In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Mark J. Kohler -- author of best-selling title The Tax and Legal Playbook -- goes over successful crowdfunding strategies. 

There are four rules that you must comply with as a business owner in order to crowdfund. Working with an SEC-approved portal, collecting the right formation and disclosure documents, supplying detailed expansions of the disclosure documents and ongoing compliance are the necessary steps to successful crowdfunding, Kohler says. 

For the first time in 80 years, thanks to Regulation Crowdfunding, startups and small businesses can raise up to $1 million from friends, family, customers and non-accredited investors. As of May 16, 2016, the JOBS Act’s Title III Regulation Crowdfunding exemption enables capital-raising via Securities and Exchange Commission-registered websites.

Prior to this SEC provision, entrepreneurs’ financing options came down to personal savings, credit cards, banks (if they could qualify) and angels or VCs (if they were among the lucky few). While most media attention about this new opportunity has focused on an entrepreneur’s ability to sell shares (equity) in his or her high-growth-potential company, a real (and neglected) opportunity is for Main Street businesses to raise debt capital through crowdfunding.

Paul Freedman was having lunch at Delmonico’s — not the original, which opened in the early 19th century, but a relic of it in the financial district. Lobster Newburg was still on the menu, the meat napped with a brandy-spiked butter.

“But the sauce used to have much, much more brandy in it,” Mr. Freedman said. “The style now is less severe.”

Even surfing can teach you how to be a better entrepreneur. 

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Bryan Elliott meets with professional surfer Tia Blanco to discover what she likes most about her career. 

Blanco doesn't surf for the fame, she surfs because it's what she loves to do. She says she thinks it's important for people to do what they love -- in both business and life. Surfing keeps her humble, happy and surrounded by people she cares about.

For those who are familiar with the principles of social entrepreneurship, the dividends they create for society are obvious, and the case for encouraging more of this kind of enterprise development is intuitive. As Thulsi Ravilla, the Executive Director of the highly acclaimed social enterprise Aravind in India put it, “Whether you are talking about cardiac care or education, the fundamental question is: ‘How do you provide it for everyone?’”

Dan Lyons knew his book would put him at risk. A former tech journalist and author, he’d written plenty of things that had made people angry at him — this was the guy, after all, who famously authored a blog that mocked Steve Jobs  — but this was the first time he’d do something that had the power to really change his own prospects.

Yesterday, Deputy Secretary of Commerce Bruce Andrews addressed the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Conference about the success of this national public-private partnership in catalyzing U.S. manufacturing and evolving to better support manufacturers. The Deputy Secretary referenced his own experience at Ford to speak about the recovery in American manufacturing since the financial crisis, and particularly the recent successes of the auto industry.

Image: http://nistmep.blogs.govdelivery.com

Good news, not so good news... On the positive side, governments have launched a series of significant new initiatives designed to inject capital into the Middle East’s entrepreneurial sector. To cite two examples, Saudi Arabia will establish a $1.1 billion fund to develop its venture capital industry, and Dubai will invest over $270 million in a program for enabling rapid development of transformative technologies. Across the region, we are seeing a welcome commitment by governments and private investors to encourage and fund entrepreneurship. The goal is simple: to spur innovation and economic development.

Image: http://www.forbesmiddleeast.com 

We picked a peck of pickle pictures to show you how helpful bacteria and salt transform this cucumber into a tangy treat.

Elon Musk’s rocket-building company SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos’s similar Blue Origins have grabbed the headlines in the space race. But there is a fascinating backstory about how the private space industry came into being. It is the tale of a renegade entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPrize Foundation to encourage rocket-building in order to find a way into space himself.

Image: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., last December. (Reuters) 

The candidates for president have responded to America's Top 20 Science, Engineering, Tech, Health & Environmental Issues in 2016. These key issues affect voters’ lives as much as the foreign policy, economic policy, and faith and values views that candidates traditionally share with journalists on the campaign trail. Several of America’s leading science and engineering organizations are urging the candidates and the press to give them equal priority in the national dialogue. For three cycles, presidential candidates have chosen to share their views here, as the Democratic and Republican candidates did in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, we also invited the Green and Libertarian candidates.

Image: http://sciencedebate.org 

Bloomberg has upped its managing editor of Bloomberg Digital, Michael Shane, to the new role of global head of digital innovation.

Shane will remain based in New York but will spend time in each region looking at new opportunities to grow audience, engagement, and revenue – focusing on six months to two-years or more into the future.

The New York Times business bestseller Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle which explores the roots of Israeli innovation has garnered global attention and won its co-authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer worldwide fame overnight. In a recent interview with Global Times reporter Zhang Ni (GT) in Beijing, Singer (S), who served as an adviser to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee before moving to Israel in 1994, said he believes China is more innovative than people think. He suggested that China is ahead of the US in some aspects, as Facebook is now trying to copy China's WeChat.

Image: Courtesy of Saul Singer

The internal organization that manages a company’s M&A processes has always been a major contributor to the success of its deals. Today, as companies increasingly choose to manage their M&A processes internally, without the support of financial advisers,1 it’s all the more important to have the right team in place. This team must not only be skilled at screening acquisition targets, conducting due diligence, and integrating acquired businesses but also have the size, structure, and credibility to influence the rest of the company.

Since I’ve started working in the entrepreneurship space, women founders have slowly but surely started breaking into the tech space. While it’s not nearly equivalent to the number of men, the number of women who are co-founding or founding companies has nearly doubled from 9.5 percent of startups in 2009 to 18 percent in 2014.

But what hasn’t increased at the same time are the number of women investors. You may ask yourself why that should matter – don’t all investors just want to make the best deals? Does the female/male ratio really matter?

If the UN Secretary General and the members of his “High Level Panel on Access to Medicines” thought the State Department was bluffing when it warned against their attempt to make intellectual property the fall guy for the lack of health care in poor countries, they were rudely awakened Friday afternoon. Disdaining diplomatic niceties, less than two days after the UN report issued, State bluntly replied in a statement titled “U.S. Disappointed Over Fundamentally Flawed Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.” Compounding the pain, the same day five prominent university associations issued a joint paper taking the report apart. Being directly and publicly rebuked in this manner is a new experience for the Secretary General and his minions– but one they richly deserve.

In finding options for summer internships, all I knew was that I wanted to experience a little bit of everything, thereby hopefully learning more about what I wanted to do. As a rising sophomore, it was expectedly difficult to find companies who would even talk to me, let alone hire me.

Image: http://entrepreneurship.wharton.upenn.edu - Amy Wang skiing during a work trip to the Andes.

The 2017 Smart Cities Innovation Summit brings together over 200 Cities and their respective leadership to prospect and partner with innovative technology and service providers; linking progressive cities with state-of-the-art solutions and best practices.

Smart Cities Summit - Placing Cities First

June 26-28 in Austin

The Smart Cities Innovation Summit, in partnership with US Ignite, will once again deliver North America's largest concentration of C-Level Smart City Leadership working towards innovative solutions for progressive city needs. Join us in Austin Texas as we expand our community of city leaders and solution providers, delivering an exciting “city first” agenda accelerating state-of-art solutions into global city practice. We look forward to seeing you in Austin!.

If you find Mondays particularly difficult, it may be due in part to how you spent your weekend. Lingering hangovers and lack of sleep aside, new research suggests that the hobbies we engage in over the weekend can impact our productivity during the workweek.

"Our main motive was to find out if people would find more benefit in certain activities based on their career," says the study’s lead author, Kevin Eschleman, an assistant psychology professor at San Francisco State University. The study, which surveyed 350 U.S. workers in different locations and industries who work Monday to Friday, was presented at the 2015 Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

Image: Flickr user Johnny Silvercloud

For this year’s search for the ultimate hometowns, we analyzed 60 key factors: taxes, education, health care, and more. Looking for places where homes are affordable and jobs are plentiful? Good. Those communities earned the highest scores. Happy hunting!

Image: http://time.com