IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses. At first this meant making punch-card tabulators, but IBM moved on to magnetic-tape systems, mainframes, PCs, and most recently services and consulting. Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry “platform shifts” occur.

A few months ago the website, The Next Web published a post called, “The 25 Most Influential People Tweeting About Entrepreneurship”.  While I enjoyed the reading the list, I was a little discouraged by the fact that only 1 woman made the list.

With women starting new businesses at twice the rate of men, and with women dominating the social media realm, I knew that there was no shortage of women tweeting about entrepreneurship.

It's a classic question when a lovely new gadget comes out on the market: when is the right time to buy? Buy the product early, and you get bragging rights and more time enjoying its features, but you almost certainly pay more than if you'd waited.

Case in point: HP's departure from the tablet business, with its announcement last week that it would stop making its Touchpad. Touchpad owners who had paid the full price of $499 for a device unlikely ever to see new apps, peripherals, or support from its parent company were insulted further when HP discounted the Touchpad to $149 for the 32-gigabyte Wi-Fi edition and $99 for the 16-gigabyte model. In one weekend, an estimated 350,000 people bought Touchpads, at more than $300 off the prices they would have paid just a couple of months before.

The world needs new energy resources—not only to offset the decline of our existing reserves but to support the rapid growth of emerging economies like those of China, India, Brazil, and Russia. The International Energy Agency estimates that resources yet to be developed or discovered could be needed to account for 50 percent of conventional oil production by 2035.

Discovering and unlocking those new resources will require a new generation of technology to be deployed at a global scale, and this technology must use existing infrastructure. That's not only a tough technical challenge but one accompanied by often overlooked challenges of industry culture.

California is America's most fecund cluster of entrepreneurs and innovators, but recently it has suffered a drought of financial irrigation. Since 2005, the amount of venture capital under management has fallen by 60 percent, and so the role of watering the best ideas in Silicon Valley and beyond has fallen to another class of investors: Angels.

As venture capital faltered, the number of Angel investor groups has more than doubled in the last six years. The reason is simple. Like nature, capitalism abhors a vacuum, and Angels have been eager and able to capture the early stage space abandoned by venture capitalists. As entrepreneurs seek initial funding for their extraordinary ideas, they've found the best way to get their technology to market is to seek out Angel Groups for early stage capital before they turn to larger venture capital firms who typically come in at higher thresholds of investment.

Sure, you’re active in social media, but as a responsible small business owner you know that it’s your site and your own community where you should be building your home base. This is where you direct people you meet in other outlets and it’s where you’re trying to form the real conversations and conversions, because this is the only site that you control. But how do you know that it’s working? What metrics should you measure to be confident that you’re growing a healthy community, while also pinpointing areas for improvement?

To help you get started, below are five areas I’d recommend keeping an eye on to help you benchmark and improve your on-site community.

Getting things done effectively in a startup requires total individual and team accountability. You can’t afford excuses and multiple people doing the same job. In my view, “taking responsibility” is the core element behind accountability. Many people hear responsibility as an obligation, but I hear it as “the ability to respond.”

Unfortunately many people don’t have the ability to respond, because they lack confidence in themselves, or simply don’t have the skills required. Therefore an entrepreneur’s first requirement is to hire or team only with people who are accountable (already have the confidence and skills you need) – training them on the job is prohibitively expensive when you have minimal income.

For many students and their families, scraping together the money to pay for college is a big enough hurdle on its own. But a new survey has found that, once on a campus, many students are unwilling or unable to come up with more money to buy books—one of the very things that helps turn tuition dollars into academic success.

In the survey, released on Tuesday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization, seven in 10 college students said they had not purchased a textbook at least once because they had found the price too high. Many more respondents said they had purchased a book whose price was driven up by common textbook-publishing practices, such as frequent new editions or bundling with other products.

It is interesting to see how work and social habits in the university are changing as the mobile phone and the other diverse and relatively inexpensive instruments of mobile telecommunication become an indispensable adjunct to life. We are no longer in a world where communication ceases. So how is this affecting the running of universities?

First off, it is rare nowadays to see academics and administrators without their mobile-phone prosthetics that seem to be indispensable. Of course, there are a few holdouts who are proud of their (often feigned) non-use but they are gradually falling by the wayside.

500Startups.com takes early state companies, gives them seed investments of $10,000 to $250,000, puts them in their startup accelerator program with over 160 global mentors, Silicon Valley work space and prides themselves on offering access to a vibrant startup community as featured in the video above.

Real estate professionals are a great target for startups because each agent is independently licensed and is the ultimate one person small business as they rely on themselves alone to eat or starve. Because each agent is a business regardless of which brokerage that hangs their license, agents are apt to try new technologies and tools that are not insanely priced.

Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have finally revealed the name of their first spin-off project since restarting Obvious Corporation, the incubation company that spawned Twitter.

Lift is the name of an app and a start-up run by chief executive Tony Stubblebine, along with Jon Crosby and Connor Montgomery.

In a brief blog post entitled Unlocking Potential, Stone explained that, in exchange for some equity in the start-up, Obvious will help with things like "strategy, design, funding and recruiting".

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug 23, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- The Startup America Partnership, an organization working to help young companies grow in order to create jobs in America, today announced the appointment of its founding board members, eleven of America's most successful and highly-regarded entrepreneurs. At the first board meeting convened yesterday, members offered strategic guidance to the Partnership on bringing the private sector together to provide startups with the resources they need to start and scale their organizations.

The Partnership also announced that four iconic U.S. corporations have become the organization's first sponsors: American Express OPEN, Dell Inc., Intuit Inc., and Microsoft Corp. These companies join the founding partners, the Case and Kauffman Foundations, to provide financial support and other strategic resources to help the Partnership maximize the success of America's entrepreneurs, and ultimately strengthen America's competitiveness in an increasingly global world.

I grew up in a small southern California town that had a sweet little community bicycle program. All the bikes were yellow, you could find them at various points downtown, and you could take them anywhere so long as you eventually returned them to the downtown area. The program was free and everyone loved it, but eventually it failed. Bikes were stolen, the system was poorly managed and so the program faded away.

Fast-forward to the recent past and every green blog worth its solar-powered servers was celebrating the bike-sharing program in Paris. I remember reading all the stories and thinking, “Good luck, Paris. We tried that in Ojai years ago and it didn’t work.”

It’s hard to not get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I watch the stock market drop and hear smart people talk about a 25 percent correction.

Those of us in the startup world are all too familiar with the next few chapters of this story: First, angel investors see their net worth shrink so they start preserving capital and stop investing in risky startups. Second, limited partners in venture funds stop investing while they allocate assets to safer investment vehicles. Lastly, venture capitalists slow down and back the strongest of the last standing.

However, if you look closely, there is a new reality today. There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic.

Most of us expect increasing sophistication in our technology. And generally, over time, we've gotten it. We've gone from large mainframes to today's smartphones, which carry more computing power than NASA used to send a man to the moon.

In getting to this point, we've abandoned outdated technologies. Music is a perfect example: We abandoned eight-tracks for cassettes and cassettes for CDs, and then left CDs behind for MP3s.

This sort of pruning comes naturally in free markets, through what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction." It helps technology evolve and provide the services and functions we expect.

Incubator Y Combinator held its Demo Day Tuesday for a massive new batch of 63 companies start-ups to pitch to investors.

Y Combinator has become a popular incubator for new entrepreneurs, so the event was packed with venture capitalists and angel investors. All of the presenting companies are raising new financing, says Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator. In the past, the incubator held a preview event for angel investors to get a glimpse of the companies. But Graham dropped that because there are now so many angel investors and because it was distracting for entrepreneurs to be raising funding while going through the program.

Forget spring break trips to Cancun — in the future everyone will holiday in the Commercial Space Station created by Orbital Technologies (assuming it ever gets constructed). Space hotel guests will have access to the stars, via Russian Soyuz rockets. It only costs about $164,000 to stay for five days in the CSS. But getting you there will put you back another large chunk of change. The Daily Mail rounds out the total costs (including travel) to be a around $511,000.

One of my favorite Gladwellian Theories (Malcolm Gladwell is the king of cool theories) is thin-slicing: the ability to find patterns and make decisions based on the combination of a limited set of data and a wealth of experience. Call them hunches, call them snap decisions, but more often than not thin-slice judgments turn out to be accurate.

Like where hiring employees is concerned.

I’ve interviewed thousands of potential employees and hired hundreds of them. Over time I developed the ability to quickly size up a candidate, sometimes even within a minute or two, based on one or two actions or comments. My snap judgments were rarely wrong.

I’ve run three startups, and each time, the most difficult part of the early stages was that I had to do everything. I did everything I could to not have to pay people. When I did pay people to do things I’m not good at, like accounting, it was such a big relief to wake up in the morning and know that work was going to get done without me actually doing it.

Here’s the problem with that outlook, though: You are dead if you hire someone for something you should be doing yourself. And in my experience, the No. 1 thing that entrepreneurs think they can hire for but shouldn’t is social media.

The other day I received this email from a reader:

I saw a business speaker recently who talked a lot about the importance of having a “vision” for your business. I didn’t and I don’t really get this. To my way of thinking, if I create a good place to work and make a profit, I have done my job. Right? — Sloan

Sort of.

There is nothing wrong with what you are doing, and you certainly do not have to create a vision for your business if you do not want to. Many businesses do just fine producing their product or service, having a good time, and making money.