Brad Dwyer, 22, launched his entrepreneurial career around a Facebook game he put together while procrastinating instead of studying for a test at Iowa State University in 2008.

"It was just something that I programmed over a weekend and put out there to see what kind of reception it would get," Dwyer said.

The game, called Hatchlings, is similar in concept to the "Where's Waldo?" book series from his childhood, but allow users to seek out eggs of several varieties (think Easter eggs of various colors and designs) that would be hidden in their friends' Facebook profiles.

"The first day it was out there, it organically grew to several hundred users and started an exponential growth curve," Dwyer said. "So at that point I thought, 'Wow, maybe this is a bigger idea than I thought,' so I started working on adding new features and keeping it going."

There’s always talk about a startup’s end game – whether it’s in the form of an acquisition, funding announcement, or eventual flame out. But we rarely hear about the harsh realities that entrepreneurs face. This isn’t meant to be a downbeat and negative article, but actually quite the opposite. By knowing the harsh realities that lie ahead, you can be prepared when they come about. Here are some of the oft unspoken realities I’ve noticed entrepreneurs face regularly.

Your first iteration of an idea will be wrong – Very few people get it right out of the gate – but as it turns out, this is actually a good sign. No idea survives its first interactions with its customers. This sort of failure requires you to synthesize feedback to adapt to the customer. You could be prideful, not listen to what your customers are telling you, and keep things the way they were, but that leaves you with no customers and a product you may not even use yourself. It’s okay if things change up a bit when it comes to your idea and its implementation.

Software is constantly trying to figure out what you mean, and often it guesses wrong. If you were curious about employment at the maker of iPods and typed "turnover at apple" into Google, the top results would be for apple turnover recipes.

It's not just search engines—the same problem crops up in software that aims to translate, recognize speech, analyze the mood surrounding a product launch, or deliver targeted advertisements.

A startup called Idilia, based in Montreal, Canada, has built software to make all these applications better at what they do. The software focuses on the problem of word-sense disambiguation—choosing the meaning of a word based on what makes the most sense in context. Word-sense disambiguation is an old artificial intelligence problem that has proved thorny over the decades. For a computer to apply a word correctly in context, it has to have a huge amount of background information—not just what's in a dictionary but also a map of how words fit together both grammatically and conceptually.

Boston has long led New York in most things venture capital, and is showing no signs of letting up.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for the Boston vs. New York rivalry's southern faction. First, Tom Brady smacked the f'ing snack out of Rex Ryan's mouth. Then the Red Sox got their men, while Brian Cashman just got Cliff Lee's voicemail. Oh, and Paul Pierce thinks that most Celtics/Knicks games play out like Globetrotters/Generals.

In the spirit of piling on, let me remind everyone that Boston's venture capital market is still far more vibrant than New York's venture capital market.*

Yeah, I know you've read differently. Some Boston-based VCs might even have told you differently. But that's all a load of bull.

Hot sectors will continue to be well funded even in the equity gap. We are seeing strong demand for deals in digital media, e-commerce, mobile software, cloud, cleantech and digital security and this will continue for some time.

Venture capital: hot sectors well fund. Jonathan Coker, investment director at MMC Ventures gives his predictions on the venture capital market in 2011

Many women are turning to social entrepreneurship because they tend to work more with their hearts, says American serial social entrepreneur and Ashoka Fellow Christina Jordan. Women tend to be very nurturing and their work is an extension of how they see the world.

According to Jordan, the gender differences come in when it comes to scale. “From my experience in social entrepreneurship, there seem to be more men who take on more large-scale initiatives than women do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that women’s initiatives are not successful; it’s just that they don’t necessarily tend to be driven by the same desire for ‘big’. Women seem to be driven by the desire for impact that’s tangible to them.”

Actors want to direct. Directors want to produce. And consultants want to be keynote speakers. And why not? The pay is good. It doesn't take much time. And it's a lot less heavy lifting than most consulting gigs.

Easier said that done, however. Delivering a kick ass keynote is not as easy as it looks. If you want to get into the game, begin by reviewing the following guidelines to see if you have what it takes.

1. Be in tune with your purpose: If you're going to hold an audience's attention for more than 10 minutes, you've got to begin by holding firm to your purpose... your calling... what gets you out of bed in the morning. If it's missing, all you could ever hope to deliver is a speech -- which is NOT what people want to hear.

If your purpose is clear, you're home free and won't need a single note card.

If you have only a few seconds to communicate the essence of your company, what is the most important message to deliver?

When confronted with this question, most entrepreneurs think about their elevator pitch - sixty seconds of highly condensed hyperbole intended to entice an investor to ask for more. But all the workshops and how-to blogs offered on elevator pitches have probably done as much damage as good. Almost every guide to developing an elevator pitch suggests that you pack the six to eight key points of your 85 page business plan into 120 words. The result is usually an unintelligible gibberish of techspeak embedded in a cloud of superlative adjectives:

“We have a highly disruptive technology that enables us to fulfill the promise of the Information Age. Our mission is to become the global leader addressing the huge market opportunity in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 space. We have a world-class team of PhDs who have developed our patent-pending proprietary SaaS solution, launching in nine months, that will enable our customers to dramatically enhance their BI deployments and increase the actionability of their analytics.”

Entrepreneurs think differently from other people. When technological changes make existing products obsolete, demographic and social changes alter attitudes, and political and regulatory changes adjust the playing field, most people complain. Entrepreneurs come up with solutions.

The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) introduction of the backscatter scanner and enhanced airport pat downs is a case in point. John Tyner became the latest Internet celebrity for his response to the new security procedures – the “Don’t Touch My Junk”  –watch the video. Others opposed to the new rules sought to trigger a pre-Thanksgiving opt out to draw attention to the new measures. And the vast majority of Americans either grumbled their complaints or stoically accepted the latest indignity of air travel in the post 9/11 age.

It seems we’ll go to any lengths these days to find inspiration and guidance, particularly when it comes to the subject of how to behave at work. Whether it’s the cool-headed planning of Machiavelli or the management finesse of Genghis Khan, there’s a consistent hunger to know what the Big Dogs know. “Teach us the rules so we can play on your turf!” the new generation demands of the old. As my colleague Suzanne Lucas has kindly pointed out, “People need help.”

The scene on the penthouse level of the Liberty Building downtown feels partly like a college house party: a game of "DJ Hero," coolers of beer, and side conversations going on in different rooms - one room that features an entire wall turned into a whiteboard.

The open house reception hosted by tech startup BitMethod, which builds smartphone and web apps and recently moved into its new digs, also has a hint of "business after hours," only with a different vibe, where the question between professionals is more often "What are you working on?" than "What do you do?"

This is an interconnected group, here to celebrate the next step of a company and, in the process, meet with friends, swap biz buzz and soak up an energy that emerges when people are trying to build something new.

HONG KONG — The United States is too reliant on China for minerals crucial to new clean energy technologies, making the American economy vulnerable to shortages of materials needed for a range of green products — from compact fluorescent light bulbs to electric cars to giant wind turbines.

So warns a detailed report to be released on Wednesday morning by the United States Energy Department. The report, which predicts that it could take 15 years to break American dependence on Chinese supplies, calls for the nation to increase research and expand diplomatic contacts to find alternative sources, and to develop ways to recycle the minerals or replace them with other materials.

At least 96 percent of the most crucial types of the so-called rare earth minerals are now produced in China, and Beijing has wielded various export controls to limit the minerals’ supply to other countries while favoring its own manufacturers that use them.

Need extra cash to move your business forward? Maybe you want to hire new people, buy a building, expand your inventory, or take your business to the next level, whatever that may be. Word on the street is that banks have money to lend.

Here are five questions you should consider before you begin the funding process: 

1. How much is my business worth, today? 

This is crucial for banks and investors. Is your company/business worth enough to cover the investment? Hiring new workers is a key motivation in today’s high market of unemployment. Even with an investment or a loan, hiring new workers means having a sustainable business model that is going to last more than another year or two. Those new workers want some long-term security, as do your investors.

I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I personally had three separate data points from entrepreneurs who took money from the firm that said “never again.”

I really try to stay out of the middle of these things so I softly said to the team, “maybe you should contact these companies and see how their experience went?” From there I figure they can both figure out what to discuss – or not. One bad comment doesn’t always scare me as there’s often two sides to every situation. But three from different, independent sources? Pattern, me thinks.

If you are new to the startup space and angel investing, you probably don’t realize that some groups of angel investors charge entrepreneurs a fee to pitch to their groups. This practice has caused a rousing debate among key players, with some calling it a scam, and others defending it as necessary to cover expenses.

Jason Calacanis, a well-known entrepreneur and angel investor, opened the debate about a year ago in a strongly-worded article on his blog which attacked the practice on ethical grounds, and called out popular angel groups charging fees ranging from several hundred dollars to $5,000 or more. He calls these a scam, and “angel group” payola.

Others, including noted angel David S. Rose, head of the New York Angels and Angelsoft, have spoken out in defense of the practice, at least for smaller amounts, commenting that, aside from covering expenses, it also provides a degree of “filtering”.

Infections resulting from joint-replacement surgeries are costly and potentially deadly. Now researchers at MIT are developing coatings for medical implants that can be loaded with multiple drugs, including antibiotics that are released over time. The process involves layering antibiotic films, which are released over the short term, onto a permanently antibacterial polymer designed to prevent infection over the long term.

About one percent of knee and hip replacement surgeries result in infection; the number rises to three to five percent for second surgeries. "It's a low rate, but if you are the one out of one hundred who gets an infection, the complications are catastrophic," says Lloyd Miller, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles. All the infected tissue and hardware must be surgically removed and replaced with an antibiotic block; the patient cannot walk for six to eight weeks while being treated with intravenous antibiotics to eliminate all traces of infection; and then a revision surgery is done. Complications due to infection are also enormously expensive. A joint replacement costs about $30,000 in the United States, but dealing with infections can raise the tab to nearly $150,000.

Becoming your own boss has sort of gained a global appeal. These days many people start up their own businesses for virtually any reason. Somehow it doesn’t seem to count anymore what led people to go into business, going into business has suddenly become the new mantra of the 21st century. Obviously, there are several factors owing to this global trend some of which are; the emergence of the Internet, the unreliability of job security, the God-like attention given to successful entrepreneurs, the rise of the knowledge worker and so on. In the end, it’s not the number of businesses that are being started that matters, but the number of businesses that thrive.

Therefore, in this article I will be x-raying some of the ways how NOT to start a business so that in the end, you can have the right mindset needed to start a business. I welcome you to join me in this exciting journey and as you go through this unusual article I want you to constantly bear this in mind, failure in business is usually as a result of how you start. It is the beginning of a thing that often predicts the end. As always, I encourage you to share this unusual information with as many entrepreneurs as possible and don’t forget to share your thoughts and opinion in the comment box below. There’s no way you’re going to read this, without having one or two things to say; trust me, it’s just too unusual for you to keep quiet.

Entrepreneurship is now a pretty big deal. Business schools all over the world have courses in this area and some even make it their major focus of teaching and research. Governments are also interested in entrepreneurs and routinely ask themselves how they can develop a more entrepreneurial national culture. Many years ago, an economist called Schumpeter recognized that risk taking and trying new technologies and business ideas was essential for economic growth. However, the current fascination with entrepreneurs would have even surprised Schumpeter.

I mainly spend my time working on innovation and strategy but over the years I’ve seen the rise of the entrepreneurship field and kept notes on some ideas that I have found interesting. One of these is the issue of nature versus nurture. In other words, is there an inherent psychological bias that makes an entrepreneur or is it something that can be learned and developed? This question matters because if entrepreneurship is largely psychological then government and business school efforts to increase the number of new ventures through training might have limited effects.

Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.

You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another...until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself. And then you could start on fantasies of other vices you wanted to eliminate.

So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.