Ketan Rahangdale felt tied down. A DJ who spent his nights spinning records at clubs, Rahangdale was tethered to his equipment; with his headphones connected to the turntables and mixer, it was difficult to maneuver around the DJ booth or move to the music.

"There were a million wires, and it took hours to set up," Rahangdale recalls. "I remember thinking, ."

Rahangdale wanted to investigate the possibility of creating a device to replace audio cables. As a freshman in Babson's entrepreneurship program, he worked on a business plan and sought out partnerships with engineers to develop the technology for wireless headphones. He later transferred to the University of Miami to be closer to those partners.

Yahoo is a strange, many-headed beast. Not often commended for its corporate vision, cohesive net of products... or anything else, really, maybe it's time to give the Web's most excited (!) megalith a break. 

When the company ousted compromised CEO Scott Thompson and poached Google's Marissa Mayer last year, the Web was heartened - maybe Yahoo gets it, after all these years!

By 2012, it seems, the Web's wary denizens were busy mistrusting Google and Facebook. Yahoo, still a giant by any other gauge, was starting to look like an underdog.

I was at a party recently and got asked what I do for work. When I replied that I am the director of content strategy at a venture capital firm called OpenView, the guy who had asked the question stared at me with a blank look on his face. He explained that he understood the venture capital part, but that the director of content strategy bit wasn’t entirely clear to him.

Ok, so maybe it’s not a job title that’s completely ubiquitous yet, but content marketing jobs of all flavors — director of content strategy, director of content marketing, content strategist, managing editor, content marketing manager, etc. — are all becoming increasingly common. A quick search on indeed.com, for example, turns up hundreds of hits, including one I might add for an OpenView portfolio company.

If innovation were a dress, what would it look like?

Iridescent and remote-controlled — that was the take on a dress Pipeline Inc. CEO Joni Cobb wore Thursday night to the organization’s black-tie event dedicated to entrepreneurship.

Aglow with LED lights, Cobb’s full-length frock drew buzz from a crowd of more than 300 when she walked onto the stage of the Midland Theatre in Kansas City.

What constitutes a successful startup? If you ask the global entrepreneurship media, they will tell you financing. Ask naïve entrepreneurs, they will tell you the same.

But I have always believed that a successful startup is a function of customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. You identify a market gap, build a product to address the gap, develop a business model, and generate revenues and profits.

ifood.tv has done just that.

In 2006, co-founders Vikrant Mathur and Alok Ranjan were interested in honing their culinary skills. However, they found that text-based instructional sites were sorely lacking in their instructional capabilities and incorporated no means of reaching out to recipe authors with questions – not to mention there were no visual elements to speak of.

Victor Hwang, author of the book “The Rainforest – The Secret of Building the Next Silicon Valley“, held a workshop discussing the characteristics of building an ecosystem in a region that encourages entrepreneurship and innovation much like the Silicon Valley. The workshop participants include Hong Kong policy makers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and many other stakeholders who all have the common goal to steer Hong Kong to become a more active ecosystem for entrepreneurs and startups.

Here is my visual notes of the presentation:

A mirror with sensors is a signpost of a future where all devices, however mundane and dumb, can use sensors, connectivity and software smarts to turn the mundane into magical. I had that thought earlier this morning when I came across this Sensor Mirror made by simplehuman, a Los Angeles company that is known for making trash cans, soap pumps and sundry other stuff for your kitchen and the bathroom.

Conventional wisdom says that startups need to embed themselves with American customers, sometimes for a stretch of years, before branching out to Europe and then Asia.

Like most conventional wisdom, it's nonsense (or bollocks, absurdité, 廢話 — take your pick).

It's seductive to listen to, especially if you're at all concerned about becoming profitable (a major preoccupation for nearly every entrepreneur, unsurprisingly). Traditionally, you'd start with the U.S. market and stay there, often for several years, because it's worth twice as much as the European market and three times that of going to Asia.

Prior to making an investment in a company, every venture capitalist (VC) completes a due diligence list––a catalog of the key business assumptions they need to validate prior to closing an investment. These lists vary depending on the stage of the deal and can range from your articles of incorporation to detailed customer calls.

This is a good thing. People should know what they’re getting into. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs forget that diligence is a two-way street. Or, just as dangerous, they overemphasize a few key items. Things like the hotness of a firm, the valuation given to your company, or even the option of board members on fit become big factors driving their choice. While these are clearly important, they are not the only factors that matter.

The rise and fall of an economic epoch is measured by employment. The convergence of agriculture and manufacturing don't concern production. When less people are needed to produce more goods, the economy has peaked. The workforce needs retraining. In his book "The New Geography of Jobs", Enrico Moretti argues that the Innovation Economy is still diverging. Regional job growth is dependent on creative industries such as Apple:

Apple, Moretti says, employs 13,000 directly in Cupertino but has spurred 70,000 indirect jobs in the region. Two-thirds of American jobs are in the local service sector, he writes, and “the almost magical economics of job creation” are that “for each new high-tech job in a city, five additional jobs are ultimately created outside of the high-tech sector in that city, both in skilled occupations (lawyers, teachers, nurses) and in unskilled ones (waiters, hairdressers, carpenters).” What’s more, innovation “has a disproportionate effect on the economy of American communities. Most sectors have a multiplier effect, but the innovation sector has the largest multiplier of all: about three times larger than that of manufacturing.”

If you live in San Francisco, it’s hard to justify traveling anywhere else, since you already have a bed in the postcard-perfect place that 16 million other people go out of their way visit every year. Still, sometimes you just need to get the hell out of Dodge. That’s why I drove up to Napa Valley last weekend and spent Sunday night at the Vintage Inn in Yountville.

This trip wasn’t about vineyard tours or wine tastings or restaurants. I picked the property because I just wanted to read a book, free of interruptions and distractions, and I knew that most of the rooms have a pleasant little window seat looking out on a burbling fountain.

Info-graphic style video of the core facts extracted from the 2012 Report on the Creative Economy.

Europeans and Americans differ in a lot of ways–the currency they use, the beer they drink and what they call football come to mind–but one thing that isn’t very different in either place is the venture industry, a new report from the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association argues.

The following “performance myths” about venture in Europe that formed in the wake of the dot-com collapse continue to harm the industry there, it says:

After successfully rallying New York City’s tech community around policy issues like SOPA and PIPA, as well as the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, the New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) aims to play a more steady role when it comes to the city’s technology policy.

NYTM is taking advantage of its more than 29,000 members by starting discussions around significant policy issues like making high-speed broadband readily available at low-cost and making tech-skills a component of the education system. The results of the discussions will be brought to the attention of candidates running for public office later this year.

What have the last two years of modest recovery meant to the growth and redistribution of population among the states? New data on the components of change for states are now available.  In March county level data will permit a more detailed portrait.

For states I present four maps, overall population change, change from natural increase, immigration (net international migration) and internal migration between states.

New Mexico State Investment Council approved an annual target investment of up to 5% of the $3.7 billion Severance Tax Permanent Fund to the New Mexico Private Equity Investment Program, said Charles Wollmann, director of communication for the $16.27 billion council in an e-mail.

The new allocation is expected to amount to about $40 million per year, including about $25 million to $30 million for new fund commitments and about $10 million to $15 million for new co-investments.

New Mexico Private Equity Investment Program is an in-state venture capital program.

Twelve groups have shown interest in a state-funded venture capital program, according to documents released Thursday by the agency Gov. Scott Walker directed to explore ideas for an angel and venture capital plan.

The groups responded to a request for information by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. They all discussed what type of interest they might have in participating in an investment capital program.

The agency released all of the applications in response to an inquiry by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel under the state open records law.

Among the 12 respondents were: Credit Suisse Customized Fund Investment Corp., which manages $29 billion of client commitments and is in the process of divesting the business that provided the information; a group formed by Wisconsin Capital Partners, which is run by Lorrie Heinemann, former cabinet secretary for the state Department of Financial Institutions; and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin, which is vying to allocate money to venture capital funds based on the experience of unnamed "corporate partners."

Late in 2012, the Brookings Institution published its annual Global Metro Monitor (by Emilia Istrate and Carey Anne Nadeau), which estimates economic data for the 300 world metropolitan areas with the largest gross domestic product (GDP). The Global Metro Monitor also provides estimates of the GDP per capita for each of the qualifying metropolitan areas. The surprising news: after at least five years of the most laggard economic performance in adult memory, the United States continues to dominate the highest GDP per capita data.

Summary by Geography

Among the 10 metropolitan areas with the highest GDP per capita, nine are in the United States (Figure 1). Hartford ($79,900 per capita), for the second year in a row, was ranked the most affluent metropolitan economy by Brookings. The US accounts for 36 of the top 50 metropolitan economies, and 67 of the top 100.

The University of Manitoba is embarking on a new approach to technology commercialization -- they're giving it away. Well, not exactly.

But instead of hard-boiled negotiations between the university and industry partners on royalties and licensing agreements for intellectual property developed in-house, the university will make the research available to partners with no financial commitment until the company itself starts making money from the technology. It's a bold realignment and an attempt to allow innovative work that is going on at the university to get outside the ivory tower.

Are you wondering how to find an interesting start-up internship and get the most out of it? Rami Abou Jaoude (Wharton MBA 2013) describes his internship at Namshi.com in Dubai during summer 2012 and shares how to facilitate your own learning in an unstructured work environment.

How did you find your position?

Two of the co-founders used to be my colleagues at McKinsey. When I found out about their venture, I informally reached out to them.

What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?

I am interested in launching a start-up in the ecommerce field. I thought that working for another ecommerce start-up would give me valuable experience in this industry.

What advice would you give to students interested in working at a start-up this summer?

Ask for work that motivates you and that you can learn from. It is easy for an intern to be given repetitive/uninteresting tasks.