A few years back, I wasn’t stoked about my position as a financial analyst, and I knew I wanted to run my own business. The problem was, I had no idea what I wanted that business to look like.

I could go one of two routes. I could take one of my crazy ideas and go the startup path, try and chase down funding, spend 80 hours a week to found a company, and take years off my life while trying to make it happen.

Or I could build a lifestyle business, where I was the only employee and made just enough to support myself while having more freedom to do the things I really wanted to.

We are in the post-PC era, and soon billions of consumers will be carrying around Internet-connected mobile devices for up to 16 hours a day. Mobile audiences have exploded as a result. Mobile advertising should be a bonanza, similar to online advertising a decade ago. However, it has been a bit slow off the ground, and its growth trajectory is not clear cut. In a recent report from BI Intelligence on the mobile advertising ecosystem, we explain the complexities and fractures, and examine the central and dynamic roles played by mobile ad networks, demand side platforms, mobile ad exchanges, real-time bidding, agencies, brands, and new companies hoping to upend the traditional banner ad.

The Obama administration is making a push for the ‘startup visa’ that will encourage foreign nationals with advanced tech degrees to stay in the US to start up enterprises.

Two things attract entrepreneurs, and this type of individual would usually flock to where these two things are: money and a market. It would make little sense to start up a business if you don’t have a market in mind, and it would not be viable if there would be no economic returns down the road.

Let’s face it — in terms of technology startups, Silicon Valley is still the place to be. Even with emerging startup hotspots around the world, capitalists, investors and talent would usually gravitate to the valley, because this is where one would find the right resources and network to build on, apart from other potential startup capitals in the country.

The transition from not working to working has never been easy, but in recent years it's gotten trickier. Yes, in this slow-growing recovery there are a lot of people still looking for work; but we're also seeing a change in employers' recruitment processes.

At the beginning of the recession, many hiring managers looked for people who had been laid off and offered them jobs well below their former pay level. Now, attitudes have shifted — most now assume that if you haven't been working, there must be something wrong. There has also been a change in how recruiters recruit. Instead of passively waiting for incoming resumes, recruiters now actively search for currently employed candidates, using social media and other search technologies. An emailed resume from someone who is not working may not even make it to their desks.

Few people like to be pushed into doing something, or sold hard on it. And few like to push or deliver a hard sell. But at the end of the day, or even the end of a conversation, you do have to move things forward. So how do effective leaders really get things done?

As part of the research for our book, I and Dr. John Ullmen, a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, interviewed more than 100 people who "get things done," but who aren't pushy. But when we asked them, "Who persuaded you to do something really important?" more than a few arched their backs and replied defensively, "Nobody persuaded me to do anything important!"

Now is a good time to be an entrepreneur. That's the view from panelists at the Kauffman Foundation's Fourth Annual State of Entrepreneurship Address in Washington D.C. today. Kauffman Foundation is a Kansas City, Mo.-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship. 

"In my opinion, the entrepreneurial bug has hit the country," said panel member Alan Patricof, founder and managing director of Greycroft Partners, a New York and Los Angeles-based venture capital firm. 

While dreaming and disrupting has unfettered me in many ways, it has shackled me in others. One of the most unexpected was losing a part of my identity. Once the rush of leaving a name-brand corporation wore off, it began to seep in that I could no longer call someone and say "Whitney Johnson, Merrill Lynch." It was just Whitney Johnson. I also became reacquainted with the immediate concern of putting food on the table whilst on an entrepreneurial thrill ride to zero cash flow.

There's a good dose of cosmic payback in all this. For years I pontificated about the importance of bootstrapping a business without having any firsthand notion of belt-tightening. Nearly a decade later, I find myself almost a fan of constraints. If you, like me, are a foot-dragging devotee, consider the following:

I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like.

If your business has yet to tap into social media to accomplish essentials such as supporting customer service, promoting your products and/or services, engaging your community and ultimately building your brand, your missing out on a lot of potential. While most of the big brands, with their extensive resources, have already established social media presences on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like, small business owners may find it difficult to devote the necessary time to create and manage content on this new medium.

With the help of a strategic plan and good marketing sense, any business can successfully set up and manage a social media presence. The key for those with little time to devote to social media is to discover which sites are most beneficial in relation to ones customer base and business model. The following infographic from Purolator is designed to help you decide which social networks are right for you.

Being a good entrepreneur means being able to effectively convince an investor that you have a great idea, persuade partners that your approach is right, and convince potential customers that the solution is right for them. If all your ideas are intuitively obvious to everyone, you probably aren’t thinking outside the box, or don’t really have the next big thing.

The process and tactics involved in winning over others with your views have has been studied extensively by Howard Gardner, a Harvard developmental psychologist, in “Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds.” It turns out that the same principles apply to changing your own mind (learning new things), as well as others.

One of the earliest and most critical decisions an entrepreneur must make is whether to self-fund a startup by bootstrapping, or raise outside funding through venture capital.  The implications of each decision are significant.

How you fund your company will help determine its chances of success, its scale, its long-term prospects, and ultimately, your relationship with your company.

As an entrepreneur who has invested significantly in my own company, I believe that bootstrapping is the best option. It’s never easy, and it’s not always glamorous, but bootstrapping will force you to become a better, stronger entrepreneur with a more vibrant business. Here’s why:

Some days I get really frustrated at the fact that there are a million things that need to get done, yet there are just not enough hours in the day to do them all. Trying to pick and choose which things to put first can be one of the most challenging parts of each day. It’s even more difficult when all of the things you would like to do are really good things that all have the ability to make a difference in the world. I find myself wanting to be able to do every good thing all at once. Yet, I am constantly reminding myself that I am just one person and that would be impossible. Oh, if only we could clone ourselves and be in 50 places at once, accomplishing everything that we desire to accomplish in this life.

There’s no perfect answer on how to pick which projects to focus on first. I am still learning how to do that in my life. It is especially hard now that I have more freedom to choose what to do with my time, which is ironic, because you’d think the opposite to be true. Weird, huh? Maybe it’s difficult because for the first time in my life it’s no longer about what I “have to do” but what I “want to do.” While doing those things that had to be done for so many years, my list of things that I wanted to do just kept growing and growing, until it’s ready to burst from the seams. There is a need to pick and choose which things on the “want to do” list get to come first – even though I really wish I could do all of them all at once.

Beginning on February 7, visitors to London's Science Museum will see a strange, stirring sight: A humanoid replica built from the world's finest prosthetics and artificial organs. The bionic man can see, speak, and interact with visitors using artificial intelligence.

The million-dollar bionic man is, himself, a museum within the museum. But he's no mere curiosity. He's a walking, talking, fake blood-pumping gallery of medical advancements coming to--or already actually inside--a warm human body near you.

Rex was created for a coproduction by British television station Channel 4 and the Smithsonian called How To Build A Bionic Man. The original title, however, might be more appropriate: Frankenstein: Building The Bionic Human.

To help cut health-care costs and enable consumers to live longer, healthier lives, companies can entice people to health technologies if they woo them into sharing and celebrating, a design consultant says. 

Design and “innovation consultancy” IDEO, a 22-year-old firm that has designed everything from Pilates machines to Palm Computer’s personal digital assistant, believes that health technologies have the potential to be just as engaging and popular as games and social networks, and that it’s up to developers to make it so.

That way, consumer may flock to gene sequencing or wearable health monitors the way they have to Angry Birds.

IDEO’s thesis was put forward at the conference of life-sciences investor Steven Burrill, whose firm holds a yearly conference, the Burrill Digital Health Meeting, on new technologies and their potential impact on the country’s health-care system.

If the cover of The Economist is any indication of public sentiment – and it often is – many are speculating that innovation is dead. Two separate articles – “Has the ideas machine broken down?” and “The great innovation debate” – suggest doom and gloom. The cover “Will we ever invent anything useful again?” suggests the hope we placed on technology was misguided and that in fact, we have not produced anything as useful as a toilet in decades.

Peter Thiel, whom many would call an innovation expert (founder of PayPal, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur), dismissively says of this generation’s inventors: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

If you’re lost in the recession or are looking for a job with more social impact, one of the coolest jobs in tech has opened up a second round of hiring: the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. First launched at TechCrunch’s own Disrupt NYC conference, Fellows work to find creative technological solutions to ongoing federal problems, from theft in foreign aid money transfers to making government contracts more small business-friendly.

In his inaugural address last month, President Obama re-enforced his commitment to education and the need for a greater focus on the areas of math and science.

"No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future. ... Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people."

Last week, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled proposals for immigration reform that include rewarding immigrants who receive advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math areas from U.S. universities with green cards. Fine, put more emphasis on education in STEM, but not at the sacrifice of a good liberal arts education.

Your father probably loved that gold watch he got for loyal service, but those days are over. This generation demands immediate recognition and creative incentives that reflect the social media world they understand.

The Millennials already account for 40 million in the workforce, and they are set to become America’s first hundred-million-member generation. How they grew up--with mobile devices, online access, and social media--influences the way they work. And it’s influencing the way everyone will work.

After two generations of paid-leave policy driven by gender equality and pregnancy, the conversation is expanding. Flex schedules are becoming a top-priority perk for office workers of all ages, family situations, and genders. Oh, let's just say it: men.

Like many others who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, I am a trend hunter. What are people talking about? What’s hot? Are people optimistic? What’s high on the agenda?

To my surprise this year, workplace flexibility kept popping up in places that I didn’t go looking for it. This isn’t the first WEF with flexibility on the agenda, but what seemed to be different this year was who was talking about it and why.

Justin Kan, founder of Exec, Justin.tv, and Twitch.tv, calls himself a "non-biased hirer of all types," and turns a Silicon Valley stereotype--hire young, cheap, and hungry--on its head.

I’ve been accused of perpetuating the Silicon Valley ageist stereotypical thinking of only hiring fresh-faced, just-out-of-diapers young talent. But the reality couldn’t be further from the way I operate. In fact, while I believe that for most positions you should hire people of all backgrounds and ages who are effective (i.e., talented, hard working, and responsible), there are certain circumstances where hiring someone experienced is essential for a startup.