Four Montreal companies are among the 10 most promising identified by a group of local investors.

FounderFuel, Montreal's newest startup accelerator, announced Monday it will invest $250,000 in 10 fledgling companies in hopes of boosting their fortunes.

The companies will undergo a 12-week intensive program that begins next Monday. They will be given shared office space, get coached by a network of mentors, and meet potential investors.

The names of the companies and their vocations have not yet been made public, but what is known is that all 10 teams are Canadian. Aside from the Montreal groups, two hail from Waterloo, another two are from Toronto, and one hails from Vancouver.

Slava Rubin, founder and CEO of crowdfunding site IndieGoGo has these tips for inventors looking to seek funding from the Internet crowd:

• Have a personal, engaging video. Donors give more when they see a human explaining why they’re passionate about what they’re trying to accomplish. A good video campaign will earn 122% more than a non-video campaign.
• Set realistic goals. Do the math and figure out exactly what you need and why.

Why does Kickstarter, the micropatronage site, work?

That's the question Rob Walker takes up in a New York Times Magazine feature this weekend. His answer is subtle and smart. Through talks with two of the site's unusual founders, gallerist Perry Chen and music writer Yancey Strickler, we see that successful Kickstarter projects are not as random as they might seem. The founders see a common basis for that success in terms of content, value, and presentation. And it's this rather strict notion of what is and is not a Kickstarter project -- as a mini-genre -- that makes the site work.

"The fact that [founders] Chen and Strickler have a genuine point of view about the forms creativity can take, and how to expand them, is the reason that Kickstarter is the breakout star of the crowd-funding notion," Walker writes.

When job candidates are considering a position, they often compare the benefits and perks package. We’ve all heard about the Googleplex and its gourmet food, dry cleaning and Razr scooters made available to Googlers. But you don’t have to be a search giant to offer admirable perks. In fact, it may even be more cost-effective to offer goods and services instead of cold hard cash, since the latter is taxed twice. The key to great perks is to make them exciting and keep them on-brand. Below, you’ll find how six brands — from small startups to larger companies — reward their employees and maintain happy and efficient workers. While they aren’t all tech or digital companies, they all excel in the digital and social media space, and other startups (and large corporations) could learn a thing or two from them.

Managing and motivating a team in a startup is more than just using the right interpersonal skills. It’s more than providing recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. A key influencer of satisfaction and motivation, top-ranked by employees, is positive progress and the completion of meaningful work. Sometimes you have to manage progress, not people.

“Busy work” and “grunt work” are deadly terms in a startup environment. So are setbacks, project cancellations, and frequent changes of direction that make people doubt that the work they are doing will ever see the light of day. These points are illustrated in detail in “The Progress Principle,” a new book from the Harvard Business School, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.

Businesses and nonprofits across Nebraska are signing up with a new state effort to get college students working, and then sticking around after graduation.

At least 79 businesses have applied for Intern Nebraska funding, and 45 have been approved, Gov. Dave Heineman said Monday.

One of those companies, said Richard Baier, director of the Department of Economic Development, is Green Bein' Productions Inc., a Lincoln-based online production company that recently launched an online virtual gaming world called Kid Command, which teaches children about the environment.

"For the companies, this is a perfect opportunity to learn about future employees and how good they're going to be," Heineman said.

Now, the state has a website to provide information and internship listings for the college students who qualify -- internNE.com.

One of the major findings in mankind’s history is realizing the value of working together. Without it we would have starved to death about 100 000 years ago because a single man going hunting is very inefficient (I know – I am a hunter). We have also seen a very strong correlation between the amount of innovations happening and the number of people who are interconnected in the society during the course of the years.

If you want your team to think outside the box, you have to create one for them first. Don’t start an innovation project until you’ve clearly articulated the strategic framework for your team. There are many models out there, here’s one of our favorites.

We hear this a lot when we talk executives looking for their next new product idea, “I want an out-of-the-box idea!”

Our first question is always: “What does the box look like?” and it’s usually met with a blank stare.

It may seem obvious, but it’s impossible to “think outside the box” unless you’ve defined the box.

An ideation session is most rewarding when the facilitator skilfully encourages the participants and monitors the process. Gijs van Wulfen together with FORTH facilitators have compiled a list of 25 tips to help facilitate successful ideation meetings. Do you have more?

The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. In my new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ I try to solve them with the FORTH innovation method.

Ideating new products and services go hand in hand with series of brainstorming sessions and workshops. In order to facilitate all these meetings effectively, it demands from the facilitator three aspects simultaneously:

1.  application of creative think techniques in the most effective way;

The bad news is all around us and never seems to end. If it's not Tea Party Republicans who somehow, shockingly seemed willing to allow the country to go into default before they would accept even the most basic of revenue increases, it's a president who seems unable to match his legislative ability to his previous soaring rhetoric, sharp mind and historic promise.

And that's for starters.

Unemployment remains far too high, hovering near 9%. The deficit is all too real and getting bigger. China is emerging as a global power, and taking the lead in creating green energy solutions - the clear, big playing field of this new century.

Here at home, Gen X and Gen Y'ers seem resigned to living in a country that was not as great as the one they were born into, and my generation - Baby Boomers - are only too happy to collect our benefits.

Last year, the dollar value of angel investments increased 11.7 percent from a recent low of $18 billion (measured in 2010 dollars) the year before, according to analysis by University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research (CVR). While this increase marks the first rise in angel dollars invested in real dollar terms since 2006, the amount put into companies in 2010 remains below that in every year from 2003 through 2007. In 2010, the amount invested by angels was only 5.6 percent higher in real dollar terms than that supplied in 2002.

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to cover yet another topic in the Financing Options series, financing capital equipment like servers, routers, switches, computers, etc.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute. It makes sense to look for places where you can use other less expensive forms of capital to fund growth. As we talked about in the last post in this series, I'm not a fan of debt for an early stage startup because there is no obvious way that the debt is going to get paid back. But capital equipment provides an opportunity for debt financing because you can borrow against the equipment. There are two primary ways to do this, capital equipment loans and leases.

Every summer, Boston venture capital firm Flybridge Capital Partners throws a big weekend shindig up in Kennebunkport, Maine for entrepreneurs, fellow investors, and their families. For the Saturday night dinner party, they ask everyone to come in costume. In prior years, the theme has been "alter agos," "rock stars," and "heroes and villains." This year, attendees were asked to come as their favorite "Saturday Night Live" character or musical guest.

The Flybridge crew put together this "SNL" parody video, shown during the party. (Toward the end, there's a cameo from yours truly, standing in for Seth Rogen.) The break-down:

0:30 - "Weekend Update"

4:00 - "Mr. Bill Raises Venture Capital"

6:05 - "Digital Short: Like a VC"

A recent Times article noted that the number of men age 65 and older increased by 21 percent from 2000 to 2010, nearly double the 11.2 percent growth rate for women in that age group.

What are the implications -- the benefits and the costs -- of having more men around longer? While most experts say it may be only a blip, some demographers say that a surprisingly rapid rise in the number of men could cost society even more in retirement costs, since they earned more than women and would collect more, and they would add to the long-term care problem.

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

While these may not have been statistically rigorous exercises, they do point to something real: In American public life, researchers are largely absent. Trained to stick to the purity of the laboratory, they tend to avoid the sometimes irrational hurly-burly of politics.

For example, according to the Congressional Research Service, the technically trained among the 435 members of the House include one physicist, 22 people with medical training (including 2 psychologists and a veterinarian), a chemist, a microbiologist and 6 engineers.

The tech sector has had a split personality for the last year or so.

VCs and angels have been throwing big money after startups and the young hotshot engineers who run them, and the tech IPO market has been hotter than any time since the late 1990s.

But established tech companies have been acting conservative, accumulating cash while their P/E ratios languish in the low double-digits -- just above the range that "steel mills trade at before they're going out of business" as Marc Andreessen recently quipped.

You may not have wads of cash to spend on marketing in the early stages of your startup, but that doesn't mean that there aren't effective ways to get your brand out there.

Before the Internet, small businesses only had a few ways to market their products cheaply, through methods like printing out fliers or sponsoring little local events. Now there are all kinds of opportunities out there on the Web—you just need to know where to look.

We are not sure yet what level of success Re.cruit.Me might achieve, or whether it will be a success at all, as we only have just released the service to a private trial group. Be we can feel happy in the knowledge that we’ve been diligent in avoiding many of common mistakes made by Australian entrepreneurial ventures.

Here are the very commandments we used to guide our new venture.

What is Re.cruit.me?

Re.cruit.me is a web-based B2B application offering employers the ability to easily screen candidates for technical roles before their existing recruitment process kicks in. It also offers recruiters a cost effective way to screen and then categorise the clientele they adv

Ithaa is an undersea restaurant at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island Resort. The restaurant is located 16 feet below the surface of the ocean.

CNN has more:

The six-course dinner menu often features French dishes from executive chef Nicolas Boutin and is priced at $320 a person. A lighter three-course lunch menu is available for $195 a person. Both meals include one glass of bubbly champagne.

A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson discussed the role of government grants in helping launch tech companies.

Fred is not a fan and argues that evaluating and aiding early-stage companies is not a core competency of government organizations.

He concludes by asking his readers to look into grant programs available for startups.

We find it hard to disagree with Fred's point of view. Prevailing evidence suggests that federal, state, and local governments are just not focused or passionate enough about growing entrepreneurial endeavors, and also typically lack experience with internet-native businesses.