Professional inspiration can come from anywhere, even the unlikeliest of places. This month, I was inspired by a rapper imparting business advice to startups.

Hip-hop historian, music technologist and founder of hip-hop band Stetsasonic, Glenn K. Bolton — also known as Daddy-O — recently spoke about the parallels between budding hip-hop artists and startups during his presentation at Geekend 2011, a techie conference presented by BFG Communications.

Sales Ninja, Linux Geek, Marketing Rockstar. These are all real job titles being used in the business world today, and according to data from online business card printer Moo.com, these creative titles are on the rise.

You’ve probably seen some of these tongue-in-cheek titles at digital conferences or among savvy startup entrepreneurs. But is an imaginative title like Word Herder or Copy Cruncher a fit for you?

It’s no secret that San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s tech demographics skew heavily on the side of men. Rather than continue quietly observing this cultural inequity, over the past few years, more voices have brought attention to the issue. Through increased publicity, thanks to speeches by leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and articles like this month’s feature in San Francisco magazine, the conversation around women entrepreneurs is beginning to change. Still, some of the discussion is going in the wrong direction – focusing only at those at the very top and at the biggest companies – founders, board members, CxO’s. When you look much closer, there are numerous women making waves as entrepreneurs, executives and investors. It’s just that they seem to be ignored because they’re not at Apple or Zynga.

Silicon Valley has its own version of celebrity culture, and the dazzling stars are not just attractive, but they’re brilliant, creative and usually nouveau riche. As with celebrity culture everywhere, the mainstream media often focuses solely on big names, big companies and big dollar signs. And the issue of women tends to be misunderstood. One way of learning the real story is to listen to the women entrepreneurs themselves, and that’s just what we did Thursday at Cisco headquarters in San Jose at the TEDx Bay Area Global Women Entrepreneurs conference. Eighteen speakers (15 women, 3 men) gave eighteen minute talks, sharing their statistics and stories.

According to a recent survey on entrepreneurship by Amway Europe, the Turks and Swiss top the list for entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. The research indicates that in both countries 50 percent of the population has a positive attitude toward establishing their own businesses. Another encouraging finding came from the Global Entrepreneurship Index 2010, which places Turkey, with 8.6 percent, in 28th place, ahead of countries such as the US and Germany; the figure indicates the ratio of people out of one hundred adults who have set up businesses.

And according to the report “Entrepreneurship in Turkey 2010,” the rate of institutional entrepreneurs among the 18-64 age group has more than doubled: The rate, which was 4.8 percent in 2008, increased to 10.7 in 2010. Turkey takes ninth place, its rate of entrepreneurs setting up business for the first time being 5.1 percent, among the 24 countries surveyed. The author of the report, Esra Karadeniz, assistant professor at Yeditepe University, said at the Second Global Entrepreneurship summit in İstanbul on Dec. 4 that the figures indicate that the number of entrepreneurs in Turkey has risen and that the enterprises have gained a lasting character in the economy.

The Los Angeles tech scene has buzz, glitzy backers and even a catchy nickname: Silicon Beach.

Tech boosters are stumping for a Silicon Valley contender down south, and conference halls and bars are brimming with entrepreneurs looking to join a growing community that includes a huge new Google campus in Venice and a wave of Internet start-ups.

"We've been investing in this area since 1999, and we've never seen a level of activity higher than it is today," said venture capitalist Nate Redmond of Rustic Canyon Partners in Santa Monica. "Anecdotally, almost all things tech are doing well."

Many young kids want to be inventors. When most of them grow up, however, they either grow out of it or resign themselves to the excuse that it is the work of only dreamers and the lucky, while forging ahead into 9 to 5 desk jobs. When we were younger, we had playful, creative lessons in school on famous inventors like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Walt Disney.

Those larger-than-life creators evolved into modern-day innovators whose products and online services we now cultishly obsess over. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jimmy Wales are the great minds of today, changing the world with their creative ideas.

While we realize you were not able to join us at the recent forum Small Business and Entrepreneurship during an Economic Recovery, we did want to reach out to you to let you know that we have now posted materials (video clips, transcripts, and speaker presentations) from the event to the Federal Reserve Board’s website, viewable by clicking here.

This forum brought together experts from a range of disciplines to share their perspectives on small business issues, including ideas around the financing and technical needs of small businesses and entrepreneurs, and the important role these firms are playing in creating jobs during the current economic environment. It was also organized to address some of the unique issues and challenges faced by women- and minority-owned firms as a way to identify research, policy, and practice recommendations to better support these groups.

Our work is not done on these issues and we appreciate any feedback that you might have. Along with the Kauffman Foundation, the Federal Reserve System will continue to build upon this work and we hope that you will keep us informed about your efforts to provide support to the small business community.

There's a great post at What Makes Them Click that explains research detailing the 4 types of creativity. Above is a matrix showing how they relate and descriptions are below:

"Thomas Edison"

...In order for deliberate, cognitive creativity to occur, you need to already have a body of knowledge about one or more particular topics. When you are being deliberatively and cognitively creative you are putting together existing information in new and novel ways.

The call for the Malaysian society to be a highly-technocratic one is not a new notion. In his Vision 2020 working paper in 1991, former premier Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad highlighted the need to establish ‘a scientific and progressive society’ as the sixth challenge out of nine outlined in the national agenda.

In Budget 2011 tabled by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak last year, the government would provide the ‘Entrepreneurship Enhancement Training Programme’ to train 500 new technopreneurs and attract more investors.

Additionally,the Malaysian Technology Development Corporation (MTDC) would be provided with a start-up fund amounting to RM100 million to furnish soft loans that allowed loan repayments only after companies had generated income.

A university’s ability to create and share innovative technology and know-how should be evaluated in a holistic way that includes both academic and commercial activities.  In this article I compare the innovation transfer activities of U.S. research universities in a new, multi-faceted way: by counting and mapping universities according to their ability to

• publish papers
• to generate new inventions
• and to attract industry research funding.

WASHINGTON -- A federal agency that hands out economic development dollars should be popular during tough economic times.

And the U.S. Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration, headed by former Bloomington Mayor John Fernandez, is getting twice as many requests than it can fund.

But the EDA isn't so popular among some members of Congress.

Permanent residence in the USA is a valuable asset that is enjoyed by most of you reading this article. Many potential immigrants from around the world want to acquire that asset and become valuable members of American society alongside us.

Why don’t we let more of them join us? There are two common objections: they will drive down wages, or they will be a drain on tax-funded programs. Some existing immigration paths, like the H1B visa-to-green card route, are based on the idea that for some immigrants, the benefits will outweigh these potential costs.

Today’s wealth currency is the influence of your personal brand and what you create with it.  Influence is the currency of the 21st Century and the more you have the more wealth you attract.

If you want to associate with the wealthy you have to learn how to be an influencer. Influence creates money and the opportunity to earn more of it. People who have influence are sought out by brands, organizations, politicians and individuals. The reasons are simply because those who have influence create money.

Consider that 250 out of the 535 members of congress have more than a million dollars in assets.  That is 47% of congress who are millionaires vs. 1% of the US population who are millionaires.  The reason is simple. Politicians have influence and they use it to gain money.

There are some big names getting involved with “badges”.  Modern ideas about badges arise from incentive used by the gaming community to indicate achievement.  Historically, however, badges are older than money itself. Recently, badges are gaining attention in the area of education as a means of indicating achievement.

Badges are steeped deep in our economy and culture When people write their resume, they “badge” themselves with the names of the companies that they worked for and the schools they attended.  They badge themselves with the market brands of the products that they worked on.  They badge themselves with the trademarks of the technologies that they applied.

Billionaire internet investor Sean Parker took the stage in Paris at LeWeb with a simple message for his audience: There are “too many venture capitalists in the world and not enough entrepreneurs”. Parker has a CV that would blow the mind of most people. He was co-founder of that great music industry disrupter Napster, and more recently an investor in Facebook and Spotify, among many other things.

But don’t call Parker an “investor”, he finds the term a bit insulting. He still sees himself primarily as an entrepreneur: “I don’t just invest in a company, I take an operating role.”

Parker is a General Partner at Founders Fund, a fund he formed with other leading internet figures in 2005. The firm recently just raised US$625-million and has invested in the likes of Spotify, Facebook and Gowalla.

In Minnesota, Warburg Pincus announced that it will invest up to $355 million in First Green Partners, a newly formed early-stage venture capital company.

First Green will, in turn, invest in early-stage companies that focus on developing methods of converting renewable carbon, such as non-food biomass and carbon dioxide to fuels and chemicals, and applications of clean or green technologies in the conventional energy or industrial process, otherwise known as green-black technologies.

The Consumer Electronics Association will present its choices of Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Award honorees at the upcoming 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The awards comprise outstanding design and engineering advancements across 32 consumer electronics product categories.

The CEA judges make their selection of the honorees in 32 categories based on overall engineering qualities and design qualities, the product’s intended use and function, unique features and how the design and innovation of the product compares to others in the marketplace.

Belgian company Biologistics Consulting is one of the first tenants of a new office space for startups at the University City Science Center‘s Port Business Incubator.

The space that offers the necessities for any life sciences and technology startup — a desk, a phone and high speed Wi-Fi access, and is located in the Port Business Incubator at 3711 Market St. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It also provides access to services at the Science Center such as the Quorum, which hosts seminars and conferences as well as provides meeting space.

The web will die says George Colony, the rather insightful boss of Forrester Research — and here is why.

He says that fundamentally the web is a waste and inefficient. It fails to take advantage of the incredible processing power and storage abilities of the powerful gadgets and computers we use. It makes no sense to leave these out of the equation. Rather the best use of the technology at our disposal today is to use both the internet and the processing power of our devices — what Colony has dubbed the “app-internet”.

Both the old and new architectures are dead

Colony said that there have been two major computing models. The first is outdated and dead — this is the PC era where we put executables on our desktop. The problem: this model does not leverage the cloud.

What are the secrets behind Steve Jobs’ success? I’ll bet you want to know.

Author and communications coach Carmine Gallo thinks he knows, and at the LeWeb conference in Paris, he provided some insight into them. In fact, he’s written a book entitled “Innovate the Steve Jobs way: 7 insanely different principles for breakthrough success”.

Here are Gallo’s 7 secrets:

1. Do what you love

For Jobs “being the richest man in the cemetery” didn’t matter, what mattered was “going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful”. Without passion your business won’t work, passion is everything. You cannot inspire people unless you are inspired. Apple’s core value is that it believes people with passion can change the world for the better. Jobs was passionate about creating tools that helped people. Think about what you are selling and why.