Earlier this week I sat down with a startup working on an iPad app for news discovery. For several hours the talk revolved around user interface and experience, user acquisition and retention and the difficulty in penetrating a mobile market that is so flooded with apps that individual apps find it almost impossible to stand out. The mobile app industry has grown to mammoth volumes so quickly that even terrific products can't make an impact among the chaos. And without impact, there are no users and without users there is no business model. 

This startup is entering a field dominated by the likes of Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, News.me, News360 and several other new aggregation/curation apps. It is going mobile first (tablets specifically) and plans to roll out to the Web next.  I looked at the CEO of this startup and asked, very pointedly, “So what? What makes you think you can cut through all clutter to not only grab my attention, but keep it?”

Over the past couple of months we have been following 3 of the 10  teams that have been progressing through the SpringBoard accelerator program of fall 2012. They are iJudgeFighs, WeArePopUp and XtGem… But now it’s graduation time! SpringBoard will be setting off this weekend with all the startups involved in the program for a week long pitching trip spread between New York City and California. If you are an investor and would like to have the opportunity to see these great teams pitch, you can register to attend the events below!

Being a good partner may make you a better parent, according to a new study. The same set of skills that we tap to be caring toward our partners is what we use to nurture our children, researchers found.

The study sought to examine how caregiving plays out in families – “how one relationship affects another relationship,” says Abigail Millings of the University of Bristol, lead author of the work published online this week in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “We wanted to see how romantic relationships between parents might be associated with what kind of parents they are.” Previous research had looked at similar caregiving processes within romantic relationships or between parents and children, but rarely for both groups. “Our work is the first to look at romantic caregiving and parenting styles at the same time,” Millings says.

Leadership isn’t easy, but there are a lot of people who can tell you how it’s done! You can find about 69,000 of them on Amazon.com. Read a few, and soon you will be ready for the fitting of your halo and wings.

Last year I answered a question about Leadership on Quora.com. I have a special place in my heart for this website. The questions that people ask and answer there can range from tough to touching. The question I picked was, ‘What are the top 10 interpersonal skills found in great leaders?’ It was irresistible because I’ve met a lot of people who seem to believe that a team is only as good as its leader, and that is just not so!

We are pleased to announce the 2012 Top 100 Global Innovators list, honoring 100 corporations and institutions around the world that are at the heart of innovation as measured by a series of proprietary patent-related metrics.

Financial analysis of the acknowledged companies gives credence to their significance in that these organizations outperformed the S&P 500 by three percent in their market cap weighted revenue (15 percent versus 12 percent). This year’s winners also added 124,214 new jobs over their prior year employment figures.

Penelope Trunk

Entrepreneur Magazine called Trunk, a dedicated author and blogger, “the world’s most influential guidance counselor.” As surprising as she is informative, her tweets regarding business and life showcase her wit and personality.

Follow Penelope Trunk: @penelopetrunk

ST. LOUIS • Downtown was quiet on Sunday morning, except for the lobby of its tallest building. There, 25 St. Louis University students with bright ideas for a business milled about, chatting, rehearsing, hanging out with a make-believe Texan in a big white hat and Elvis sunglasses who called himself “Mr. Pitch.”

They were there for St. Louis University Center for Entrepreneurship’s first-ever Elevator Pitch Competition. It was a sort of speed-dating for the new business world, but with a twist.

Every good startup has a so-called “elevator pitch,” the quick come-on you would use to explain your idea to a potential customer or investor or partner. They are a pretty standard ingredient for a business plan competition. But when planning SLU’s student startup contest, Tim Hayden, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, thought he would try a different approach

We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. From recent survey feedback, it seems evident that the urban legends leading to success are wrong. The average entrepreneur is not the one who dumped a promising career, sketched his idea on the back of a napkin, and accepted millions from an investor to make billions of his own.

I was just perusing an older but still very relevant report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, titled “Making of a Successful Entrepreneur.” They surveyed 549 successful company founders across a variety of industries, and gathered their views on success and failure drivers. Many are predictable, all were interesting, and a few even surprised me:

At a startup or small business, every hour counts. You need to get things done and stay on task if you want to grow your business. As a leader, learning to beat procrastination will make you and your team more productive, more often.

We all procrastinate occasionally, but chronic procrastinators put off almost everything they have to do. According to Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago, and author of Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done (Wiley, 2010), about 20 percent of the global population can be classified as chronic procrastinators. They let the gas tank run to empty, miss concerts because they waited to buy tickets, or put off projects until hours before they’re due.

Entrepreneurial-minded people (and the ideas they generate) are extremely valuable to an organization. At our research firm, we recently conducted a multi-variable analysis of a group of serial entrepreneurs and identified five personal skills that clearly make them unique. "Personal skills" — often classified as "soft skills" — develop slowly over time, and we used them to help identify what job-related activities a person has developed. We primarily looked at people who started multiple businesses and experienced both success and failure.

After assessing the subjects on their personal skills and comparing their performance against a control group, we found a certain set of skills were the most predictive of an entrepreneurial mindset. In fact, by examining these five distinct personal skills alone, we were able to predict with over 90 percent accuracy people who would become serial entrepreneurs.

I received a newsletter in my email box in which there was a TV reportage saying:

"Cancer is finally cured in Canada but Big Pharma has no interest! The fact that the international drug & medical industry have no interest is because the cure is really cheaper than a chocolate bar and it won't get them to gain any profits at all."

The missions of Universities are:

• Research and knowledge production 
• Knowledge transmission through the publication of scientific articles and teaching to students and to professionals by continuing education programs 
• Professionalisation of students (the goal is to enhance their employability) 
• The commercialization of scientific discoveries, unique know-how and technologies developed by academic researchers  

Ask a venture capitalist if the much-bemoaned “Series A crunch” is real, and they’ll tell you it is.

And then he’ll spend an hour telling you why it’s not.

“Anecdotally, we’re as busy as ever with Series A deals,” said Bob Ackerman, one of the founders of Allegis Capital, a San Francisco investment firm. In a recent phone conversation with VentureBeat, Ackerman spoke about industry-wide yearly figures as well, saying, “There’s been an increase in activity.”

Let’s take a step back: Over the past week or so, news reports have suggested that some types of entrepreneurs are having a hard time raising Series A funding, which refers to the first round of capital a company gets from institutional investors. These entrepreneurs were able to seal smaller “seed” deals, no problem. But when it came time to raise a round larger than $1.2 million or so, they stalled out.

It's suddenly a lot harder for venture capitalists and startups to raise funds, as investors fed up with low returns turn their backs on the sector.

Most industry observers agree that lots of young firms will simply not be able to raise their next round of funding, commencing a period of belt tightening, consolidation and closures. At a minimum, it seems to mark the beginning of a more level-headed investment climate in Silicon Valley, after years of insatiable lust for all things mobile and social.

Much ink has been spilled about why technology makes it easier than ever to start a business. But connecting with consumers and brand advocates directly, in active online communities, is the real secret sauce, especially for B2C startups with an online presence.

On the flipside, social enterprise and non-profits have been particularly hip to this trend. And certain non-profits’ knack for touching the consumer directly and involving them in the social story behind the cause has, in turn, inspired for-profit founder.

It’s time for more entrepreneurs to reset their focus, and shift their thinking to completely different ways of doing things. Everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with improved usability, one more wind-farm energy generator with a few more blades, or one more dating site with a new dimension of compatibility. Serious changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

In searching for ways to get this message out, I came across a no excuse, no apology, recent book by Brian Reich, called “Shift and Reset,” which makes some excellent points on ways to increase the range of change in a person’s thinking, or an organization’s results. Here are some of the key principles that he espouses and I support:

Crowdfunding pioneers Indiegogo and Kickstarter opened up their fundraising platforms in 2008 and 2009 respectively, but 2012 may be the first year that tech investors and entrepreneurs took crowdfunding very seriously.

Hardware projects especially grew into full-fledged businesses after humble beginnings.

Some hardware entrepreneurs raised huge amounts via crowdfunding this year, notably Pebble Technology which raised $10.27 million in July on Kickstarter. The company is still developing and manufacturing its signature “smartwatch,” a time piece that also alerts its wearer with vibrations when a call, email or message comes through their smartphone.

Struggling to think of the perfect gift for the entrepreneur in your life? Sure, a new MacBook Pro, Herman Miller chair or high-res monitor always make great gifts. But try one of these budget-friendly alternatives, sure to please any hard-working, enterprising small business owner on your gift list.

Give Green: An Office Plant

Studies show that having a plant in your workspace can reduce stress, improve your overall wellbeing and reduce blood pressure levels. For example, one study conducted by Washington State University compared participants in a college computer lab that had plants with another without plants. The result? Participants with plants had quicker reaction times, were less stressed and felt more attentive.

Acquisitions happen all the time in the tech world. But how do they change a business?

Amazon acquired Zappos and didn't change a thing -- the company still operates out of Las Vegas, while Amazon is located in Seattle. On the other hand, when Google acquired Wildfire, it moved the company to its large campus.

On this episode of the Valley Girl Show, we sit down with Doug Ludlow, founder of the virtual postcard company Hipster, which AOL recently acquired. Ludlow says there are benefits to the relationship after the acquisition.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More stress appears to be a modest drawback of being an entrepreneur in America. In the U.S., entrepreneurs are slightly more likely than other workers to report experiencing stress a lot of the day "yesterday"-- 45% vs. 42%. They are also slightly more likely than other U.S. workers to say they worried a lot of the day "yesterday"-- 34% vs. 30%.

Importantly, the slight differences between entrepreneurs and other U.S. workers in daily emotions hold true even after controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, income, education, marital status, and weekly hours worked. This means that these demographic factors alone don't account for entrepreneurs' emotional health dividend; rather, there is something else about being an entrepreneur that relates to having more stress and worry.