During the last month, hundreds of thousands of our nation’s college graduates have proudly crossed the chasm between college and the working world. With 21.9 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed and plenty of doting parents, mentors, and siblings dispensing advice on what they should and shouldn’t do, I thought I’d take the road less traveled. I propose we spend less time debating whether Millennials are slackers or savants and focus instead on how we as entrepreneurs and business leaders can adapt our companies to attract millennials. The way in which people work has changed forever, and those of us who don’t adapt will be left in the dust when competing for top talent.

Do you work at a large enterprise – a place with more than 500 employees? Then your best hope of helping the company — and your career — is to try to get fired. Seriously.

Start-ups and small businesses tend to be more agile and flexible than their larger, corporate siblings. During the nimbler, non-bureaucratic, rat-race of trying to grow or survive, founders, owners, and employees are freer to take risks, be creative, disrupt the old way of doing things, and attempt anything that will help the business be more successful. It’s about making changes today, otherwise, we may not be here tomorrow.

People ask these questions often, especially in the startup obsessed circles. Why don’t good startups get funded and why do bad ones do? It seems there is finally an answer. I recently came across this piece from iBusiness Angel on Twitter (Hat tip: Brett Commaille). The piece looks at why good startups don’t get funded and bad ones do. It’s actually quite simply in the end — leadership. The piece argues that the quality of a pitch is highly dependent of the quality of the leadership team.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to the Internet as an opportunity to get rich quick, instead of a place where you can start a business you love, for very little capital and minimal technical expertise. The reality is that if you build a business you love, you may in fact make big money, but if you start a business to get rich, you will probably fail.

In my experience, there are good reasons for starting a business, and good ways to go about it in the new online world, but even entrepreneurs with good intentions often don’t have a clue on key principles to follow for this rapidly changing platform.

As we know, change is the only constant factor. So the answer to, “What is eCommerce” is always changing. However, experts predict a very promising future for eCommerce in the years to come. In the foreseeable future, eCommerce will be considered the major tool of sale. As e-shopping is becoming more and more widespread, so the sales volume of online stores becomes much higher when compared to brick-and-mortar stores.

Quentin Hardy on the New York Times Bits column, reports that a survey of tech companies by Payscale, shows a very young median age compared with the overall US average age of 42.3 years. There’s a 16 year difference from the norm at some companies.

This article from govtech.com touches on 6 technologies that may change IT and what importance CIOs should place on them. 

3-D Printing has evolved into an amazingly innovative technology over the past few years.  This technology cuts down on the manufacturing process.  Since items can be produced in “batches as small as one” cost and time are reduced. An idea designed in the morning can be on your desk in a matter of hours.

Last month Siemens and EADS demonstrated a new gas-electric vehicle capable of carrying two people and their luggage 900 kilometers—roughly the distance from New York to Detroit—between refuels and recharges. The prototype was not a car, but a small two-seater airplane.

The hybrid plane is similar to the Chevrolet Volt in that it relies on an electric motor and uses a gas engine as backup. The airplane matches the performance of some private airplanes already on the market, but it has two distinct advantages: it’s remarkably quiet, and uses about 25 percent less fuel.

Many of us already record the places we go and things we do by using our smartphone to diligently snap photos and videos, and to update social media accounts. A company called ARO is building technology that automatically collects a more comprehensive, automatic record of your life.

ARO is behind an app called Saga that automatically records every place that a person goes. Now ARO’s engineers are testing ways to use the barometer, cameras, and microphones in a device, along with a phone’s location sensors, to figure out where someone is and what they are up to. That approach should debut in the Saga app in late summer or early fall.

Intel came to dominate computing by consistently beating others at packing transistors ever more densely onto chips for desktop computers and servers. Today, even as the PC market shrinks and the giant company struggles to convince phone and tablet makers to use its chips, Intel spends $10.1 billion on research annually. Justin Rattner, who has been the company’s CTO, recently met with Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review’s senior IT editor, to argue that this investment will help Intel’s mobile chips overtake those of its competitors and create new businesses. Last Thursday, Rattner announced he was stepping down as Intel’s CTO to take personal leave. He plans to return to the company in a different position.

The most scalable sort of entrepreneurship these days have some essence of technology in their gameplan. However, pure technology plays have the most to learn from Chik-fil-a.

• Chik-fil-a created something basic, but unique and protected with something - in this case their marketing and intense focus. 
• Technology is not an end in itself, but simply a tool to enable some outcome. 
• You don’t need to invent the platform, you just need to build a scalable, high profit, monopoly around a certain platform.

THIS ERGONOMIC BAT HAS MLB APPROVAL AND COULD SAVE MILLIONS A YEAR IN PLAYER INJURIES. SO WHY WON’T ANYONE MANUFACTURE IT?

It’s March 12, 2013. Gordon Beckham of the White Sox stands at the plate facing down the Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez. The promising young hitter has weathered a tough few years of disappointing averages, but his 2013 season is off to a solid start. He’s batting over .300, meaning it could be the season of the turnaround, the year that redirects his career to come.

Today I’m going to discuss Corporate Business Incubator model. This is the only model of Business Incubation Models series (up to now) that is proposed by consultants and intentended to enhance organization’s capability to innovate. 3 consultants from Booz, Allen & Hamilton have published an article in 2000 where they explicitly describe the process of corporate business incubation, it’s pros and cons as well as key success factors that could help corporations to boost innovations.

I probably get around a dozen e-mails a week asking me how to get into venture capital.  On top of that, anytime I talk to anyone who wants to get involved in startups but isn't sure what they want to do, inevitably, I hear, "And then I was thinking maybe I should look into venture capital, too."

I usually direct people to this post--still hanging atop the search rankings for "How to be a VC analyst" years later.  

China's venture capital (VC) market continued to improve after last year's retreat, with the number of deals signed growing in the second quarter.

Eighty-nine VC deals were disclosed during the April-June period, which was 20.3 percent more than the previous quarter, data provider ChinaVenture said in a report on Monday.

Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Michael Dell. What do these hugely successful entrepreneurs have in common? They are all university dropouts. If the founders of some of the most successful companies of all time don’t need to complete a degree, then why would you?

As a young entrepreneur, you’re probably going to hit a point where your little home office just isn’t enough for all your business needs and starts to be more of a burden than a way of saving money and flying light. If this happens, well, congratulations! It usually means you’re growing and moving up in the business world.

Why do some of your messages get prompt replies and others vanish into the aether? As Anna Codrea‑Rado contends at Quartz, the details are in the attention.

Recapping a Carnegie Mellon University study, she observes that :

... people are more likely to respond to information requests--whether important or trivial--if they're easy to address. ... By contrast, very important but complex messages that require a lot of work to answer often don’t get a response.

This confirms something we've discussed before: that if you want to get your emails read, your message needs to be the opposite of vague--that is, it should be as clear, concise, and actionable as possible.

If you've watched more TED Talks than Will Farrell movies lately, you may be yearning for a meaning-filled career. And while haters are going to hate , do-gooding go-getters have a number of resources at their disposal--like the three catalysts below.

FIRST UP: REWORK

To help purpose-driven jobseekers find meaningful careers, ReWork pairs qualified applicants with mission-fueled companies seeking their skills. After completing a short profile covering their education, skills, experience, and impact they care about (such as renewable energy, poverty alleviation, or disaster recovery), ReWork conducts searches for their client companies, while also putting on networking and skill-building events for candidates. Recent placements include positions at Acumen Fund, The InterSector Project, Youth Run New Orleans, and the Coexist Foundation.

Yesterday, we had a slideshow detailing the 22 maps that define America.

One of the most interesting of these was this map, which was developed by Redditor SomeGuyFromCanada, that shows the most significant television show that was each state. 

It's a bit controversial -- how exactly is That 70's Show more significant than Happy Days -- but it's certainly entertaining.