For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan.

Adeo Ressi on Product Development 08/19/2010 from Adeo Ressi on Vimeo.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by “sat on the sidelines” is this – until today I haven’t really said what I felt. Now I’m going to.

I do not have a Harvard MBA. I’m not a “#u30pro” (but secretly wish I was). I’m not a social networking God (but am getting better). But I am an OJT CEO.

I’m a former engineer trained in the Air Force. I’m a consistent workaholic. And I am a passionate entrepreneur.

For the past year, our team has developed YouTern – an online community that connects emerging talent to entrepreneur-driven companies, through internships. We’ve accomplished a lot in 12 months; 90 days after Alpha launch we are grateful that over 300 companies now use YouTern to find great interns.

Harvard University professor Clayton Christensen says in a recent Newsweek interview that startup companies’ first strategies are almost always wrong, and an overfunded startup can prolong those false assumptions because “the founders can assume that they’re right for quite a while before they start to need to depend on peoples’ willingness to pay.”

The same is true in idea management.

Look at ideas as currency, and an idea management platform as a bank. An in-house IT technician can build your bank, and guide everyone to it, and even show you exactly how to put your money into it. The trouble is, if you focus on generating lots of activity (a high number of deposits), rather than encouraging high value, you likely will end up with a huge mountain of nickels, when what you really want is quarters.

PitchBook Data has just released its 3Q 2010 PE Presentation Deck, a collection of market intelligence compiled using data from the PitchBook Private Equity Platform. The deck covers PE activity through the first half of 2010 and is available now in PowerPoint format for use as a reference tool or as a resource for your next industry presentation. This latest presentation deck includes data covering U.S. private equity deal flow, deal valuations and deal activity by industry, as well as data on PE fundraising, the current PE capital overhang and exit trends. Download the PitchBook Private Equity Presentation Deck here.

We live in a world defined by deviants.  By communities who have made it a habit to define what “normal” is only to isolate those that don’t fit the description of the quintessential middle-class family with a 22 minute commute and 1.78 kids.  Whether young, old, poor, or rich, modern development patterns have segregated these groups through the euphemistic existence of gated subdivisions, industrial parks, low-income housing, and retirement communities– creating isolated pockets of deviation. 

As the frequency of these pockets grew over time (and the distance separating them increased), communities became more and more reliant on vehicular transportation to stitch them together– and in turn more tolerant of suburban sprawl.  However, as cities and towns prepare for the rise of intergenerational communities and attempt to position themselves to accommodate a shifting marketplace, this deviant model must be avoided at all costs.

Tom Quinn isn't the kind of entrepreneur who needs help getting his ideas in front of the right people. He's a former president of networking software maker Novell (NOVL), and he invented the motion-controller technology behind Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii while running a company called Gyration, where he raised $40 million in venture capital. So why is he pitching his latest idea—a portable system to convert food scraps and other waste into ethanol—on a website frequented by basement tinkerers and dorm-room startups?

Quinn's E-Fuel is among more than 1,000 companies, inventors, and students vying for funding in a General Electric (GE) contest called the ecomagination Challenge. A half-dozen winners will get cash prizes of up to $100,000. More significantly, GE and four venture capital firms plan to invest $200 million in the best clean-technology ideas entered in the contest.

Screw-ups are inevitable when you’re launching your own business. Entrepreneurs are often less clear about their company’s purpose than they thought they were – or hit roadblocks they didn’t anticipate and don’t know how to handle. Serial entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan, in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University, runs down the list of mistakes that are most likely to bring a startup down. (The lecture’s seven years old, but the advice is timeless.)

If you’ve considered the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur there are eight traits that are important in describing the perfect entrepreneur.

1. Risk Taker – Entrepreneurs understand that in order to make a profit they will need to assume a certain level of financial risk.

2. Business Manager – Entrepreneurs have a keen understanding of finance and are well equipped to manage the finances of a business.

3. Organizer – Entrepreneurs are well equipped in the area of organizing all aspects of the business for current and long-term growth.

4. Marketing Expert – Entrepreneurs are capable of understanding and implementing marketing strategies both online as well as offline.

Walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging, and increase performance on cognitive tasks, researchers have found.

The new study used fMRI to determine whether aerobic activity increased connectivity in the default mode network (DMN), which dominates brain activity when a person is least engaged with the outside world, and in the fronto-executive network, which aids in the performance of complex tasks. Previous studies found that a loss of coordination in the DMN is a common symptom of aging and in extreme cases can be a marker of disease.

The U.S. likes to think of itself as a cradle for the world's newest and cleverest tech. But Intel's CEO Paul Otellini is foretelling a looming high-tech crunch, and the nation's venture capital association is equally worried now that 10-year VC returns have turned negative for the first time in a decade.

Intel's Paul Otellini has a voice that's definitely worth listening to: As the successful CEO of one of the world's most successful companies, he is a man with his finger on the pulse of the tech industry (admittedly, concentrating on the chip markets) in a way that few others have. And speaking this week at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum, Otellini had dire things to say about the state of things:

"Our research centers were without peer. No country was more attractive for start-up capital...We seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology. That simply is no longer the case."

On December 24, 1968, astronauts aboard Apollo 8, making the first human trip around the moon, stumbled upon a most beautiful scene – an “Earthrise.” Almost 40 years later (in 2007), Japan’s Kaguya satellite captured footage of the same scene unfolding: an Earthrise and also this time an Earthset. If you click on the preceding links, you will see some pretty wonderful still shots in HD.

Google has stated that the “market of conversations” are growing to a point that businesses will either jump in or fall out. The way Google positions the need for enterprises to engage is in their statement which says  “Bottom line: More and more business is going to transact via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other applications yet to be developed.  This train is too important to miss.”

Has Google Failed?

Social media is here to stay. More personal communications are being sent via social media than email, which is mindboggling. Technological developments are on the horizon. Google has launched numerous “social trial balloons and many have failed. Failure is part of success. The determining factor is learning from failure and moving to new ground using lessons learned from your failure and others. Google is nothing more than a great big incubator of “trial and error” and they use their failures, and that of others, to predict market behavior. However their predictions are not based on past references rather future indicators of “market shifts”.

Startups that enter the Y Combinator program don’t generally do it for the money alone — most companies receive $20,000 or less in seed funding. Instead, they do it for the exposure, connections, mentors, and resources that the YC program affords. And they just got one more major perk: Facebook has announced that it will be working to help YC companies create “transformative social experiences”, and it’s going to give them preferential treatment and access to company resources. From the Facebook post:

We’ll provide product, technical and design resources to support new Y Combinator companies interested in working with us to build deeply social products, whether a website or an application on Facebook.com. These companies will have priority access to our technologies and programs such as Facebook Credits, Instant Personalization and upcoming beta features. Y Combinator will be publishing a “Request for Startup” focused on social startups and is now looking for interested entrepreneurs for their winter 2011 funding cycle.

I visit a lot of startup websites. A lot. And as a journalist, I am perhaps more prone than others to click on a company's "About Us" page. Of course, my motivations for doing so typically involve finding pertinent facts and figures, FAQs and anecdotes to round out a ReadWriteWeb story. But I don't think I'm alone in my desire for company websites to do more than just talk about the products they offer.

While it's well known that investors care a lot about the composition of your founding team, arguably visitors to your website - customers and potential customers - are also interested in reading more about who you are.

We read about them in the newspaper and watch them on television every day: people who have the creativity to develop an idea, the confidence to take the risks, and the tenacity to turn the idea into a successful business. Many parents hope that one day their own child will enjoy the level of success that is attainable through entrepreneurship - not only the potential financial rewards, but also in terms of personal development and fulfillment. Here are six tips to help steer your child down the road to entrepreneurism.

IN PICTURES: 6 Millionaire Traits That You Can Adopt

1. Teach Kids about Money
   By teaching your child about money, you help them discover the relationships between earning, spending and saving. In doing this, children also begin to understand the value of money. This financial literacy can begin at a young age with simple money concepts like counting coins and making change for purchases. Older children can learn about savings accounts, balancing a check book and creating a personal budget. The key is to teach a concept and let them try, even if it means a little extra time in the grocery store while a youngster painstakingly counts out coins from the piggy bank. (For more tips, check out 5 Money Skills To Teach Your Kids.)

Lots of talk these days about new forms of angel/seed capital. But less talk about the most vexing issue facing the venture ecosystem over the past decade - that being the shrinking amount of liquidity on the way out.

If you look at how much money has been raised by venture firms, including the seed and super seed categories, versus how much money has been returned in the past ten years, the ratio is not good. At some point the investors who fund the venture capital asset class will not be able to keep funding it.

The asset class needs to focus on liquidity. M&A continues to be the one bright spot and although I have not seen the data, I suspect M&A activity around venture backed companies in the past ten years has not shrunk and may have actually increased (if you take out the bubble years of 98-2000).

I’ve read hundreds of articles on how to corral your employees in social media. Posts on how to make sure they don’t reveal too much, waste too much time, or annoy people to the point that customers hate you.

However, all that assumes that your employees and your team are comfortable stepping into social media and that they WANT to be there.

It doesn’t account for the people who aren’t. The people who are fearful of the new tools, of casting bad light on the company they work for, or, even worse, accidentally getting themselves fired.