Every technology cycle is driven by a huge disruptive new trend in innovation, such as the PC, the Internet/telecom boom, or the rise of social networking. We’re in the midst of the latest cycle, and it’s particularly compelling because it marks the convergence of four important trends: mobile, social, cloud infrastructure and Big Data.

These technological mega-trends have converged to create the real-time marketplaces of the Right Now Economy, which are already disrupting trillions of dollars in aggregate market value and have produced an incredibly fertile area for entrepreneurs to grow ideas into well-funded companies with the potential to take on established stalwarts.

The Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and Innovation Factory help get Hamilton businesses off the ground 

Hamilton, ON (June 13, 2013) – The Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and Innovation Factory have announced the 10 finalists for the 2013 LiON’S LAIR competition. LiON’S LAIR will provide these companies with the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of top Hamilton business experts to solicit over $100,000 in cash and professional resources.

Companies submitted their business plans in April, and after careful evaluation by a panel of independent judges the 10 finalists are: OverAir Proximity Technologies, Schopf Innovation, Prevori Flow Control, Roux, Lusso Living Products Inc., Pain-QuILT, Walkbug, GolfScoring.net, Trend Trunk, and RZR Skate Blades.

“We’ve had some outstanding finalists over the past two years, and this years’ finalists continue to represent the high calibre of businesses and startups we have in Hamilton,” stated Ron Neumann, Executive Director of Innovation Factory. “We have seen entrepreneurial spirit grow across Hamilton, and this competition allows us to train some of the best innovators and entrepreneurs in this area, and present them to the Hamilton community.”

When Frenchwoman Mireille Guiliano was a girl, she spent a year abroad in the United States, during which time she gained so much weight, that her father, upon her return, greeted her by saying she looked like, “un sac de patates,” or, a bag of potatoes. After putting on even more pounds in her first semester of college, a doctor set her on the right path by having her eat seasonal foods in moderation, and to focus on the pleasure of eating.

Later, she became a spokesperson, executive and CEO for champagne maker Clicquot, and people would always ask her how she could make food and wine the center of her life and yet remain thin. The answer — that French women don’t get fat — eventually became the subject of her New York Times number-one bestseller by the same name. That idea also launched her into a new career — a type that John Butman, in his new book, “Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas,” calls the “idea entrepreneur.”

Every entrepreneur needs to have a personal manifesto. This is a public declaration of the company’s intentions and commitments. Here what they should include:

1. We will always bring our full resources to bear. When you hire us, you not only have our full attention, but the value our entire business network.

2. Every contact you make with us will be answered in a few hours. When you don’t sleep, we don’t either. It may as simple as an acknowledgement that your message was received, but you will never wait wondering.

When consumer startups like Foursquare, Snapchat and Instagram raise millions of dollars without generating much (or any) revenue, people tend to flip out. "But they don't make money! How will they ever make money?!" critics want to know.

If you've ever wondered that, Greylock Principal Josh Elman says you've been demanding an answer to the wrong question.

Upon leaving University, all that today’s graduates hope for is the opportunity to really show the world what they have to offer.

I have witnessed countless friends and acquaintances write and send job applications bursting with enthusiasm and ideas, but all to no avail. To give just one example, a friend applied for a creative role at a particular fashion magazine. In order to stand out, she incorporated her cover letter within a freehand design of the magazine’s cover.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal looked at efforts to spur entrepreneurship in St. Louis. It’s an important challenge: Research has suggested a connection between job growth and entrepreneurship. Yet rates of business formation have been declining for decades.

Bloomberg News St. Louis So what can cities do to support home-grown businesses? Perhaps not much, according to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. “It’s not at all obvious that governments know how to promote entrepreneurship,” Mr. Glaeser says in the story.

One of the areas this blog covers are policies that impact entrepreneurship in Maine. One policy ripe for discussion is the extension of Seed Capital Tax Credit (“SCTC”) by the Maine Legislature and the Governor.

I’m not under any notion that this is easy. I know from experience that crafting a bipartisan budget for Maine is a very, very difficult thing. There are many hours that go into it and there are many hard choices that get made. In fact, the essence of the unanimous vote by the Appropriations Committee is compromise itself. No one gets everything they want.

Thinking about conducting a strategic planning process? This book gives practical advice on how to make the strategic planning process effective so it gets results. Many recommended processes require gathering exhaustive data, scheduling numerous meetings and still lead to sub-par results. In this book you will learn how to get a comprehensive plan that is fully endorsed by your Board, leadership team, staff, volunteers and even external stakeholders. You will learn how you can spend a minimal effort and get world class results.

Written by strategic planning expert Tracy Morgan, who shares her methods, tips and stories from more than twenty years of experience of strategic planning with hundreds of organizations. These organizations include large global nonprofits, entrepreneurial start-ups and Fortune 500 companies.

When you ask successful entrepreneurs about how to discover the next great startup idea, many suggest solving a problem you face on a regular basis -- to build something that ‘scratches your own itch.’ Nat Turner, co-founder of Flatiron Health, has a different approach. He has built a unique methodology to systematically find the next great thing without being what he calls “a visionary founder.”

Science writer Erin Biba has been profiling some of the most epic of gigs we've heard of--from tagging blue whales to exploring Mars (on Earth!) to plunging into the world's deepest point. What's more, the working lives of these extreme scientists parallel our own: from the how individual glories require collective effort to why the happiest people have the hardest jobs.

There were so many times our start-up almost failed, we joked it was a cockroach, a life form in its own right that, simply put, would never die. There were times when we barely could pay our Rackspace bill, and one time I distinctly remember our blog being down because we forgot to pay that bill. There was also the time one of our investors cut our credit line in half, unexpectedly, right as we made a huge payment. And then the time our lead customer, two days before integration, committed suicide. Then the time a few weeks after that when our CTOs wife committed suicide.

Most people have no clue that quantum computing exists. Even fewer know how it works. But once you understand it, and its vast processing power, you'll understand that this new Digital Age we're living in has barely scratched the surface of the computer potential.

Simply put, today's computers rely on electrons — electricity — flying around on circuits to deliver information in "bits," or yes/no, 1/0 chunks.

Everyone has a great idea. Few, however, have the necessary funds to back an idea. That's why an increasing amount of creatives, entrepreneurs, and innovators are turning to crowdfunding campaigns to give their respective projects the boost needed to make a concept reality.

Kickstarter, perhaps the most well known of the crowdfunding organizations, has launched over 100,000 projects with a success rate of 44 percent. Success is determined by a project's ability to reach their self-determined fundraising goal by a deadline. If a project reaches the goal, the creator gets the money and any extra on top of the goal.

A startup accelerator is built to foster rapid growth of its portfolio companies. It's a man-made perfect storm of mentorship, access to technology, office space and an innovative community, packed into a short time frame. Essentially, the function of an accelerator is to turn the art of starting a company into a program that can be repeated, churning out valuable companies as if on an assembly line.

While each accelerator has nuances, programs tend to share several traits: Startups apply to be part of a program lasting a few months, in which they obtain mentorship, office space and funding, usually in exchange for company stock. The accelerator program hopes to enable exciting new businesses and of course get a return on the investment.

Minnesota venture capitalists investing in med-tech have reason to be gloomy, but a rise in first-time financing for tech companies could be good news for the state going forward, National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) President Mark Heesen writes in a blog post. Heesen said he had to reiterate some bad news about "waning" investments in the med-tech sector when speaking at an entrepreneurship event in the Twin Cities — a trend he said could prove "grave" if it doesn't turn around.

Some efforts to replace traditional letter-and-number passwords rely on gestures, wearable devices, or biometrics. An approach in the works from research-and-development company SRI International and Stanford and Northwestern takes a different tack: passwords that you know but don’t know you know.

Patrick Lincoln, director of SRI’s computer science laboratory and a researcher on the project, calls this “rubber-hose resistant authentication” in reference to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, in which a user is coerced or physically forced to give up, say, the passcode to a secure building. Lincoln says the approach relies on implicit learning—the sort of learning that occurs through sheer repetition, such as learning to ride a bike, that the learner can’t verbally explain—to prevent passwords from being compromised.

Every time you spend bitcoins to buy a drink at Evr, a swanky bar in midtown Manhattan that accepts the digital currency, you make its co-owner, Charlie Shrem, just a little bit richer.

And that’s not only because a chamomile sour costs $17 (or 0.16 bitcoins). It’s because whenever someone new uses bitcoins, the electronic currency’s value tends to increase. Shrem has bought thousands of bitcoins for about $20 each, starting in 2011. Since then, the digital coins have soared in value to $109.

It's easy to imagine CommonBond, a peer-to-peer lending service for college students, being the brainchild of a well-to-do graduate. 

But co-founder and CEO David Klein doesn't fit into that mold.

Klein, who came up with the idea while scraping together money for business school, is a drop out. He founded CommonBond in 2011.

How can a companies’ ability to innovate be improved?All innovation activity can be traced back to the behavior of employees. That makes the employee the center point of attention, if you want to improve your innovation ability. This article is built around the question: Which personal abilities and traits as well as organizational culture enable an employee to be innovative?