Whether you like it or not, style has caught up to substance in the modern business landscape. Everyone's got an opinion about what's cool, and those opinions can make or break you, 140 characters at a time. It's like the first day of school at Beverly Hills High and, as a small business, you might be feeling like the gawky new kid from the Midwest. Harder still, it's not enough just to get the popular crowd to like you--now you have to do it without alienating yourself from the edgy kids. Long story short: You're not getting anywhere until you can establish yourself as cool, because when it comes to business, cool equals cash.

But what makes products, software, websites, brands or companies cool? Should you go viral on Twitter or YouTube? Can you cash in by attracting other cool people to become evangelists on your behalf, or is it possible to gain top search engine rankings (and robust sales) by blogging?

To uncover the secrets of cool, we sought out several leading experts, a mega-preneur and two growth-track entrepreneurs. The results may surprise you: Coolness--and the hefty revenues that come with it--is attainable, even for "nobodies" on a skimpy budget.

Despite the growing complexity of doing business in China, it is where innovation needs to happen with products designed solely for Chinese consumers.

Our View: Product development in emerging economies can cross over to serve your core consumers. Global companies have embraced reverse innovation and set up local growth teams in India and China that innovate for local markets. These teams are often allowed to steer product development and utilize a local budget, and their efforts can dispel the threat of local competitors. These products increasingly do well in developed markets, where price-consciousness and demand for basic products are on the rise.

Rodney mighta felt bad … but he should make you feel good. Because a new study shows that laughter can produce the same health benefits as physical exercise. That euphoric finding was presented at the 2010 Experimental Biology conference in Anaheim.

The idea that a good guffaw might be good for you surfaced in the 1970s. Since then, mirth has been shown to reduce stress and even boost immunity.

To continue cataloguing the health benefits of hilarity, scientists at Loma Linda University had volunteers watch a video: either 20 minutes from a funny movie or stand-up routine. And the researchers found that laughing along with some light-hearted comedy actually lowered volunteers’ blood pressure. And it altered their appetite hormones in the same way that moderate exercise would.

A to-do list is a fundamental tool for getting things done: it helps you plan your day, see what you've accomplished, and what you should work on next. But a badly-written to-do list can actually sabotage your productivity instead of boost it.

The best part of using a to-do list is crossing items off of it as done, finished, complete. Some tasks are easier to tick off as done than others, so you want to make your to-do list as doable as possible. A common mistake is assigning ourselves impossible tasks that never get done because we didn't think them through. If you put in some thought up front, you can pare down your to-do list to the tasks you're most likely to check off the list.

First, know the difference between a project, goal, and a task. A project is a big undertaking that involves several tasks. A goal is something you want to achieve through both tasks and repetitive actions. "Clean out the garage," "Save $5,000," "Learn how to speak French"--these are projects and goals, and they don't belong on your to-do list. They'd just sit there and haunt you, because it wouldn't be clear where to start. Reserve your to-do list for the next steps that move a project along. Your goal to "Save $5,000" is going to start with a simple task, like setting up a monthly savings transfer.

This week PricewaterhouseCoopers and Cooley Godward Kronish hosted the “Shaking the MoneyTree Report” event in Palo Alto. The annual event featured top names in the venture capital industry and was hosted by Steve Bengston of PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose humor brought a welcome and lighthearted air of optimism that fit well with the news that, although Silicon Valley endured tough times along with the rest of the country these past years, the VC market is seeing some moderate signs life after some rough quarters. The MoneyTree Report is a collaboration between PWC and the national Venture Capital Association using data from Thomson Reuters.

Mr.Bengston hosted a panel with top VC names that included Dan Avida of Opus Capital, Juan-Antonio Carballo of IBM, Craig Jacoby of Cooley Godward Kronish, Dan Lankford of Wavepoint Ventures, and Tom Vertin of Silicon Valley Bank. As our economy is pulling itself out of the doldrums that were the past couple of years, the panelists expressed a general—and cautious—optimism about the VC industry in the year to come. When queried by Bengston as to how much investment money was likely to pour into Silicon Valley this year, a general and probably safe consensus was an average of around $20 billion. This number is up from $17.8 billion last year but doesn’t even come close to the peak of $100.4 billion in 2000.

Ron Conway is the Robert Pattinson of angel investors.

Hell, if Conway had a gig on Twilight he’d turn all the bad vampires into good ones!

So how did the angel investor who endowed Google and PayPal become so very successful?

Conway is often referred to as the messiah of angel investors worldwide, and according to an article by Chris O’Brien, Conway walked the hard road with poise to take the title as Silicon Valley’s most influential startup investor.

O’Brien states that, while most VCs are best known for the money they’ve made, Conway is best known for the people he knows and the way he treats them – which is well.

In recent decades, many economists have advised governments to stabilize, privatize, and liberalize markets. Economists do know how markets work, and they can often predict how mature market economies will respond to certain events and policies. But developing economies lack both mature markets and the institutions that support them—including institutions that define property rights, enforce contracts, convey prices, and bridge gaps between buyers and sellers. These are precisely the institutions that political leaders must establish and then modify as economic growth introduces new problems and opportunities.

The work of the Commission on Growth and Development tended to confirm that political leaders play pivotal roles in the success—and the failure—of economic development. As detailed in its publication The Growth Report, the commission closely examined 13 nations whose gross domestic product (GDP) grew at least 7 percent a year for at least 25 years after World War II. In other words, these economies at least doubled in size each decade.

While the federal government’s efforts to pull the nation out of the Great Recession drew a tremendous amount of attention, some metropolitan areas responded to the wrenching downturn in remarkably creative ways. A handful used funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to drive innovation in service delivery, governance arrangements, or integrated solutions to policy problems.

As we explain in this paper, innovators tended to have either a pre-existing vision for regional collaboration or regional goals; strong leadership and institutional capacity; and a widely shared spirit of collaboration. In some cases the federal programs funded by ARRA such as the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program or the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP2) program explicitly encouraged collaboration or integrated proposals.

But we also found that creativity in governance breeds creativity. For example, Seattle and the Puget Sound had a long history of innovation around sustainability issues, with dedicated public offices to address environmental concerns and a regional culture primed to embrace new green initiatives. So, not surprisingly, they offered compelling ARRA responses around energy efficiency and conservation.

AUSTIN – The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council has ranked Texas as one of the best states for small business and entrepreneurs in their Business Tax Index 2010: Best to Worst State Tax Systems for Entrepreneurship and Small Business report. Texas is ranked second in the index based on the cost of the state tax system on small businesses.

“Here in the Lone Star State, we have developed an environment that encourages entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams of small business ownership, further strengthening our economy and creating jobs for Texans,” Gov. Perry said. “Thanks to our low taxes, reasonable and predictable regulatory environment and skilled and educated workforce, businesses continue to look to Texas as a place for growth and prosperity.”

Download the full report here.

After a trip to Peru last year, microbiologist Rob Knight came home with a horrendous case of traveler's diarrhea. He took some antibiotics and quickly recovered. But because Knight had been participating in one of his own studies of the human microbiome--the diverse collection of bacteria and other organisms that inhabit our gut, skin, mouths, and other parts--he could examine how the drugs changed the microbial population in his gut. Microbes did repopulate his digestive tract, but the community makeup was different.

Soon after his trip, Knight restarted a diet and exercise program that had previously proved ineffective at helping him lose weight. This time around, he lost 60 pounds. His mind went straight to his microbes. Previous research from his lab at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, showed that microbes can have a transmissible effect on weight--transplanting microbes from fat, hungry mice into normal mice causes the recipients to eat more and gain weight. "The conjecture was that the antibiotics might clear out the microbes that were already there and make it easier to reshape the community," says Knight.

Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset, looks at the lasting effects of economic recessions: how they’ve shaped our society in the past, and how the one we’re currently in will do so again over the next few decades. His vision of “the New Normal” includes a population move toward urban centers, as well as a shift from material consumption to what he calls “experience consumption.” I spoke with him recently about what it will take to make these changes succeed and where we can expect to see job growth as a result.

BNET: What inspired you to write this book?

Florida: I had just become head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and had moved from the United States to Canada. I was building a media and consulting company, establishing a new teaching program at the university, and learning about a new country, so I had all of this stuff on my plate. The last thing I wanted to do was write a book.

What do economies and forests have in common? A lot it seems. I recently attended a seminar where John E. Jackson, a professor in political science at the University of Michigan, used a forestry analogy to detail his work studying market economies.

Jackson has spent years studying the cycles of job creation and loss, in the state of Michigan and in Poland. The similarities between the two are striking: Michigan has been struggling with the loss of jobs in large automobile companies, and Poland has struggled with the downfall of large state-owned enterprises.

Jackson has studied quarterly employment figures for every firm in Michigan over a 20-year period from 1978 to 1998, which includes the 1982-1983 recession. He divides job creation and loss into three categories, labeled for their analogous forest counterparts:

Over the weekend, Mark Suster wrote a great post titled How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings.  Mark continues to just tear it up with great advice for entrepreneurs.  However, he left out one thing from the post – which is one of my favorite pieces of advice for entrepreneurs.

Give your venture capitalists (and board members) assignments

Mark alludes to this in many of his suggestions but he never comes out and says it.  And, amazingly to me, many entrepreneurs either don’t ever think of this or don’t feel comfortable doing it.  They should.

Most VCs will quickly say that they want to help the companies they invest in to success. Some will go further and say things like “I’ll do anything I can to help my companies.” Rarely have I heard a VC say something like “My plan is to just hang around, go to board meetings, ask a few nonsensical, low insight, rhetorical questions, eat the crummy food, and then disappear until the next board meeting.” However, as any entrepreneur who has ever worked with multiple VCs knows, the statements a VC makes (or doesn’t make) doesn’t necessarily correspond to his behavior.

Have you ever had a day when you wished you had a partner to share the ups and downs of running your own business?

With my last company, I remember having days when I felt like it was me against the world—and the world was winning. Without partners to commiserate with, I often felt alone. That is, until I set up an advisory board.

I used my advisory board as part business guide, part support group. Here are three lessons I learned for setting up an effective advisory board:

1. Pick business owners (not your accountant or attorney)

I found the most valuable advisers were other business owners who had accomplished what I was attempting to do. I still paid for the services of an accountant and attorney when I needed technical advice, but keeping these professionals out of my advisory board meetings allowed my meetings to focus on strategic advice on company building.

During the last quarter of 2009, US venture capital investment in young Internet companies increased by 38 per cent, to $1.8 billion, compared to a year before.

And according to Crunchbase, a database managed by Techcrunch, this momentum is continuing, with VC investments doubling during the first quarter of 2010, compared to last year.

In Europe, statistics are less upbeat. Last year, venture capital investments dropped 41 per cent in all sectors. Yet, if you listen to Internet start-up investment professionals, these figures do not reflect the full picture.

The financial crisis has blown a chill wind through US technology transfer offices, making it harder to fund start-up companies. This is prompting a search for new ways to reduce the risk profile of novel technologies, and at the same time increase internal efficiencies, cut costs and sharpen academic awareness of industry’s needs.

“There has been no impact on the flow of ideas. But there has been an impact on how [these ideas] are transferred into a commercial venture and on subsequent funding,” Charles Cooney, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Faculty Director for the Deshpande Center for Technology Innovation at MIT, told delegates at the annual US BioIndustry Organization conference in Chicago this week.

“The financial community is less willing to invest and follow-on funding is very difficult to find,” Cooney said. This is creating pressure to advance ideas further than in the past.

BEIJING (Caixin Online) -- In a long-term view, the rise of China is to be welcomed, but today China remains what the journalist Martin Wolf calls a "premature superpower."

China's current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. In one poll, 44% of respondents mistakenly thought that China already had the world's largest economy, compared to 27% who accurately picked the United States (which is three times larger). Martin Jacques even entitled his recent book "When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Some people draw analogies to the rise of Germany a century ago, and predict a coming conflict with the U.S. like that between Germany and Britain. Fortunately, these fears are exaggerated.

How many times have you heard or said “Google it”?

The term has become synonymous with conducting a search on the Internet. But, few small businesses actually know how to use Google to advertise and grow their business.

That was the message Google and the U.S. Small Business Administration delivered during a webinar Wednesday morning to announce the launch of their partnership in an effort to educate businesses about how to succeed online.

The University of North Carolina isn't the only institution to develop a standardized approach to license technology developed on campus. According to Lee Taylor, technology licensing associate at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, his institution implemented a form license at the beginning of the academic year, in September 2009.

Called the "Mahele Method" (Mahele referring to a major land division that took place in the 19th century in Hawaii), the patent licensing structure derived from the realization "that there is no need to start building from the ground up every time," Taylor said. "Also, we are an understaffed office, like 95 percent of [technology transfer offices], so it did not seem worthwhile to dedicate resources to this endeavor."

Taylor explained that the university has kept news about its technology transfer approach quiet, "because we did not want to have cherry picking occur."