half of his wealth to charities.

The Giving Pledge is a movement--small in members, but large in funds--that was initiated by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and asks the world's billionaires, young and old, to do just that: pledge to give half of their wealth away before or after they die.

In September, Zuckerberg made a $100 million donation to Newark's public school system. Critics questioned the timing of that grant, which coincided perfectly with the release of the potentially damaging film The Social Network, a film said to portray Zuckerberg as greedy and friendless. But Newark Mayor Corey Booker defended the entrepreneur, saying that he had to convince Zuckerberg to not give anonymously and that the Facebook team was worried the move would be viewed as a publicity stunt.

This research report presents findings from the Michigan Public Policy Survey, an ongoing survey research program targeted at the chief elected official and the chief appointed official in every unit of general purpose local government in Michigan. This report focuses on issues related to economic gardening and broader "grow from within" economic development strategies.

Download the PDF

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is shaping up to be one of the most exciting devices in the coming months. Now we have 10 minutes of the tablet in action (below), courtesy of the folks over at the mobile device site BGR.

What surprised me the most about the demonstration is just how well suited the PlayBook is to media. RIM has been positioning the device as a more business-oriented alternative to the iPad, but from the looks of it, the PlayBook also handles music and video effortlessly as well.

RIM’s new operating system — based on technology from QNX software, which RIM acquired earlier this year — looks absolutely modern with zippy touchscreen response, and overall more polish than the best Android tablet on the market right now, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. The tablet also juggled multiple applications seamlessly in the demonstration, looking even better than the iPad’s recent multitasking update. One thing’s for sure, RIM needs to get this new OS on its phones as soon as possible.

A House of Representatives panel heard testimony on a proposal, backed by outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), aimed at allowing smaller companies to go public with fewer costs.

Federal law allows companies to conduct securities offerings of $5 million or less without filing a full registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The proposal, which hasn’t been introduced yet as legislation, would raise the dollar limit under the exemption, known as Regulation A, to $30 million.

The venture capital industry is pushing for the change, arguing that it will help smaller companies access the public markets and be a boon to job creation. The venture industry argues the current exemption isn’t useful to small companies because the current dollar limit is too low to justify the costs of going public.

Big dreams and lots of cash are happily colliding this week in Ann Arbor. Today begins the final three-day event for the inaugural Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, which organizers are calling “the world’s largest business plan competition.”

The event at the University of Michigan’s North Campus Research Complex is expected to feature 50 companies from the state and around the world and 28 student teams from Michigan public or private colleges. The competition, which has a company track and a student portion, is awarding more than $1 million in cash prizes as well as in-kind services, staffing, and software, according to its website. That at least places this contest among the largest of its kind, a group that includes the Mass Challenge competition in Boston, which awarded $1 million to 16 startups in October.

From Russia Today: "A US-operated Antarctic cruise ship with 160 people aboard has lost an engine in high seas, but is limping safely to its scheduled port. The Argentine Navy said the Clelia II declared an emergency on Tuesday, reporting it had lost an engine amid heavy seas and 55 miles per hour (90 km per hour) winds. The ship, operated by Polar Cruises of Bend, Oregon, has 100 passengers and 60 crew members aboard."