The truth is: Startups are hard but doable. But really, don't discount the "hard" part.

Paul Graham, an influential investor who runs a startup school in Silicon Valley, gave Inc magazine a quote on this point in a interview published last night.

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To comprehend the aging of the public sector, look no further than your mailbox.

Postal service workers register a median age of 52 – as high as any other industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The only other group of employees that old work in jobs, literally, near death: funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories.

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Export manufacturing has recently become the unsung hero of the U.S. economy. Despite all the public focus on the U.S. trade deficit, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country’s exports have been growing more than seven times faster than GDP since 2005. As a share of the U.S. economy, in fact, exports are at their highest point in 50 years.

But this is likely to be just the beginning. We project that the U.S., as a result of its increasing competitiveness in manufacturing, will capture $70 billion to $115 billion in annual exports from other nations by the end of the decade. About two-thirds of these export gains could come from production shifts to the U.S. from leading European nations and Japan. By 2020, higher U.S. exports, combined with production work that will likely be “reshored” from China, could create 2.5 million to 5 million American factory and service jobs associated with increased manufacturing.

UC Berkeley and Fraunhofer study how large companies practice innovation

The Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have conducted the first large-sample survey of open innovation adoption among large companies. Their study of European and U.S. companies gives an extensive overview of the ways that companies are now practicing open innovation, along with the trends that can be discerned.

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The image of the entrepreneur as whiz kid has serious currency in American business lore. But according to a new study from the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City think tank that studies entrepreneurship, that image is a myth.

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We write a lot about Paul Graham, the man behind the uber successful Y Combinator. Graham’s incubator, which has spawned rock star startups such as AirBnb, Reddit and Dropbox, has funded over 500 companies which have gone on to raise more than US$1.7 billion in funding. Y combinator is considered, by some, the top startup incubator in the world.

Naturally, Graham’s latest interview for Inc. magazine piqued our interest. It’s long, but worth a bookmark. Still, we dug into the interview and created a TL;DR version that outlines some of Graham’s views on startups.

Nearly three out of four people in the United Arab Emirates owns a smartphone, making it the country with the highest smartphone penetration in the world. Following the UAE are South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The United States doesn't even fall into the top 10, finishing at No. 13 with just 56.4% penetration, according to Google's Our Mobile Planet report from Q1 of 2013.

The situation is familiar to everyone who has taken public transportation: You rush into up to the turnstile and then spend five minutes ransacking your pockets and bags for your transit card.

Two undergraduate students at MIT designed a ring to replace Boston's transit card, the Charlie Card, to pay public transport fares with ease. The inspiration came from forgetting their Charlie Cards time and again.

For high-tech in much of the 20 century, when start-up capital was scarce and the need for it was great, innovation began at the core and migrated to the edge. Today we have the reverse. Start-up capital is plentiful, the need for it is modest, and innovation is thriving at the edge and moving reluctantly to the core, fearful of the inertia it will encounter once it gets there.

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Nearly one-third of the 36 emerging technology pioneers chosen by the World Economic Forum this year have implications for the life sciences and health IT space. They represent robotics, noninvasive prenatal testing, using edible identifiers to guard against counterfeit drugs and an anti-smoking vaccine.

Since 2000, the World Economic Forum has identified companies based on their potential to make a global impact with the groundbreaking technology they’ve developed. Here are 11 of the companies.

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I’m a communicator. It doesn’t really matter if it’s good or bad, I just have some mechanism in my brain that fires off when I believe communication is necessary.

It’s irresistible.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. According to this great post in Psychology Today, one key step in effective communication is to “say what you mean and mean what you say. Be direct and honest; don’t dance around the issue or play games”.

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The best interview is one conducted as a two-way professional conversation. You are not only there to prove yourself to the company, but further, to determine if you can do your best work there, if your goals are aligned with those of the employer, and if your career objectives can be accomplished through the organization. At the end of your interview, you should anticipate being asked, “Do you have any questions for me?” Never decline.

By refusing to pose a question, you show the interviewer you have not done your homework and are uninterested in the company’s initiatives. Do not pass up the perfect opportunity to prove your inquiring mind and potential role within the company. However, be careful what you ask! We’ve come up with 20 questions to avoid asking.

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With Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this week announcing that he plans to retire next year, some people active in the venture and startup community see a greater role for the software giant’s next CEO in bringing venture and startup partnership relationships more to the forefront of Microsoft strategy.

David Becker/Getty Images Microsoft is nowhere near as active in the startup space as some technology companies such as Google Inc., and Intel Corp., who through their venture arms do extensive direct investments in startups. But some say Microsoft has been gearing up for greater participation.

A partnership between the City of Oklahoma City and i2E Inc. has expanded the financing options by $2 million for Oklahoma City-based small businesses seeking capital to grow their ventures and create new jobs.

The city, i2E and the Oklahoma City Economic Development Trust created the $2 million GrowOKC Fund through a Memorandum of Understanding, which was unanimously approved by the City Council on Aug. 13.

i2E committed $1 million to the new fund from its GrowOK Fund, which is part of the federal State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) funds it manages on behalf of the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

Would a rat risk dying just to satisfy its desire for chocolate?

I recently found out. In my laboratory, we gave rats unlimited access to their standard fare as well as to a mini cafeteria full of appetizing, high-calorie foods: sausage, cheesecake, chocolate. The rats decreased their intake of the healthy but bland items and switched to eating the cafeteria food almost exclusively. They gained weight. They became obese.

DC I-Corps, a new, NSF-supported program designed to foster, grow and nurture an innovation ecosystem in the Mid-Atlantic Region, is now accepting applications for its fall cohort, beginning on October 7. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis up until that date. Apply here.

Open to research teams and technology entrepreneurs from universities, federal laboratories, agencies and the general community, the free program guides researchers in exploring the commercial potential of their inventions.

For our 13th annual celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs, we’re presenting the stories in a new way. We’ve grouped them by categories that reflect the variety of approaches that people can take to big problems. The Entrepreneurs are creating businesses that could overturn markets or create new ones.

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Brussels has paved the way for a specialised European patent court to solve disputes in one instance and avoid multiple litigation cases in up to 28 different national courts.

The European Commission yesterday (29 July) announced the legal framework for Europe-wide patent protection by updating EU rules on the jurisdiction of courts and recognition of judgments, the so-called Brussels I Regulation.

The following short film about smartphone overuse has been passed around a bunch this weekend. We first spotted it on Gawker and BoingBoing.

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At the center of pretty much every startup community there are key networking events. As a startup, it can get pretty exhausting going to all of them and deciding which one is important can be like a game of crystal ball gazing.

If you are in tech, these events do tend to be quite useful as a great place to meet possible collaborators and to gain insight into the industry. However as a young startup, is this the best use of your time? Shouldn’t you be busy actually building the product and getting ready to launch rather putting in face time that may or not help the company?

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