I enjoy the ride on a good commercial airline flight. It’s time that I can use to catch up on tasks that require focus. I throw the headphones on, listen to the best music ever created by mankind (70s music - as if I needed to spell that out), and get to work on the laptop. Nary a thought is given to the route the plane will take to get from point A to point B. Once we do our initial turn after taking off, it seems like a pretty straight shot to me.

Well, it’s anything but a straight shot. The auto-pilot is correcting constantly the entire route. It is being temporarily taken off course the whole trip. And, each time the elements take it off course, it corrects and gets back on the right path.

In the world of venture capital (VC), ideas are plentiful but fundable businesses are hard to find. Despite the perception, VCs do not fund ideas alone, no matter how solid passionate entrepreneurs believe they are. To negate risk, VCs evaluate proposals based on several characteristics, often in-line with their specific funding mandate, to bridge the huge divide between a cool idea and a fundable business.

Differentiated

VC funds are inundated with requests for capital to get start-up businesses to the next critical level but very few offer significantly differentiated product or service in the eyes of their target market. The tech behind the business maybe amazing but it still needs to meet the customers’ burning need and deliver greater benefit to them.

tudent loan defaults are rising fast, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Education. While much of the press coverage focused on defaults by students attending for-profit schools, defaults at state colleges and universities went up, too. The bad job market is a big factor: Unemployment in 2010 was 10.1 percent for people between the age of 25 to 34, and those numbers are even higher when you remove people above the age of 30. At the same time, state budget cuts to higher education have led to big tuition hikes at many public colleges. California students graduated from public colleges with the least debt in the country in 2009, but tuition jumped 18 percent last year for in-state students in California and double-digit increases are projected for the next several years, as well.

Climate change is here, and as it worsens, it will affect the entire planet. But it's the hard truth that it won't happen equally: some areas will be affected more than others. Those areas, one would hope, would be spending the most time and energy preparing for the eventualities of drought, food shortages, and rising sea levels. But this is largely not the case. The most ill-prepared countries are the ones that will be hit the hardest.

That's just one of the major conclusions of the Global Adaptation Index (GAIN), which provides scores for every country based on their vulnerability to climate change and their readiness to deal with those issues. Denmark is ranked the highest (it isn't very vulnerable to begin with, and has done a lot to get ready), while Ethiopia, which is doing very little while being very threatened, is the lowest. On the map above, the more red a country is, the worse their score.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is worried that high U.S. unemployment could lead to the same kind of riots here that have swept through Europe and North Africa.

"You have a lot of kids graduating college, (who) can't find jobs," said Bloomberg, during his weekly radio show on Friday. "That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

That was the mayor's response when asked about the poverty rate, which rose to 15.1% in 2010, its highest level since 1993, according to census data released Tuesday. About 46.2 million people are now living in poverty, 2.6 million more than last year.

The Canadian university system costs about $25 billion a year. The total income for all Canadian universities from licensing their intellectual property is around $50 million. Subtract the cost of managing that IP and you’re left with a net income of only $15 million. Getting technology to market is clearly not a big income stream for the typical Canadian university.

Those numbers come from The Way Ahead, Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, by Tom Brzustowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. While the book is a few years old, the overall trend illustrated by those numbers hasn’t changed. However, Brzustowski also quotes Doyletech’s Denzil Doyle, who puts these numbers in their proper context. According to Doyle, the IP income to universities represents only 2.5 percent of the new sales generated by products based on it. Do that math and you arrive at $2 billion — $2 billion in annual sales for the Canadian economy. That isn’t an insignificant sum.

The fact that we all have technology at our fingertips has caused a disintermediation within traditional commerce, and significant disruption for retailers big and small. Consider the impact of Netflix on Blockbuster and local video stores, or how Amazon upended book buying. What we know for sure is that innovation, and the speed at which a business is able to innovate, is no longer an option. Rather, it is paramount to survival.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.The reason? Four mega trends being driven by consumers are dramatically changing buying and selling habits as we know them. Merchants of all types—from brick-and-mortar retail outlets to non-profits, to manufacturers and even those selling online, need to ensure they’re keeping pace or risk going the way of Blockbuster, Borders and the dinosaurs.

What city do you think is the best place for a young entrepreneur to start a business?

We have nominated 12 cities that are great start-up spots for young entrepreneurs. Take a minute and vote for the one that you think is the best or add your own.

Remember to think beyond just the business environment. Young entrepreneurs are looking for a balance of business and lifestyle. So the culture, activities, social scene and even climate matter when a young entrepreneur is trying to decide where to setup shop.

The poll will be open for 1 week and then we will be publishing the results to determine the best city for young entrepreneurs in 2011. Check out last years results – Top Cities for Young Entrepreneurs in 2010

Japan and the US aren’t the only countries in the world boasting advanced robot cars. Now Germany has one, too. A team of researchers at Freie Universität Berlin has roboticized a conventional VW Passat, which has successfully finished trial runs in central Berlin “several times” over the last weekend without causing an accident.

The car (which is called “MadeInGermany” for some reason) made its debut in 2007 when it drove around autonomously in a closed area in a closed down airport in Berlin. But now the vehicle was able to finish a 20km round trip in the center of the city, between Kaiserdamm to Brandenburg Gate, for the first time – roundabout traffic, speed limits, pedestrians and a total 46 lights on the way included.

Your visitor and lead volumes have taken off since you began using inbound marketing strategies.  Congratulations! The key question now is “How do you convert leads into customers?”

This is where a sales process might be helpful. What is a sales process?   Think of a sales process the way you think of Inbound Marketing, meaning it is a methodology. The inbound marketing methodology has three steps: get found, convert, and analyze.  Within each step you have an objective, a set of activities to accomplish, some tools to do so, and exit criteria that indicates it is time to move to the next step in the process.

For example, in Get Found your objective is to attract visitors.  The activity to do so is to create remarkable content. The tool you use to create this content is a blog.  The exit criteria that indicates a visitor has become a lead is a form fill. There are objectives, activities, tools and exit criteria for Convert and Analyze.

Around Labor Day, the commentary on the current state of the workplace increases. But this year, it seemed that the media focused more on what the future of work will look like. A couple of examples that I’ve seen over the past few days include:

• A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy, part of The Future of Work—A Labor Day Special Report (TheAtlantic.com): Advocates creating unions that bring together the increasing number of independent workers.
• The Blended Workforce: The New Norm (Talent Management): Foretells of a future workplace made up of a combination of employees, consultants, independent contractors and contingent workers. Not unlike the Shamrock Organization that Charles Handy first predicted in his 1989 management classic, The Age of Unreason.
• Are Jobs Obsolete? (CNN.com): Challenges the relevance of the entire concept of a job.

Innovation has spread far beyond its traditional boundaries of the United States, Europe, and Japan as cheap technology allows more countries to compete in the global marketplace.

But great new ideas, no matter how groundbreaking or potentially valuable, are only the first link in a chain that includes government and corporate allies in an economy that supports risk.

“Innovation is an important prerequisite for national economic success,” says Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at INSEAD, a multinational business school with campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi.

It’s gone global for two reasons, adds Dutta, “The rise of emerging markets with populations moving out of poverty and asking for new products and services,” while the spread of technology has enabled less-developed economies to innovate.

Former President Bill Clinton hit the Sunday shows and was on NBC's "Today Show" on Monday morning, all to highlight his massive Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York this week. The CGI brings together heads of state and leaders from all walks of life around the world. It is timed to coincide with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

Click below for fascinating list of speakers.....

below, from CGI....

President Clinton Announces "Conversations on Courage" at 2011 Clinton Global Initiative

President Clinton Announces "Conversations on Courage" Featuring Aung San Suu Kyi, General Secretary of the National League for Democracy and Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative

AT&T is officially launching its 4G LTE network in five cities today, according to the carrier. That means if you’re an AT&T subscriber living in San Antonio, Chicago, Dallas, Houston or Atlanta your mobile Internet access should be faster today. The rest of the country will have to wait jealously until AT&T expands the service to 10 more cities (70 million United States residents total) by the end of the year.

LTE stands for “Long Term Evolution” and it provides a wireless broadband technology that helps mobile devices get faster Internet access. The 4G stands for “fourth generation,” meaning this version of LTE should be faster than the previous editions.

Facebook hosts 140 billion photos, and will add 70 billion this year, according to the blog of photo-sharing site 1000memories. Putting this in context, 1000memories made the following visualization which shows how big Facebook's library of photos are in comparison to other photo sharing sites, as well as the Library of Congress.

There’s been quite a bit of chatter about the “Brian Cox Effect” in the UK recently, as interest in science seems to be on the rise.  But I haven’t heard anyone talking about the “Charlie McDonnell Effect”.

Maybe it’s because Charlie appeals more to a growing movement of teens who just want to immerse themselves in awesomeness, rather than science advocates on the lookout for the next Carl Sagan.  Maybe it’s because Charlie doesn’t fit the mold as science communicator extraordinaire – he didn’t even go to University for goodness sake!  But like it or not, 20 year old Charlie McDonnell is reaching out to millions of teens when it comes to science, and engaging with them in ways few others are even getting close to!

We have heard several entrepreneurship-based proposals recently to get our economy back on track, but one piece seemed to be missing this whole time in the debate: re-evaluating Sarbanes-Oxley for young firms. We have long known that the compliance costs associated with SOX—particularly section 404—have been discouraging many companies from going public, thereby blocking their access to capital and growth. Researchers have suggested that Congress address this issue in some way, and a measure to allow shareholders of companies with market cap below $1 billion to opt-in under SOX was one of the ideas floated in the Startup Act released mid-July. The measure is now gaining track in Congress.

Last week, Rep. Ben Quayle introduced a bill called the Startup Expansion and Investment Act (H.R. 2941), which allows new companies with a market capitalization under $1 billion to opt-out of regulations within section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for the first ten years after going public. To inform investors, a company must disclose in its annual reports that it chose to opt out of section 404. Currently, the market capitalization threshold to be exempt from complying with section 404 is $75 million. This high-impact, low-cost reform could significantly expand the number of companies that access the public markets.

According to ES Research, between 85% and 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. At the same time, companies are spending billions of dollars on sales training each year. That’s billions of dollars wasted on training that disappoints and only produces short-term boosts in sales...at best.

Training can be a disappointment right away when it just doesn’t go well, or it can be a disappointment months later when results don’t materialize. Regardless, sales training strikes out a lot. When it does, it’s usually because of common and predictable reasons.

Ross Thomson

Radical technological changes involved new knowledge, but how was that knowledge generated? In the case of electrification in the United States, I argue that two sources of knowledge were fundamental to the widening of electrical technology: practical knowledge associated with the telegraph and the conclusions and methods of applied and pure science. The telegraph industry was the most important for-profit antecedent. Its agents, knowledge, and networks were essential to later electrical innovations, as a sample of the 5,300 patents issued to 250 telegraph inventors from 1836 through 1929 demonstrates. These innovations then took on their own dynamics. Scientific knowledge in the not-for- profit sector, often developed in colleges and spread through teaching and publication, solved problems beyond the knowledge of telegraph operators and inventors. A study of 212 major electrical inventors shows that innovators commonly, and over time increasingly, learned off the job through formal and informal education, networked in scientific and engineering societies, published frequently, and taught others in meetings and in colleges. Economic and extra-economic sources of knowledge interfused more tightly as the period progressed.

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WASHINGTON—A top Securities and Exchange Commission official said there could be benefits to easing rules limiting entrepreneurs from tapping investors for small amounts of capital, as long as doing so doesn't create openings for scam artists.

The rise of the Internet has allowed creative artists, nonprofits and entrepreneurs to use "crowd-funding" techniques to raise small amounts of cash from a large number of people. But SEC rules currently bar companies from issuing shares in exchange for the capital without first registering with the agency.