One of the toughest decisions for a startup is how to price their product or service. The alternatives range from giving it away for free (like Twitter), to pricing based on costs, to charging what the market will bear (premium pricing). The implications of the decision you make are huge, defining your brand image, your funding requirements, and your long-term business viability.

The revenue model you select is basically the implementation of your business strategy, and the key to attaining your financial objectives. Obviously, it must be grounded by the characteristics of the market and customers you choose to serve, the pricing model of existing competitors, and a strategy you believe is consistent with your future products and direction.

Just five years ago, when I was looking to build a tech company with venture capital in New York, finding early stage or seed capital was a daunting prospect. NY just wasn't an easy place to start a tech company. But last night, hundreds of developers, entrepreneurs, and funders stood side by side as Mayor Michael Bloomberg handed out awards to this years BigApps3.0 winners. Wow, have times changes.

Today the New York Tech scene is exploding. It's alive with talent, innovation, passion, and capital.

How did that happen? And what can Washington learn from New York's Tech renaissance that could help fuel and expand the fledgling economic recovery that now seems to be blooming?

Chief of Instagram Kevin Systrom recently told the Financial Times that his required eight hours of sleep was “terrible for an entrepreneur.” Systrom, obviously a smart guy when it comes to business–Facebook just paid a cool $1 billion for his fledgling photo-sharing app company–was actually dead wrong in this assumption. In fact, sleep is critically important, not only to the basic function of the brain, but to the type of thinking skills that can make or break an entrepreneur or businessperson.

Most people have heard that lack of sleep is linked a host of health problems, from weight gain and getting sick more often to sexual dysfunction and early death. No one wants any of these things to befall them, and while we’re staving them off with a good night’s sleep, here are the reasons that getting adequate sleep will also enhance your business prowess.

Who says there isn't room for health-related companies in the city's startup scene?

Two of the top three recent venture capital deals were classified in a report as biotechnology, and the sector landed a much bigger pot of cash than usual. The amount invested in the biotechnology deals rose to $54.8 million in the first quarter, up 13% versus the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. There were five biotech deals in the first three months of 2012, down from eight in the preceding quarter.

Overall, the region's venture cap funding was down. The total number of deals in the New York metro area dropped 11% to 75 from the last quarter, and the amount invested fell 34%, to $378.3 million. For the larger New England area, funding shrank a less-severe 14.6%, to $677.9 million.

When Poornima Vijayashanker started Bizeebee, a Silicon Valley site that helps yoga studios and other membership-based businesses expand, in 2010, several incubators approached her about joining. She'd been the second engineer hired at Mint.com.

But Vijayashanker took a pass. She'd noticed that many incubators focus heavily on technology development but didn't teach the business skills she wanted to master. "I was talking to people who had graduated from these business incubators, and the vast majority were still asking business questions," she recalls. "They were talking about 'How do we market? How do we find customers?'" As she did her research, she found that entrepreneurs in a variety of fields who'd built a company outside of the incubator scene "had the most knowledge and experience," she said.

The British crowdfunding space would be better off if a cap was introduced on how much entrepreneurs could raise.

That is according to the British Business Angels Association’s (BBAA’s) Jenny Tooth, who spoke exclusively to Startups about regulation of online investments.

The BBAA’s business development director spoke out after President Obama approved a bill that will legalise equity-based crowdfunding in the United States (where equity in a business is offered in return for funding).

The Jumpstart Our Businesses (JOBS) Act will allow US businesses to raise up to $1m (£620,375) a year through approved crowdfunding platforms (without SEC registration); a move Tooth described as “very sensible.”

The University of Maryland School of Medicine    and Advanced Particle Therapy LLC of San Diego plan to start construction Tuesday on a new $200 million-plus proton treatment center on Baltimore’s west side.

The Maryland Proton Treatment Center will be located inside a new 110,000-square-foot building that is part of the University of Maryland BioPark.

Proton therapy is an advanced form of radiation that hones in on cancerous tumors. The facility at UMB would be the first of its kind the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., region, and just the 12th in the U.S.

Your best side may be your left cheek, according to a new study by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University in the US. Their work shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face. Their work is published online in Springer’s journal Experimental Brain Research.

Others can judge human emotions in large part from facial expressions. Our highly specialized facial muscles are capable of expressing many unique emotions. Research suggests that the left side of the face is more intense and active during emotional expression. It is also noteworthy that Western artists’ portraits predominantly present subjects’ left profile.

It took about six months of due diligence before Katie Chitwood, John Field and their colleagues decided they were willing to put up $30,000 for a University of Missouri startup that makes a long-lasting human tissue filler.

But it's typical for angel capital funds to spend months vetting a company and its leaders before making a high-risk investment in an unproven business. What's not typical is for students to be doing the vetting.

MU's Student Angel Capital Program, though, gives about 15 students the chance to get experience running an angel capital fund, complete with a pot of money worth more than $100,000. Yesterday, Chitwood, an MU junior studying accounting, and Field, a senior accounting major, held up an oversized check at a luncheon yesterday to announce the fund's first investment.

For three decades, Robert A. Rosenbaum helped guide established companies and fresh startups through complex challenges.

The Connecticut native was president of an apparel manufacturing firm, ran technology projects for big companies, and helped several businesses run smarter and more profitably with his operations acumen.

Boulder Startup Week, a five day celebration of the tech scene here in Boulder, is offering several free plane tickets to people who would consider relocating.

Since I moved to Boulder in 1995, I’ve watched and participated in the evolution of an amazing startup community which I believe currently has the highest entrepreneurial density in the United States. On top of the the hundreds of open tech company positions, Boulder has an incredible quality of life which I believe makes it the best small city in the United States to live in.

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

THE complimentary wine and fruit platter was sent up to Jessica Griffin and her family moments after they strolled into their roomy suite. They were accompanied by a bellhop who placed their bags near a tidy crib made up with luxurious, high thread-count sheets for Ms. Griffin’s 1-year-old daughter.

The V.I.P. treatment at the Cheeca Lodge and Spa in the Florida Keys last month hadn’t come with an extra cost. In fact, Ms. Griffin said, she paid about $100 a night less than the standard rate for her room. And the deal wasn’t the result of hours of tedious online research either. She had finagled her savings the old-fashioned way: through a travel agent.

IF Procter & Gamble (P&G), the multi-billion dollar-earning diversified pharmaceutical giant can deliberately share product innovation secrets with its competitors, Zimbabwean firms should be comfortable to receive ideas from non-competitors. In fact, they must craft deliberate strategies to source and bid for these ideas.

To place the text of this article in context, we begin by publishing feedback from a Zimbabwean living in the diaspora.  Part of the feedback reads:  “I follow your articles with great interest and I’m inspired by your desire to see Zimbabwe produce world class entrepreneurs.  I am sitting on web and mobile (phone) based ideas that can change the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans and other people around the world. Unfortunately, Zimbabwe lacks a synergistic approach to unleashing powerful ideas and building them into businesses.”

Successful startups are all about turning ideas into action quickly and efficiently. These actions must be the hard part, since entrepreneurs always seem to come to me with ideas, and ask me for help on the actions. That has always seemed strange to me, since the magic is supposed to be in the ideas, and the actions are the same for every business.

In fact, the actions required to start and run a business are well documented, the subject of many books, and taught in college courses across the land. As confirmed by John Spence in his book on this subject, Awesomely Simple, turning business ideas into action consists of six essential strategies:

The smart grid is an electrical grid that communicates. The idea is that the Internet and communications technology can make our electrical system far more resilient to problems like blackouts, better accommodate unconventional power sources, and ease energy demand by providing instant information about prices to consumers.

Public investment in smart-grid infrastructure has ballooned over the past several years. The charge has so far been led by the U.S. and China. In 2009, the U.S. government set aside $4.5 billion as part of a larger economic stimulus package to fund projects designed to modernize the grid and deploy smart technologies. China has also committed billions of dollars.

A few months ago we featured a day-in-the-life profile of Kendall Herbst, a first-year student at MIT Sloan's School of Management.

We recently caught up with her again, and she offered to share with us some of the coolest internships her peers landed for this summer.

"In the fall, banking and consulting recruitment begins, luring in interested parties along with risk-averse people who want to secure a prestigious spot early on," she told us. "Then comes tech companies like Google, Samsung and Facebook. Finally, my two primary fields of interest, startups and the luxury industry, start to trickle in. It's certainly stressful to have to wait until spring to recruit. But all of these industries come with their own blood-pressure-raising aspects."

There are an estimated 7-billion of us. Between us, its other inhabitants, the big black bit around it and Mother Earth herself, there’s never a dull moment, news happens organically, all the time.

The news machine is an efficient one, the cogs — reporters, news agencies and so on — have become invisible. It seems seamless, news follows us everywhere, the machine works, but that doesn’t stop brilliant minds — internet entrepreneurs, emerging media innovators and legacy newsrooms — from attempting to push it forward, especially in the digital age.

The Knight News Challenge is part of Knight Foundation’s US$100-million plus Media Innovation Initiative. The initiative seeks new ways to meet community information needs in the information age. In the five years of its existence, Knight Foundation reviewed more than 12 000 applications and funded 76 projects for a total of US$27-million.

EUROPEAN governments like venture capital: it smacks of innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. And venture capitalists have every reason to like European governments. Of the €4 billion ($5.3 billion) that firms from continental Europe and Britain managed to raise last year—half the 2007 total—around 40% came from government agencies (see chart). That is a big jump from pre-crisis days, when government funds provided 10% of new capital; and a lot more than European private-equity firms, which drew 8% of their funding from public sources in 2011.

Reverse innovation is any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. Such an innovation has the potential to defy gravity and flow uphill to rich countries. The fear of cannibalization is often used as a weapon against reverse innovation projects. That is because they aspire to deliver performance roughly comparable to that of a company’s higher-priced offerings, but at a dramatically lower price—obviously a red flag for such fears.

We are likely to see the reverse innovation phenomenon in a wide range of industries such as ultra-low-cost transportation, renewable energy, clean water, micro finance, affordable health, low-cost housing, and many others. There is certainly a cost of cannibalization, but there is also a cost of inaction. In the case of reverse innovation, the cost of inaction is much higher than the cost of cannibalization. Unless the chief executives of Western multinationals can overcome their fears of cannibalization, they are likely to be disrupted by emerging market giants.