In easily the most influential and monumental inventions of the 21st (or 20th, or even 19th) century, beers at Dodger Stadium will now stay cold up to 30 minutes thanks to an extra added layer of foam. As a frequent visitor to Chavez Ravine, this is a game changer. Try and go see a day game from June-Sept and your beverage will be warm by the time you get back to your seats. The great folks at Food Beast did us a favor and took to a Dodger game to try out the game changer and below is what they learned.

What CEOs want from an investor and what investors think entrepreneurs want are two pretty different things.

A survey of CEOs, venture capitalists and limited partners done by the National Venture Capital Association and two marketing/communications firms found that when CEOs look at venture firms, they want an entrepreneur-friendly, trustworthy, collaborative firm. Meanwhile, VCs say they most often described themselves as being experienced, a quality that wasn’t so important to CEOs.

The jetpack that science fiction promised us long ago might not be here just yet, but the medical tricorder from Star Trek, or the phone that doubles as a desktop might soon be. With crowdfunding you can make a lot of humanity’s most craved technological dreams a reality. Kickstarter was the beginning, but now more and more high-profile projects are announced on a different platform - Indiegogo.

After Ubuntu launched its Edge smartphone on it aiming to raise a whopping $32 million and we saw the success of the Scanadu Scout, an amazing gadget that works like a medical tricorder, it’s time to dive deeper in Indiegogo.

This year, the employees of SpareFoot (we call them SpareFeet) gave the company one of the biggest compliments an employer could ever receive.

In confidential surveys for the Austin Business Journal’s Best Places to Work program, the people of SpareFoot gave the company high enough praise that we were named our region’s 2013 Best Place to Work among midsize employers. This honor was no accident. Every day, SpareFoot strives hard to make the company a place where people truly want to work and truly feel valued—and where they really want to stay.

Social entrepreneurship made a huge step forward this month, as Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed legislation creating a new corporate form, the public benefit corporation, that enables companies to “do well while doing good.” Although 18 other states have already enacted similar legislation, Delaware’s status as home to more than one million American companies, including 64 percent of the Fortune 500, bodes well for the accelerating benefit corporation movement.

Photo: National Governors Association Chairman Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware (Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, especially in tech-heavy regions like Silicon Valley, need each other. But, surprisingly, they don't really know what the other wants.

According to the National Venture Capital Association's first study on the role of branding in the venture-capital industry, entrepreneurs and startup CEOs seeking venture-capital funding say the most important characteristics of a VC firm are being "entrepreneur friendly" and "collaborative." Meanwhile, VCs say that they take the most care to emphasize their "hands on" nature, the study found.

As an entrepreneur who founded and runs a successful and growing business, Getaroom, I see many entrepreneurs with great ideas but no clue how the business will be profitable. For certain websites or apps, if the idea is good enough you can get lucky and sell the business after you get a spike in interest. However, most companies require considerable planning and need both a competitive advantage and a solid business plan in order to succeed. For my company, I focused on a big market and found a profitable and attractive niche.

Image: Flicker - 3D Simplify Business

The word “entrepreneur” – especially in the internet age – is wrapped up in the image of young high-flyers, sometimes just out of school or university, sometimes still in full-time education.

Last week, 24-year-old Leah Totton won the chance to set up a new business with Sir Alan Sugar on the Apprentice. Earlier this year, Yahoo paid 17-year-old London schoolboy Nick D’Aloisio (pictured) £18m for his news app Summly. Most famously of all, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook aged just 19 whilst still at university. But in our admiration of these impressive career beginnings, are we ignoring the potential of older generations?

We can talk with someone halfway around the globe as easily as with someone in the next office; sell our products in places we couldn’t spell two years ago, take a job in India as easily as in Indiana. What, however, does all of this have to do with our ability to live productive careers and satisfying lives?

Over the past several years, we have conducted dozens of studies to explore how exposure to foreign cultures changes the way we think, behave, and make decisions. The most consistent finding from our work is that individuals who have lived abroad, either for personal or career-related reasons, tend to show heightened levels of creativity. For example, across several studies we find that MBA and undergraduate students who had previously lived abroad are better able to solve standard tests of creativity than those who have never lived outside their home country. We have found this to be true regardless of whether the task involved making creative connections among very different ideas; whether the creative task demanded a sudden insight; or whether people needed to imagine something completely new. Furthermore, we have also found that MBA students who had lived abroad achieved better outcomes in negotiations exercises that demand creative solutions.

I’ve noticed a great tendency among startup founders to ignore the essentials of business accounting in the early stages of their startup. Just because you are not profitable yet, doesn’t mean you can skip the record keeping.

In fact, just the opposite is true. When you anticipate losses for the first year or two, it is more important to properly document all expenses, including tricky ones like business travel, business meals, and your home office. Sloppy documentation and reporting of these expenses is an open invitation to an IRS audit, which is the last thing you need or can afford during the busy startup period.

If you’re among this year’s ranks of interns, how can you stand out from the crowd and turn your summer experience into a full-time offer? Here are some tips on how LinkedIn can help:

1. Do your homework.

Yep, there’s still homework in the summer. One of the best ways to stand out as an intern is to be so knowledgeable about your employer, industry and colleagues that you already feel like a co-worker. Here’s how:

No matter what industry it's in or what product it's selling, the absolute best way for a startup to obtain the capital it needs to grow is to generate revenue and reinvest profits.

Of course, it's easy to say that and very hard to do it.

That's why many entrepreneurs turn to friends and family for funding. These types of investors do not bet on the business so much as they bet on the person. And more often than not, these bets do not pan out, leaving angry family members and broken friendships at their wake.

The Iowa Innovation Corporation today announced the release of a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the position of fund manager for the new Iowa Innovation FundSM. HF 615, approved by the Iowa Legislature and signed into law by Governor Branstad, enables the Iowa Innovation Corporation to develop an investment fund to support Iowa companies. The fund will fill the critical gap between angel and venture capital funding for Iowa businesses poised for growth.

“The Iowa Innovation Corporation believes that the Iowa Innovation FundSM will help strengthen early stage funding in Iowa’s financing continuum by leveraging up to $32 million per year in new capital investments for Iowa-based businesses with high-growth potential,” said Karen Merrick, Chief Operating Officer of the Iowa Innovation Corporation.

It is striking to see how many chief executives see their most important responsibility as being the leader of the company’s culture. According to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, “Culture is your company’s number one asset.” Her counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said, “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.” In another typical remark from the C-suite, Starbucks Corporation CEO Howard Schultz has written that “so much of what Starbucks achieved was because of (its employees) and the culture they fostered.” Researchers such as former Harvard Business School professors John Kotter and James Heskett have also found consistent correlation between robust, engaged cultures and high-performance business results (as described in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance (Free Press, 1992)). But most business leaders don’t need that evidence; they’ve seen plenty of correlation in their own workplace every day.

Ventureburn’s monthly panel show, Venture Talk, is out with its second edition, all about the pros and cons of bootstrapping versus getting funding. Guests Nic Haralambous, the founder of Nic Socks and Motribe (which exited to Mxit) and Emma Kaye, the founder of Bozza and formerly Triggerfish Studios (Khumba), chat to Mich Atagana about their entrepreneurial journeys and the various types of funding they used/received to start their diverse companies.

I have long advised startup companies that if you don’t control your messaging somebody else will and your potential customers will form impressions of you shaped by somebody else or by nobody at all.

It’s why it’s important to establish a brand, know what your key messages are and communicate them often and simply.

I have published many of these PR Tips before.

With capital they need to get the business off the ground.

What is this rule change?

This is after the jobs act.

Of the jobs act was passed april fifth of last year.

It did two things.

For the first time, uncredited investors could invest in private places and it was a change from the 1933 law of general solicitation of accredited investors.

What that means is, traditionally, you had to have an investor first and to show them the offering.

A nice report on reforming the Department of Energy National Labs1 was released recently by an ideologically diverse triumvirate of think tanks: the ITIF, the Center for American Progress, and the Heritage Foundation (report downloadable only from the first two). Reserving the right to disagree with each other on other issues, the authors still do a fine job untangling the way DOE thinks about, funds, and manages the labs, and the report nicely spotlights the pathologies. I have few problems with any of the specific recommendations, but I wish there had been more consideration of some fundamental questions.

Word is getting out that the general solicitation cake has a firecracker in it.

The "firecracker" is a wholly unexpected SEC release proposing new rules that would grossly undermine the usefulness of the lifting of the ban on general solicitation.

Let's be clear: Last week the SEC did indeed issue final rules, not subject to any further comment but only a 60 day waiting period following publication in the Federal Register.