From Gangnam Style to The Harlem Shake, viral movements sweep the Internet frequently. But the current craze takes a fair amount of talent, so most of us won't be able to partake. The Cup Song movement was made popular by Pitch Perfect, a movie that came out in 2012 about a college singing group. It stars Twilight's Anna Kendrick and Bridesmaids' Rebel Wilson. During Kendrick's audition for the singing group, she sits on the floor with a solo cup, clapping and beating rhythmically on it while she sings "When I'm Gone." The song is from 1937 by Mainer’s Mountaineers, but the version Kendrick sang is by Lulu and the Lampshades.

Tech companies have a reputation for treating their employees well – especially their engineers. Engineering talent is scarce, so companies are willing to pay big bucks to keep them happy. Which companies pays their engineers the most? Jobs review site Glassdoor helped us pull the top 25 companies around the world that pay their US-based software engineers the most. 

Last week, President Obama launched the “Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative,” along with the opening of a new carbon fiber technology facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This announcement is the first step toward the “National Network for Manufacturing Innovation” mentioned in the 2013 State of the Union. It looks increasingly likely that, as mandated, one of the first three institutes will have an energy focus.

Obama requested $1 billion in one-time funding for fifteen “Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation” across the country. These Institutes will be not-for-profit organizations that focus on a particular issue (such as advanced technologies) or a particular industry area (like clean energy). The Institute will be charged with anchoring a regional cluster of universities, industry, and government with the objective of spurring innovation and accelerating collaborative projects. Each Institute could leverage $140 million to $240 million which, if directed toward clean technology, could be a big deal.

President Obama unveils a bold new research initiative designed to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain, and discusses the importance of investing in American innovation to create jobs and strengthen our economy. April 2, 2013.

In Part I of this series earlier this month, I identified the association value gap as an underlying structural problem within membership-centric business models. Put simply, associations are unable to drive profitability solely by delivering on the membership value proposition and must find alternative ways to monetize membership to maintain their existing business models. Unfortunately, since membership-centric business models wrap all value into membership, associations typically have few options for filling the gap that do not depend on membership.

I found the following article interesting, because when I talk to innovation executives about their Open Innovation strategy, we always end up talking about how open should they be…. Should they openly post challenges?  Post Challenges in a private place?  Don”t post challenges, but encourage people to send in ideas?  If they post their challenges, willl their competition use the information? If they post their challenges, will they get inundated with more ideas than their resources can handle?

While foreign entrepreneurs face a protracted immigration battle in the U.S., Canada has forged ahead with a new ‘Startup Visa‘ program.

Canada is not the first country to implement policy to entice foreign entrepreneurs; Australia and Chile have launched similar programs. But if accepted, those who choose to settle in a city like Montreal or Toronto will earn residency immediately, not in a few years.

If you have worked in sales or technology, odds are that you have probably signed a noncompetition agreement, an agreement that restricts your ability to leave your position and work for a competitor of your employer.  If you run a startup yourself, odds are that you have asked your employees to sign a noncompetition agreement.  In Massachusetts, these kinds of agreements are enforceable (within limitations).  In California, however, they are not.

There have been a few bills introduced into the Massachusetts legislature that have tried in various ways to limit (and even eliminate) noncompetition agreements. So far, those bills have all died.  Once again, this year Senator William Brownsberger and Representative Lori Ehrlich have introduced a bill in the Massachusetts legislature in order to place some restrictions on the enforcement of noncompetition agreements in Massachusetts.

Here’s a bit of bad news for entrepreneurs seeking to finance high potential startups. Venture capitalists are doing fewer deals and investing less money than they did before the financial crisis and the Great Recession. According to data from Price Waterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the number of venture capital deals shrank from 4,211 in 2007 to 3,698 in 2012.

The amount that venture capitalists put into companies is also down substantially. Measured in inflation-adjusted terms, in 2012 venture capitalists only invested 75 percent of the amount they did in 2007.

Being a startup, creating credibility among your target audience to try out your product is a big challenge in itself. Hence, you need some early adopters who will take the pain to test and try your product, give valuable feedback for you to develop and help in making your business graph soar higher and higher. But the question is how to get those early adopters to your side in the startup phase. Fret not; here are some easy and useful tips to make early adopters follow you for lifetime.

Design a viral launch page

Going viral is one of the most sought after method that any business would look up to get recognized in the market. So utilize it from your startup phase only. Design an easy to use viral landing page. All you have to do is keep minimum signup details like name and email and generate a URL for the user to share among his/her social community. The most active referrer gets honoured with a gift hamper. Are you finding it too good to believe? Check out Launch Effect for free WordPress based viral landing pages.

Each year since 2010, Shopify's Build-A-Business online entrepreneurship competition has inspired and helped thousands of e-tailers set up shop. The prize for the best performers this year? A $50,000 investment and mentorship from one of four mentors: Lean Startup author Eric Ries, Swissmiss founder Tina Roth Eisenberg, 4-Hour Workweek guru Tim Ferriss, or FUBU founder Daymond John. The process? Dream up something (great) to sell, build a store on Shopify, grow your business, and make for the winners' circle, like boutique casemaker Dodocase or coffee contraptions Joulies. This year, more than 10,000 businesses have launched this way, creating $50 million in gross merchandise value since Augus

Traditional business wisdom says that revenue is king, above all else. However, the brief history of the app industry seems to contradict that notion. Many of the business models for successful, profitable apps share one feature: They are brilliant at building ecosystems. Therefore, the lesson for app developers is perhaps counterintuitive. To make more money, don’t focus on revenue first. Instead, focus on growing ecosystems.

Getty Images Comedian Louis C.K. pioneered a new business model when he self-released a standup special on his website for $5. What do we mean by ecosystems? Human networks are like biological systems. Their ultimate value comes from the interaction of all the elements, not just the sum of the parts. That’s why places like Silicon Valley are what we call “rainforests.” What matters are the bonds that connect, and the barriers that inhibit.

To build ecosystems in the app world, developers should focus on how networks are built, rather than how revenue is made. What are the barriers that inhibit the building of relationships with users? How do we lower the transaction costs? These questions are critical because neither customers nor developers know how much something is really worth in the beginning.

In this in-depth article we present how Open innovation meshes with crowd sourcing, drawing on ideation, market needs and opportunities, to fuel a balanced portfolio with actionable innovation challenges, or « the right things to do », and converges these with a need driven approach to source the ways of « doing things right ». We will illustrate this innovation continuity with a number of examples and a focus onto the food and drink industry.

When starting your own company your first goal should be to of course generate revenue. Mine was to generate revenue and find a way to survive on my own without venture capital or loans. Throughout the years of working around the clock in a basement and at my mother’s kitchen table, I experienced a few things that I did not plan for.

1 – Don’t Let Taxes Sneak up on You, Save for them Monthly

You’ll get caught up trying to chase money and break even. Once you start generating revenue, the government comes into the picture again. When you’re creating your revenue model, it’s important to remember that a part of your profit will instantly go to taxes whether you like it or not. So look at how much you want to make after taxes when adding your margin to your products or services. Create a plan to pay your taxes quarterly so you don’t end up having to owe thousands of dollars come April.

I had the pleasure of visiting The Wharton School recently as a returning Entrepreneur-in-Residence. I found myself more encouraged than ever about the student body and their desire to be entrepreneurs. When I earned my MBA at Wharton, from 1997-1999, I was a bit of an outlier as an entrepreneur in a class of almost all aspiring consultants and bankers. In my class, there were a few entrepreneurs, such as John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, the co-founders of MouseDriver (I recommend reading their book on the experience), and Gregg Spiridellis, the co-founder and CEO of JibJab. John is at it again with Rivet & Sway and Gregg is still running JibJab, an unusually long tenure for any Wharton graduate in my class. But, at Wharton, I was even more strange than John, Kyle, and Gregg. And that is because I was founding and running businesses while I was still in school.

When we spoke to IBM last year, the world’s largest IT company predicted a decrease in consumer-facing startups. New ventures, it said, will be increasingly targeting enterprise environments. It’s no longer just enterprise heavy-weights such as Oracle, IBM, Accenture and SAP that can compete in corporate environments. Powerful, cost-effective cloud services and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies have opened up an industry ready for disruption — slow-moving corporate environments offer opportunities for nimble startups, that can often tailor make solutions.

Lack of confidence in your self, your product, and your startup is a surefire recipe for disaster. At the other extreme, too much confidence or arrogance can kill you just as fast. It’s always painful when a startup fails, but as a mentor to founders, I would hope that you can learn from these failings and not stumble on the same issues. I’ve written about these before, but since I see them so often, I thought it might be worth reiterating:

Name: Goldbely

One-Liner Pitch: Goldbely delivers iconic regional dishes to your doorstep.

Why It's Taking Off: The craftmanship that goes into creating amazing dishes can't be copied, but Goldbely helps you find great foods from across the country and have them delivered to your front door.

After being hit hard by the recession, office furniture makers are racking up sales by persuading companies that open space office layouts can encourage collaboration and cut costs, the Wall Street Journal reported. It's a far cry from the office cubicle, double-sided desks and "flying chair" of the office of the 1930s.

Over the last five years we have seen Internet technology disrupt a number of industries, sending the dominant players into a downward spiral from a kingdom they once ruled. Whether it was ignorance from management teams or simply the fact that technology changed too rapidly for their massive organizations to shift their operations, the results remain the same with new companies taking over as the market leader. Its not just the main players that are effected when an industry is disrupted either, its all of the supporting industries and service companies that receive a rude awakening as well.