Entrepreneurs are feeling as good as they have in over a year about the prospects for their early-stage companies.

According to the Startup Confidence Index for Q1 2013, 84 percent of entrepreneurs said they are confident their profitability would increase within the next year — the highest confidence level they’ve shown since the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom launched its quarterly survey early last year.

I have to wonder if young companies in the healthcare and life science industries would fall in line with that trend, or demonstrate more reserved confidence in their growth over the next year. Even well-established medical device companies, for one, are already reporting weaker earnings this year. And for growing startups, there’s the extra burden of securing growth capital.

Now that we have confirmation that the Liberator 3D-printed pistol can be fired without destroying the body, let’s address what this means for 3D printed weapons and, presumably, homemade weapons in general.

Does the pistol work? Yes, it can be fired at least once without damage to the body of the gun or the person at the trigger. Andy Greenberg at Forbes has seen the gun fire multiple times and the video above shows one shot.

Book-length business plans are out…but planning isn’t a total bust. What resource(s) do you use to put together simple business plans?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Why should only computers, smartphones, and tablets be able to send a tweet? In the hopes of challenging this idea, Twitter recently developed a whimsical tweet-enabled cuckoo clock. It uses a toolkit that could help other designers and engineers test ways for new products to contribute to, and feed on, the social network’s chatter. Twitter created the clock, called #Flock, last month in partnership with London-based technology consultancy Berg; the clock responds to incoming tweets, @-messages, and retweets by animating small wooden puppets.

In bid to foster Nigeria’s growing entrepreneurial landscape, a new innovation hub has launched. Its aim, it says, is to “help Nigerian entrepreneurs create successful businesses”. The new hub, called Information Technology Developers Entrepreneurship Accelerator (iDEA) launched in 2013 and is a not-for-profit organisation aiming to accelerate the development of the technology industry in Nigeria.

The aptly named Lagos-based hub launched with four developers sessions facilitated by tech industry bigwigs: Google, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Nokia. The companies, as part of their support for the centre, provide entrepreneurs with tools to build software skills, solutions and businesses to aid their success.

Where will we find the next generation of innovation leaders, those willing and able to believe in themselves, take risks, and persevere?  Well, one place to look might just be in our university and college first-semester writing classes.

It seems almost axiomatic that long-term business strength, economic growth, and the health of our society in general depends in great measure on innovative leaders.  Our world becomes more complex every day, technology grows at an ever-increasing pace, and human systems of organization are changing and evolving before our very eyes.  Our future success as a society, as well as the success of individuals in their individual lives, hinges on how well we cultivate, nurture and grow individual leaders.

A radio ad I used to hear all the time said, “The words you use matter.”

That is true for people, and it is especially true when you are figuring out how to brand a company. The brand language you strategically choose to describe what you do and how you do it sets the stage for both employees’ and customers’ expectations and satisfaction with your brand.

What types of brand language should you be using as you brand a company?

If you are an entrepreneur these days, or trying to grow an existing business, everyone is telling you that you need to use social media. There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you how to do it, or even offering their services. But very few are talking about how to measure your results, and the right metrics for optimizing your marketing environment.

Jim Sterne, who has written many books on Internet advertising, marketing, and customer service, tackled this complex world of social media metrics in his book titled "Social Media Metrics." He has one of the first books on this subject, and he breaks the process down into nine steps, as follows:

With the advent of LinkedIn, Facebook, and dozens of other websites requiring your profile, the old-fashioned written resume is simply an artifact of a hiring practice that is slow to change, and should be abolished. In fact, if your profile is not already on one of these sites, it probably means that you aren’t in the business market anyway.

Today, most personnel organizations readily admit that they already use the Internet to cross-check what they see in your written resume. You can bet that if the stories don’t match, they will more likely believe the online version. That’s why I emphasized in an old article, “Google Yourself to See How Other People See You,” how important it is to keep your online image clean.

The federal government wants to tap the skills of obscure basement inventors and turn their tinkering into innovative consumer products.

A new survey for Industry Canada has found that almost 13 per cent of Canadians are so-called "private innovators," who have improved on consumer goods or created new products in the last three years.

Recent research in the United States and elsewhere has found similar numbers of ordinary basement tinkerers, regarded by some as a talent pool that consumer-products firms need to harness to find fresh profits. "The consumer innovations uncovered by researchers abroad arise in many sectors, including software, gaming, sporting equipment and automotive," says an Industry Canada description of the survey project.

The lack of women entrepreneurs in the tech industry, and the shortage of female tech employees, have been topics of much discussion. Now a new survey from Elance, Women in Technology, suggests virtual work might be the key to women finally achieving parity with men in tech roles.

The survey, which polled more than 7,000 independent professionals worldwide, found that women are finding more tech opportunities in the virtual world than in the real one. Some 70 percent say online work gives them more opportunities to succeed in technology than traditional on-site work does.

Even if Germany had to write off the loans it extended to Southern European countries as part of the eurozone’s emergency rescue measures, the economic advantages of its membership would still be overwhelming, according to a recent study by the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

The bailout programmes adopted to rescue Greece, Portugal and Ireland from bankruptcy have engrained the notion in the German public of their high cost to taxpayers. An opinion poll conducted in the summer of 2012 showed a whopping 65% of respondents would favour returning to the Deutschmark.

The Healthcare Transformation Group – made up of members Geisinger, Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Mercy – has created a research and development team, to put implementation of a Unique Device Identification System on the fast track.

The team is composed of physicians and clinical researchers from the five healthcare systems that make up the Healthcare Transformation Group, or HTG.

Abu Dhabi: Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahayan, UAE Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development, opened the UAE Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum 2013 in Abu Dhabi on Monday.

During the forum, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology announced its plans to launch the Centre for Innovation Systems and Entrepreneurship (CISE), a new initiative to further develop and spread entrepreneurial spirit among youth in the UAE.

As an entrepreneur, your personal integrity is critical for getting and keeping the support of investors and team members, and your company’s integrity is critical for getting and keeping customers and vendors. But in a practical sense, what does that really mean?

Most definitions of integrity include something like “the quality of being honest and morally upright.” Yet, I’ve found through experience that both honesty and morality are relative terms, depending on the reference point of both the speaker and the receiver. In business, the only view that counts is that of the receiver.

The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship has expanded its MIT Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) Network to better support MIT students. The updated program still features a lineup of successful serial entrepreneurs but has added two more levels of support to match students with those EIRs who best suit the student's level of entrepreneurship knowledge and expertise.

“We’re excited to be able to better support MIT student entrepreneurial endeavors of all kinds — inside and outside of the classroom as well as at each stage of their growth cycle — as well as give the broader network of MIT entrepreneurs the ability to connect and advise the next generation,” says Christina Chase, the Martin Trust Center’s full-time entrepreneur in residence.

Innovation: It's something everyone is in favor of, everyone likes the idea of, yet no one really understands it, according to Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach. Werbach moderated a panel on the topic at the recent Wharton Economic Summit 2013 held in New York City, during which he challenged the participants to define innovation, talk about its relationship to entrepreneurship, and explain what is needed to nurture it. He noted that innovation is essential for companies to grow, and that it is transformative.

In response to a question about whether innovation is necessarily related to new technology and big breakthroughs, Lady Barbara Judge, chairman of the United Kingdom's Pension Protection Fund, defined innovation as either "using something new, or something known, but in a different way, different time or a different place."

The University of Illinois subsidiary created a decade ago to help catapult technologies coming out of the school's research labs into the marketplace is making a renewed push to support startups that have ties to the state.

IllinoisVentures is bringing in a new co-director and more board members from outside academia. It will also increase investment funding for startups emerging from the university's Chicago campus.

Bennet, one of the “Gang of 8” senators negotiating comprehensive immigration reform legislation, was adamant that we should not create an under-class that has fewer rights than American citizens.

But if Bennet and his colleagues wanted to place immigrants’ interests before their own, they would, in short order, pass a series of bills that are acceptable to both political parties rather than risk the possibility for reform entirely by waiting for one, comprehensive bill. Even Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said that the bill he helped craft as one of the leading voices in the “Gang of 8″ would likely not pass the House without changes.

The nature of being an entrepreneur means that you fully embrace ambiguity and are comfortable with being challenged regularly. Choosing this career path is completely irrational because the odds of succeeding are dismal, but most succeed because of their unwavering belief, laser focus on delivering and persistence.

Starting a company is a riveting roller coaster of emotions with tremendous highs and at times, difficult lows, but one thing that always helps me through the ups and downs is to connect with some of the greatest minds. Below are just a few of my favorite quotes: