Determined to take their startup company to the next level, entrepreneurs Nicholas Seet and Ashok Kamal are living out of an RV in Oklahoma City for the next 12 weeks while participating in local business accelerator VentureSpur.

Hal Gatewood, creator of Zalongo works on his laptop at VENTURESPUR in Oklahoma City. PHOTO BY STEVE GOOCH, THE OKLAHOMAN Steve Gooch - The Oklahoman “My first company took 10 years to get off the ground, and this time I'm shooting for five years,” said Seet. Already a seasoned entrepreneur, Seet is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of New Mexico at Los Alamos and sold part of his first company to Yahoo in 2011. Kamal is the CEO of another startup social media marketing company in New

Image: Hal Gatewood, creator of Zalongo works on his laptop at VENTURESPUR in Oklahoma City. PHOTO BY STEVE GOOCH, THE OKLAHOMAN Steve Gooch - The Oklahoman

According to an article by Mark Henricks in All Business, the 2008 economic recession was responsible for a 50 percent increase in business bankruptcy, and these businesses included the likes of automotive giants General Motors and Chrysler. While some businesses including the aforementioned companies were able to be saved by bankruptcy, many more were forced to close their doors completely. Those still in business might still be struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly competitive market as the economy slowly rebounds.

If your business is struggling, either because of the economy or because the business still in its infancy, how exactly do you make it tick? Here’s a look at five smart and simple ways to add bite to a struggling business.

Image: Flickr

Entrepreneurs often get the advice from their lawyers and friends to always get a Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA or CDA) signed before disclosing anything about their new venture. Most investors and startup advisors I know hate them, and refuse to sign them. Who is right?

Let me try to put this question in perspective. If you are totally risk-averse, then push to always get signed NDAs. You won’t last long as an entrepreneur in this category, since a startup is all about taking risks. On the other hand, if you intend to patent an idea, you need a signed confidentiality agreement from everyone knowing details, or you will legally lose patent rights.

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To date, more than $680 million has been raised on Kickstarter, as crowdfunding becomes an increasingly viable option for startups to raise much-needed funds without the help of VCs, angels or banks.

For a young, bootstrapping startup, crowdfunding is often seen as fast money that will help you build out the product or app you and your team have always dreamed about. Whether or not a project ultimately reaches its funding goals, it’s still relatively quick and easy to post your pitch and see what happens.

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Two companies launched by discoveries at an engineering research center at Iowa State University have been awarded grants to help them commercialize their biorenewable technologies, the Ames Tribune reported. The technologies, which would help industries produce chemicals from biorenewable sources rather than petroleum, were developed by researchers at the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals based at ISU. OmegaChea Biorenewables LLC of Ames won a one-year, $225,000 Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 grant. Glucan Biorenewables LLC of St. Louis won a six-month, $150,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant.

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You just ate your lunch, and all you want to do is go home.

There's no way you can possibly get anything done--the next four hours of your workday are doomed. And to top it off, it's summer, the most productivity-demolishing season of them all!

Let's all pack it in and try again tomorrow, right?

Wrong.

Image: Flickr

Success in raising money from domestic investors in the emerging markets is not only about the ‘pitch,’ but the business model selected and executed which local $ will finance. Certainly entrepreneurs in the developing world must create and deploy business models which meet customer requirements for commercialization and revenue generation; but they frequently overlook which models best match the risk behavior of wealth too. Selecting the business model which impacts the DNA of investors is the path to open their wallets—to finance your dreams, your hopes, and your aspirations.

A digest of the top business technology news stories from the past week.

Google to open The Foundry, new innovation centre in Dublin Internet search giant Google is building a 15,000 sq-foot digital innovation centre in Dublin’s Docklands that is expected to attract up to 15,000 extra business visitors from abroad each year.

The new centre, to be called The Foundry, is the company’s first such investment outside the US. Google has not mentioned the value of the investment.

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Since the recession the number of recent graduates who class themselves as self-employed has increased by 40% in the past few years. These students form a small part of the 4.2 million self-employed people in the UK today. 

I myself see the benefits of starting an enterprise while a student at UCL. I created PlanetTechNews.com because I wanted to enjoy being an entrepreneur. UCL’s help has been invaluable in both promoting the site and ensuring the science and technology news content, presented on the site, is of the highest standard and relevance. 

Image source: robb3d 

The Wall Street Journal looks at free or low-cost classes for entrepreneurs—and why they could pay off. And do you reach out to customers through email? Check out Inc.com’s article on the new Gmail – and what it could mean for your sales strategy.

Using Facebook for more than friends:  The New York Times examines how Texas-based retailer The Polkadot Alley sells clothing and accessories directly on Facebook.

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I’m an entrepreneur and I married an entrepreneur. No, I’m not crazy. Okay, maybe a little, but more on that later.

I run an advertising agency called Rocket XL and my wife, Ro Cysne, is the co-founder of Jil Ro clothing. Like any relationship, it’s not always a bed of roses. Our busy startup lives caused us to change the date of our wedding four times, and we’ve forgotten whose turn it was to pick up our son at preschool seven times (and counting).

Image: Flickr

If you think you want to start a company, questions ought to be buzzing through your mind: How do I know I’m ready to start a company? Which of my ideas is worth betting on? How do I get a risk-averse customer to try my product? If I get customers, how do I scale the business? How do I build my start-up’s team?

Mobiquity founder and CEO, Bill Seibel – a serial entrepreneur — offered his take in a July 28 interview. Briefly, Seibel’s answers are: Because you’re passionate about something you’re good at doing – not just to get rich; pick a simple idea that solves a big problem; show how your product beats the competition and build the best team; pick customers that need your product the most; and build a team of people with the best skills who work well with others. 

Image: Flickr

The recently released Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a nationally representative survey of American adults, reveals that the fraction of Americans who intend to start a business rose to 12.5 percent in 2012 — a substantial increase from the 8.3 percent recorded in 2008.

What’s behind the change?

It doesn’t appear to be driven by a shift in Americans’ beliefs about their entrepreneurial abilities. In both 2008 and 2012, 56 percent of Americans said they had the skills to start a business.

Image: Flickr

Success in raising money from domestic investors in the emerging markets is not only about the ‘pitch,’ but the business model selected and executed which local $ will finance. Certainly entrepreneurs in the developing world must create and deploy business models which meet customer requirements for commercialization and revenue generation; but they frequently overlook which models best match the risk behavior of wealth too. Selecting the business model which impacts the DNA of investors is the path to open their wallets—to finance your dreams, your hopes, and your aspirations.

Image: Flickr - Startup Business Meeting

AUSTIN, TX - In its role as the leading advocate for the Central Texas technology community, the Austin Technology Council (ATC) today reaffirmed the Council's immediate and long-term responsibilities for ensuring the advancement of Austin as a global hub for technology innovation. Following a conclusive annual CEO Summit and a comprehensive strategic assessment of the needs and strengths of the regional tech community, ATC has outlined a series of goals to continue fostering the Austin technology industry.

Image: Flickr - Newspaper and Pen

Every age likes to believe it sits at an inflection point in history but Australian business may just be there as it confronts the challenge of staying competitive in an increasingly connected and global marketplace.

In a series of reports on the Future of Australian Business Trends – commissioned by Accenture in association with The Australian Financial Review – it would seem Australian business does face further unease as the global slowdown continues to infect more economies and digital disruption cleaves through traditional business models.

Photo: Accenture’s David Mann believes Australia is well placed to move up the global innovation league table because the building blocks are already in place. Photo: Louise Kennerley

Last year, a former Princeton University president, William G. Bowen, delivered the Tanner Lectures at Stanford, continuing a long tradition of college leaders' using the top floors of the ivory tower to speak difficult truths about academe.

When the dot-com craze was sweeping the nation, back in 2000, Bowen—an author in the 1960s of the original "cost disease" diagnosis of labor-intensive industries­—kept his eyes on the evidence. He didn't yet see reason to believe that colleges could use technology to save money. But another decade of progress changed his mind. "I am today a convert," he said. (The lectures were published this year by Princeton University Press as Higher Education in the Digital Age.) Bowen's random-trial-based research suggests that "online learning, in many of its manifestations, can lead to at least comparable learning outcomes relative to face-to-face instruction at a lower cost."

Image: Flickr - Amazon Kindle 2 | E-book and paper books

In Shirie Leng’s excellent post, “The Email I Want to Send To Our Tech Guys But Keep Deleting“, Dr. Leng lists a series of problem areas which plague software development in healthcare. Making things better requires taking a closer look at the specs we use. The new-age consumer-focused software companies can build products with outstanding usability because they start and end with the specs.

I have spent time at several academic medical institutions, and their software solutions are very much the same. At one, I was given this five-page table of portals and documentation systems with instructions on how to log in.

Right now Google Glass sits at the apogee of geeky, wearable technology.  Last month, interviewing a Glass-wearing Robert Scoble, Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman memorably debunked it in his opening question as “that thing on your head. ” Getting non-techie people to view Glass as anything other than ludicrously geeky is going to be an uphill fight for Google.

Arguably, though, even more of a blocker to Glass adoption is people viewing the technology as the epitome of creepy, thanks to its built-in camera. Sure a digital eye sited at eye-level lets you share a nice view of that mountain you can see from your hotel window. But in more everyday scenarios, it also lets you video your fellow humans as they go about their business, and that privacy intrusion is inevitably going to cause some friction. Throw in the whole NSA PRISM surveillance fallout and stuff like this is inevitable.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of the Treasury delayed a key provision of Affordable Care Act (ACA)—the requirement that companies with more than 50 employees extend health insurance to their full-time staff. Then, the House of Representatives passed a bill extending the same relief to individuals, who under the law would start facing tax penalties if they go without health insurance next year. It prompted me to take a fresh look at progress overall.

It has been more than three years since the (ACA) was enacted on March 23, 2010, after a long, tough political battle over the best way to reform health care in the United States. The debate appears not to be settled.

Image: Flickr (Holiday)