Yesterday, with delight, you shared with us your worst interview mistakes (and those you’ve witnessed).

Boy, were you guys excited! We promise to never cry (or show up drunk) at our next interview.

That went so well, we decided to give it another shot. For today’s question, though, we took a more positive approach:

Once upon a time, a startup could issue a press release and get the word out.

If it were only that easy today….

Now a starup is confronted with an information horde from Twitter... to TV… to YouTube…to Yelp... to Facebook and on and on. It becomes a challenge just to rise above the noise, not to mention controlling the message across all these media. Add in the need to manage its communications cost-effectively and you have all the ingredients for startup agita.

During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion.

The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator's language.

In this conversation with entrepreneur and investor Steve Blank, inDinero Co-Founder Jessica Mah offers a humorous story about the dangers of young startups moving into fancy office spaces. Mah urges entrepreneurs to skip extravagant touches (such as hot tubs) and select modest accommodations. According to Mah, "It's a lot more exciting to feel poor and to feel like the underdog."

Facebook Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein describes how the physical space, an attitude of risk-taking, and a sense of humility contribute to Facebook's "stay hungry" internal culture.

Doing a startup in Europe is challenging for all sorts of reasons. But one key issue is cultural — even if the gritty realism of European entrepreneurs is ultimately tied to the relative difficulties of raising larger investment rounds in the region. The can-do attitude of Silicon Valley is undoubtedly fuelled in part by the amount of investor money flying around. But that’s not the only reason. Failing in the Valley isn’t seen as an end point in the way it can be in Europe.

Being exposed to a little of that ‘fail and move on’ and ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude is a key part of the rational behind a new internship programme for U.K. computer science graduates that’s placing them with Silicon Valley startups for a year, starting in August. The Silicon Valley Internship Programme (SVIP) is aiming to get some of this Valley chops to rub off on 15 students from nine U.K. universities by giving them real-world startup experience in the place that knows how to do it best.

The U.S. venture capital industry has been contracting for several years, with fewer firms investing less money in companies and more firms going out of business–but one investor, Menlo Ventures Managing Director Mark Siegel, believes that’s about to change.

Not only will it change, Siegel predicts, but he believes the industry is poised to return half a trillion dollars to its investors over the next decade. He also predicts that  internal rates of return for the top venture firms will approach 30% the way they did in the mid-1990s, before the dot-com boom spurred the creation of way too many firms and crushed returns for everybody.

Many times when I talk with small businesses, they don't fully understand the difference between a Federal Grant and a Federal Contract. It is important for a small business to completely understand if their government funds are coming from a grant or a contract.  The terms and conditions surrounding each have somewhat unique requirements that may have implications on how the business handles the award and, in particular, the accounting related to that award. 

The NIH is one of the 'easier' federal agencies to apply to because every year it issues an Omnibus Solicitation, requesting investigator- initiated topics. This means that rather than telling you exactly which projects they will fund, the NIH asks you, the investigator, to come up with the ideas.

As long as these ideas are related to Human Health, have the requisite level of Technological Innovation and Commercial Potential, they may be appropriate for SBIR/STTR. However, you still need to do some homework to make sure your idea fits within the research interests of the NIH's Institutes and Centers. So before you put a lot of work into developing your proposal, there are a few things you can do:

When David Cain was 31 years old he had a life-changing breakthrough: He figured out breakfast.

As he writes on his superb Raptitude blog, fixing the same meal of oats and apples every day has lent a sense of spaciousness to his mornings that was otherwise absent, given the eenie-meenie-mynee-mo of choosing between choices. He used to think that leaving the breakfast choice to the day-of would lead to a more organic, fulfilling fast-breaking experience--though it did not.

The start-up world has made a religion of killing the sacred cow: anything that reeks of business-as-usual is frowned upon. Graduating from university? Unnecessary. Cubicles? Please. Powerpoint? Shame on you.

And while this very dismissal of orthodoxy has become its own status quo, there is one particular approach that has truly earned the right to become part of the future as far as I am concerned: agile (software) development.

Individuals contemplating leaving the security and stability of a company job to become self-employed must consider the implications for their health insurance, as well as the financial risks associated with launching a new business. In most states, leaving a job means leaving the guarantee of subsidized health insurance coverage sponsored by the employer for the uncertainty of the non-group health insurance marketplace.

Gone are the days when we needed to borrow money from the family or take a loan to start a business. If you have got the will and a great idea, you can fund your business through the crowd. Crowdfunding has definitely gained a lot of momentum over the past couple years. Sites like Kickstarter, Indigogo, etc. have been providing opportunities to entrepreneurs for quite some time. This infographic takes a look at crowdfunding and gives readers a peek at what crowdfunding is as well as how important it has become when it comes to raising capital for your business/idea.

A new cybersecurity incubator program that formed with the help of Virginia stimulus money is ready to accept applications for its inaugural 90-day session.

"Mach37," as the incubator is known, calls itself "the first market-centric cyber cyber security accelerator," and aims to train cybersecurity start-ups and help them attract investors.

Mach37 is calling the Herndon-based Center for Innovative Technology its home.

In the year following its groundbreaking last June, all aspects of Bioscience Connecticut have moved forward on time and on budget. Of note, the project has created about 500 construction and related jobs on the UConn Health Center campus in its first year, including higher-than-required averages for small business participation and 85 percent of all work going to Connecticut-based contractors. The number of construction jobs will rise significantly over the next three years.

“Bioscience Connecticut was an important first step in positioning Connecticut as a leader in the industry,” said Governor Dannel P. Malloy. “This investment, in conjunction with the new Bioscience Innovation Fund and our other efforts, not only creates thousands of good paying jobs with good benefits, but also highlights the commitment we have to growing this sector of our economy. Our vigorous approach to establishing long-term partnerships between our universities, medical centers, and private sector businesses will strengthen Connecticut’s overall economic strength and competitiveness.”

When the US changed its securities laws to (eventually) enable equity crowdfunding, advocates of the practice to the North started urging Canadian securities administrators to follow suit. Just what reforms are needed to enable equity crowdfunding in Canada? We answer this question by looking at how crowdfunding fits (or more to the point, doesn't fit) within current Canadian securities law.

Legality of Equity Crowdfunding in Canada

No specific rule or law prohibits equity crowdfunding in Canada. However, Canadian issuers may raise capital only by filing a prospectus (a costly proposition) or relying on an exemption from prospectus requirements. In addition, funding portals must probably register under Canada's dealer and investment adviser registration regime. Most issuers that want to crowdfund do not have the resources to prepare a prospectus (or prospectus-like) offering document or to involve a registered dealer or investment adviser. At the same time, equity crowdfunding does not fit comfortably into any of the current array of Canadian prospectus and registration exemptions. As a result, existing rules in Canada are too restrictive to allow for easy adoption and scalability of crowdfunding.

Emory University has launched a public-private drug development enterprise that will transition scientific discoveries more rapidly and efficiently from university laboratories into the marketplace. The new venture is expected to help address worldwide drug development and commercialization needs.

Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, LLC (DRIVE) is a not-for-profit company separate from, but wholly owned by Emory.

A group of Czech engineers and designers have successfully test flown via radio control a proof of concept hybrid bicycle/multi-copter, the FBike, at an exhibition in Prague, Wednesday. The group says they hope to perform a manned flight at a future date. Early design specifications made available last year included lithium-polymer batteries powering six electric motors together capable of producing 50 kW of power. Thrust is delivered by two sets of counter-rotating blades mounted fore and aft, and two stabilizing rotors on the left and right side. The design includes most of the limitations a skeptic might anticipate, including limited flight times (currently estimated at three to five minutes), limited redundancy, and limited real-world usefulness as a bicycle due to its roughly 200 pound weight. ... All of which may be of little concern to the bike's designers.

We love the idea of bootstrapping here — we even have a guide to it. Recently I have been noticing a movement toward bootstrapping. It seems that it’s the way to go if you want to avoid being “screwed” by the lovely people known as Venture Capitalists (VCs). But is it really? Many people make the argument for bootstrapping and I am mostly inclined to agree with them, at the very least in the idea stage. The biggest argument for bootstrapping is valuation. At the idea stage, valuing your company is more of an art than concrete science. Approaching an investor with an idea that may or may not work is risky for both you and the investor. To quantify that risk, the investor will ask for more of a stake in your company. For them that seems fair because they might lose all their money if this venture of yours doesn’t quite work out.

If Europe is serious about boosting innovation it needs to create a single market for innovation, reducing bureaucracy, allowing greater cross-border cooperation and promoting the development and mobility of skills, says leading industrialist Nani Beccalli-Falco.

Europe has experienced one of the worst crises in its history, with more than a decade of economic and social progress wiped out by the financial collapse. The crisis has exposed some significant structural weaknesses and processes across the EU and member states – many of which are now being addressed by the EU.