New recruits to making sales via cold-calling often struggle to take their generic sales training and put it into practice.   If they are not trained professionally on how to make the actual call, until they are pitch perfect, they will lose calls and burn leads, often leaving a bad impression if they managed to say where they are calling from before the callee hung up on them.  They may even take abuse, further reducing their will to make more calls, with their confidence dropping at an exponential rate.

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The brave new word of free, online college-level courses finally makes it possible to get an inexpensive degree-equivalent education in many fields. Employers, though, might be less impressed with the supplemental coursework, unless you're looking for a job in technology or computer science.

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The most Instagrammed location in the world is (drumroll please) — a mall in Bangkok.

How disappointing.

Instagram released its end-of-year data today, revealing fun tidbits about the most popular locations, the most liked photos, and top hashtags.

Image: Instagram 

Having trouble keeping up with the onslaught of new gadget tech these days? You’re not alone. Even for someone like me, who loves gadgets and who keeps track of all this stuff every day, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. So let me simplify things for you: Here’s a list of gadgets that anyone would love to receive as a gift. There’s no need to worry about specs and such — these are all devices that work without much fuss, even if the recipient isn’t very tech-savvy.

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Michael Crow believes our state universities must be role models of innovation for other institutions, such as state government and the public schools, constantly sending the message that we can’t continue doing things the same old way.

Image: http://www.azcentral.com 

Where is it that innovation-economy makers want to be? Not in the office towers of their parents. They want to be in cool, old industrial buildings. A lot of those are along the BQE in Brooklyn and Queens, and also in the South Bronx. Drive that route and you'd see tens of millions of square feet in beautiful old buildings being used for storage, providing one low-paying job for every 500,000 square feet.

Image: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/ 

Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.

Technology. It's always changing. It's always accelerating and being innovated. This year was no different. Entrepreneur.com chronicled all the action and it was a ton of fun.

From Google unveiling computerized glasses, to Elon Musk's Hyperloop to the mobile battle between Apple and Samsung, 2013 was all about bold ideas and fierce competition. Here's a countdown of Entrepreneur.com's most-viewed tech stories of the year:

The hard-charging entrepreneur has become something of a trope these days. From Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg to Jack Dorsey, the image of the self-made man striking out on his own has become an updated, 21st century version of the old Horatio Alger myth.

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Meet Martyn Ashton. He's about to blow your mind.

The professional cyclist, along with two accomplices, pulls off more than five minutes of the most amazing bike tricks you'll ever see in the YouTube video, above.

Rameet Chawla had a career in finance, in which he primarily analyzed risk. He was ready to leave finance and wanted to do something new in the tech world. But one thing stood in his way.

"Starting a technology startup was fairly high-risk," he says. "It was questionable whether I wanted to do my own startup because I knew the chances of success were really slim."

It might not be the best thing for San Francisco rents, but the venture-capital (VC) industry reasserted itself as a major force in the US economy again this year—putting lots of money to work, successfully exiting some earlier investments, and sparking talk of another bubble.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement may have faded in the past few months, but its core beliefs have stuck with tomorrow’s talent.

It’s tempting to think that these grass-roots sentiments will run their course, but my interactions with young professionals around the globe, as well as our own research, tell me there is something larger at work, and that business leaders need to pay attention.

Image: http://www.forbes.com 

Want to know when the Anthropocene started exactly? It will only cost an entirely revamped scientific effort in archaeology, ecology and paleontology, among other disciplines, at an unprecedented planetary scale, according to a new paper calling for such a scheme.

The putative start date for what scientists have begun to call the Anthropocene—a newly defined epoch in which humanity is the dominant force on the planet—ranges widely. Some argue that humans began changing the global environment about 50,000 years back, in the Pleistocene epoch, helping along if not outright causing the mass extinctions of megafauna, from mammoths to giant kangaroos, on most continents.

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Densely populated neighborhoods, commercial district city squares and multiple public transit lines all span the city of Cambridge, Mass., creating an environment ideal for walking.

The most recent Census counts estimate nearly a quarter of the city’s residents walk to work, far more than any other larger U.S. city.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvard_square_2009j.JPG 

Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen posits, but open-source software seems to be eating itself. And at a far faster clip. While the software world has grown used to products and their vendors dominating for long stretches (think: Microsoft in operating systems and Oracle in databases), the new world of open source is moving at an accelerated, Darwinian pace, leaving no project to rest on its laurels.

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Most entrepreneurs who start a company alone soon come to the conclusion that two heads are better than one – someone to share the workload, the hard decisions, and the costs. In a moment of crisis, you may be tempted to take on the first person expressing interest as a co-founder. This would be a mistake, and could easily cost you your startup.

The general public often views colleges and universities as the purest symbols of American democracy because of the essential role they have played in promoting upward social mobility. Indeed, they have been outstanding vehicles for untold millions to achieve a better life than the one enjoyed by their parents. If they were ever pure, however, that is certainly not the case today.

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When Eric Tetler's insurance broker told him the health care premiums for his small business were going up 19% in 2014, Tetler feared he'd have to send his employees to the new health insurance exchange to buy their own coverage.

That was with a Dec. 1 renewal date, which meant the plan wouldn't have to comply with the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which take effect Jan. 1.

Image: Josh T. Reynolds for USA TODAY 

The Hub’s innovation ecosystem has long debated the advantages of Cambridge and Boston proper. But now that the rents are creeping upwards both around Kendall and Harvard Square and the Innovation District, entrepreneurs – and a few of the organizations that cater to them – seem to be settling in Downtown Boston.

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