It never has been an either or scenario, rather how many must we support.  It's key that your content reach your readership based upon your readerships' wants and needs.  That means supporting email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and wherever your clients want to consume your content.  That's why it's key to build a good content management strategy.  We believe your website should be the center hub from which you publish content into all of these venues.  Contact us to learn more.  -Ed.

The importance of using B2B email marketing has increased markedly in recent times as more and more people seek correspondence via the platform.

A huge rise in the amount of people now owning smartphones that can gain access to the internet wherever they are has played a part in this jump

Last weekend I made a brief visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland. Most cities are scarred and shaped by their history, but it’s true of Belfast more than most. Wherever you went, shadows of the past were visible.

The docks, once crawling with shipbuilders constructing huge constructing vessels like The Titanic, are now an empty sprawl of wasteland dotted with lonely office buildings. And for anyone who remembers the Troubles, an activity as simple as crossing the road or staying at a hotel can carry chilling reminder of brutality that is not easily forgotten.

A coming generation of retinal implants that fit entirely inside the eye will use nanoscale electronic components to dramatically improve vision quality for the wearer, according to two research teams developing such devices.

Current retinal prostheses, such as Second Sight’s Argus II, restore only limited and fuzzy vision to individuals blinded by degenerative eye disease. Wearers can typically distinguish light from dark and make out shapes and outlines of objects, but not much more.

I talked with Gary Hamel last week about the new M-Prize challenge on Innovating Innovation. The challenge is organized by the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an open innovation platform that aims to “crowd-source the future of management.” Among other things, it launches idea-challenges called “M-Prizes” to stimulate contributions from their community of management practitioners. Previous M-Prize challenges have focused on “Management 2.0” and “Beyond Bureaucracy”. This time, the focus is on “innovating innovation”.

Managing and motivating a team in a startup is more than just using the right interpersonal skills. It’s more than providing recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. A key influencer of satisfaction and motivation, top-ranked by employees, is positive progress and the completion of meaningful work. Sometimes you have to manage progress, not people.

“Busy work” and “grunt work” are deadly terms in a startup environment. So are setbacks, project cancellations, and frequent changes of direction that make people doubt that the work they are doing will ever see the light of day. These points are illustrated in detail in “The Progress Principle,” a recent book from the Harvard Business School, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.

In 2012, taxes made headlines and it is likely that taxes will continue to be at the forefront in 2013. Congress needs to act on many measures impacting small businesses. The IRS is in gear to continue or initiate a number of programs impacting small businesses.

Here are some trends to watch for in 2013.

1. Uncertainty About Tax Rules Could Linger

Congress continues to debate the fate of a number of expired or expiring tax rules impacting individuals and businesses. The tax rules for 2013 are anything but certain now and “taxmageddon” (an overall tax increase of about half a trillion dollars) is still a threat; this status could continue into 2013 unless there is a solution in Congress by December 31, 2012.

The IRS just released its standard mileage rates for 2013, which show slight increases from the current 2012 rates. These rates are made available so that employees, self-employed individuals, and other taxpayers can calculate their tax-deductible transportation costs for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes.

The 2013 standard mileage rates are set at 56.5 cents per mile for business transportation or travel, 24 cents per mile for medical care, and 14 cents per mile for charity purposes. The 2012 rates are 55.5 cents per mile for business transportation or travel, 23 cents per mile for medical care, and the rate for charity purposes stayed the same at 14 cents per mile.

The new rates will take effect on January 1, 2013.

How should companies go about innovating? Easy question to ask – lots of mushy answers on the web. About a dozen companies in Stockholm, yesterday, told their story of innovation as part of a new, interesting and largely successful innovation policy initiative in the Nordic area. The day nailed down some imperatives for innovators, based on two years of practice and measurement.

The companies came from all over the Nordic region – Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland. And initiatives like yesterday’s Nordic Innovation conference are one reason why this part of Europe is not in recession.

The translation of cutting-edge science into new clinically-relevant therapeutics is the ultimate goal of many academic investigators, industry researchers, and investors.  This stage of R&D is the most challenging, and typically frought with scientific and technical risks: taking a new approach or biological target, discovering a lead drug candidate to interact with the target in the right way, tuning the drug-like properties around pharmacology, safety, and PK/ADME to find the ideal Development Candidate, and then ultimately testing the hypothesis in clinical studies to show if it delivers the desired outcome to patients.

There are many possible modes of failure in this process, and all of us involved in this part of the ecosystem spend a lot of time thinking through how to derisk projects, reduce those costly false positives, and channel capital towards the right innovations.  The ingredients of success are multiple – sound science, titration of capital, clear early development path, the right exploratory markers, etc…

Tired of boring, ineffective staff meetings? Here's what you do: Get your team together. Declare a challenge. Then play this song at full volume. Debrief. Vote. Commit to something. Go back to work.

Over the last six months, many people have observed that we've entered a quiet period for consumer Internet startups, as the latest social, commerce, and mobile waves play themselves out. Venture capital funding has dropped. Excitement has sagged. Fewer red-hot products are taking the world by storm.

Good news for anyone prone to losing the TV remote.

A group of developers created a series of Bluetooth-powered stickers that track down the objects you're most likely to misplace. The StickNFind stickers are about the size of a U.S. quarter and sync with a smartphone app. They have a range of about 100 feet and a battery life that reportedly lasts almost a year.

Using them is easy: The objects you tag with the stickers are displayed on the app's screen, which lets you know how far away you are from them. If you lose something that's tagged, you can tap the object on your phone's screen, and the sticker will buzz and light up.

The federal government invests $147 billion in U.S. research and development, with $90 billion going to institutions of higher learning to underwrite faculty research projects and the training of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. However, based on licensing fees, federal dollars generate a very small rate of return on investment.

In this new paper, Darrell West examines that low ROI and argues that part of the problem is that the focus on patents, licenses, and startups places too much emphasis on outputs as opposed to outcomes. Those indicators represent proxy measures of getting material to the market as opposed to whether particular research ideas actually are having an impact and being successful in the marketplace. If a patent is awarded, a license issued, or a start-up business established, it does not guarantee that the product is used or generates revenue.

The days flew by, the money poured in, and before you knew it, your project was successfully crowdfunded. As the celebrations begin and you start to imagine things on a larger scale than ever before, reality begins to set in.

The hard work is just about to begin.

Now more than ever, crowdfunding campaigns have begun to go viral, with some project creators raising 10 times more than they had anticipated. While this seems like a great scenario, metrics are very precarious with new businesses. If a company is prepared to create 1,000 units of their product, and they receive 10,000 orders, they may not have the production means to keep up with such demand.

Recently we managed to catch up with Jennifer Reuting, Founder & CEO DocRun, an awesome startup in CA. Jen, is a serial entrepreneur who founded her first company at just 17 years of age. Her first company came to life due to a crazy situation where the founders of the company, that she was working for at the time, eloped with the cash box.

Jen used the free office space to launch InCorp, and this year they are on target to generate well in excess of $25m in turnover. Jen is also the creator of LLC’s for Dummies and can be found in her spare time mentoring at several accelerator and incubator programs across the West Coast.

DocRun is a SaaS solution that creates highly-customized, state-specific legal contracts and agreements instantly just by asking the user a series of simple, intuitive questions. Even the most inexperienced users can create (and also understand!) highly complex contracts.

This year a high-school student in Maryland announced that he had invented a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer. The test costs three cents per use. It works 168 times as fast and more than 400 times as accurately as the best previously existing test. It also may be able to detect ovarian and lung cancers.

Jack Andraka, the inventor, is 15 years old. His cancer test is more than a medical triumph. It is also a triumph for open access, the goal of a decade-old movement to replace an obsolete and inefficient scholarly publication industry with something better for everybody: a system that allows anyone with a computer and an Internet connection free access to results of academic and scientific research—most of it paid for by taxpayers.

This time of year, there’s a lot of talk about getting your flu shot. In addition to ensuring your personal health, it is also a good time to give your small business its own “flu shot.”

Small business influenza, depending on what part of your business is affected, can be very resistant to treatment and may even begin to spread to other areas of the business. Get your business flu shot now so your business, and you, can be in good health and prepared for the challenges ahead.

I recently introduced the ENTOVATION® Network, lead by Debra Amidon, which is an international network of theorists and practitioners, dedicated to developing a sustainable future through knowledge and innovation. Within that network,  E100 is a group of over 200 leaders and innovators representing different perspectives, and 69 nations.  See Global Knowledge Leadership Map.

Let’s drill down and meet some of these amazing leaders starting with, William A. Ghormley SVP Marketing Xconomy.  Xconomy is the exponential economy mashed together to get one word out of it (smart).  Xconomy is focused on providing business and technology leaders timely, insightful, close-to-the-scene information about the local personalities, companies, and technological trends that best exemplify today’s high-tech economy.  Their team many of who have an authoritative voice on the exponential economy, the realm of business and innovation characterized by exponential technological growth and are responsible for an increasing share of productivity and overall economic growth.

Do you run your business from home? These days, more and more small businesses are going virtual, and some of the most successful small businesses are run entirely from home. With online conferencing and project management tools, websites where you can outsource to workers all over the world, and most clients now recognizing that workingfrom home doesn’t mean you’re small potatoes, there’s no reason not to be home-based.

But while working from home may no longer have the stigma it used to back in the 1980s or ‘90s, it brings with it its own set of challenges, as any home-based small business owner knows. After three years of working from home, my partners and I have learned a lot about staying energetic and motivated.

When you have been on the startup firing line, you quickly learn that any insight from experts and entrepreneurs who have been there before you can make the difference between failure and success. Yet, many new entrepreneurs brazenly assume they are bulletproof, and march blindly into the fray. The result is that half or more of startups fail in the first two years.

I don’t think anyone proclaims to have any silver bullets, but there are common failure threads that appear all too often. There are many books written about failure in startups, and I don’t recommend any of them. I prefer the more positive approach of getting you better prepared up-front, like the recent book “It’s Your Biz” by Susan Wilson Solovic.