Students from Harvard Business School recently launched their startups as part of Harvard's "startup bootcamp" program for first-year students.  The Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development 3 program is a 10-week crash course in building a company from scratch with a limited budget, and on a tight deadline. 

In a CNBC interview interview aired on Monday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates suggests that Windows 8 and Microsoft's Surface tablet line could ultimately dethrone Apple's iPad from its global tablet crown because iPad "users are frustrated." 

Yikes! I guess Gates has access to the really good stuff.

It's happened to every founding CEO. You're in a meeting — with fellow founders, potential partners, VCs, or even just friends — and you're asked that simple question that often feels like the hardest one:

"How are things going?"

"Great!" you respond

Cue, awkward pause. Where do you go from there? As a CEO, I have to answer a lot of tough questions: What's our 5- and 10-year vision? Where do we hire next? Should we focus on existing products, or launch our next one? But for the open-ended "How are things going?" there's no perfect answer.

Question: What’s the best source of funding for a new business?

Answer: Bootstrapping, tapping personal savings, and asking friends and family for funding are still the top ways small businesses get started. Once you have some business assets, even such intangibles as a business plan, a patent application, or promising market research, you will be in a position to seek capital from outside investors.

I recently attended NY Tech Day where 400 eager beaver startups sought to get some love--not to mention media and VC attention--at their respective exhibit booths.

All this company self-promotion raises an interesting question: How do you truly differentiate your new business in a sea of startups? How do you make a name for your company?

First, a few facts to consider:

- A survey of CEOs once found that startup companies that engage in PR are 30 percent more successful in getting early funding than those that don’t.

- Well-known VC firms are getting into the PR game with firms like Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia hiring in-house PR talent.

Beethoven and Woody Allen bathed their way to genius. Dickens (and just about everyone else) walked. And you don’t want to know how Thomas Wolfe got the juices flowing. Mason Currey, author of "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" shares some of the surprising work modes of history’s most creative.

Not long ago Gov. Rick Perry came poaching on my turf. Well, not mine, exactly, but close: He came to Oxnard, Calif., the town next door to the one I’ve lived in for 25 years, in hopes of luring one of our best local employers off to Texas.

I’m not sure how Perry targeted Haas Automation, one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of precision machining equipment. Admittedly, he wasn’t trying to lure the whole company; he just wanted to attract future expansion. Still, it was a rather brazen move. Although Haas and its Oxnard-based founder have had a lot of ups and downs over the years, the company remains large, successful and very civic-minded. Haas pays well and is one of the most philanthropic companies in Ventura County.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office forecasts a gloomy outlook for state and local government budgets, finding an ever-widening gap between projected revenues and expenses for years to come.

States and localities will record operating balances with an aggregate deficit of 1.6 percent of gross domestic product this year, according to the report. Absent any reforms, the deficit will balloon to 2.7 percent within 30 years.

Anyone who has served on a board of directors can appreciate that each board has its own characteristic rhythm, social rules and level of effectiveness. I've been advising boards and management teams for 25 years as a consultant and C-Suite executive, and have served on several corporate boards, and can attest that it's long been a puzzle to me what exactly makes a board effective.

To try to answer the question, I went back to school. As part of my PhD research, I interviewed directors at 22 small- to medium-sized publicly traded companies about board practices and dynamics. Half the companies had received above-average rankings for governance quality from Governance Metrics International; half had received below-average rankings.

At last week’s The Next Web Conference it was interesting to hear how entrepreneurs are changing their goals.

At previous events we would often hear about monetization, scalability and the Long Tail. Starting at last year’s event, entrepreneurs seemed to give more attention to building 100 year companies, doing what’s best for the customer, and working ‘from the heart’. These aren’t ‘new age’ entrepreneurs who found Zen or don’t care about revenue anymore, but it seems like a lot of entrepreneurs are starting to agree that doing whats best for the customers, doing what feels good for the entrepreneur and building companies to last ends up being damn fine business practice.

Initiating a business is exciting, fun even. But startup dreamers shouldn’t forget the business of starting a business. Sure, it’s enjoyable to pick out a cool logo, a mission statement, a team of professionals to back your vision and a sweet office rental. But don’t let the looming, obligatory startup expenses involved in getting your startup off the ground get lost in the excitement.

If you do, your success will falter. Estimating an accurate startup cost is essential to meeting your future goals. Make sure you get your funds in order for the following expenses.

Do you need a strategic business plan to begin a new venture? The answer depends on how you define a business plan. Every business must have a plan to begin with; but this does not mean that it has to be in a written format. Even a mental construction of a plan can serve as the foundation for your new business.

A study titled the “Pre-Startup Formal Business Plans and Post-Startup Performance: A Study of 116 New Ventures” by the researchers at Babson College displays the fact that there is no significant result in the success of a business started with a strategic business plan and that of a business started without one.

The international development landscape is changing to include many more participants, “solution holders” and willing collaborators than ever before. USAID encourages the academic, scientific and entrepreneurial communities to pioneer solutions to the most challenging development problems. USAID is open to ideas from anyone passionate about finding innovative solutions to achieve development goals and recognizes that development breakthroughs can come from anyone:

Tom Agan wrote an inspiring article in The New York Times on innovators and age. According to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He based his conclusions on data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors.

Do innovators in companies also get better with age?

I am 53 now, and have been working for 25 years. I think I became a better innovator, for three reasons:

The Southeast’s first digital health accelerator is launching this month in South Carolina, with the Mayo Clinic, Abbott Laboratories and the prestigious Health 2.0 conference on board to help it recruit and launch the best B2B health innovation companies in the nation.

And it’s all because founder Peter Barth wasn’t about to create something average, or like any other program in the world.

“We’re not looking for companies that are building the next Facebook for hospitals,” says Barth, managing director of The Iron Yard in Greenville, South Carolina.

Video tour explores the fertile neighborhood where entrepreneurs are growing their startups

A new Kauffman Foundation video takes viewers on a tour of Kansas City's vibrant, Google Fiber-powered startup scene, anchored in the Kansas City Startup Village, where local startups are building a community of collaboration and support.

Kansas City's Startup Village has become known as the nation's first Google "Fiberhood," with Google's 1-gigabit fiber-optic cable installed and serving up Internet connection speeds 100 times faster than broadband.

On location for a special episode of Kauffman's Top of Mind video series, Kauffman Foundation Vice President Tom Ruhe visits a house where four startups are working on their entrepreneurial ventures. The community also features the Homes for Hackers and the recent winners of the Brad Feld KC Fiberhouse competition, the Handprint team, whose vision is to make 3D printing a household necessity.

Presented on the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship.org website, the Top of Mind video channel features the latest in entrepreneurial news and discussions that impact the world of startups.

Michigan Innovation Corps (I-Corps) is a statewide program that was designed to foster and grow an innovation ecosystem.  The program was designed through partnerships between the National Science Foundation (NSF), several universities in Michigan, Michigan SmartZones, and multiple entrepreneurial communities.  The program has created opportunities for teams throughout the state of Michigan to turn their technology into commercial opportunities.  There will be two Michigan I-Corps programs taking place in 2013.  Both programs will run for seven weeks and will be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

High blood pressure dramatically increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack and so is one of the biggest silent killers in the Western world.

But while there are several known mechanisms that cause high blood pressure, some 90% of cases are entirely unexplained. Physicians believe that various factors increase the risk of high blood pressure, such as age, family history, lack of exercise and so on. But the actual mechanism that causes the increase is hotly debated.

POTUS will be visiting Austin on Thursday, March 9 to conduct "events on the economy." It's expected one focus will be on the innovation economy.

As reported in local media:

Obama will be traveling into the wheelhouse of the “Texas miracle,” which Republican officials from Gov. Rick Perry on down credit to the state’s low-tax, low-regulatory, pro-business regime, a stark contrast, they say, to the way the federal government, particularly under a Democratic president, operates.

The visit also comes at a time when alumni of Obama’s presidential campaign have launched an effort – Battleground Texas – to turn Texas blue.

Today, the day before the President's visit, 150 tech CEOs will be attending an unprecedented Austin Technology Council (ATC) Summit to introduce a new economic impact study outlining tech's growing influence on the regional economy. What the data, survey, and Summit are suggesting: Austin is a much more established, mature technology epicenter than previously understood – and therefore the President is coming to the region at very interesting time of "discovery"

In writing about the plethora of startups, devices and strategies that companies large and small are throwing at the internet of things, I’ve been thinking about market size. Cisco says it will generate $14.4 trillion in profits by 2022. GE says it will add $10 trillion to $15 trillion in GDP by 2030. These numbers are hard to be believed. For example the federal government only brought in $2.45 trillion in tax revenue in 2012.

But there’s also the question of how to measure the market or the value. Do we count the devices themselves? The dollars spent on platforms and services that tie connected devices together? What about subscriptions to wireless networks? In GE’s case it’s counting dollars saved by implementing better data gathering systems. But the whole idea of trying to measure what is fundamentally a technological shift as a market baffles me.