One of the most valuable assets of a business accelerator is something called the island effect. Essentially, it involves spending time in close quarters with other ventures and mentors for a prolonged time, which dramatically increases the potential for beneficial encounters, innovation, and new ideas for your startup. But as most islands are pretty stationary by nature, staying on an island is not the most effective go-to-market strategy. I am saying most islands, because there is one accelerator program that is combining the best of both worlds.  It’s all the benefits of the island effect plus international exposure, an asset most accelerator programs are sorely lacking.

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Students arrive on college campuses with multiple mobile electronic devices. And a quick scan of the Apple Apps store turns up hundreds of note-taking, assignment-sharing, and textbook applications. In this ocean of options, what education technologies are students actually using to help them navigate their studies?

The Chronicle sat down with a trio of graduate students in the communication, culture, and technology program at Georgetown University, and quizzed them about the technology tools that keep their academic lives humming.

There’s a very slim chance you know who Steve Schlafman is, but you’ve probably heard of Turntable.fm, the fleeting viral interactive music sharing service that raised US$7-million, before pivoting to focus on live, interactive music performances as Turntable Live. Schlafman was VP of Business Development at StickyBits, a QR code startup which eventually became Turntable.fm

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As we have been writing, startup accelerators in India’s nascent ecosystem are beginning to seek more mature, late stage companies to work with. The latest to join this trend is Microsoft Ventures, which announced its Summer 2014 batch for the Indian accelerator today. Of the 16 startups selected, six will be part of Microsoft’s new Accelerator Plus program, aimed at helping companies who already have customer traction and are more mature.

One of the most potent things that entrepreneurs, startup founders, and small business owners can do to grow their businesses is to learn from the experiences of others, both the successes and the failures, and to network with other like-minded people. And the best way to do that is to attend conferences and networking events, where entrepreneurs, journalists, VC firms, and industry insiders are all in one place, making it much easier to discuss partnerships, expansions, collaborations, media coverage, or funding.

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Remaining humble and grounded might be just as challenging as obtaining riches and success. In life, most of us seek out wealth and power, but if we can remain humble and wise along the journey, then that is the true reflection of successful life. There are many success stories, but few who have chosen to be humble and show the world that status symbols are not the real definition of their achievement. Here are 10 self-made billionaires who remain grounded and humble with their feet planted firmly on the ground:

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It seems we are still suffering from a dot-com hangover.

Tech entrepreneurship is down, according to a Kauffman Foundation report out Tuesday morning that looks at long-term trends in both tech and the private sector overall.

As of 2011, there were 80,000 tech firms five years or younger, down about 30 percent from the peak of 113,000 in 2001, the report says.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo., Feb. 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- With the face of private accredited investing rapidly evolving, the Angel Capital Association (ACA), the world's leading professional and trade association for angel investors, is offering individual accredited investors significant savings to hone deal flow and best practices. Savings include a blended membership and 2014 ACA Summit fee, which reduces annual membership costs by more than 85 percent. Individual investors who belong to accredited platforms that belong to the ACA also receive ACA membership reductions. ACA, with nearly 200 groups and 10,000 member angels, provides angels access to co-investors, professional development events, deal flow tools, resources for portfolio success, and the ability to influence public policy.

Rock Health CEO Halle Tecco describes sweet spots for digital health startups interested in scale. According to Tecco, founders should find ways to automate manual processes, use technology to lower costs of current therapies, and give a good, hard look at improving current legacy software products.

Investor Dave McClure shares the "lean VC" approach, applying to venture capital many of the tenets of lean entrepreneurship, such as quick product builds, iteration and the testing of markets.

Crowdfunding platforms are an exciting addition to the startup scene and are playing an ever-expanding role in the fundraising mix. The days of viewing them as fringe or marginal are long gone; Kickstarter, alone, since its 2009 launch, has seen 5.4m people pledge $918m (£563m) to fund 53,000 creative projects.

Today, few would dispute that crowdfunding has become an accepted and effective way for entrepreneurs to road-test ideas, raise their profile and get useful customer feedback in the pre-launch stage.

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Not all progress is good progress, and not all investors are as hands off as startups might prefer. When your investors start asking questions and don't like the answers, what should you do next?

Below, 12 successful entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) weigh in, offering advice on how to respond—and how to make sure you reach your milestones in the first place.

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My name is Andrew Kung and I’m a recent Berkeley grad. When I was in college last year, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the student job search. But now, having spent three months with LinkedIn’s recruitment team, I’ve realized that everything I thought I knew about the job hunt was wrong.

Let me explain.

Back then, I was like every other student – attending career fairs and applying through online job portals, confident that this was the tried-and-true path to success. After all, it was just so obvious – stand in line, apply, and you’ll get a job. There was just one problem: I never heard back from a single company.

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Everyone knows that particular feeling of dread that accompanies a lull in conversation at a party, networking event, or even a job interview.

You’ve already covered the usual small talk and then, oof, you hit a dead end. What now?

Even the most extroverted among us know that being a good conversationalist doesn’t always come easy--but there are some experts who have had more practice than the rest of us.

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Silicon Valley isn't just a spot on a map. It’s a brand--a global symbol of enduring innovation.

Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook from his Harvard dorm room to Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs grew up there. The stereotypical image of the entrepreneurial garage comes from the real one in Palo Alto that housed HP. But what, exactly, makes the Valley tick? And how much of it, if any, can be bottled up and applied outside the area?

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This sweat-inducing video brings new meaning to the phrase "Don't look down!"

Rock climber Alex Honnold is known for his free solo ascents of enormous rock walls, which means that he forgoes ropes, harnesses and other protective gear while climbing. In this clip from YouTube climbing channel REEL ROCK, Honnold performs his signature climb up El Sendero Luminoso, a 15,000-foot wall in Mexico.

I don’t have an MBA. I used to fear that this would put me at a disadvantage in starting my own company, but now I’m convinced that it may be the other way around. In some reputable surveys, as many as two-thirds of entrepreneurs felt that their entrepreneurial spirit was more ingrained than learned, so a specific education level is at least irrelevant.

For business professionals who aspire to an executive position in a large company, most people agree that an MBA is always positive. It will get you a higher starting salary, and a valuable edge in your credentials at every promotion opportunity. In fact, BusinessWeek reports that roughly 40 percent of the S&P 500 chief executives have MBAs in any given year.

Rip-roaring demand for tech IPOs has created lots of happy people in Silicon Valley. But it also has some tech CEOs feeling pressured to bring their companies to market -- and some venture capitalists worrying that things are getting overheated.

After a decade marked by dismal returns and restive investors in the wake of the dot-com crash, the valley last year saw the most initial public offerings of stock since those dark days. Venture firms took notice, pouring more money into startups last quarter than at any time since the Great Recession. 

Back in 2006, my colleague Huggy Rao and I launched an executive education program at Stanford called “Customer-focused Innovation.”  Mornings consisted of lectures and case studies in a traditional classroom in the Stanford Business School; this was the “clean models” part of the program. In the afternoons, we moved the group to the (then) new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or “Stanford d.school,” for the “hands on” part. That midday transition could be jarring. The d.school was in a crowded, messy, and rather run-down double-wide trailer in those days. And then there was the fieldwork. That first year, the d.school team (led by Perry Klebahn) sent the executives out to observe and interview customers in BP gas stations. Their assignment was to prototype solutions to problems they heard about, revise them in response to user feedback, and then present them to a demanding group of BP executives.

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It is nearly a year since the last annual report on innovation across Europe as reflected in the annual Innovation Union Scoreboard, so a fresh one should be reaching us some time next month. The scoreboard measures the application of innovation by Member States using a basket of 24 performance indicators to decide whether you are first in class, running but keeping up, or failing to deliver in the innovation sweeps. The last scoreboard had us firmly with the “innovation followers” camp, one of four categories defined by the process along with innovation leaders, moderate innovators and the modest innovators.

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