Two fresh statistics from the U.S. Labor Department underscore the importance of small business creation to the American economy. The feds reported last week that 192,000 jobs were added nationwide in March; meanwhile, the U.S. manufacturing sector lost 1,000 jobs for the month. A thousand jobs are a rounding error when spread over a nation of 330 million people, but it illustrates continued employment consolidation within a vital sector. It also begs the question: If not within manufacturing, what kinds of businesses are creating those 192,000 jobs?

Image: http://host.madison.com  - Tom Still

At first glance, few technologies feel as unsexy as voice. From a user’s perspective, little has changed since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. Most see voice as a mature technology that simply connects people in real-time across a distance. But voice is experiencing a wave of innovation that will fundamentally alter this definition.

During Mobile World Congress, Jae-woan Byun, the CTO of SK Telecom, condemned current voice offerings as “boring for users” but promised a “second tsunami” that could change everything.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

"God, I hate Palo Alto," an exotic dancer exclaims inside a house full of awkward tech nerds during an episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, which debuts Sunday at 10 p.m. ET — an ideal time slot after the Game of Thrones season four premiere.

But for all of the things that this frustrated dancer hates about Silicon Valley, you'll likely find them enjoyable while watching the new half-hour satirical comedy, as the series doesn't hold back mocking the area's burgeoning startup culture. The sitcom was somewhat inspired by co-creator Mike Judge — the mastermind behind King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space — who worked begrudgingly at a Silicon Valley startup in the 1980s.

Image: ISABELLA VOSMIKOVA/HBO 

Seattle based start-up, Current Drives LLC doubled its fundraising goal on popular crowdfunding site Indiegogo with the first electric fin motor system for stand-up paddle boards called the ElectraFin.

The ElectraFin propels users on paddleboards, longboards and kayaks using electric power. The ElectraFin allows users to go further and access waterways that would be hard to reach

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about his job search that went something like this:

Friend: I wrote to him last week and still haven’t heard back. It’s so frustrating. Me: Why not follow up and check in? Friend: I don’t want to be annoying.

The fear is understandable. No one wants to be annoying or bothersome to a professional contact, especially when you want a job, meeting, sales dollars, or something else very important from that person.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

It’s time for another Community News and Information Roundup. As tax season approaches, we’ve got some important news about taxes on for crowdfunding and home business. There’s also news about the latest version of WordPress coming out soon. We’ve done the heavy lifting surveying small business blogs and communities on the Web to bring you what business leaders are talking about. So enjoy:

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Widening our view of the world can mean taking a much closer look at the familiar. And technology from MRI to Scanning Electron Microscopes, which use focused beams to interact with a sample's surface to produce nano-sized resolution, is allowing scientists and medical researchers to delve into our strange and beautiful world (sometimes aided with a little Photoshop).

Three academics with winning entries in this year's Wellcome Image Awards tell us how they got their image.

Image: KEVIN MACKENZIE, UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN 

On March 17, 2014, a group of physicists announced a thrilling discovery: the “smoking gun” data for the idea of an inflationary universe, a clue to the Big Bang. For non-physicists, what does it mean? TED asked Allan Adams to briefly explain the results, in this improvised talk illustrated by Randall Munroe of xkcd.

Image: http://www.ted.com 

If Hannah Horvath is really the voice of Generation Y, it must be a fairly self absorbed generation indeed. It’s more hopeful to think that it might be found in Leonora Epstein. Her recent book X vs. Y: A Culture War, A Love Story (written with her Gen X sister Eve) paints a more optimistic picture for Millennials. We talked to her about who they are, how they compare to their Gen X counterparts, and what’s ahead for the generation.

Image: http://bigthink.com 

In 1960, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt published a landmark paper in Harvard Business Review that urged executives to ask, “What business are you really in?” Even today, a half century later, his challenge still resonates.

By pointing out that no industry grows forever, he gave rise to many concepts we still recognize, such as the customer centered business, Porter’s 5 Forces and value chains.  Many executives who seek to be modern are often merely repeating Levitt’s insights.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

A common misconception I often hear in the startup world is that non-profits are easy and safe, since they don’t have to pay taxes, and they don’t have to make a profit for their shareholders. In reality, from the feedback I get from non-profit executives, exactly the opposite is true.

Technically speaking, in the United States, a non-profit corporation or association is one which has been exempted from Federal income taxes by meeting the criteria set out Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code, most notably religious, educational, and charitable entities like the Salvation Army. Other countries have similar exemptions for similar organizations.

Back in 2009, downtown San Jose's San Pedro Square district took a big hit when longtime tenant Tied House Brewing Co. closed its doors. But the company's extensive inventory of brewing tools didn't go to waste; it's now enabling a new generation of experimental Silicon Valley craft beers at Hermitage Brewing Co., which has become a kind of incubator for budding Bay Area brewers.

Image: Vicki Thompson - Peter Licht, Brewmaster at San Jose's Hermitage Brewing Co., churns out tens of thousands of beers per year for the company's in-house brand and dozens of other Bay Area beer companies. Click the image for an inside tour of the Hermitage beer haven in San Jose. 

Hello everyone. This is an alert to some research I have underway. I am looking at several of the leading crowdfunding platforms to assess the “state of crowdfunding” today. I am looking at the following crowdfunding sites:

Image: http://blogs.gartner.com 

Ari Horie doesn’t have a women’s studies degree, and she’s not really interested in debating the politics of women in tech. Rather, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley’s one-year-old Women’s Startup Lab began her effort to make the region more inclusive for female founders by finding a market opening.

Image: Vicki Thompson - Ari Horie, a veteran of IBM and several smaller Silicon Valley startups, is helping would-be women entrepreneurs launch and scale companies through her Women’s Startup Lab in Menlo Park. 

When's the last time you used a chamber pot? If you’ve spent most of your time in the industrialized world, we're guessing the answer is “never.” But for thousands of years, squatting over one was the only toilet game in town, and our ancestors couldn’t think of another sanitation solution. Similarly, most of us probably assume that our modern S-shaped-pipe porcelain thrones are what the toilets of the future will look like too.

Image: http://www.takepart.com 

The robotic fish kept alone in a tank at the University of Maryland, College Park doesn't dazzle with its agility or speed, but it does promise bigger things to come.

At the flick of a switch, water flows through the tank. The faceless gray plastic creature less than a foot long knows this, and you know that it knows this because it slides languidly from side to side to shelter behind a white plastic pipe, minimizing its energy use.

In an article published today on its website, the president of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) cites an “abusive patent litigation practice called patent-trolling” that she explains can interfere with the complex process of moving university research discoveries into the marketplace. (The full article, “Lions and Tigers…and Trolls, Oh My!” is available at www.autm.net.)

You will be pivoting your business in your lifetime, whether you are a new startup, or a mature company like Motorola or IBM. You can count on it and plan for it, or you wait for the next survival crisis brought your way by this rapidly changing world. You can even give it a more elegant name, like “market-focused reinvention,” but it won’t be graceful if you don’t take the lead.

Worldwide IT spending is expected to increase this year, but it's nothing compared to how much money will flow into Big Data. And for employees at those companies, more money is certainly a good thing.

As a new IDC report reveals, spending in the Big Data market will reach $32.4 billion by 2017, or nearly six times the growth rate of the overall IT market.

Image: http://readwrite.com 

Bain Capital Ventures led a $4 million investment round in the New York financial tech startup OpenFin. The deal was announced Wednesday, but the connections that made it possible date back more than three years.

Speaking during a panel discussion shortly after the deal went public, Bain Capital Managing Partner Matt Harris said far too many entrepreneurs don't put that kind of long-term, consistent effort into their relationships with potential investors. OpenFin founder Mazy Dar met with him about 10 times over the course of seed funding rounds and their time in the FirstGrowth Venture Network accelerator. As a result, the deal was fairly easy once it came time for a bigger round.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net