It all started as a joke. The six of us – all interns from the University of Waterloo – were brainstorming ideas for our first hackday at LinkedIn. While we were commenting on our lunch from that day, we thought “Why not build an app to rate our lunches?”. We had the perfect name already picked out: EatIn. Our hack went on to win the “Best Internal Tool” award – a win at our first hackday!

Say you're interested in learning to code. Should you go back to school and pick up a formal diploma? Or just teach yourself (perhaps with some help from the Internet) in your spare time at home?

Catalin Zorzini, the founder of Web design resource site Inspired Mag, was wondering just that, so he built an infographic on the subject. “Some readers are confused by the relevance of attending university in a time where technology information is not locked within the university walls anymore,” he told me.

The music industry didn’t imagine the ipod, airlines didn’t conjure up “go-to-meetings”, and TiVo wasn’t the brain-child of the cable company. The disruptive technologies that radically alter markets are the genius of outsiders that have the freedom to identify what others are too entrenched to imagine. Innovation requires an open mindset that sees the possibilities and solutions that no one on the inside is looking for.

All the best practices we’ve found out there suggest that developing a creative divergent-thinking mindset comes down to 3 things:

The connection between age and entrepreneurial success can be a touchy subject these days.

Movies like ‘The Social Network’ and the media promote entrepreneurship as being pretty much a young person’s game. As one Forbes contributor pointed out, some younger business builders have more energy, motivation and a willingness to challenge the ‘status quo’- good attributes to have in any startup. Then you have the research studies and articles on TechCrunch arguing older entrepreneurs usually have more experience and financial stability behind them- again, great attributes for running any business. These are all excellent points to think about, but they don’t define any one person’s chances of success. Age, just like your gender or where you live, isn’t the deciding factor to your entrepreneurial future.

In my adolescent years, my single mother started two businesses and worked a third wage job in order to raise my younger brother and me. Eventually, I started working in these businesses—one of them was a restaurant—to help my family through difficult times. Every weekend, I would wake up well before dawn to open the restaurant and work 12-hour days among the grease and fumes. Many years later, I would go on to Harvard Business School, where I learned about things like the 4Ps and 5Cs, before joining a venture capital firm, where I got used to sizing up markets and entrepreneurs in my sleep. I learned quite a lot about businesses and startups in these institutions (unlike many people in tech, I’m a true believer in the value of an M.B.A.), but I can say that I learned a lot more about entrepreneurship when the stakes were my family’s ability to put food on the table rather than getting a good grade.

The 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Gem) report, which was released earlier this year and surveyed 198 000 adults in 69 countries, shows that in comparison with other emerging countries South Africa continues to fare dismally in creating new entrepreneurs.

Last year fewer adults were involved in starting up a business than in 2011, with South Africa's total early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA) rate – the percentage of adults involved in starting firms younger than three-and-a-half years – falling from 9.1% in 2011 to 7.3% last year.

The angel investor market in 2012 continued the upward trend started in 2010 in investment dollars and in the number of investments, albeit at a moderate pace.

Total investments in 2012 were $22.9 billion, an increase of 1.8% over 2011, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 67,030 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2012, an increase of 1.2% over 2011 investments. The number of active investors in 2012 was 268,160 individuals, a reduction of 15.8% from 2011.

The University of Illinois subsidiary created a decade ago to help catapult technologies coming out of the school's research labs into the marketplace is making a renewed push to support startups that have ties to the state.

IllinoisVentures is bringing in a new co-director and more board members from outside academia. It will also increase investment funding for startups emerging from the university's Chicago campus.

Growing up in Wisconsin, says ­Alison Stace-Naughton, “my family always played card games, especially poker. And I was always the one who’d be all-in, the biggest risk-taker.”

So when she told her parents a few months back that she was planning to continue working on her start-up, Spiral-E, after earning her engineering degree from Dartmouth College, “I don’t think it was unexpected, or a shock.”

As the globe shrinks and our social worlds expand, the need for more transparency in both our on and offline dealings is increasing. In a virtual world, we may need a universal character score.

Before the Young’s Modulus measurement of elasticity, engineers had to guess when a material would fail. A chancy proposition in the context of bridge-building, yet a risk we still take when it comes to assessing the fortitude of a person’s character. When daily business was conducted face-to-face, judging character was a fairly straightforward, albeit highly subjective, process. Now, in a digitally connected world, assessing character can be a stubbornly elusive task.

The renown entrepreneur and investor, Richard Bendis, will present a conference: “Keys to accelerate entrepreneurship with innovation for the development of global markets” within the framework of an event to announce the 15 finalists of the “Invent Your Future” Boot Camp, being carried out jointly by Mexico’s Secretary of Economy, the US Embassy in Mexico, the US-Mexico Foundation for Science via their TechBA program, and CONACYT.

Committees of negotiators in the Hawaii Legislature have approved funding for several new initiatives, including proposals to revitalize emergency funds, create a new school readiness program and establish a new entrepreneurship initiative.

Sen. David Ige and Rep. Sylvia Luke decided Friday to set aside millions for relief funds for hurricanes and other emergencies.

I love Lean. In my eyes, the work Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and others have done to provide a cogent, accessible frame around the academic concepts of emergent strategy is one of the most important contributions to the innovation movement over the past few years.

I have repeatedly stated that the next wave of innovation will come from companies that harness the transformational power that too often lies latent inside their organizations. There is a growing sense that so-called lean start-up techniques — developing a minimal viable product, learning in the marketplace, and pivoting based on market feedback — can help to unleash this potential. Indeed, in this month's Harvard Business Review cover story, Blank notes that the development of the lean start-up toolkit comes "just in time" to "help existing companies deal with the forces of continual disruption."

I will never forget the experiences of getting my first suit. I was 12 years old and my father took me to a department store on 18th street in New York City. I was very excited; this was the transition to feeling grown up. A real milestone. I would have a suit like all the grown men I knew.

At the store, we headed straight downstairs to the boys department and I tried on several cream-colored suits (very mid-1970s Saturday Night Fever). Once we found the right one, the tailor had me stand on a box in front of a mirror. He then went to work pinning and marking for the alteration. When he finished he stepped back, and he and my father looked at the suit pinned on me. In the mirror, I saw my father point to the back and shoulder of the jacket and sleeve and then shake his head no. The tailor went back to work, re-pinning and re-marking. Once again, my father shook his head no. So the tailor added padding under my shoulder. Still, my father shook his head. After about 30 minutes of back-and-forth, finally my father nodded and my cream colored, three-piece suit with bell bottom pants went off for alteration.

Google Ventures has been backing startups through its venture capital fund since 2009 and offers a pretty diverse range of services to entrepreneurs. Here’s a look at the eight healthcare and life science businesses among its portfolio companies spanning innovative areas such as DNA analysis, accelerated drug development, and oncology analytics.

23andMe The startup has helped make personal genetics and DNA analysis much more accessible to consumers. The company, co-founded by Anne Wojsicki, offers DNA test kits that for $99 and a little saliva help people better understand what conditions they are at risk for developing, whether they are carriers for any diseases that they could unwittingly give to their children. It can also provide information on whether people’s genetic makeup makes them particularly sensitive to certain drugs. It also uses results from user queries, with their consent, to conduct in-house research.

I closed a large transaction yesterday without signing a single piece of physical paper. It was painless. The entire negotiation was done using email and DocuSign.

I’m doing this at least once a week at this point. Either with DocuSign or EchoSign, the two services that seem to be most popular. I generally hate paper and have almost no paper in my world anymore so being able to eliminate the “print out the signature pages”, “sign the signature pages”, “scan the signed document”, and “email the signed document” step is a joy.

The UK's creative economy is one of its great national strengths, historically deeply rooted and accounting for around one-tenth of the whole economy. It provides jobs for 2.5 million people – more than in financial services, advanced manufacturing or construction – and in recent years, this creative workforce has grown four times faster than the workforce as a whole.

Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). These high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are the latest in a trend of above average temperature seen during the spring and summer seasons, and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic, but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the past century.

The advisory reports on conditions in the second half of 2012.

Sea surface temperature for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius (57.2°F) in 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 12.4 C (54.3 F) over the past three decades.

Even though “Big Data” has now been around for a few years, the opportunities for startups seem to keep growing, just as the amount of data keeps growing. According to IBM, companies have captured more data in the last two years than in the previous 2000 years. This data comes from sensors, social media posts, digital pictures and videos, purchase transactions, everywhere.

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — much of it unstructured and far beyond the capability of conventional databases. Hence one segment of the opportunity is the need for new database technologies, like Hadoop, a distributed file system originally designed for indexing the Web. Data capacity is measured in petabytes (1000 terabytes), or soon even yottobytes (1024).

Over 25 years ago, Michael E. Gerber wrote a best-selling business book called The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. The E-Myth (“Entrepreneurial Myth”) is the mistaken belief that most businesses are started by people with tangible business skills, when in fact most are started by “technicians” who know nothing about running a business. Hence most fail.

Some pundits argue that the E-Myth principle is now out-dated, due to the instant access to information via the Internet, pervasive networking via social media, and courses on entrepreneurship at all levels of education. Perhaps an innate business savvy is no longer a requirement for starting a successful business.