Amazon released their quarterly results yesterday and announced that they are selling 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperbacks – the first time their Kindle e-books outsold paperbacks. Amazon lead the market here, and I doubt that any other book retailer is anywhere near this watershed mark, but mark my words this trend is only going one way.

Kindles are going to get better and it will become easier to use them to view and annotate other documents – e.g. work oriented PDFs. Then collaboration becomes easier too.

Cash is the fuel of every startup. Your burn rate is the rate at which that money is being spent, and allows an estimate of how long you can go before refueling (runway). That refueling is when you will need more investment, or when you will break even and begin that steep profitable growth curve.

Investors look at your burn rate to see how efficient and effective you are at running the business. It continually amazes me how two startups, seemingly comparable in stage and objective, can be so far apart in their burn rate. One can build a new website application for $10,000 per month, while another is burning $50,000 per month. Which would you bet on?

An economic development success story out of Utah is coming Northern Nevada's way this week.

But while recession-weary Nevada likely doesn't have the money to emulate its success, there are steps that can be taken now that could reap rewards years down the road.

That's what Nevada business leaders see in the Utah Science Technology and Research initiative, or USTAR, a legislatively funded project that leverages Utah's research universities to create and commercialize technology, which in turn generates tech-based startup companies.

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. There are no “overrides” – for example, businesses don’t thrive just because they offer the latest technology, or because everyone wants to be “green, or because their goal is to reduce world hunger.

I expect that should seem intuitive to all entrepreneurs, but every investor I know has many stories about startup funding requests with major business model elements missing. The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, and giving away the product.

I am in the Gan Eng Seng Primary School in a middle-class neighborhood of Singapore, and the principal, A. W. Ai Ling, has me visiting a fifth-grade science class. All the 11-year-old boys and girls are wearing junior white lab coats with their names on them. Outside in the hall, yellow police tape has blocked off a “crime scene” and lying on a floor, bloodied, is a fake body that has been murdered. The class is learning about DNA through the use of fingerprints, and their science teacher has turned the students into little C.S.I. detectives. They have to collect fingerprints from the scene and then break them down.

I missed that DNA lesson when I was in fifth grade. When I asked the principal whether this was part of the national curriculum, she said no. She just had a great science teacher, she said, and was aware that Singapore was making a big push to expand its biotech industries and thought it would be good to push her students in the same direction early. A couple of them checked my fingerprints. I was innocent — but impressed.

At the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco in 2010, Peter Thiel had a rather stunning announcement to make. The Paypal co-founder announced that his foundation would offer grants totalling $100000 to up to 20 students under the age of 20 who would be willing to drop out of school and start something new and experiment with breakthrough innovation.

Whether it was appropriate to encourage youngsters to opt out of school is matter for another discussion but what it does reinforce is the widespread notion that our university system does not allow for much focus on or encouragement to innovation. Yet, innovation in today's fast changing world is no longer an option but an imperative - not just for product design or technology breakthrough but in every aspect of business. In fact, for the transition of great ideas into successful innovative enterprise, effective and innovative management is a necessary condition.

During the past 25 years I've seen a lot of innovation task forces come and go. Some of them looked good at the beginning and died a slow death. Some of them looked bad at the beginning and died a quick death. And some of them actually succeeded.

And so, at the risk of giving your task force one more task to do, please take a few minutes to review the following guidelines.

They will save you time. They will save you headaches. And they may even save your company...

Breaking out on your own is hard. Just ask anyone that runs their own business, and you can pretty much guarantee that the one answer that will be consistent across the board is that it’s hard to be your own boss.

No guaranteed pay-check; no water-cooler conversations to split the day up; no big corporate budgets for projects and pitches.

But no-one said it would be easy. It takes hard work, commitment, lots of compromise and hard knocks to get to the point where you want to be. But the satisfaction and kick-back that you get when you get there makes all the struggle worthwhile.

My longtime bleeps may think this post will once again refer to the debate on whether entrepreneurs are born or made. But- surprise- that topic has almost nothing to do with this post.

No, this post has to do with Colorado. What some refer to dismissively as one of "the flyover" states. But they are wrong. That is old school thinking.

In December, a small group met to talk about how to promote Colorado's entrepreneurial and innovative culture. As is often the case with a small group, someone said something, and someone else built on it, and all of a sudden, we had a pretty cool mantra. "Colorado... Entrepreneurial by Nature."

DEMETRI POLITOPOULOS says he has suffered countless indignities in his 12-year battle to build a microbrewery and wrest a sliver of the Greek beer market from the Dutch colossus, Heineken.

His tires have been slashed and his products vandalized by unknown parties, he says, and his brewery has received threatening phone calls. And he says he has had to endure regular taunts — you left Manhattan to start up a beer factory in northern Greece? — not to mention the pain of losing 5.3 million euros.

Bad as all that has been, nothing prepared him for this reality: He would be breaking the law if he tried to fulfill his latest — and, he thinks, greatest — entrepreneurial dream. It is to have his brewery produce and export bottles of a Snapple-like beverage made from herbal tea, which he is cultivating in the mountains that surround this lush pocket of the country.

For the EU to achieve its goal of becoming the foremost knowledge-based economy in the world and a true ‘Innovation Union’, biotech Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are vital. Some of the most valuable innovation happens in SMEs which then go on to form relationships with larger companies, paving the way for improved health, cleaner energy, products and processes and sustainable farming for Europe’s citizens.

However, to make sure Europe’s biotech SMEs thrive, there needs to be an appropriate regulatory and policy framework within which these companies can operate. EuropaBio’s SME Platform aims to create just that.

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Everything just changed in the angel investing world.

Two years ago Yuri Milner, through his investment firm DST, disrupted the traditional Silicon Valley venture capital model when he began investing in the hottest startups – companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon – at very high valuations and extremely easy deal terms. He looks brilliant in hindsight, with all of his U.S. investments at significantly higher valuations since he invested.

Most top VC firms have begun emulating DST’s deal structure.

Ever since the launching of the Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) in the 1982 in the United States, innovation procurement through stimulation of small businesses has proven a highly efficient concept for stimulating innovation and economic growth. Often quoted success stories include Qualcomm (16 000 employees, US$ 60 billion market capitalization) and Symantec (17 000 employees, US$ 13 billion market capitalization). In Europe, several countries have taken the example of the United States establishing similar programs, such as SBRI in the United Kingdom, Forska & Väx in Sweden and SBIR in the Netherlands. On the European level structures for pre-commercial procurement have been put into place. Currently, the European Commission is looking into options for a catalytic form of innovation procurement. This event brings you the latest insights on innovation procurement through SBIR and Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and offers the opportunity to discuss future EU collaboration structures with your peers from EU member states and the European Commission.

A new streamlined system to enable University of Nevada, Reno and DRI faculty to begin start-up companies based on their research and development, and to seek entrepreneurial partners from the business community to encourage economic development, has been put in place by the institutions’ Technology Transfer Office. This system is based primarily on a new standard license agreement, the “NSHE Express,” available to faculty-based start-up companies.

“The Tech Transfer Office is committed to facilitating and encouraging our faculty who want to engage in entrepreneurial activities, and to encouraging economic development and diversification that benefits the State of Nevada,” Ryan Heck, patent counsel and director of the TTO, said. “This opens the door even wider for Nevada companies to develop new technologies in partnership with the University and DRI.”

Jan. 27--When SoftBank Capital Technology Fund moved to the East Coast last December, partner Craig Cooper decided not to go.

The New Zealand-born, Australian-bred entrepreneur liked living in Newport Beach near good surfing beaches and his expertise was in wireless technology and digital media, which have their stronghold in Southern California.

So he went to Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund VantagePoint with a venture-like pitch: Southern California is a substantial market, and you need to be a part of it.

In November, Cooper became VantagePoint's presence here. His Fashion Island office overlooks Big Canyon golf course and the snow-dusted mountains beyond. His surfboard stands in a corner.

Science blogger Mike Lisieski found this video of an octopus who's turned trash into treasure. It's a tight squeeze to get out of the bottle, but the ability to maneuver through tiny spaces is one of those skills octopuses evolved both to defend themselves against predators, and catch their own prey. Basically, an octopus can go anywhere that it can fit its hard beak through—the rest of its body is squishy and malleable. In fact, in aquariums, octopuses are often given mazes with narrow passageways and hidden food "prizes." The games help keep the octopus' awesome brain entertained in captivity.

I’ve written two books on Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, and the question I get asked frequently is “Can the principles that made Steve Jobs so successful be applied to anyone in any field? The answer is yes. For example, I recently watched HBO’s Bruce Springsteen documentary, The Promise. It was obvious to me that the “boss” shares the same success principles as Apple’s boss.

Here are 5 entrepreneurial qualities that Steve Jobs shares with Bruce Springsteen—principles that any leader or entrepreneur must have to achieve breakthrough success.

The flood of venture capital from 2005 through 2007 slowed considerably, but after a slow 2009, the money and venture investors seem to be back in funding action. For the full year, 2,792 companies raised a total of $23.7 billion, but while the amount of fundings have returned, the deals change. See how in this infographic.

Some cash-strapped states have identified another job they want to shift to the private sector: economic development.

A number of governors are working to turn their development offices into some form of nonprofit private entity, a move that would transfer the task of giving out state grants, tax breaks and other economic incentives from the hands of government.

The idea, which has as much to do with economic philosophies as with saving money, is mainly gaining ground in states with Republican governors, including Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Arizona.

"It's a matter of greater flexibility and the ability to act more like a chamber [of commerce] rather than a state agency," said Wisconsin's new Republican governor Scott Walker, adding that private groups are better equipped to create jobs and attract companies.