Do you think men make better entrepreneurs than women, and why? I did some research on this subject a while back, and I found some interesting perspectives. Everyone seems to agree that women think differently than men, and run their businesses differently, but there is a lot less agreement on which styles are better or worse.

First of all, it is evident that there are fewer women entrepreneurs today than men. Only one in four companies in the USA today are run by women. Yet, according to a study by the Center for Women’s Business Research, the number of female-owned firms is growing twice as fast as all the rest, so women are catching up. Here are key observations from this and other studies:

1. Leadership style. There are clear differences between males and females in their management and leadership styles, probably reflecting their genetics. Distinguishing traits of male leaders are autonomy, independence, and competition, while those of women are relations, interdependence, and cooperation. Both have their advantages.

HBO's movie version of Andrew Ross Sorkin's bestseller "Too Big Too Fail" brought some of Hollywood's energy to the story of the 2008 financial crisis.

We've put together our favorite lines from the movie in approximate chronological order to give you a fast play-by-play of the film and its t

Entrepreneurs are the heroes of the tech business -- they take the big risks and push for the big disruptions that move the entire industry forward. They create a hot job market for engineers, huge returns for investors, and concrete real-life improvements for the rest of us.

But that doesn't mean that big old companies like Google and Microsoft are losing their relevance, as Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch argued last week.

Some big companies have big problems, Microsoft and Cisco being two obvious examples. But the tech industry isn't a binary Cold War universe with old defensive companies looking over their Berlin Wall to a host of innovative startups on the other side.

We keep hearing about how the cloud and open source have dramatically lowered the cost of launching a company.

But we lose sight of just how easy it has become to start a company online, and sometimes we don't know what the best tools are for the job.

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman has a great post where he lists the tools he used to get his company off the ground. We're using it with our own amendments and suggestions to give you the best tools to get your startup off the ground.

Here's a great clip of Steve Jobs doing some Q&A with developers at the 1997 WWDC.

Jobs says Apple was not focused enough, it was saying "yes" to too many projects, and it meant the total of Apple was worth less than the sum of its parts. "Focusing is about saying no," says Jobs.

Last week, President Barack Obama traveled to Durham, N.C., to tour Cree Inc. — one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of energy-efficient lighting. He spoke with employees and met with his Jobs and Competitiveness Council to discuss initiatives and policies to spur economic growth, promote job creation and accelerate hiring across the United States.

A major point of agreement is that one of the most effective models to achieve these goals is regional innovation clusters that focus on developing and commercializing clean energy technologies, accelerating regional economic development and creating jobs. Another is that strong federal support for energy research is critical to developing technologies that will allow the U.S. to transition away from imported oil, reduce carbon pollution and build a world-leading clean energy industry.

Hey, can you give us $15 million? Impudent as the question sounds, it’s precisely what Zero Point Software is asking of the general public. With said cash, sourced straight from the community’s pockets, the developer hopes to fund Interstellar Marines – a firstperson shooter intended to rival the likes of Halo and Killzone. That may seem like quite a long shot, but the idea of crowdfunding has been around for years, and its successes in other industries are well documented, even for budgets extending into the millions.

The concept turns the traditional transaction  on its head: customers put their cash up front,  and then the game gets made. In order to attract potential donors, developers post an early version of the game, or even just a video or screenshots, explaining their aims and laying out the required budget. If people donate, they get a ‘perk’ – anything from a thank-you call to an in-game appearance; the more cash, the better the perk.  It’s common for beta access or at least frequent development updates to be part of the package.

In her new book, The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that faculty tenure is among the factors contributing to the decline of higher education in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the book.

If colleges were to eliminate tenure tomorrow, they'd have to pay faculty higher salaries. That's what most economists—and common sense—will tell you. Lifetime job security is a perk, like health insurance or a company car. If you take it away, you'll have to compensate in another way to get the same quality of employees.

Raising funding for an early-stage venture is always difficult. There is no bottled recipe for success, but even if you have a great concept that is scalable combined with a passionate team that can execute the growth strategy, you still need to communicate this in a multifaceted investor’s pitch.

Most entrepreneurs can give a fair account of the top line business strategic growth path, dive into the complexities of the product or service offering, put together a good industry analysis, name a handful of possible clients and present enticing year three to five financial projections, but this will not necessarily get you to the due diligence phase.

Unless all of this is based on solid research, the application for venture capital (VC) funding will most likely get rejected. In my experience as funder of early-stage businesses, the following seemingly easy questions are stumbling blocks that just about never get answered satisfactorily.

When others were questioning whether Facebook was really worth $10 billion in February 2010, two Wall Street investors were quietly buying chunks of its shares at a $15 billion valuation.

The investors, Frank Mazzola and Emilio DiSanluciano, principals of Felix Investments, a Manhattan-based broker-dealer, are not part of Silicon Valley’s elite. Dressed in crisp wool suits, the two New Yorkers are more comfortable navigating the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan than on tree-lined Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., well known for its venture capital residents.

But in late 2009, the pair had a plan: buy as many shares of the largest private Internet companies as quickly as possible. And if valuations go up, just buy, buy, buy.

The Kansas Bioscience Authority Executive Committee has adopted its annual operating plan for fiscal 2012, which begins July 1, 2011. The plan outlines KBA's strategic priorities and budget for the year.

The plan allows for the KBA board to consider up to $29.7 million in new investments during the year, approximately $20 million for commercialization projects and $9.7 million in research and development projects. Through fiscal 2011, KBA's total investment commitments to bioscience businesses and researchers since its inception total $249.2 million.

The tech bubble of the late ’90’s was fueled largely by the promise of universal high-speed Internet access. As millions of consumers gained access to the Internet, new market opportunities emerged. But today, content is so heavy, and networks so overburdened, that more efficient use of the network is a critical behavior.

The state of web content today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web; the existing infrastructure has become insufficient. While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it’s clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

On Monday June 20 in Cambridge, Mass., and on Tuesday June 21 in Washington, DC, the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center will release two new reports on The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color that provide the most comprehensive data, research findings and recommendations to improve the educational experiences and pathways of young men of color. Combined with findings from in-depth student interviews and video student voices, produced in collaboration with the Business Innovation Factory's Student Experience Lab, these two studies provide a compelling narrative that tracks the progress and pitfalls for young men of color on their way to a college degree.

The report and launch of this new national initiative will be announced at an event on June 20th at 2 p.m hosted in collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research. A distinguished panel, moderated by National Public Radio's Claudio Sanchez will include Representative Joaquin Castro, Special Assistant to the President for Education Roberto Rodriguez, Yale Professor James Comer, Actor/Activist Hill Harper, among others. The event will be live webcasted here and you are invited to join Katherine @thebif Hypolite for a lively twitter chat at #studentvoice.

Mobile app analytics firm Flurry is releasing a new report today comparing the daily engagement of smartphone users on mobile apps vs. web browsing on the PC. For web analytics, Flurry used data from comScore and Alexa and for mobile application usage, the startup used its own analytics, which now counts 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications. Flurry says that this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity. While this is an imperfect methodology, it does point to the rise of mobile apps in our lives.

Flurry says that daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web.

Imagine something so insidious that it leads to the following: over 750,000 personal bankruptcies per year. In Bill Gates’ recent TED talk, he described it as the factor that is devastating education budgets and is leading to a pitting of old versus young; it impairs U.S.-based automakers by adding a $2000 “tax” on all of their vehicles; many believe it is the primary driver of the jobless recovery. Despite corporate profits being at record levels, many corporations simply aren’t hiring as a result. In the startup arena, it can keep people from moving to a startup.

What is it? Healthcare hyperinflation. It won’t be long before $1 out of every $5 in the U.S. economy is spent on healthcare despite the U.S. ranking 31st in the world in terms of health outcomes. Founded by Dr. Samir Qamar in Monterey, MedLion recently opened a clinic in the heart of Silicon Valley with a model that is revolutionizing how primary and urgent care are delivered (Disclosure: MedLion may become a customer of my company, Avado.com, which is why I am so familiar with it.) Their breakthrough model is enabled by disintermediating insurance companies from their encumbrance of day-t

One of the most enjoyable (and sometimes complicated) part of working with startups is protecting founders and watching their backs.  Not only are there key contractual issues that must be buttoned-down (like vesting and IP assignments), but there are also a minefield of laws and regulations that must be complied with.

In a world of easy access to online documents, this legal compliance is often overlooked or marginalized by founders, as they attempt to stay “lean” and “scrappy” (and sometimes even handle the legal work themselves or through a web service).  Certain violations of law, however, could lead to founders’ criminal liability.  Here are four sets of laws to watch-out for:

Employment laws.  The most common employment law violations are misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor and/or failing to pay an employee the minimum wage.  Both violations could lead to the same result: criminal liability for the failure to properly pay wages.

I would like to propose a challenging and, I believe, extremely important thesis, namely, that we know enough about how entrepreneurship develops in the world to deliberately create the conditions so that there will be measurably more of it, and do so in a relatively short period of time, that is, years and not decades. Furthermore, we know enough about how to accomplish this XPRIZE-like challenge so that entrepreneurship will be relatively self-sustaining, self-generating. Finally, achieving this will generate tremendous amounts of economic and social benefit. To present this thesis I draw on decades of experience around the world, as well as my own as an entrepreneur, academic, venture capitalist, angel investor, government advisor (including playing a small role advising the White House’s StartUp America). I also lived in Israel for 22 years and participated in the miraculous entrepreneurial transformation of that society.

I would like to start my presentation to you with several assertions which will frame my comments. As assertions, of course, although there is some evidence for them, they can be challenged, and there should be no better environment for open discussion and debate about ideas than universities, and here we are graced with the presence of representatives of all of the universities of this great and challenged island.

In early May, President Obama traveled to El Paso—on the doorstep of the Mexican border to try to drum up enthusiasm for yet another push for comprehensive immigration reform. The pundits offered a collective yawn, concluding that the hyper-partisan, divided Congress would never be able to reach agreement on an immigration reform bill.

They’re almost certainly correct. However, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have said they don’t want to take a piecemeal approach to reform. But with just about everyone agreeing that comprehensive reform isn’t in the cards—especially with a presidential election year looming—doesn’t it make sense to take action where we can? Oh, right. Who said Congress makes any sense?

However, there is one element to immigration reform that both sides might be able to muster the good sense to agree on if they truly want to help jump-start the still moribund economy. That’s an effort to help immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to start businesses and create jobs in the United States. Obama singled out the issue in his El Paso speech.

What is the influence of entrepreneurship education on intentions to become entrepreneurs and becoming full-time entrepreneurs?  According to Babson College researchers:

• There is overwhelming evidence that taking two or more core entrepreneurship elective courses positively influenced the intention to become an entrepreneur and becoming an actual entrepreneur both at the time of graduation and long afterward.

• Writing a student business plan also had a significant influence, but it is not a strong as taking two or more core courses.

The findings are based on a sample of 3,755 Babson College alumni who graduated from 1985 to 2009, analyzed by Babson College Professors Julian Lange, Edward Marram, and William Bygrave and Ajay Solai Jawahar M’11 and Wei Yong M’11.