So, you’ve decided to do the startup thing, and you’ve told a few people. Turns out everyone and their dog has an opinion about it, regardless of whether or not they’ve ever been in your shoes. Some are flat-out discouraging you, while others are congratulating you and asking some interesting questions you haven’t yet considered.

You’re quickly discovering that many people are coming along with you for the startup ride: your friends, family, business partners, investors, cofounders, employees, and more. And they’ve all got something to say.

Who should you listen to? How much of what they’re saying is true? What does it all mean?

The world economy has disappointed this year with its jobless recovery and continuing financial instability. Clearly, the country needs more entrepreneurs. A recent poll in the U.S. shows that those ages 18-34--the so-called “Millennial Generation”--are that entrepreneurial bunch. Fifty-four percent of “millennials” either want to start a business or already have started one. And judging by last week’s vibrant Global Entrepreneurship Week , this seems to be a global phenomenon and one driven by people interested in doing good and do well.

Take Global Entrepreneurship Week’s Startup Open, which received thousands of applications from startups from over 60 countries launched between GEW 2010 & GEW 2011. The ‘GEW 50’—those with the greatest chance of growing into game-changing firms that will move markets and create jobs—included many women-led firms as well as a lot of new for-profit companies birthed to solve problems. The two final winners were Cambridge-based Fenugreen and Boston's Dynamo Micropower. Kavita Shukla founded Fenugreen to offer patented, all-natural material to address the global challenge of food spoilage. Jason Ethier's winning Dynamo Micropower in turn commercializes a proprietary ultra-micro turbine architecture that will supplant conventional power solutions in the sub-10kW range.

There has been a lot of media buzz in recent months about the makeup of the tech landscape. Many industry observers say there is a serious lack of racial, ethnic and gender diversity among startup founders and other tech executives — essentially, that it’s a field dominated by white men. Now new data indicates that the venture capital industry that funds many of those tech companies is similarly homogeneous.

VC field: white and male, especially at the top

On Monday the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Dow Jones VentureSource released the results of the 2011 Venture Census survey, which polled nearly 600 individuals in the VC industry. Of the respondents, 87 percent were Caucasian, nine percent were Asian, two percent were African American or Latino, and two percent were of “mixed race.”

An entrepreneur who doesn’t take the time to master the art of social marketing is heading nowhere and fast!

Most of the time when we hear the phrase “social marketing” we think of all the new social media sites like twitter and facebook that have changed our economy in recent years. Yes, that’s correct, completely changed our economy …

But that’s not what I mean when I refer to “social marketing”…to me “social marketing” really means Relationship Marketing.

Have you ever thought about why you became an entrepreneur? One day you thought it was a great idea and then it happened. Now perhaps you’re in the thick of it and can’t recall how it all happened so quickly!

These reasons might help you understand and/or remember why you became an entrepreneur.

Top 10 reasons you’re an entrepreneur:

1. A passion for adventure
2. Need for a challenge
3. Seek self-improvement
4. To be unique
5. To find meaning

Lobby artwork in the new Harvard Innovation Center sets the tone for the Ivy League school’s first cross-university initiative to foster entrepreneurship and innovation.

Hanging colored glass that reflects onto the floor and 3-D sculptures of human forms scaling a wall, diving off a cliff and walking on a path speak to the “sense of what’s possible and the breadth of areas where innovation may happen,” director Gordon Jones said.

The 30,000-square-foot i-lab, which unofficially opened in October on Harvard’s Allston campus, debuts publicly today with a ribbon-cutting, open house and self-guided tours.

At last night’s first ever Venture Shift in New York, the topic of angels vs. VCs was a recurring theme.  In the third panel of the night, moderated by BullPen’s Richard Melmon, several VCs took the stage to discuss the VC industry and whether it’s been forced to pivot (if we were playing the VatorSplash drinking game, you’d be taking a drink right now) by the rise of the angels.  James Robinson (RRE), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Gil Beyda (Genacast), Tony Florence (NEA), and Bobby Ocampo (Grotech), all weighed in on the issue.

Howard: “We saw that the venture model was broken as it affected Internet companies.  The classic venture model was not the only model.  Some of the older, more established firms have realized if they want to get established with some of these new rising

'Here is a staggering fact," marvels John Lechleiter, the CEO and chairman of the drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. "In 1960 the average life expectancy in East Asia was 39. Thirty-nine! In 1990, 30 years later, it was 67. Think about that. Does that explain the Asian economic boom? I think it might go a long way."

Longer, healthier, more productive lives, and more of them; more workers; an expanding middle class; more opportunities for the formation of capital—this virtuous medical-economic cycle, as Mr. Lechleiter sees it, is helping to generate the equally staggering growth in China and elsewhere in the region. "Wealth follows health, and it ain't the other way around," he says earlier this week, as the dawn catches the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses here in his office atop Lilly's sprawling research campus.

I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.

1. How to Program - I spent $100,000 of my own money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs. Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend with a new feeling of gratefulness—we were going to break up once I moved. I knew it.

The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition awarded more than $1 million in cash and in-kind services Thursday night to the winners of North America's largest business plan competition. The competition's grand prize of $500,000 in cash was awarded to Ypsilanti, Mich.-based DeNovo Sciences and the grand prize of $25,000 for the student portion of the competition was awarded to University of Michigan's students for their company "are you a human."

The three-day competition was held Tuesday, Nov. 15 until Thursday, Nov. 17 at the Eagle Crest Conference Center at Eastern Michigan University. The winners were announced on Nov. 17 at the Finals and Gala Awards Celebration held at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

There, I said it -- and it must sound so out of vogue, since financial magazines are full of articles about M.B.A. students competing for big investments from venture capitalists. After all, who wouldn't take a check for $5 or $10 million to fund a start-up?

Well, I hate to be the one to tell you that there is no Santa Claus: VC money comes with a price, and because of that, it's not all it's cracked up to be. First, it is extremely hard to get, so chances are you will spend a fortune in time and end up with nothing. Your time could have been spent elsewhere, like fine-tuning and selling your products or services, and landing smaller investments.

As 2011 winds down, small business owners looking for new financing options would do well to take a slice of the holidays and use it to study the two most common startup funding options — angel investing versus venture capital.

In this two-part series, we’ll do just that. And before the year ends, look for columns on ancillary business funding sources, like crowd sourcing and bootstrapping, that will give you an even clearer picture of the business financing landscape.

First, some background, popular convention has it that venture capital is the most common and popular form of startup funding.

Minnesota’s OrthoCor Medical may have won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for a line of heat-and-cold wraps for knee and back pain three months ago, but it’s the company’s knee brace system that’s getting all the buzz right now.

The Active Knee System was featured on The Dr. Oz Show Wednesday in a segment on magnetic therapy for treating pain, along with BioElectronics’ ActiPatch. Dr. William Pawluk, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and expert in magnetic field therapy, lauded the FDA-approved device as effective for treating knee pain because of its dual approach, using heat and electromagnetic waves to combat swelling and pain in the joint.

How can I change the world? I ask myself this question every day. It's the standard against which I measure myself, and seek to calibrate success. I admire those who've achieved this, and reserved my greatest admiration for those who try. And I know I'm not alone. Recently, however, I've started to wonder whether by glamorizing the Next Big Thing, I -- we -- have undervalued the importance and the impact of the day-to-day. Have we glorified the virtue of unrestrained ambition while minimizing the worth of structured effort?

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Let's begin with a story I first heard from the late Dr. Judah Folkman, a surgeon and pioneering medical researcher at Harvard. Folkman explained his mission by telling the tale of a man, our protagonist, who was walking by a river when he heard someone call out for assistance mid-stream; immediately, a passer-by jumped into the water to rescue the drowning person. A few minutes later, another drowning person called out, and again, a passer-by jumped into and rescued him; it happened a third time as well. At this point, our protagonist, who had been carefully observing the successive rescue missions, started to walk purposefully upstream. "Where are you going," one of the rescuers cried, dripping wet. "Aren't you going to help save these struggling swimmers?" To which our protagonist replied, "I am: I intend to find out who's throwing them in."

A team of US engineers say they have developed the world's lightest material which is one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam. The research has been carried out by HRL Laboratories, The California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Irvine.

The material has a unique 'micro-lattice' cellular architecture featuring interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of just 100 nanometers, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. A pioneering fabrication process allowed the team, led by HRL senior scientist Dr Alan Jacobsen, to make a material that consists of 99.99 percent open volume by designing the 0.01 percent solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales.

State and federal economic development officials Friday showed their confidence  in a Holland-based effort to create a green, bio-tech cluster of businesses.

Michigan State University’s Bioeconomy Institute this week was announced as the recipient of more than $1 million in grants — $580,000 from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration and $500,000 from the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Holland’s bid was one of six to receive the competitive i6 grants from the Commerce Department for “proof of concept” facilities, that allow entrepreneurs and startup companies to demonstrate their ideas and products could be accomplished on a large, industrial scale.

Crucial to the efforts of transforming the healthcare system is supporting individuals who can test and refine new models to drive delivery system reform. The Innovation Center seeks to deepen the capacity for transformation by creating a network of experts in improving the delivery system for Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries.

The Innovation Advisors Program will inspire dedicated, skilled individuals in the health care system to deepen several key skill sets, including:

• Health care economics and finance;
• Population health;
• Systems analysis; and
• Operations research

When the Arab Spring demonstrations were under way in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and reports were streaming out through Twitter and Facebook and text messages and cellphone videos, it was easy to feel superior to the Egyptian government. How could they not realize that information can no longer be contained by blockades or even internet blackouts when everyone has the power to publish? Now the authorities in New York City and elsewhere have been getting a dose of that medicine, with the “Occupy Wall Street” protests being tweeted and live-streamed in real time. As the Associated Press learned this week to its chagrin, we all have newswires at our disposal now.

One of the things the NYC police have been trying to do to keep a lid on the protests is corral and/or exclude journalists from certain areas — and in many cases even arrest them — and then argue that only “registered” journalists are allowed to move freely (in an Orwellian move, the New York police restricted them to what they called “Free Speech Zones”). As Elisabeth Spiers of the New York Observer noted, the rules that govern who can be considered an official journalist for police purposes are convoluted and in some cases even contradictory, since they require that someone report on events before applying for a permit — events that they should not have been reporting on without a permit.

The latest report from the World Intellectual Property Organization points to the changing ways innovative firms around the world are approaching issues of IP rights ownership.

According to WIPO figures, the number of global patent applications has more than doubled in the past three decades, rising from 800,000 in the early 1980s to 1.8 million in 2009. As a result of this growing demand for IP ownership, significant ripple effects have been felt in the global economy.

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels.

In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):

• Go online to reserve a website domain name. Be sure it matches your business, and get a hosting agreement from one of the popular providers like GoDaddy. The cost for the domain name is maybe $10/year, and the hosting starts around $50/year. Start simple.