We talk about companies going through accelerator programs all the time. We bring you interviews with really great founders every week, where they share their experiences of being part of an accelerator program and share advice to those considering applying to one. We thought It would be really interesting if we could follow a couple of companies as they progressed through an intense accelerator program, kind of like in the movie Avatar, where Jake Sully documents his experiences in a webcam like format. Our goal with this is to bring you, almost in real time, the massive highs and lows that startups experience as they progress through an accelerator. SpringBoard Mobile Started in London last week, the programs goal is to cram a years worth of knowledge,  exposure and development into just 3 months. During this time the startups live and breath their company, meet 100′s of advices/mentors and receive a little bit of funding, somewhere around £15,000. We have interviewed quite a few startups that have already been through the SpringBoard program, please click on “tag cloud” on the right hand side of the post and follow the tag for SpringBoard if you wish to read them.

In light of all the talk surrounding a potential funding bubble and Series A crunch, entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon says entrepreneurs need to focus more on the product market. According to Dixon, there are two markets: financial and product. The two markets are related, but only partially. The financial market is the one between VCs and startups, while the product market is the one between startups and their customers.

Instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineers is essential if we want our bright young talent to innovate and then productize those innovations to better mankind. Tuition at top engineering schools is close to $200,000. For that, we, the American people get the best minds and the best ideas. But not all ideas from engineering students make it into the real world. In fact, most ideas never make it past the class deadline. Prototypes, solutions, disruptions sit on the shelf because they were designed for an engineering class not as a potential business venture. How to solve that is to integrate entrepreneurship into the fabric of the engineering program.

But not all engineering programs include entrepreneurship at all, let alone as a core competence. Entrepreneurship seems well integrated in a handful of schools: Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, and Stanford, which has recently opened Epicenter, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to “create a nation of entrepreneurial engineers.” But for most engineering schools, entrepreneurship is an afterthought, something taught out of the business school where engineers, those who dare, brave the walk across campus to a class that might change their lives – or our lives.

The popular view of a real entrepreneur is someone with a big vision, and a stubborn determination to charge straight ahead through any obstacle and make it happen. The vision part is fine, but successful entrepreneurs have found that the extreme uncertainty of a new product or service usually requires many course corrections, or “pivots” to find a successful formula.

This reality has fostered a popular startup approach which dramatically improves the efficiency and speed of these corrections, pioneered by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Eric Ries. His popular book on this subject, “The Lean Startup,” lays out how today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses.

The terrible recovery continues. Slow economic growth and high unemployment have kept household income on a downward trajectory.

A recently released Census Bureau report (PDF) reveals that real household money income fell again in 2011, marking the fourth straight annual decline. Median household real money income is now 9 percent off its 2000 peak.

Moreover, the typical American household now has 11 percent less money income than if the trend in income growth present from 1967 to 2000 had persisted through 2011.

Entrepreneurship is part of Temple University’s DNA.

Ever since its founder, Russell H. Conwell, envisioned Temple “as an incubator for the talent and creativity of Philadelphia’s working class,” the university has always provided opportunities for students to drive progress, President Richard M. Englert said.

On Monday, Englert joined in announcing a $3 million Blackstone LaunchPad grant from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation that establishes a partnership among Temple, Philadelphia University and the University City Science Center to promote entrepreneurship as a viable career option and to provide students and alumni with the skills, knowledge and guidance to transform ideas into viable companies. The Pennsylvania Blackstone LaunchPad programs are expected to generate some 100 ventures and hundreds of jobs during the next five years.

Y Combinator will limit the number of early stage startups in its Winter 2013 class. 

In its last batch, the accelerator produced more than 80 companies. It will limit its upcoming Winter batch to less than 50 startups.

YC founder Paul Graham writes on the accelerator's blog that in Summer 2012, YC simply grew too fast and "more things than usual broke" when it increased the number of startups from 66 to 84.

In a world of communicating with our devices, voice control seem to have gotten a lot of attention. But is that really what we want? The voice focus in products Looking at Siri in iOS, Voice Actions for Android, Google’s Project Glass and much more, there’s an amazingly strong focus on conversing with your phone/device. There is, or about to be, voice commands for any action you can think of, and more and more are added as we speak (sorry, not that funny).

Thomas A. McDonnell has been named president and chief executive officer of the Kauffman Foundation. McDonnell, an experienced business leader with a track record of building global organizations that are both innovative and philanthropic, has been a Kauffman trustee since 2003 and chairman of the board since 2006. 

In 1987 when I started my first company (Feld Technologies), I wrote a business plan for a course at MIT that I was in called 15.375: New Enterprises. The textbook for the course was Jeffry A. Timmons’ classic book “New Venture Creation” and the course ended with the submission of a written business plan.

I went on to create a company, with my partner Dave Jilk, that bore very little resemblance to that business plan. When I reread the plan several years ago for amusement, it motivated me to go dig up plans for other successful companies that I was a co-founder of or early investor in, including NetGenesis and Harmonix. In each case, the business plans were big, long, serious documents that had only a minor semblance to actual business that got created.

This is why internet successes fade. This is why amateur salespeople so often fail to become professionals. This is why one-off sports analogy stories make no sense. Successful at the beginning blinds us to the opportunity to get really good instead of merely coasting.

The only thing more sad than the self-limiting arrogance of the confusion between lucky and good is the pathos of the converse: confusing ungood with unlucky.

We’re entering the home stretch of 2012. The next two months are hectic for everyone, but particularly for small business owners. While it’s easy to become overwhelmed with end of the year sales (not to mention holiday planning and parties), business owners should take some time to make sure their business is “legally fit” for 2013.

After all, what better gift could you give your business than a fresh start for the New Year?

What you use your tablet may well depend on its size. People are much more likely to share via email on a 10 inch device than a smaller tablet for instance. According to data by tablet publishing and ad provider Onswipe, around 49% of sharing on 10-inch tablets is done via email, compared to 30% on smaller tablets. Social sharing on seven-inch tablets is also much higher on smaller tablets, particularly on Facebook and Twitter.

A great deal has happened in the 50 years since J.C.R. Licklider wrote his famous “Inter-Galactic Network” memo—the first conception of what eventually became the Internet—in April 1963.

Perhaps the most profound observation made about the early Internet was that it was unlikely to spread across the globe. And yet, slowly at first, and faster with the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet has found purchase on every continent–even Antarctica. This penetration is a consequence of the independent decisions made by hundreds of thousands of Internet operators whose business models range from nonprofit to for-profit to government operated and every other variation you can imagine.

KQED and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation each invested $1.25 million in Matter Ventures, a media startup accelerator they've created with help from Public Radio Exchange. Corey Ford, who ran the accelerator Runway, is CEO of Matter Ventures. The accelerator -- publicized last year as Public Media Accelerator -- will pick startups for its four month program and pay them a $50,000 investment as they work in shared space in the South Park area of San Francisco.

“IN recent years, fences and barricades have blocked the public right to have access to our seas. We are becoming a landlocked people, fenced away from our own beautiful shores, unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches.” This is how Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas characterized the relationship between the American public and its coasts in 1969. Nearly a half-century later, those same words could have described much of the New Jersey and Long Island shorelines on the eve of Hurricane Sandy.

In the years between, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, beachfront property owners, wealthy municipalities and private homeowners’ associations threw up a variety of physical and legal barriers designed to ensure the exclusivity — and marketability — of the beach. These measures were not only antisocial but also environmentally destructive.

If Europe wants radical innovations, fast-moving entrepreneurs and paradigm-changing start-ups, it can’t rely on traditional, top-down policies. It has to change attitudes toward entrepreneurship and failure and nurture the ecosystems that drive new ideas to market.

“We work with good ideas that flow from the bottom up,” said Tuula Teeri, president of Aalto University speaking on 3 December at a conference of the Science|Business Innovation Board in Brussels entitled, “Can EU = Entrepreneurship Union? New Approaches to Helping Small Companies Grow.”

Finland’s Aalto University has become an entrepreneurial hotspot since it was founded in 2010 to foster innovation. Start-up Sauna, a student initiative, has mushroomed into a Nordic hub for coaching would-be entrepreneurs that sends the best-in-class to Silicon Valley. Aalto is also home to Rails Girls, a workshop launched by an Aalto student to helping women learn basic computer programming and “build their ideas on the web” which went viral spawning global communities of women coder entrepreneurs from Beijing to Brazil.

Nearly every school day, about 100 Valley fifth- and sixth-graders spend a day at JA BizTown learning the values of work and community.

Now, with the help of the non-profit Local First Arizona, they also have an opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship and the benefits of good nutrition.

JA BizTown is a simulated town inside Junior Achievement's central Tempe location. It was created in 2007 by Junior Achievement in Arizona to give students an opportunity to experience running a business, working and earning a paycheck, and taking on the responsibilities of elected officials who run cities and towns.

“For many years the R&D spending in pharma has been growing, while the number of drugs approved has been diminishing. The good news is that R&D spending is now reducing ($35 billion worldwide in 2009–2010) and the pipeline of new drugs is growing. I believe there is a link between those pharma companies that are becoming more outward-facing and their increasing productivity,” comments Patrick Vallance, president, pharmaceuticals R&D at GlaxoSmithKline, speaking at the recent “Open Innovation in Action” Summit at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC).

According to Clare O’Neill, Ph.D., founder of innovation consultancy, Original Ventures, open innovation is a form of collective intelligence. O’Neill explains, “Those in companies who are more connected have a higher risk of having a good idea. If you are connected to people, then ideas can be challenged from multiple angles.”

Startup Valuation Calculator estimates and compares business valuation in minutes

FAYETTEVILLE, AR – December 4, 2012 – EquityNet announced today the availability of their Startup Valuation Calculator, the second of their fast, free, and easy-to-use Crowdfunding Tools. The interactive Startup Valuation Calculator complements EquityNet’s first free crowdfunding tool, the Startup Risk Calculator, which the company released earlier in Q4 2012.

In the free Startup Valuation Calculator, entrepreneurs answer questions that deal with their industry sector; their current cash and other assets; current liabilities; estimated annual revenue now and in 5 years; and estimated operating profit now and in 5 years. The calculator immediately estimates the business’ valuation and compares it to the average of peer businesses in the same industry sector. Both the Startup Valuation Calculator and Risk Calculator enable entrepreneurs to easily share their specific results via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Like the Startup Risk Calculator, the Startup Valuation Calculator is suited for businesses that are five years of age or younger and leverages EquityNet’s patented Enterprise Analyzer™ system, a proven methodology for calculating business risk and valuation. Results from the Startup Valuation Calculator are based on real market data gathered by EquityNet from more than 3,000 businesses across North America. The educational questions used in the Valuation Calculator were chosen from the wide-ranging list of questions that EquityNet’s business planning and analysis software, Enterprise Analyzer, uses to determine a more precise business valuation calculation.