We are launching a market research study that will provide insights into how startup founders navigate the world of accelerators, and we would really appreciate your participation, candid insight and feedback.

If you have ever founded or held a C-level position at a startup company, your opinions in particular are invaluable to us. Please take 10 minutes to complete this online survey.

There’s little debate that an MBA is a great foundation for building a business—but is it a magic bullet for budding entrepreneurs? For us, the answer was an unequivocal “yes!” While many MBA graduates go on to work in relatively narrow fields and only use a fraction of what they learned, entrepreneurs will—at some point—tap into nearly every aspect of the curriculum. In fact, taking an entrepreneurial leap is the ultimate way to put newly acquired business school skills into real-world action.

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Everyone said this would be the most embarrassing moment in the band’s eight-year career.

Depeche Mode had decided to play the Pasadena Rose Bowl — capacity 60,000 — for the 101st show of their 1988 tour. To sell out would make it one of the largest music concerts ever played in America — highly unlikely for an English electronic band. Claiming they were popular enough to fill that stadium was an audacious act of bravado that critics were eager to see transform to humiliation as they played to a vast, near-vacant space, mocked by the each of the tens of thousands of empty seats.

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Earlier this month, MoneyTree released its quarterly venture capital report, and the news was overwhelmingly positive. VCs invested almost $13 billion in 1,114 U.S. startups during the second quarter, which is the highest level of VC funding in 13 years.

That included a strong showing by the Midwest, which isn’t known for its VC investing. Michigan had a banner quarter for VC activity, with $121 million invested in 11 deals. During the same time period, Wisconsin saw a relatively respectable (although not spectacular) $27.8 million invested in eight deals.

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For a seventh-grade science project, 12-year-old Lauren Rojas reached for the stars—literally. Lauren sent a silver rocket bearing Hello Kitty and a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon high up into the Earth's atmosphere. After the mission's successful completion, she analyzed the effects of altitude on air pressure and temperature and will present her findings on Feb. 12 at her school's science fair.

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Everyone has to start somewhere. Even the rich and famous often come from humble beginnings. Jennifer Hudson worked at Burger King. Jon Bon Jovi made Christmas decorations. Demi Moore was a debt collector. Before they were famous, they were just trying to make a buck.

Without the credibility of success, one can't help but wonder what the best and brightest minds might have looked like to potential employers. Would you have hired them? You be the judge.

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Call it the time paradox: Empirically, people are working less, but feeling more overworked. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average work week at 34.5 hours. The number of hours Americans work yearly has fallen from about 1,900 in the 1950s to about 1,700 now.

And yet people are always talking about how overworked they feel. A recent poll by PGi (a maker of meeting and collaboration technology) found that 88% of respondents claimed to work more than 40 hours a week. A recent poll by Seamless (the online food delivery company) found that 48% of respondents claimed to work nights and weekends some or all of the time.

When considering where to startup, you might want to consider Hong Kong.

But if you'd like to stay closer to home, there's good news. The U. S. is still one of the most attractive places to start a new business.

When it comes to things like workforce education, low cost of living, and economic health, the U.S. and four other countries come out on top for the best places to launch a startup, according to research compiled by Washington State University’s College of Business.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Essentially, service is the most common ingredient among the largest companies in the United States, whether they are publicly or privately held employers. Thus, people who are in a dilemma of selecting between jobs that they love and a well-paying job can certainly have the best of both worlds.

The largest among a number of American employers is the United States Federal Government. They are housing over four million employees worldwide - from counting the pencils at the General Services Administration and delivering mail at the post offices to uniformed military services and negotiating various foreign heads of state.

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I woke up to an article in Daily Camera today titled Small Business Administration trying to bring SBIC funds to Colorado.

There are so many things wrong in the article I felt compelled to write about it. This isn’t a knock on the writer (Alicia Wallace) – I like Alicia and think she does a good job. Rather, it’s an example of the difference between signal and noise in any kind of reporting around the VC industry.

Entrepreneurs don't need venture capital, Sageworks chairman and co-founder Brian Hamilton tells Adrienne Mitchell.

Over the past year I've been running the Startup Next Pre-accelerator in SF, which is a 5-week program by UP Global and Google for Entrepreneurs that helps early startups prepare for an accelerator (or simply crash) by validating their ideas and building prototypes to test with real customers.

Startup Next is run in many cities around the world and our graduates have not only been accepted into accelerators such as Techstars, 500 Startups, AngelPad, Plug and Play Startup Camp and more, but they've also raised funding from big-name investors.

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Oklahoma had a clear vision for its future when the Oklahoma Center for Science and Technology (OCAST) was formed — to create a unique agency focused exclusively on technology-based economic development. Our intention was to diversify Oklahoma’s energy and agriculture-based economy through research, technology transfer, seed capital, and support to advanced manufacturing.

If you’re a mid- or late-career marketer, chances are your job today is mostly unrecognizable from what you signed on for. Perhaps no other business function has changed as dramatically over the past decade.

Why? Following a silent coup, the coronation is complete: the customer is king. With an abundance of information and choice, customers now guide their own self-directed decision journey as they traverse connected experiences that blur the lines between physical and virtual and scramble marketers’ signals for targeting.

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We all struggle for a moment of insight. Whether you’ve been banging your head against the wall for days or just woke up to a problem this morning, the desire for a creative boost is a powerful one. It’s the same feeling that plagues writers facing a blank page or advertisers developing a brand’s next campaign—and learning how to achieve it can have a profound impact. Here are some tips to avoid your next headache or create something the world has never seen before:

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Millions of people make a living without ever setting foot in an office. Particularly in technology, companies are moving away from just outsourcing rote tasks to remote workers and toward building entirely distributed teams. One leader is Elance-oDesk, the largest online marketplace for freelance talent. In addition to providing a platform for distributed and part-time work, the company practices what it preaches. Telecommuting in the United States increased by as much as 79% (paywall) between 2005 and 2012.

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In these times of tight budgets and rapidly evolving science, we must consider new ways to invest biomedical research dollars to achieve maximum impact—to turn scientific discoveries into better health as swiftly as possible. We do this by thinking strategically about the areas of research that we support, as well as the process by which we fund that research.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ditching handshakes in favor of more informal fist bumps could help cut down on the spread of bacteria and illnesses, according to a study released on Monday.

The study in the American Journal of Infection Control found that fist bumps, where two people briefly press the top of their closed fists together, transferred about 90 percent less bacteria than handshakes.

"Entrepreneurs often unwittingly limit their future growth potential by creating Me-Too companies that can be put out of business over night by their larger competitors. We show you why Disruptive Innovation and a blank piece of paper can be the Entrepreneurs greatest asset."

At our Venture Capital days our we see pitch after pitch from aspiring Entrepreneurs but with so much Me-Too competition our teams need to quickly establish whether or not they believe a brand is clearly differentiated enough to be able to get a foothold in its chosen market.