The prevailing business philosophy around social media are consumed with measuring everything with the aim of determining effectiveness.

The marketplace is exploding with tools to provide data insights, knowledge and wisdom about what are and aren’t effective social media strategies.

The obsession with measuring all things social is indicative of thinking inside rather than out. Inside thinking focuses on justification of time, energy and efforts all aimed at creating results.

Outside thinking focuses on learning market needs and intents. Do you measure market needs and intents? The irony of measuring all things social is that the measures are put for the moment.

The connections between your nerves and muscle deteriorate with age--a phenomenon that may help explain the serious loss of muscle that often strikes old people. New evidence suggests that caloric restriction--a nutritionally complete but low-calorie diet--could help prevent these changes. According to a study published this week, a very-low-calorie diet, and to a lesser extent exercise, can prevent or slow some aspects of muscle decline in aging mice.

The researchers hope that the findings will point toward new ways to stem loss of muscle mass, one of the most common problems of aging and a major cause of injury. They also say it could help them understand how similar factors affect neural connections in the brain. "Much of the research on aging in the nervous system has been done in the context of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's," says Joshua Sanes, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and one of the senior authors of the study. "Remarkably little is known about the basic phenomenon of aging in the nervous system."

Every real estate agent knows the value “curb appeal” brings to showing and selling a home. That first impression the buyer gets when he/she steps out of the car and looks at the property you want to sell often determines whether the buyer wants to proceed – and how seriously he/she will take the rest of the tour.

The same is true for your e-mail marketing campaigns – no matter what business you are in. The placement of elements on the page, the font choice, even the colors you use all create an impression before your prospect reads a single word of text. So you want to be sure the impression you’re creating is a good one.

Still, you don’t have to be a professional artist or designer to create an e-mail marketing campaign with plenty of curb appeal. These easy-to-execute tips will help you create e-mails that draw prospects in, encourage them to open the e-mail and leave them with the impression you want to make – that your business is professional and potentially helpful to them.

No doubt, you’ve taken some creativity training — either back in college or on the job. You know all about Creativity Circles, brainstorming sessions, and crowdsourcing innovation through suggestion boxes. And you know what?  It’s pretty much all hogwash.

According to Newsweek, brainstorming sessions were discredited as far back as 1958, when it was found that the technique measurably reduces the creative output of a group compared to what they’d accomplish separately. (I did not know that.)

So what techniques really work? Here are a few:

Exercise. As little as 30 minutes of exercise improves “almost every dimension of cognition” for at least 2 hours. It only works on people who are already physically fit, though. For out-of-shape folks, the fatigue outweighs the benefits.

This morning a got a email that hit me hard. This is a very smart and talented guy, with a great idea to create an innovative system for individual medical record management and processing. His email to me was...

To each and every one of you that have contributed to my new education, Thank You.

In my endeavors as a designer I find it difficult to quit but when it comes to the world of entrepreneurs I think knowing when to say enough is enough is not same. In this environment you need two things; luck and lots of capital, both which have run out. I thank you all for your support and advice and hope to keep in touch as I am sure I want to pursue the path of the entrepreneur, but with the lessons and perspective of all or your advice. You can find me at my personal email (sean@~.org) or on facebook sean@~.org as this email will be shut done with the site.

Thank you again for all of your advice and I am open for any other opportunities you might have now or in the future.

After demonstrating his skills playing Nintendo game “Rad Racer,” Lucas Barton in the movie “The Wizard” exclaims in a perfectly smooth, yet sinister delivery as the antagonist of a cheesy ‘80’s teen movie, “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.”

“The Wizard,” essentially a feature-film advertisement for Nintendo starring Fred Savage, has developed a cult following, mostly from those tuned into video gaming culture. The Power Glove that Barton found so “bad” (in a Michael Jackson way, rather than a negative connotation) went on to be considered one of the worst video game controllers in history, even despite its flashy cameo in the movie.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius yesterday announced the six winners of innovation awards in the first cycle of the HHSinnovates program, which is aimed at supporting a “culture of innovation” in one of the federal government’s largest departments.

“We launched the HHSinnovates awards program this year because we recognize that innovation is the lifeblood of continual improvement in our Department’s performance in serving Americans,” Sebelius said. “I am proud of all the candidate innovations that were nominated in this first cycle, and I thank all the employees who took part in reviewing and voting for the winners. I look forward to making HHSinnovates a permanent feature of the HHS landscape.”

Unless you literally run your business with your ears plugged and your eyes covered, you are aware of the importance of social media and its impact on both brand and bottom line. However, while social media is the topic du jour in mainstream news, on blogs, in books, at conferences and at your local Starbucks, we may still underestimate its overall promise and potential.

The socialization of business is comparable to the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the red pill in the Matrix. If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. Where there’s insight, there’s opportunity – but with opportunity, there’s also a cost. In this case, that cost is financed through learning, change, adaptation and innovation.

Google Books is one of the most straightforward projects in the Google meta-project of cataloguing and indexing every piece of data in the world. The human race has, after all, only been literate for around five or six thousand years, which makes the task measurable, if not easy. The project is also interesting for many other reasons — social, technological, and logistical. The impact of all of the world’s literature being searchable online is incalculable, but the methods being used by Google to accomplish that are a fascinating convergence of legacy and high tech systems.

If Silicon Valley has an angel, it’s Ron Conway, the legendary early stage investor who has backed many of the greatest Internet start-ups including Google and Facebook. Last week at the Social Currency Crunchup at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to sit down with Conway for a few minutes
to talk about technology, entrepreneurs, investors and the next big thing in the Valley.

In his avuncular selflessness, in his apparent concern for everything and everyone but himself and in that reassuring thick shock of silver hair, there’s certainly something angelic about Conway. But dig a bit into Ron Conway and you get a sense that behind all that reasonableness there’s a remarkably shrewd operator who has minted a fortune for himself, his investors and his entrepreneurs. My sense – for what it’s worth – is that the guy has multi-million dollar eyes. He is a brilliant watcher, an acutely sophisticated observer of the tech space, a remarkably perceptive businessman who doesn’t miss a trick. That’s where his unique talent lies and that’s why he is amongst the greatest early stage investors of our times.

Leveraging talent outmigration for purposes of economic development is an idea whose time has come. The common cynical retort is that those who leave rarely come back home. This criticism ignores trends, preferring a static snapshot. We are only beginning to understand the scope of the opportunity. A developing success story in Atlantic Canada:

Gordon Pitts, in his bestselling book The Codfathers, chronicled the success of East Coasters in the highest echelons of business and the professions in Central and Western Canada as well as the USA - and there are many others waiting in the wings. This is where a three year old networking organization called East Coast Connected has a key part to play in playing an advocacy role for our region, as well as providing networking avenues to attract back home some of the displaced expatriates.

Whether your business is a pre-revenue startup or a Fortune 100 company, one of the most important skills necessary to become a high-performing manager is managing cash flow. Unlike a Fortune 100 company chief financial officer, however, the average entrepreneur doesn’t have a staff dedicated to managing cash.

Entrepreneurs need to know a few significant rules about cash flow management.

Philip Campbell, a Round Rock-based certified public accountant has written a comprehensible book about managing cash flow. In his 25 years as a CPA, Campbell has worked for very large accounting firms, large companies and small to midsize companies.

Developing countries are increasingly embracing innovation and entrepreneurship as a key component of their social and economic development. To this end, business incubators and other types of business development service organizations are playing an important role in providing infrastructure, business advice and mentoring, networking, financing, and security to millions of business entrepreneurs in developing countries that otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to grow and scale up.

To explore this area further, infoDev commissioned a study, with support from IFC, that had two primary aims:

1. Draw lessons from sustainable ICT business incubators to develop a model that could be implemented at scale in developing countries, particularly in the Africa region; and
2. Propose an investment framework for evaluating prospective and existing ICT business incubators, as well as innovative mechanisms for addressing the financing needs of the incubated SMEs.
   The report produced from the study includes:

A new article on Mckinsey Quarterly outlines the top 10 innovation trends in business that are being enabled by new technologies — and shows how they trends are re-shaping the challenges and opportunities for companies, society and their ability to reach sustainability goals.

These trends are significant for our innovation work at Volans, partly because they reflect a growing way of thinking about the pathways to scale of business solutions to social and environmental problems (e.g. think about telcom operators in Africa providing banking solutions to the poor instead of banks).

But also because they say something about the way we work, as we find ourselves increasingly designing and delivering projects by working collaboratively with others — something I find fascinating in terms of management, as the project teams look more like distributed networks and ecosystems than traditional, hierarchical institutions.

When entrepreneurs pitch their companies, they focus on a variety of things. Some make dazzling PowerPoints. Some make sure to include a nice graph predicting "hockey stick" growth. Some feature their team, their team's experience. Some actually do feature their product.

But few demonstrate it with quite the skill and success of Twilio's Developer Evangelist John Britton. Twilio helps developers add voice and SMS capabilities to their apps. And sure, you could explain how Twilio works. You can have slides that explain your product's capabilities. Or, as Britton did at a recent New York Tech Meetup, you can just do one better and code a demo live in front of your audience.

Less than a month after making news for collecting its second round of seed funding, Cambridge-based online clothing exchange ThredUP is heading for San Francisco.

The news was first reported by Scott Kirsner on Innovation Economy. ThredUP co-founder James Reinhart confirmed that he has signed a lease on office space in San Francisco, and he and five other employees will move, while two others remain in the Boston area.

There has been much discussion about VCs doing seed funding in the past year.  I’ve written about it myself (Is VC Seed Funding Dead?) and (Is There Really a Signaling Problem with VC Seed Funding?).

Short summary of my posts:

1. There is a structural reason that VCs are investing at early stages,
2. Many (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, True Ventures, GRP Partners, Mike Hirshland at Polaris Ventures) do it the right way – we treat it as a normal investment and we don’t have a “options” strategy with our investment.  I’ve done
   
3. Many firms do it in a way that can be more detrimental to entrepreneurs.  They either do too many seed investments (for which they can spend no quality time with any) or they treat it as an option (“if you succeed come back and see us and we’ll match any term sheet you get”) – they view it as a sort of “right of first refusal.”
4. seed investments in the past year and they are 100% referenceable.

At Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference this morning: Wharton professor David Chu led Half.com founder Josh Kopelman, now of Conshohocken's First Round Capital; Marc Berejka of the U.S. Department of Commerce; and Andy Weissman of Betaworks in a discussion of how startup funding has changed.

They didn't say much about some obvious changes - the way there's less money in venture-capital funds than there was ten years ago, and fund returns are lousy, making it tough to raise more. Instead they focused on the online social networks and local groups by which "angel investors" and others with capital find good ideas and people they trust:

Kopelman: "The Internet has changed... the power system… When I cofounded my first company, Infonautics, in 1991 the ecosystem was v different… You would go to venture capital, and the (specialty VC trade) press would write about you." From places like Philly, as a result, "my ability to connect with VCs anywhere in the country was limited."

Since the economic downturn, small business owners seeking funding for operation and growth are finding it increasingly difficult to secure financing from banks and commercial lending institutions. As Project Director and Business Consultant for a non-profit organization and providing Technical Assistant to small businesses seeking funding through the SBA Community Express Loan program, several of the SBA lenders that I work with admitted being reluctant to lend but feel a little ease since SBA guarantees 80 percent of the loan programs.

What does this mean to small businesses? When traditional bank financing is unavailable, small businesses need alternative business financing sources to start or stay in business! To help, here are 7 alternative financing options for small businesses.