Today's mobile device is the new personal computer. The average smart phone is as powerful as a high-end Mac or PC of less than a decade ago. And as billions of people worldwide rely on these ultra-compact machines for more and more tasks, the mobile device might qualify as humankind's primary tool.

We are only just beginning to fathom what this reality implies for business, culture, and society. Our phones can now track our movements though the physical world. They can record our social interactions, store our personal histories, keep tabs on our likes and dislikes, and track our Internet content consumption, app usage, and purchasing behavior. As we outsource ever more of our decisions and memory functions to smart devices, our tools are gaining a powerful advantage over us. They live in our pockets; they know who we are. They're learning more and more about us all the time. That's why smart phones and tablets are uniquely positioned to predict what businesses should do to serve us best. Our devices are both comforting and a little frightening at the same time.

With the an estimated 150K new websites and 7M new pages added to the Internet every day, the biggest challenge for every entrepreneur is to get found, and get some credibility for a new startup. I can attest from experience that publishing a regular blog to properly showcase your offering, even before you have it, is a most cost effective approach in time and money.

The biggest roadblock is that startup founders already have too much to do building a product, mapping strategy, courting investors, etc. So finding time is hard, and good writing is simply not what most people do. But here are some key reasons why you need to give it some priority:

1. You can validate the need and your solution before spending money. Too many entrepreneurs spend big money on development, only to find out that the solution isn’t quite right. Feedback from your blog will tell you quickly whether anyone agrees with your assessment, and whether you have a customer base waiting.

2. Find potential partners. Most of the people you would want as co-founders are now cruising the relevant blogs for ideas and partners. It’s a great way to find like-minded people, and get a dialog going. From a networking standpoint, it’s a lot more efficient than going to seminars and other industry events.

You may be handed a project or report and asked to work within a structure someone else has designed. Sometimes it works wonderfully. Often times though, it can lead to a creative block as you spend more time trying to figure out the format than making progress toward the effort’s objective.

When you find yourself in one of these situations, remember:

• Don’t let arbitrary structures stop you from doing what makes sense.
• Don’t let thinking you can’t get everything done stop you from doing something.
• Don’t let a poorly conceived format stand in the way of you (or others) being able to see the progress you’re making.

While Wisconsin has done well lately nurturing angel capital investments, it still lags in another vital component of its innovation economy — building and attracting venture capital.

That was the conclusion of a panel of investors who spoke recently at the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium in Madison, where 500 people — including 75 investors of all descriptions — gathered over two days to hear about trends in the high-growth economy.

On my recent trip to South America during Global Entrepreneurship Week, I cast a mournful eye over Uruguay where, were it not for problems with flight schedules I had hoped to visit. Uruguay, the South American nation nestled between Brazil and Argentina, is trying to take the fast track toward becoming a startup economy.

The government of Uruguay has long recognized the importance of entrepreneurs to its small economy. It began programs to promote entrepreneurship in the early 1990s and has matched those with technological literacy programs. In 2009, Uruguay became the first country in the world to provide every child (and their teachers) a free laptop through the One Laptop per Child Program, managed by the government-owned, privately-run Uruguayan National Technology Laboratory (LATU). Due to the country’s advanced telecommunication infrastructure, primary school students from anywhere in the country are able to access the Internet, which opens the doors to knowledge gathering, networking and idea sharing for potential entrepreneurs. Today, Uruguay has the highest internet, broadband and PC penetration in Latin America.

Whether you find advisors from family, friends, faculty or fellow managers, great advisors can become an informal resource that rivals that of more formal resources, including board members. You will certainly know when you’ve found such a treasure, almost always through introduction by others and rarely because you have deliberately approached someone to fill a needed hole. Most of these people will provide time for you out of friendship, rather than seeking reward in the form of stock options or pay for service. Therefore, it is important that you recognize their worth and be most careful not to overuse the gift of their time. “We work for food” is a common mantra for such friends who are willing to provide such informal services.

The resources an aspiring entrepreneur needs are now all in one location. Early-stage companies can visit www.jumpstartnetwork.org and fill out one form to be connected to business advisors, funding, incubators, an online community focused on their needs and other resources.  It’s about determining the right resources at the right time for your unique idea. The JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network . . . find out why Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs start here.

This sky-scraping 27-story mansion in Mumbai, India, recently made headlines for its elevated gardens — and sky-high price tag. But the reported $1 billion vertical behemoth is only a more extreme example of the latest in outrageous luxury living: Screening rooms, swimming pools, wine cellars and gym/spa facilities are de rigueur for the homes listed here. What follows are a few of the world’s most expensive residences. And if you’re feeling tempted, we’ll add that several of these are for sale. Just don’t settle for anything less than a ballroom of your own.

The study of personality types has been a tool that has been used to help people predict their future careers. The Myers-Briggs model has been one of the most popular and just about every career has been assigned one or more preferred personality types. This tool has been used to predict success in entrepreneurship as well.

Myers-Briggs model has four different dichotomies:

* Extraversion-Introversion (outward vs. inward turning)

* Sensing-Intuitiveness (preference towards concrete information or abstract concepts)

* Thinking-Feeling (tendency to solve problems through either logical reasoning or empathizing)

In the dot-com boom I made a little bit of money and then proceeded to make every mistake possible with that money. It was like reading a Stephen King horror story written in blood across your bank statement.

Several years later, I included the story in the intro to one of my books and gave the book to a potential investor. He read the intro and said, “I can’t invest in you. You’re a functional idiot.”

And yet, I’ve seen the pattern repeated so many times with so many people can I at least enjoy the company of other idiots?

So to help out others who will pocket some of the $600bb in quantitative easing, I have a few simple tips for greatly improving the chances of success if you have sudden fortune thrust upon you, either through your hard work or simply by chance.

Lack of confidence in your self, your product, and your startup is a surefire recipe for disaster.

At the other extreme, too much confidence or arrogance can kill you just as fast.

It’s always painful when a startup fails, but as a mentor to founders, I would hope that you can learn from these failings and not stumble on the same issues:

Maybe saying this is an exciting time for startups is a redundant thing to say.

When isn't it an exciting time for startups? Starting a company in Silicon Valley is a death-defying feat. It takes drive, determination, and the ability to alternatively swig Red Bull and Pepto-Bismol without spilling a drop or missing a beat.

But there is a building buzz about how building startups is different these days; about how the cloud, social networking, new ways of corralling capital are changing the game. Starting a company -- particularly an Internet-based company -- has become dirt-cheap, with open-source software, a big inventory of free collaboration tools and a marketing strategy that can start with crowd sourcing and Twitter.

I was talking about this notion recently over coffee with Howard Greenfield, president of Go Associates, a consultancy that helps companies with marketing and business strategy. He had just written a piece for the Huffington Post that cogently laid out the place startups hold in the economy.

The fact that the drive of individuals with brilliant business plans can convince them to plunge headfirst into projects with slightly less than everything at stake is a testament to either the boldness of our local businessmen or the opportunity that this land holds.

Unfortunately, within these turbulent economic waters, the entrepreneur might become an endangered member of our society.

Kamil Aziz Khan, Managing Director of Espresso, a rapidly growing and immensely popular chain of coffee houses, bemoans the economic turmoil and social unrest that has gripped the country recently.

On the third floor of the Montreal Chest Institute, at McGill University, Olga Kotelko stood before a treadmill in the center of a stuffy room that was filling up with people who had come just for her. They were there to run physical tests, or to extract blood from her earlobe, or just to observe and take notes. Kotelko removed her glasses. She wore white New Balance sneakers and black running tights, and over her silver hair, a plastic crown that held in place a breathing tube.

Tanja Taivassalo, a 40-year-old muscle physiologist, adjusted the fit of Kotelko’s stretch-vest. It was wired with electrodes to measure changes in cardiac output — a gauge of the power of her heart. Taivassalo first met Kotelko at last year’s world outdoor masters track championships in Lahti, Finland, the pinnacle of the competitive season for older tracksters. Taivassalo went to watch her dad compete in the marathon. But she could hardly fail to notice the 91-year-old Canadian, bespandexed and elfin, who was knocking off world record after world record.

On Nov. 19, Rasmussen Reports published results from a national telephone poll that showed that 47 percent of America’s likely voters said the nation’s “best days are in the past,” 37 percent said they are in the future. Sixteen percent were undecided. Just before President Obama was inaugurated, 48 percent said our best days were still ahead and 35 percent said they had come and gone. This is a disturbing trend.

What’s driving it? Let me say what’s not driving it. It is not that millions of Americans suddenly started worrying about the national debt. Seriously, do you know anyone who says: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I was tossing and turning until dawn worrying that the national debt was now $14 trillion.” Sorry, that only happens in contrived campaign ads.

Is your team fully engaged to give their best, day in and day out? In a recent study by TowersWatson, an international HR consulting firm, fewer than 21% of employees surveyed described themselves as “highly engaged,” down from 31% in 2009. 8% admitted to being fully disengaged. Having only one-fifth of your employees highly engaged is not the hallmark of a “Winning Business.”

Other studies show that employee engagement derives from three important factors:

1. Alignment of the employee with the goals and vision of the company.
2. Faith of the employee in the competence of management and their commitment to realize the goals and vision.
3. Trust in their direct supervisor that he or she will support his or her people and help them to succeed.

I've spent much of this long weekend curled up on the couch reading Too Big To Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin's history of the financial crisis of 2008. I've wanted to read this book since it came out last year but it took me a while to get to it. I'm enjoying it very much.

As I read about bank after bank waking up and smelling the coffee too late, I am reminded of the risks of chasing returns. In the case of the financial crisis of 2008, the banks were chasing returns in the mortgage markets and the related markets for CDOs and other exotic derivatives. The scary part of the whole thing is they were chasing returns in a market they did not fully understand. Here's a quote from Alan Greenspan that I got from the book:

I've got some fairly heavy background in mathematics. But some of the complexities of some of the instruments that were going into CDOs bewilders me. I didn't understand what they were doing or how they got the types of returns out of the mezzanines and the various tranches of the CDO that they did. And I figured if I didn't understand it and I had access to a couple hundred PhDs, how the rest of the world is going to understand it sort of bewilders me.