It was April Fool’s Day, 2011.

Matthew Bellows walked into a board meeting for his startup, Yesware. In the room were Brad Feld and Rich Miner, prominent venture capitalists from Foundry Group and Google Ventures, respectively, who had just led seed investments in Yesware.

Bellows, the startup’s CEO, had previously started WGR Media and sold it to CNET in 2004. He was an experienced entrepreneur and manager. But he had talked to 45 different investors about Yesware, an e-mail software startup, and found seed money surprisingly hard to come by. He was thinking the meeting would be a victory lap with his new investors. He was wrong.

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Imagine that psychologists are scanning a patients' brain, for some basic research purpose. As they do so, they stumble across a fleeting thought that their equipment is able to decode: The patient has committed a murder, or is thinking of committing one soon. What would the researchers be obliged to do with that information?

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The United States and the other major advanced economies are currently stuck in a seemingly endless twilight of slow growth. The numbers are ugly: The April 2013 forecast from the International Monetary Fund predicts that economic growth in Europe will average only 1.7% over the next five years. Japan is projected to average only 1.2% growth. Germany, held up as a paragon of success, is expected to grow at only 1.3% annually.

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Business-school literature has long stressed the importance of taking risks and encouraging rapid failure. In the real world of quarterly numbers, though, embracing failure mostly remains a throwaway line in CEO speeches.

At PBS Digital, we went beyond corporate lip service and demanded failure from each and every employee.

The results? The transformation of a venerated but legacy brand into a digital leader.

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Whether or not you become the next Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) depends on your entrepreneurship skills and how much you are winning to learn, take risks and work hard. We look at 10 of the best quotes on entrepreneurship. Read on to gain wisdom. “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.”- Richard Branson.

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Most of us accidentally break glass, but a group of scientists accidentally created it.

It's not just any glass, though. Cornell University researchers stumbled upon the world's thinnest pane of glass, measuring one molecule — two atoms — in thickness. The pane is so thin that it's actually two-dimensional.

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Reduced mobile phone roaming charges was the popular leading act in the European Commission's proposal to harmonise the telecoms sector, which also included controversial attempts to level EU access to the internet and radio spectra.

The proposals, released yesterday (11 September), are intended to kick-start the underperforming European telecoms sector, in comparison to its US and Asian rivals, and incentivise investment in ultra-fast broadband networks.

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In investing, comedy, and business, timing is a key component of success.  It’s not enough to have a sense of where the future is going, directionally – you have to have some sense of when it’s likely to arrive.

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Pushing around supply carts for miles, tending to plastic babies, and maintaining an ersatz operating theater are how one health-care giant figures out what saves money.

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Mumbai: When Saurabh Kedia, co-founder and chief executive of Sanskriti Infoedge Pvt. Ltd, Nepal’s first and largest online travel portal, decided to set up operations in India, he found it very hard to get investors in India excited about a portal in Nepal.

It’s a new start for 11 new digital ventures today … The LaunchPad start-up incubator in Dublin has taken under its wing 11 new start-ups after a rigorous selection process from 100 applicants. For the next 12 weeks, the chosen ventures will be nurturing and scaling their digital ideas, and they will each get up to €20,000 in micro-seed funding from the NDRC.

LaunchPad is just one of the many start-up incubators that have sprouted up around the island of Ireland over the past few years. This particular one is run by the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC).

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Twitter announced on, uh, Twitter today that it has confidentially filed an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO.

Companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue are allowed to submit their IPO filings confidentially under the relatively new JOBS Act.

After years of not making any money, Twitter began building its business through a promoted tweets product in 2010 and has recently courted television advertisers by allowing them to understand and target who is watching the shows on which they already advertise. One of the company's investors valued it at $10 billion last year.

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OK, Louisville. You’ve had the whole summer to sleep off that basketball championship and the Derby. School’s back in session. Six startups are spending the next 10 weeks in Louisville, Kentucky, with their heads down, pencils sharpened and proverbial thinking caps on as they begin XLerateHealth‘s intensive immersion program as its inaugural class.

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In 1954 one of Hollywood’s greatest artistic geniuses, Walt Disney, had a fantasy. Disney dreamed of building a giant amusement park unlike anything that existed in America. His chosen site was on 160 acres of farmland in Anaheim, an area southwest of Los Angeles settled by German immigrants. The problem was how to find financing for his project. His brother Roy Disney didn’t support the idea and the banks scoffed at Disney’s projection of a million visitors a year going through the turnstiles of the Magic Kingdom. William Paley and David Sarnoff both turned him down because they imagined a park that looked something like the tawdry sideshows and daredevil rides at Coney Island.

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Since launching my startup Learnemy (a web application that finds you instructors for anything you want to learn) last April, I have seen more than 450 learners and 100 instructors come on board. I started without knowing how to code. I started with zero programming knowledge and didn’t manage to find a suitable technical co-founder. And so I picked up programming.

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The heroes of entrepreneurship are often college-drop outs who left school to create billion dollar fortunes – think of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Such is the power of this college drop-out archetype that some prominent members of the entrepreneurial community have actively encouraged potential entrepreneurs to not go to college at all.  What should we make of the idea of the entrepreneurial prodigy?  Is it better to found a company as a fresh-faced drop-out or as an experienced (and maybe older) individual?

Cars entering UMBC’s campus from I-195 will pass by a collection of nice looking buildings and a Subway restaurant. When temporarily stopped to obey the four-way stop before crossing the intersection, passengers may notice the sign that says bwtech@UMBC.

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Canadian entrepreneurs seeking financial support got a boost Monday as the world's largest online crowdfunding platform officially moved north of the border.

New York-based Kickstarter launched in Canada amid a four-day visit to Toronto by co-founder Yancey Strickler.

Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) has launched the first cyber-security technology startup accelerator program in the U.S. The Mach37 Cyber Accelerator is intended to locate and leverage the wealth of cyber security talent in Virginia to create companies that will develop and launch new products. Mach 37 represents 37 times the speed of sound, which is approximately the same as the Earth’s escape velocity.

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We’re not trying to sound like your mom here, but seriously, when was the last time you cleaned your laptop? If you can't remember — or never have — then read this article and get to work, because you're long overdue.

Even just sitting on your desk, your laptop can get dirty. Dust accumulates and clogs the internal components of your laptop, especially in the fan. This forces the fan to run more often, which can lead to overheating. Allowing a laptop to overheat is one of the best ways to kill it, short of a sledgehammer. Since we love our tech, we want to ensure that yours lives a long and healthy life.

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