I recently read a book I’d highly recommend to every reader of this blog called “Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive” by Robert B. Cialdini who is also author of a very well received book called “Influence” (which I plan to read).

“Yes” was given to me by one of my favorite angel investor / seed VC’s to work with – John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners and author of the blog InfoChachkie that you should check out because it is filled with great info from a guy who has been a very successful operator.  Rincon is part of the new breed of Seed Stage VCs and with the leadership of Jim Andelman has charted out the most authentic early-stage investment strategy in Southern California.  Any SoCal entrepreneur raising early-stage money should put Rincon on their short list.

A few months after the presentation of the Green Paper on Cultural and Creative Industries the European debate has been more centred on innovation, rather than creativity. In a document produced for the European Commission Enterprise & Industry Directorate-General called “New Cluster Concepts Activities in Creative Industries” the core definition of creative industries is linked to art, music, culture, writing and fashion. This approach is mainly metropolitan-based.

The document also states a big difference between creativity and innovation: “Art and culture and most other creative industries are not driven by neither research, nor new solutions based on new knowledge from users; creative industries are basically taste-driven and most creative workers aspiration is to set new standards for users taste and choice”.

SAN FRANCISCO — Whether he's swimming with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean or drawing inspiration from rappers, Marc Benioff has broken the CEO mold while running Salesforce.com Inc. for the past decade.

Some of his antics seem calculated to make a point about the importance of daring to be unconventional, a method that has worked well for him.

Benioff, 45, wouldn't be a billionaire — and Salesforce.com wouldn't have emerged as an even better investment than Google — if he hadn't been able to persuade so many corporate decision-makers to change their ways.

Salesforce.com rents software for managing customer relationships and delivers its product exclusively over the Internet. The concept, often called cloud computing, is hot now, but it was considered a pie-in-the-sky notion when Benioff started Salesforce at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999.

" />

To read the full, original article click on this link: Innovation, adventure drive Salesforce.com CEO

Author: Michael Liedtke

Angel investors--affluent individuals who invest in early-stage companies--have long been a staple in the world of business investment. But a new breed of so-called "super angel" investors is emerging.

This segment of investors, which includes individuals and early-stage funds, often forms groups to invest in a broader range of companies to mitigate risk. And their numbers are growing--up 40 percent from last year, according to a recent National Association of Seed and Venture Funds study.

They can be an important bridge over the "valley of death" in investment dollars: that gap between about $100,000, which often can be raised through friends and family investors, and several million, which is how much most VCs need to invest to generate returns large enough to sustain the businesses, says Jim Jaffe, president and CEO of the seed and venture funds association. Fifty-one percent of its survey respondents plan to invest more money in new companies than they did last year.

Looking for someone with deep pockets and big ideas? How to find an angel investor who can take your company to the next level.

So you have a great business but can't find enough money to take it to the next level? And you just know that if you found someone with good intentions and deep pockets, also known as an angel investor, he or she would see the light and invest in your company -- and everyone would get rich?

By dropping the social in innovation, is North America breaking the innovation chain?

Andy Grove, a co-funder of Intel and a Silicon Valley icon, is sounding two alarms about innovation’s future. Both flow from his disagreement with the accepted article of faith that the US tech sector necessarily should focus high-end jobs in the US and export manufacturing jobs.

One alarm is that US innovation is dropping the ball in job creation. By exporting manufacturing offshore to Asia, the United States is focusing on start-ups.  “Start-ups are a wonderful thing,” says Grove in a recent essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, “But they cannot by themselves increase tech employment.”

Some scientists toil in isolation, but in my field, collaboration is the norm. For most projects, I work in groups that range in size from two to tens. In some cases, I can choose my collaborators, but there have been situations in which I have had to work with obnoxious, rude, patronizing, manipulative, controlling, unethical, and/or unpleasantly strange people.

I am not referring to people who are merely difficult or who have a different style of working. If we make the definition of "jerk" broad enough to include routine incompatibility, then we are all jerks, at times. So when I use the term here, I am referring to people who are more extreme and systematic in their unpleasant behavior.

It is nearly impossible for most researchers to go through an entire career without ever working with a jerk.

Anita Campbell recently blogged in this space that the government’s efforts to spur small business lending have largely fallen flat. Last year I blogged here about how big banks including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase were pledging to lend more money to small businesses in 2010. Have the banks come through on their promises?

Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported on the progress banks made for the first quarter of 2010. Reporter John Tozzi writes that assessing small business lending is difficult because at most banks, lending to small businesses can fall into several categories—from real estate to credit cards—and because banks typically don’t break out separate numbers for small businesses.

• Wells Fargo made $2.9 billion in new loans to small businesses. The bank’s total goal for 2010 was to lend $16 billion to companies with under $20 million in revenue. The $2.9 billion brings it to 18 percent of that $16 billion goal, which is an increase from the $13 billion in loans Wells Fargo made to small companies in 2009. A spokesperson says Wells Fargo hopes to reach the goal by the end of the year.

As a rule I'm a 'never-before-noon' man. But one morning recently there it was, on top of the spread of magazines laid out for me on my desk. Cover story of The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and some cronies over a few drinks at the Parker House Hotel in Boston in 1857. Four words. "The End Of Men."

I glanced at the clock -- 11:15. But I picked up the ice tongs anyway, put two cubes in an old-fashioned glass and drowned them in three fingers of Chivas. I broke the filter tip off a fresh Marlboro, put the business end between my lips, rolled the wheel on my Zippo, and settled back in the Eames chair. I started thinking. Thinking hard.

It's funny when I think about it now, but growing up I always had an irrationally positive view of my older brother. Not only could he not do anything wrong, but I latched on to anything he said and internalized it. He once told me that “TV commercials are basically lies,” and to this day I can't watch TV without thinking I am having the wool pulled over my eyes. Pretty typical stuff for a kid growing up no doubt.

It’s the same story for the venture capital industry in Canada. I think that Canadian venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike have developed an irrationally positive opinion of those outside their geography and asset class. Specifically of buyout managers and American venture capitalists. There is some fundamental desire to be just like them, to act like them, sound like them, and look like them.

Our most recent green economy survey shows signs of steady growth in corporate environmental initiatives, a level of optimism that outstrips that of the overall recovering economy, according to the semi-annual “Green and the Economy” survey conducted by our GreenBiz Intelligence unit.

The two best pieces of news: Hiring continues to increase and company environmental budgets are growing.

Twice a year, we ask our 3,150-member GreenBiz Intelligence Panel for their views on key green economic indicators. Our most recent survey, conducted in late June and early July, garnered 483 responses, with 43 percent from companies with revenues of more than $1 billion (which we define as “large companies”). With four such surveys under our belts, we can now see clear trends in the green economy since the beginning of 2009.

Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook official blog said that the company had 500 million active users. An impressive number. However, a little thought could make you wonder just how accurate the claim of “actively using Facebook” might be, and whether some trends indicate that changing tastes and dissatisfaction with the service might not eventually do the same thing to it that they did to MySpace (NWS).

Start with how accurate that number might be. If you’ve any experience with social media services, you know that strange things happen. People get personal accounts and then maybe a second for a separately professional identity. (Yes, it happens on Facebook, as I’ve seen it occur.) More to the point, how many people do you know who signed up for Facebook and then hardly ever used it? Look at some stats from Alexa.com. The traffic measurement site pegs the percentage of global Internet users who visit Facebook.com at around 35 percent. But that’s an estimate. According to the latest numbers from Internet World Stats, there are over 1.8 billion Internet users in the world, so 35 percent would be something north of 630 million. So Alexa may underestimate traffic — not surprising, as it estimates numbers from samples.

There is a lot of debate about the value of an MBA, particularly for entrepreneurs and technology executives. So I looked at some top people in the industry and their educational backgrounds. Below are 17 entrepreneurs and technology executives who have run successful, disruptive businesses. The results are not meant to be conclusive or scientific, but are definitely interesting.

There are a few things you’ll notice (none of which should be surprising): lots of technical degrees, a bunch of dropouts, and 3 MBA’s.

2010 has been the hottest year globally ever recorded. This won't surprise anyone residing in New York City last weekend.

The rise in American heatwaves will make water a scare commodity by 2050, according to a new study by the National Resource Defence Council. Water scarcity will be felt most on American farms, devastating the agricultural economies of many states.

According to the IT Employee Confidence Index, a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by IT staffing company Technisource, IT workers are more confident in the economy than they have been in the past three years, and 37% are planning to look for new jobs in the next 12 months.

This year has brought a lot of productive give-and-take of ideas on clean energy innovation by people around the world who saw opportunity rather than doom in the combination of environmental and financial challenges. Last May, for example, I joined over 140 participants from all sectors at the White House Energy Innovation Conference to discuss how to accelerate energy innovation and support entrepreneurs and small businesses in the energy sector. During follow-up regional meetings in June, scientists, entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists, military and government experts, and others discussed policy and processes that can enhance all stages of the energy innovation pipeline. Earlier this month, the United Nations Environment Program and the Renewable Energy P

olicy Network for the 21st Century showed concrete results (at least in terms of effort) when they revealed in a pair of new reports that by early 2010 more than 100 countries enacted policies to boost the development of a green economy and businesses in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have also mobilized. Take the work of MIT’s Angela Belcher, who appears to have worked out how to genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a Lithium-ion battery that has the same capacity and performance as the state-of-the-art battery that A123, an MIT startup, will start rolling out in plug-in hybrids next year. Last week, I witnessed firsthand more history of clean energy in the making at the 2010 Cleantech Open Conference in San Jose, CA. This important gathering stemmed from a group of California-based entrepreneurs who decided it was time to get serious about building a new green economy through clean technology innovation. Members of the Cleantech Open decided to expand their business plan competition program around the world through a global Ideas Competition, which I had the pleasure of launching last week. This competition follows a trend of a global cleantech mindset that detects market opportunities beyond the artificial grid of national boundaries by engaging thousands of individual minds working on other innovations (for an example of this trend, listen to Erik Straser talk about Clean Tech's Global Opportunity).

Wichita, Kansas (CNN) -- At a table in Caffe Moderne, a coffee bar in downtown Wichita, sat a couple of young Kansans sipping coffee and working away on Macbook Pros. Terms like "content management systems" and "web integration" floated in the air as Clint Brauer taught a local about his business.

Thirteen years ago, Brauer couldn't wait to get out of the Sunflower State. "I just didn't see the opportunities in Kansas," he said. "I grew up in a small town outside of Wichita, went to Kansas State ... and so I moved to the West Coast to get into high tech."

Brauer traveled from the prairie to the Hollywood Hills and spent his 20s living the kind of life he'd fantasized about while growing up in the small town of Haven.

THE ORIGINAL SILICON PRAIRIE TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION (SPTA) WAS CREATED IN 1986 IN KANSAS CITY BY RICH BENDIS, INNOVATION AMERICA FOUNDER,  AND 4 OTHER TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURS.

Fads are hard to miss. Whether it's this summer's craze -- Silly Bandz, the rubber-band bracelets that have become a must-have accessory for children -- Beanie Babies or the Rubik's Cube, they take off like a rocket in popularity and then seem to fizzle out just as quickly. You might think fads are kids' stuff. But adults aren't immune to the fad machine -- remember all those grownups sporting Crocs a few years ago? And while fads present challenges to businesses riding that wave, they can also spell opportunity if managers are smart about taking the cash generated by these crazes and using it to build a sustainable business.

So what is a fad exactly? Bryan Lilly, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin, describes fads as a sudden and unpredictable spike in sales in which consumers are buying a product as much because of its popularity as its usefulness. Lilly notes that while fad products eventually experience a rather abrupt decline in sales, revenues don't necessarily fall to zero.

The latest must-have item for a growing number of kids -- and more than a few adults -- are Silly Bandz, brightly colored bracelets shaped like animals, letters, princesses and dinosaurs, among others. A pack of 24 Silly Bandz -- which have spawned numerous imitators -- sells for around $5 and can be found at toy stores, drug stores and even hardware stores. Robert Croak, founder of Silly Bandz maker BCP Imports, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the bracelets have generated more than $100 million in annual sales. A former concert promoter from Toledo, Ohio, Croak began making and selling the bands after seeing a similar product from Japan. Although Croak told the paper that BCP is trying to diversify with other "silly" accessories including buttons and necklaces, and even taking design suggestions from fans via the Internet, many observers warn that history shows the bracelets' popularity is a bubble waiting to burst.