The dreaded pink slip - it’s still an all-too-common occurrence in America today. Despite an economy that appears to be on the road to recovery, there are still too many Americans being laid off every day. So what are we going to do about it?

Most unemployed Americans have only a few options. Most spend their days applying for jobs, not just because they need the opportunity to work and earn a living, but also because job searching is a prerequisite for collecting unemployment compensation.

No matter a person’s gender, age, or industry, everyone wants to find a job he or she enjoys. Oftentimes, this is easier said than done. The elusive ideal of a “dream job” is appealing, but what are the steps needed to find and secure that job?

For me, it’s all about figuring out what you love; that’s the starting point. Once you have clearly articulated that, both to yourself and others, you can proceed from there. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in my own personal journey toward pursuing my passion. In my case, that passion was art, but these are key steps in anyone’s journey to a rewarding, fulfilling career.

Two years into retirement, Atlanta super angel investor Sig Mosley is back in the game with a $25 million fund aimed at betting on the riskiest tech companies in the Southeast.

Mosley, referred to as “the godfather of Atlanta angel investing,” has teamed up with entrepreneur and investor Palaniswamy Rajan to form CTW Venture Partners LLC.

Usually when we think creativity, we think openness, shades of gray — and yellows, greens and blues — and an infinity of options at our disposal.

But, sometimes, the less we have to work with, the more creative we can get. Sometimes, constraint can actually help creativity flourish.

“There are many real-life situations in which imposing severe constraints leads to an outpouring of creativity,” writes Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, in her excellent book InGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity.

In it, Seelig includes the ingredients we need to nurture creativity, which she views as an asset in any field and a skill that requires practice.

Stanford professor, neuroscientist and author Tina Seelig, who just published InGenius: A Crash Course On Creativity, recently spoke at Google about innovation.

Seelig heads up Stanford's Technology Ventures Program and says that creativity can be taught — but you have to work at it.

Here are the highlights: TRAIN TO BE CREATIVE When we're young we're given information to understand how the world works, but not given a parallel process to learn how to invent new things ...

Philo Farnsworth created a technology which underlies one of the 20th Century’s most ubiquitous products, yet he died a man of modest means and is relatively unknown today.

Philo was an inventor, not an innovator. He was primarily motivated by the educational potential of his invention, not the wealth it might generate.

Dell has launched an Innovators Credit Fund, a $100 million financing initiative that provides entrepreneurs with the financial and scalable technology resources to get to market and innovate. Through Dell Financial Services, eligible startups who have already been backed by angel investors or venture capitalists can get up to 10% of their funded amount, or up to $150,000, with accelerated, limited credit terms. Startups also get a dedicated Dell sales team, as well as ProSupport Services for any Dell business products they use.

Ingrid Vanderveldt, Dell’s Entrepreneur in Residence created the financial fund with the assistance of an Advisory Board. Vanderveldt serves as a spokesperson for Innovator’s Financing Fund.

A “downer” is defined here as someone who seems to dwell on the negatives of every business challenge, and loves to highlight bad news or potential problems. No matter how smart or experienced this person may otherwise be, things must change or they will kill your startup.

I’m not talking about someone who has an occasional bad day, but rather people who when asked, “How are things?” will proceed to give you a 20-minute dissertation on their latest health symptoms, the latest company problem, and the sad state of the world in general.

When Daniel Wein told his mother the story of how he had just landed an internship using a social video chat service, her only response was “You got an internship where?”

He quickly told his mother that this was not ChatRoulette. Wein was using Airtime.

A political science student at George Washington University in Washington D.C., Wein hadn’t been able to find an internship for the summer. Potential employers were interested, but when they found out Wein was leaving to study abroad in Australia in 6 short weeks, they were suddenly “going in a different direction,” he says.

THE question of how science can advance New Zealand’s prosperity was aired at the 2012 transit of Venus forum, Lifting Our Horizon yesterday.

Chief science adviser to the Prime Minister, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman said the late Sir Paul Callaghan, who initiated the forum, wanted to make New Zealand a more clever country.

“Science is not just a collection of facts, but observation and a view of the world to make better of it. Science is the only process we have to gain knowledge of the world.”

While Google likes to grill its future employees and engineers on technical questions, Apple takes a different approach.

Apple will ask brain teasers, grill people on hardware specifications and is looking for a lot of creativity in all its potential employees.

That even includes sales and specialist roles.

We pulled some of the most interesting interview questions from GlassDoor — a site where people "review" companies they interview with on how the interview process went.

Author Malcolm Gladwell recently spoke at the Toronto Public Library's Appel Salon, and he had some interesting insights about entrepreneurs in our culture.

"We venerate entrepreneurs in our culture," said Gladwell. "They are our new prophets. Literally, we worship them. If you read the literature about great entrepreneurs, it is iconography," or "hagiography," he continued.

Are they worthy of this extreme level of reverence? Gladwell doesn't think so.

We can use The Innovation Matrix to help us understand how the innovation capability of firms evolves over time. A great case study in this regard is Procter & Gamble. Starting from the late 1990s, this is the path that they’ve travelled:

In the late 1990s, their innovation program had lost its way. Successful product innovation was at the centre of their competitive strategy, but their performance had been slipping. P&G had reviewed their Research & Development strategy and increased their budget for the five years leading up to 1999, even though they already had one of the largest R&D budgets in the world.

Michael Nussbacher, co-founder and chief executive officer of Toronto-based Epilogger, recently returned from a three-month program run by Montreal-based accelerator FounderFuel.

The program gave him training, mentoring and $25,000 in seed funding; in return, he gave up a 6-per-cent equity stake in his company.

The program wrapped up with a “demo day” pitch, where Epilogger was deemed “venture-ready” and received a $150,000 convertible note from the Business Development Bank of Canada. Mr. Nussbacher has since been fielding further offers from investors for his company, which makes an application that consumers, marketers and event organizers can use to share and archive social content before, during and after events.

New Avenue Solutions, San Diego, California, USA announces the launch of its Genesis patent-pending Hy Five Hand Holds product for movable apparatus and will initially provide these to the global wheelchair market.

The company, which designs, markets and sells the patent-pending Hy Five Hand Holds products, “will license and sell these to major wheelchair manufacturers and distributors” says company co-founder Jonathan Chesner.

At Google’s annual science fair, the projects go well beyond making a tornado in a bottle. These impressive kids are doing things like inventing new toilets and giving hearing to the deaf. 

For most people, high school science fairs yield amusing but not altogether practical results: your baking soda and vinegar volcanoes, your potato clocks. There are exceptions, of course: 15-year-old Jack Andraka created a cheap, efficient pancreatic cancer sensor for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. And there are the finalists in Google’s annual science fair, which invites entrants ages 13 through 18 to compete for a variety of prizes. These kids’ results are anything but amusing. They’re potentially world changing.

ANY ORGANIZATION WITH GRAND AMBITIONS MUST BE BUILT AROUND A HUMANIST SOUL. HERE’S HOW IT’S DONE, ARGUES TIM LEBERECHT OF FROG.

As business leaders speak of the “Human Age” and claim that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism”--defined as access to talent as a key resource and differentiator--many companies have embarked on initiatives to “unleash their human potential.” Those are big words and noble ambitions, and naturally they seem worth striving for. But as one of the hosts of a hackathon in San Francisco this weekend, which invites developers, designers, and other creative minds to “reinvent business,” I have been wondering: What is a “human” business, anyway?

I’m Sonia Kapadia and I’m going for it all.  I’m an entrepreneur, business woman, wife, and soon to be mom.  I’m definitely not the stereotype you see in the tech world these days, and I don’t think I’ll fit that pattern anytime soon, but I’ve been working hard at trying to break the mold and build a successful startup.  In this column, I plan to talk about the intersection of being a woman entrepreneur and balancing family life.  It hasn’t been easy, and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited to share my journey with all of you.

One of the issues I’ve been struggling with these days is what am I going to do when the baby comes?  I get this question from others on a daily basis.  And I receive all sorts of unsolicited comments from others either encouraging me that things will be fine: “You can make it work”, or discouraging me saying: “Well your business will surely suffer,” or “Sounds like you’re going to take some serious time off for awhile.”  It’s a fair question to ask I guess and I try not to get offended when others are pessimistic about me not being able to balance come Baby K’s arrival.  Because you see, I’ve been working full force on Taste Savant, my first baby, for the last year.  And as my belly is getting bigger, I haven’t been slowing down, but instead have been speeding up.  So it begs the question: What will I actually do when this child comes?

BOTH political parties in America claim to love entrepreneurs. Barack Obama waxes lyrical about “a society that empowers the inventor and the innovator; where men and women can take a chance on a dream.” Mitt Romney, who once started a company himself, says much the same. Yet America’s immigration system is strangely unwelcoming to foreign entrepreneurs, even as other nations roll out the red carpet.

For plenty of historical and cultural reasons, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley is frequently still the first choice for people who want to start a business. But not at any price. The tale of Claudio Carnino, a young Italian who wanted to create games for mobile phones that other firms could then use to advertise their products, is fairly typical. Investors in Rhode Island were willing to back him, but only if he could stay in the country. Mr Carnino discovered that he was likely to be refused a visa, and that even if he got one, he would face a long wait—in which case his games would probably be out of date before he got it. So he took his idea to Chile instead. He was granted a visa in two weeks, and is now on his second start-up, running a firm called FanChimp that helps companies find new customers through Facebook.

On the first day of the D10 conference last week, the (mostly male) attendees dipped into their swag bags and pulled out lacy, yellow thongs. The panty placement was a bold move to bring attention to True & Co., a lingerie e-tailer launching at the conference. But founders Michelle Lam and Aarthi Ramamurthy were placing even ballsier bets on their bra business. 

Replacing tape measures, clueless salespeople, and humiliating fitting room ventures with algorithm-based e-commerce, True & Co. aims to bust the spandex stranglehold Victoria’s Secret has on approximately half of the estimated $12 billion lingerie industry. Lam says given how reluctant most women are to replace their bras, she estimates the right experience could boost the entire channel.