A recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report on entrepreneurship training asks a central question for anyone interested in starting a business: “Does entrepreneurship education make a difference?”

You might think that this question has been resolved. After all, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation reports that more than 2,000 U.S. colleges and universities teach entrepreneurship. How could all those professors teach something that might not matter?

As surprising as it may sound, we don’t know the effect that entrepreneurship training has on start-up company success. Relatively little research has looked directly at the benefits provided by entrepreneurship education; and the results to date are far from conclusive.

The term “Valley of Death” has come to describe the period of transition when a developing technology is deemed promising, but too new to validate its commercial potential and thereby attract the capital necessary for its continued development1. During this transition, there is often a funding gap due to the weariness of risk-adverse investors. This is especially true today with the depressed market, creating limited exit strategies for early investors.

Drug discovery often begins in academic research labs; many of today’s best selling and leading edge products have their roots in academia. These include Byetta, Copaxone, Geldanamycin, Emtriva, Alimta, Taxol, and Rapamycin. But the process of translating a laboratory discovery into a drug is fraught with difficulties. There is a tremendous gap between the time of the original discovery and the time to market.

Seven EU countries and the European Parliament have told the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that the European Commission's plans for a single patent court are unacceptable, EurActiv has learned. The move leaves Europe deeply divided on an issue that goes to the heart of efforts to boost innovation and competitiveness.

Who do you think has more influence, Kim Kardashian or Martha Stewart? If you picked the jail-bird, you'd be wrong: homemaking expertise has nothing on bold badonkadonk. At least on Twitter.

According to a new analysis by social media guru Dan Zarrella (who previously helped us learn Steve Jobs' presentation techniques), the Kardashian sisters are some of the most influential celebrities on Twitter. By studying click-through rates--the amount of clicks a tweeted link receives--Zarrella was able to graph celebs' influence on their followers (see chart below). Some of the names are not so surprising (Ashton Kutcher), but others, including British actor Stephen Fry and poet laureate "Weird Al" Yankovic, may come as more of a shock.

Influence comes in many forms. The Kardashian sisters may gain more clicks because of the many provocative photographs they tweet. On the other hand, someone like Lance Armstrong may reach more fans because of his powerful message. And then there are those who have a perhaps more "nerdy" following, such as "Weird Al," Stephen Fry, and Felicia Day. "Felicia is probably high because she's a web star so her followers are more web savvy and likely to follow her links," Zarrella says.

It ain't gonna happen this year folks. The 111th Congress will be remembered for many things. Reauthorizing SBIR won't be among them.

But, don't worry, they won't let it die. No one wants to be accused of killing a small business program. So it'll be extended as is, with yet another Continuing Resolution, and the 112th will have to start over. With a clean slate. All unresolved legislation is trashed, ya' know.

Hit the Reset Button. It'll be a brand new game.

If the polls are even close to being accurate, there will be a lot of new faces in both the House and Senate. Many of these new legislators are likely to have never even heard of SBIR. So we must start over again with educating, persuading, persisting.

Bob Dylan once said that ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’, but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa’s Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon.

That’s because there’s so much of it. For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation. Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless.

By all criteria, cash doesn’t work here. Could tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is almost certain. There is already a surprisingly strong base for this to happen. Thanks to a cobbled together-by-necessity system of money-transfer posts from Somaliland’s diaspora and a surging mobile banking industry, the country has to do away with cash. But first some background.

Starting your business is an exciting time – one that’s full of new beginnings and endless possibilities. As you focus on the big picture, it’s easy to ignore the minutiae of organizing your company. But those details matter – and ignoring them can be hazardous to your company’s health. In some cases, it can be fatal.

There are plenty of pitfalls startups can fall into, but here are five of the most common – and most dangerous:

Choosing the wrong entity – There are numerous corporate structures, including (but not limited to) sole proprietorships, partnerships, Limited Liability Corporation and C-Corporations.

Fisherman Wily Dean was trying to catch cow-nosed rays in Southern Maryland's Potomac River for a marine biologist this week, but he ended up netting an 8-foot-long bull shark. Unfortunately, the story doesn't have a happy ending for the shark. From NBC Washington:

"We had an interesting morning bringing it in," Dean said. "It was quite a fight."

Once the shark was captured, the next question was: What the heck do you do with it?

"I am probably going to have it mounted, maybe the head," Dean said. "Right now, the shark's in the freezer."

Behold, the face of the enemy.

(Why, yes, my nose is rather runny, why do you ask?)

Urge to vengeance aside, my main reaction while flipping through this gallery of pollen images was wonder at the intense variety of sizes, shapes, textures and tricks floating through the microscopic world of plant pollen. This group shot ranges from the (relatively) giant orb of pumpkin pollen in the center, to the teensy blue dot that belongs to the forget-me-not. Some of the grains seem like completely alien things, but others bear a striking resemblance to the plants they help create—for instance, I guessed that Venus fly trap pollen went with the Venus fly trap before I read the caption.

I've been hearing good things about yet another MIT Media Lab spin-out, PerfectSight Opticals, which comes out of work done at the lab's "Camera Culture" group.

A group of four Media Lab researchers developed a plastic lens assembly (cost: $2) that can clip onto the front of a mobile phone. When a user looks through the lens at the mobile phone's screen, she sees a set of parallel lines. She presses keys on the phone to make the lines overlap, and in about two minutes, the phone displays the proper prescription data. (See the videos below.)

The project won a $5,000 award at last spring's MIT Ideas Competition, and a small team working to commercialize the technology also was chosen as a finalist for the MassChallenge start-up competition this summer. The team says that "uncorrected refractive errors" (near-sightedness and far-sightedness) affect about 600 million people, and are the second most common cause of blindness worldwide. As you might expect, the majority of those people live in less-developed countries, where there isn't a Lenscrafters on every corner, and where the lowest-tech equipment for diagnosing eye problems still costs around $100.

We make decisions all the time. Big ones, small ones, easy and tough. Making the right choice can be obvious, and sometimes it requires time invested in thought. Luckily we have simple tools to help.

(1) Pro & Con

First, the basic Pro and Con list. A list of the good and bad aspects of a particular choice.

The Obama administration back in January promised $8 billion in funding for cities and states to build high-speed, intercity rail projects.

This week, the Department of Transporation issued its specifications for the manufacture of new fast trains, namely double-decker coach, dining, baggage, and business class passenger rail cars that can travel between 79 MPH and up to 220 MPH.

Bi-level rail cars not typical in the US today, would accommodate more passengers, and hopefully alleviate congested roads and some resulting air pollution.

As a longtime Apple TV owner, I’ll admit a dirty little secret: I really like the device. Sure, it has been one of the rare flops for Apple in recent years. And it could be so much more with say, a Blu-ray player or a web browser. But it is really good at its core functionality: bringing iTunes content into your living room. And that’s why this new version of the Apple TV makes sense — at least for now.

When I first bought the Apple TV, there were two varieties: a 40 gigabyte version and a 160 gigabyte version. I was torn between which one to get, but I ultimately went with the 160 GB one thinking I could put most of my movies on it. Big mistake. I basically never use the hard drive on my Apple TV, so it’s a 160 GB hard drive sitting there doing nothing. Instead, I stream everything to the Apple TV.

The answer to that question is: no. Not any more than the next person. They just like their business better. They took risks because they saw the goal. It was the dark side of building the company. They like to. But when it comes to savings and investment, no.

Well, actually, the most correct answer to that question is:

You can’t generalize. Some do, and some don’t. Entrepreneurs are a bunch of hard-to-categorize individuals, and who has good data, because all we really get are successful entrepreneurs.

There really is no one-size-fits-all approach to inventing that can be claimed to be a road-map to success that will work in all cases. Notwithstanding, there are certainly a number of things that can and should be done early in the inventing process if an inventor is going to pursue inventing as more than a hobby. I continually preach to inventors the need to follow what I call a “business responsible” approach, which is really just my way of counseling inventors to remember that the goal is to not only invent but to hopefully make some money. Truthfully, the goal is to make more money than what has been invested, which is how the United States Congress defined “success” in the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999. Odds of being successful with one of your inventions increase dramatically if you engage in some simple steps to ensure you are not investing time and money on an invention that has little promise.

In the late 1990s, as Silicon Valley's tech industry headed into boom-land, so too did New York City.

A slew of startups formed, many focused on "new media," or advertising on the Internet. I lived in the city for part of it, and it was a crazy time. Venture and corporate money flowed, and dot-com parties became a frequent occurrence in lower Manhattan, where many of the new media startups clustered. Somehow along the way, the moniker "Silicon Alley" was given to one of the densest urban areas in the U.S., where nary a computer chip firm was to be found.

The global unemployment problem is so huge that the total number of jobless in the ten most populous nations in the world totals 1.1 billion. That is only slightly smaller than the population of China.

Macedonia’s 33.8% unemployment rate is the world’s highest. The figure is 65.2% when the disabled, those no longer looking for work, and the elderly are included.

One of the great debates surrounding start ups is whether ideas or people are the primary determinants of success.

In the course of my career, I have taken both sides. Ideas are inorganic and often powerful; the quality of them alone has created many successes. But the people behind the companies are also powerful. There are endless examples of teams creating success from nothing.