WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A trade group representing top technology companies on Monday told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that it opposes the Trump administration’s focus on tariffs to try to change China’s unfair trade practices.

The Information Technology Industry Council said in a letter to Mnuchin that it supports the Trump administration’s “Section 301” investigation into China’s abuses of intellectual property, but instead of tariffs, it advocates a U.S.-led international coalition to put pressure on Beijing.

The world is certainly not short of entrepreneurs with a brilliant idea looking for funding. And indeed having more competition has only increased now that there are more funding platforms available to crowdsource cash for your world-changing concept. The flip side of that is that your potential investors are now global and you can be more visible than ever. The key? Creating a strong website that clearly communicates your missions, resonates with people, shows them what you have to offer, and allows them to connect with you. Work with the best IT support services to create a brilliant platform, such as Eberly Systems. If you’re after crowdfunding success, you need to get your shop window to the world the best it can be, and it will support your ambitions.

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If you want to start a business, you'll need advice on where to start, what pitfalls to anticipate, and how best to spend your time and money to get your idea off the ground.

While you may be tempted to spring for classes, seminars, and training sessions, books are the most accessible and affordable way to start learning.

Whether you're an aspiring tech entrepreneur or an artisan looking to sell your work, these are some of the most insightful books to read before you launch.

Being an entrepreneur is daunting enough with the constant hurdles in dealing with employees, sales, and customers; challenging yourself to be a better leader; and managing the personal drain on your mind. Knowing that you aren’t alone is a comforting feeling, but also surrounding yourself with like-minded smart people can be a differentiating factor. I’ve been in difficult times, and one of the best resources has been getting involved and experiencing some of the communities and organizations below that truly want to help entrepreneurs through those hard times.

Many Americans sit in a cubicle-based world and dream of being their own boss and “calling the shots.”

Business gurus make a fortune selling books and recording podcasts on how to build your own company. After all, who doesn’t want to make as much money as they can and take as many vacations as they desire?

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Brainstorming. Problem Solving. Creative Thinking. These are all characteristics shared by the successful business professionals. However, you would be surprised to know that even the most successful businesspeople hold themselves back creatively because of ingrained patterns and “fatal flaws” in the way that we approach thinking.

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Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their business, due to natural human tendencies and the pressures of business challenges.

CEO Satya Nadella talks about innovation, disruption, and organizational change.

In 2014, Satya Nadella was appointed CEO of Microsoft, making him only the third leader in the software company’s 40-year history, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Since taking the top job, Nadella has doubled down on cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and social networking while also pushing Microsoft to become more innovative, collaborative, and customer focused. In 2017, he published Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, a book reflecting on his journey from a cricket-obsessed childhood in India to leadership of one of the world’s largest companies.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella#/media/File:Satya_Nadella.jpg

Innovation has taken the world today by storm, leading to the development of new solutions to problems that humans have inherently faced. Since virtually every sector of life on Earth meets with some form of challenge, these innovations have touched on every aspect, including medicine, science, engineering and social life. Here is an outline of six inventions that are likely to define the world’s future.

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Movements from #MeToo to #TimesUp have upended the national dialogue around gender diversity, and empowered women to speak out around inequities and abuses of power across the industries. They've galvanized women to harness the energy of this unique moment in time with the mission to ignite much needed action in targeted, sustained ways.

In the 1930s, Laurence Rockefeller began investing his oil-anointed inheritance in technology and aviation companies. Several decades later, in 1969, the grandson of John D. Rockefeller brought his siblings together to found Venrock, the family’s official venture capital arm. (“Venture” plus “Rockefeller” equals “Venrock.”) Today, long after multiplying its fortunes through prescient bets on then-upstarts, such as Intel and Apple, the firm is embarking on a new frontier: cryptocurrency.

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Funding for U.S. and Canadian startups rose across all venture stages in the first quarter, and large exits also ticked up as both M&A and IPO activity gained momentum.

Overall, venture investors put $28.67 billion to work across seed through technology growth stage funding rounds in Q1 of 2018, according to Crunchbase projections. That’s up from $24.2 billion in Q4  and $18.23 billion in Q1 of 2018.

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A nonprofit designed to champion the groups working on innovation here in Portland formally launched today at TechFestNW.

Being “street smart,” or able to anticipate and deal with daily business problems and surprises, is generally recognized as a critical skill to have for business owners and entrepreneurs. Most investors say they can recognize this capability when they see it, but it’s hard to define if you haven’t been there. They say you can’t have street smarts if you have never lived in the streets.

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Every person dreams about becoming a successful Entrepreneur and make a passive income by working from home. It is the American Dream. Many may not realize that if you do not put in the time and the effort to make this dream a reality, than most likely it will not work out. Many do not realize how much work is put into making a business successful, or they are not willing to put in the effort. I have came up with the list of 5 tips to help you become a successful entrepreneur. 

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IBM recently concluded its 2018 edition of THINK, a conference that encompasses diverse digital domains and brings together some of the biggest names from the tech industry.

During the four-day long event which took place in sultry Nevada, the computing powerhouse pushed businesses, both large and small, to adopt blockchain technologies.

In addition to promoting the blockchain sector, keynote speakers at the event also highlighted various technological innovations that took place during 2017. Among the many showcases was the world’s smallest computer, designed by the IBM team themselves.

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Even in this age of videos and text messages, the quickest way to kill your startup dream with investors, business partners, or even customers, is embarrassingly poor writing. Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summaries, and business plans with one paragraph per chapter.

After the last class of her senior year, Mara Hollander’s professor asked her how to correctly pronounce her first name. Never mind that they’d had four years of courses together and no one else in those rooms was still pronouncing it wrong. Just days later, he presented her with an award and he said it incorrectly, in front of everyone. Congratulations.

Funding has been flowing into biotech over the past few years.

Over one week earlier this year, biotech and healthcare startups raised almost $1 billion in capital. And on Tuesday, a cancer-drug startup called Allogene raised $300 million in its series A round.

All the funding has led to a lot of unicorns, as companies with multibillion-dollar valuations have raised hundreds of millions, predominantly during their series A or B rounds.

Image: Reuters

Over the past few decades, Silicon Valley has been such a powerful engine for entrepreneurship in technology that, all too often, it is considered to be some kind of panacea. Corporate executives seek to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures, and policy makers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems.

This is a dangerous mindset. The Silicon Valley model, for all of its charms, was developed at a specific time, for a specific industry, which was developing a specific set of technologies. While it can offer valuable lessons for other industries and other problems, the model is not universally applicable.