The crowdfunding news mill has been rife with warnings and doom-saying lately from all corners of the globe.

Equity crowdfunding is a gamble, no doubt. Startups eagerly wait on the sidelines while regulators and advocacy groups wring their hands over the final details of the JOBS Act.

After all, once the JOBS Act becomes law and crowdfunding for equity becomes legal in the United States, startups will be participating, and startups fail at a high rate.

Here’s an email exchange that I had in the past 24 hours with an entrepreneur. Remember, I try to answer all of my emails and be responsive to any inquiry – this was a random one (which I get between 25 and 100 a day).

Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you are taking on new startups right now.

Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in. Everyone else to bcc:

Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph. 

I responded politely that I didn’t think this was something I’d be interested in exploring. I did skim his longer description and took a look at the website (which was a landing page with some a vague description of the business.) I could determine from this that it’s not something we’d be interested in (it’s outside of our themes) but this entrepreneur also missed his chance to engage me more deeply since he couldn’t articulate what he was doing.

I tell entrepreneurs that Google was an “exception” to all the investment and startup rules, but I’ve always wondered what it takes to be an exception. Since every business is built by unique individuals, I’m totally convinced that exceptional people are the key to an exceptional company.

To check out the Google founders, and because I still see so many business plans that are modeled after Google (more search engines, and more billion dollar growth models), I had to take a look at the definitive book about them, called “Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain,” by Richard L. Brandt. It didn’t disappoint me.

The most recent economic data for the Pittsburgh region continue to be a cause for concern. Our unemployment rate has increased for two months in a row. More than 95,000 of our residents were unemployed in August, more than any August since 1985. Job growth in the region has been slowing, and most of the jobs being created are not in the high-wage sectors where they were lost. Our labor force won't keep growing for long if there aren't enough job opportunities for those looking for work.

IT’S 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you’ve finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don’t come off as a slacker. 

It’s an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace. I had that feeling a lot when I was a partner in a Washington law firm. Because of my expertise, I could often answer a client’s questions quickly, saving both of us time. But because my firm billed by the hour, as most law firms do, my efficiency worked against me.

HARTFORD, Conn. — As a truck driver for the U.S. military in wartime Iraq, Ed Young racked up 7,000 miles, facing a constant threat of attack that left him struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

Four years later, he is driving long hauls again, but now in the U.S. as one of a growing number of veterans turning entrepreneur. The Navy veteran who had seen his post-war life spiraling out of control says his Connecticut-based car transportation business has helped to put him on the road to recovery.

LUIS VON AHN, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, sold one Internet start-up to Google in 2009, and is now on to another. With the new company, Duolingo, he hopes to tap the millions of people learning languages online to create a crowdsourced engine of translation. “We want to translate the whole Web into every major language,” Mr. von Ahn says.

Ambitious, sure, but Duolingo recently attracted $15 million of venture capital. The investors are betting on Mr. von Ahn, his idea and his growing team of 18 engineers, language experts and Web designers.

I dropped out of college to pursue my business goals instead of completing a degree. While I wouldn’t say that college is a waste of time for everybody, I do think that there are plenty of important entrepreneurial skills that just aren’t covered in obtaining a traditional education.

So, if you’re thinking about pursuing your own startup business, I recommend brushing up on the following skills, either instead of or as a complement to your ongoing education:

1. How to handle SEO. Business is digital these days – so if your website (regardless of what type of business you have) isn’t getting noticed by the search engines, you’re unnecessarily hindering your own startup’s growth. To avoid this, take the time to learn basic SEO principles and put them into practice every day.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs were college dropouts. Check out this infographic highlighting them and what role college played in their lives.

Open innovation is increasingly common in organisations to accelerate the pace and impact of innovation by sharing risk and reward with partners. As part of a recent project working with organisations new to open innovation, we have drafted a quick ‘bluffers guide’ with seven main ways you could further quickly implement open innovation into your organisation which we thought we’d share here as follows:

1. Crowdsource

Run a crowdsourcing competition with employees/customers/consumers/general public to develop and refine your ideas and/or proposition  and allocate funding and process in place to implement the best one/s.

I’ve been making New Year’s Resolutions for my business for years. You could also call what I compile at the start of the year goals for my company. Rather than creating a stagnant business plan that I forget to update, I simply revisit what I want for my company at the fresh start of the year.

So why am I telling you this when New Year’s is so far away?

Because the rest of the year I measure my goals. I create a neat little spreadsheet like the one pictured below to see how I’m doing each month toward those goals.

I still get business plans, looking for an investor, that say all too clearly that the primary “use of funds” will be to do research and development (R&D) on some promising new technology, like superconductivity or cancer cures. Investors are looking for commercial products to make money, rather than R&D sunk costs, so your investment hopes are sunk as well.

In fact, the term ‘research and development’ covers a continuum of activities, so you need to use a more precise term to optimize your funding considerations. There are opportunities all along the continuum, and they need to be mapped to the right academic environments and public- and private-sector development organizations before a funding source can be determined.

On October 27, 2010, I wrote a blog post about the “57 Things I Learned Founding Three Tech Companies.” This past week while in Tokyo for meetings, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on startups. The discussion quickly turned to those 57 things. Thousands of miles away and two years later, people still want to talk about those 57 things.

As the questions came in, I realized that my 2010 list was great for what I had learned as of two years ago, but it also was in desperate need of an update to include what I’ve learned more recently, especially after pivoting in 2011 and scaling the company.

In the last few years, dozens of incubator programs catering to tech startups have popped up. Their typical business model is to take equity in the young companies they nurture in the hopes of breeding some superstars that yield big returns. With the proliferation of these programs, entrepreneurs could theoretically shop around for the most attractive deal terms. One incubator I wrote about this week in Bloomberg Businessweek has ridiculously favorable terms.

It has been a year since the world lost one of its brightest luminaries. Yet people in the tech industry continue to puzzle over how things would be different had Steve Jobs lived beyond October 5, 2011. It is a measure of his enormous influence that a year after his passing, his specter continues to guide many decisions people make in their day-to-day lives.

With the release of the iPhone 5, many oberservers have speculated that the Apple Maps snafu would never have happened if Jobs were still on the job. Or that Apple would have never made such a public apology for it, like the one CEO Tim Cook made, if Jobs were still alive. 

Being married to a food writer has exposed me to every type of food this planet has to offer. I’ve eaten larvae tacos, fish air bladders and thousand year old eggs whose packaging touts “now lead-free!”

Want to know how to cook a tarantula? Fish sperm? Tuna Jell-O? We’ve got a cookbook for that. While I return from conferences with my arms full of papers and books, my husband returns from his meetings with duffle bags full of almond candies, 10-pound wheels of cheese and black wine.

Good news for the Class of 2013: Hiring is expected to pick up. Companies expect to hire 13 percent more college graduates from next year’s class than they did in 2012, according to a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So which industries are doing the hiring? Employers in pharmaceutical manufacturing; computer and electronics manufacturing; retail trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; management consulting; and professional services anticipate double-digit increases in hiring, the survey said.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation’s biomedical research agency. The NIH’s extramural funding supports research at more than 3,000 institutions. A portion of this funding supports the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, which play a critical role in supporting the agency’s mission to improve human health. The programs are uniquely positioned to convert basic research ideas into commercially viable products and services available to the general public. The NIH intramural program includes about 6,000 scientists working at the NIH. Their output of inventions has grown over the years, resulting in the largest biomedical patent and licensing portfolio among public sector institutions worldwide. The NIH has achieved great success in licensing inventions made by the scientists who work at the NIH and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with 25 FDA approved products and hundreds of others having reached the market. NIH scientists have collaborated with other institutions, both for-profit and non-profit, to leverage the scientific discoveries that ultimately benefit public health worldwide.

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As pharmaceutical marketers increase their use of digital media to reach physicians, one business has found with a little ingenuity it can help companies discover social media channels and websites where they may not have expected to find doctors and other healthcare providers. Slideshare, anyone? SoundCloud?

Medikly, a graduate of Blueprint Health’s summer class, was founded by physician, pharmaceutical marketer and entrepreneur Dr. Venkat Gullapalli. It offers pharmaceutical marketers an integrated platform to better target their audience. Gullapalli said it’s offering a service more commonly found in the consumer arena than in the business-to-business pharmaceutical space.

Many of us might like the idea of talking to an angel, but for startup entrepreneurs looking for some seed funding, it's a more hard-and-fast type of aspiration.

Many of us might like the idea of talking to an angel, but for startup entrepreneurs looking for some seed funding, it's a more hard-and-fast type of aspiration.

That's "angel" as in angel investor, a philanthropic funder that is willing to take a risk on a young company and usually provide some mentorship along the way. In Canada, there's been a recent hike in angel investor actvity thanks in part to government programs that match dollars invested by those early funders. Organizations in Canada such as the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) are also helping to focus fundraising in what used to be a more ad-hoc system.