Do you need a business partner? A partner can be your best asset or your worst burden. But not all startups need to be partnerships. Your circumstance dictates your decision. Even more important than this decision is the choice of the right business partner.

Do You Need a Business Partner?

Before you decide who can be an appropriate partner in the venture, you need to pay attention to this basic question. The answer is in the affirmative in the following circumstances:

Small businesses that are adopting “mobile workstyles”—that is, allowing their employees to work whenever, wherever and however they choose—are enjoying productivity gains of more than 30 percent, according to new research sponsored by Citrix.

If your small business doesn’t yet offer remote or mobile work as an option, you might soon be in the minority. In the study, which polled small businesses worldwide, one-third of small business owners say there’s “more pressure” to offer or increase their mobile and flexible work options compared to five years ago.

As of 2012, there's such a thing as an Internet Hall of Fame. It functions just as you'd expect, honoring people through history up to the present who've made significant contributions furthering the Internet in one way or another.

You've got your tech superstars on the represented here, of course. Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source Linux operating system. Tim Berners-Lee, father of the modern Web. The list of obvious names goes on much in the same way of saying The Beatles are a good band.

Sky Deutschland, the German unit of TV provider Sky, and an advertising company called BBDO have invented an insane new technology that broadcast ads directly into people's brains. It uses something called "bone conduction technology" which transmits sound to the inner ear by passing vibrations through the skull, reports the BBC's Leo Kelion. That makes it seem like the sound is coming from inside your head.

By 1960, Silicon Valley had already captured the attention of the world as a teeming technology center. It had spawned the microwave electronics industry and set a pattern for industry-academic partnerships. French president Charles de Gaulle paid a visit and marveled at its sprawling research parks set amid farms and orchards south of San Francisco.

Stanford University, which is at the heart of Silicon Valley, had given birth to leading companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Watkins-Johnson, and Applied Technologies. These companies were pushing the frontiers of technology. There was clearly something unusual happening here—in innovation and entrepreneurship.

I know some entrepreneurs with successful businesses, and others who seem to have a great relationship with their family, but I can’t think of many who have both. Some people would argue that these two successes are mutually exclusive, but I’m not convinced.

Individually, they both take focus, commitment, and a variety of skills, all the strengths of a good entrepreneur. Assuming a person wants both a family and a business, the challenge is to achieve a balance that can satisfy both. This July 4th Independence Day Holiday in the USA is a good time for all of us to do a reality check on our own efforts.

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too.

Wedeveloped this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here.

Knowledge management and strategy go hand in hand; this article shows models of a typical strategy map.

“A strategy map is a pretty well established way of mapping out the strategy of a company in a visual way, The approach was invented by Bill Kaplan… A strategy map can be linked to Balanced Scorecard, and can be used to explain why a company is choosing the initiatives that it has.”

Check this out. It’s an image comparing the advancement of music technology to human evolution. Tweeted out by live music video site OurVinyl, the image covers everything from the early days of vinyl and boomboxes, through to the Sony Walkman, the birth of Napster and the iPod, and finally the emergence of streaming music services such as Pandora and Spotify.

In the third and final installment on the Moore’s Law series, Graeme Lipschitz sits down with POET technologies executive, Peter Copetti, to discuss their technology and what they’re doing to counteract the end game of Moore’s Law. Memeburn: What is POET Technologies and what do you do? Peter Copetti: POET Technologies (formerly OPEL Technologies) provides a patented process and methodology for the design and manufacturing of next generation integrated circuits, which will power the next wave of chipset innovation. The POET platform is a flexible one that utilizes gallium and arsenide instead of traditional silicon which allows for a quantum step forward in efficiency, speed and cost over present technologies.

Recently, I had an inspiring conversation with my friend and Under30CEO contributor, Michael Peggs. Throughout the course of a couple beers, we got into some pretty deep, philosophical stuff about life, business, and the future. What came of it was this:

Whatever you believe your future to be is true. You just have to show up.

Lots of us have big dreams and ambitions, but it’s only the people who execute them who are actually successful.

Everyone else quits, stops showing up, listens to the naysayers, and throws in the towel. They never push through the struggle. They never truly act upon what they want to do in life. Their dreams… stay dreams.

Angel investment grew 19% in Europe in 2012 The European angel market recorded a consistent growth in 2012 breaking the 5 billion Euros barrier. The data, revealed by EBAN and collected through EBAN members and credible sources across Europe (eg. government agencies, BvD...), also shows an increased number of Business Angels (BA) and Business Angel Networks (BAN). This growth is mostly due to an increased activity in the 10-30 million investment range markets with a particular highlight to countries such as Finland (+42%), Ireland (+61%) and Turkey (+116%). On the more established markets we notice a significant increase of the activity in the UK (12%) and Spain (5%) while France angel investment falls 10%.

Developing countries are the most efficient innovators, achieving results in areas such as scientific research, infrastructure and technology production with relatively low inputs, a report indicates.

But an "innovation divide" persists because overall innovation levels still lag well behind those of richer nations, according to 'The Global Innovation Index 2013', launched this week (1 July) at the High Level Segment of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), in Geneva, Switzerland.

So you have a killer technology, funding, a budding team, and stores of determination. But the mobile app universe is a very crowded space.

To help you stand out, I’ve had a think about the lessons I’ve learned over the years. These factors alone don’t guarantee a successful plunge into the market — or more importantly, user adoption and revenue. But to increase your chances of building a mobile startup that lasts, here are five important tips:

Earlier this month, we co-hosted the Grand Final of King’s College London’s (KCL) inaugural Cultural Challenge. Seeking an innovative way to connect students with external institutions, King’s Cultural Institute offered KCL students the opportunity to compete for internships at four world-class cultural institutes (Royal Opera House, Royal Shakespeare Company, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Southbank Centre). Students were invited to submit project proposals to address Challenges each institution was facing, with the winners receiving an internship at their chosen institution.

The Fourth of July, high holy day of the hot dog, is upon us. It may seem the fourth marks the eternal return of barbecues and fireworks, a seasonality for those without fields to tend. But time's arrow shapes even the cookout. Here, we survey the year in hot dog innovation through patents filed since the last time we celebrated the nation's independence with fire and processed meat.

Let it never be said that our nation stood still while others carried forth the banner of progress.

With the world on the computer screen, Jase Wilson can get philosophical about cities.

Zooming in on Tokyo’s cityscape at night, brought to him courtesy of Google, Wilson says: “It’s like a circuit board. It’s beautiful.”

Next to the sparkling grid of one of the world’s largest cities, Wilson calls up a picture of a brain, its neural paths rendered in luminescent colors.

“What’s the real difference?” he asks.

Some of that reflectiveness also could be the unwinding of a Friday afternoon. Wilson, 31, in shorts and a T-shirt, has a glass of Jameson Irish whiskey at hand to celebrate “Whiskey Friday” in the Crossroads office space that houses Neighbor.ly, the digital fundraising platform for civic projects that Wilson founded.

It’s good to have friends in high places. Especially friends who can leverage more than 30 years of experience in technology and business to nurture and foster your startup seed.

1776, a new startup incubator based in Washington, D.C., just announced a brand-new partnership with Microsoft, in which leaders from the company will collaborate with startups to guide them from a technical and business standpoint.

“(Microsoft) will help startups to leverage platforms upon which they can build innovative apps with the ability to scale rapidly and efficiently,” says 1776 co-founder Donna Harris. “Through 1776, they're also providing mentorships for architects who can ensure that startups are maximizing the potential of these tools and platforms.”

Fourteen days without email! First I marked my youngest son’s Bar Mitzvah: a week of ceremony, sentiment and celebration.

Then a family vacation with kinsfolk from near and far. I set an “out-of-office” reply and, for the first time in twenty-one years, I ignored email.

Everyone knows Google isn't just a search company. Besides developing the Android smartphone software and Chromebook Pixel laptops, Google has a ton of other projects and services in the works.

These products are being developed by Google's secret skunkworks group, Google X.