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By Fred Patterson (The Commercialization Funding Coach)

The launch of Amazon’s new “lending library” feature through its Kindle devices this week means that another form of content or media — namely books — is becoming something that we rent or stream, Netflix-style, rather than owning a physical copy of. There are plenty of reasons to prefer renting or streaming over actual physical goods: It’s often cheaper, and you don’t have to lug around heavy books or CDs or DVDs everywhere, since your content is (theoretically at least) available anywhere. But there are also downsides to renting content; moving to a rental model changes our relationship to that content, and not always in a good way.

I have a new least favorite phrase. One so overused it now belongs in the “Overused Cliché – That Means Nothing Hall of Fame” along with inane silence killers like “at the end of the day” and “It’s not Rocket Science” (I’m actually married to a real rocket scientist, so I hear this one in every possible social situation…).

My new least favorite set of words all used together:

“It is what is is…”

Cellular data usage has become subject of contention among consumers, carriers and federal regulators. Consumers want more data with less restrictions at manageable prices. The carriers want the opposite. The federal government is left to balance consumers' rights with spectrum allocation, bandwidth requirements, net neutrality and mergers that may disrupt the ecosystem.

There are a lot of balls in the air. It is likely that there will not be any type of compromise between the interests of these groups any time soon. Carriers are starting to set bandwidth limits into their data plans and throttling users who exceed those limits. The data plan needs to evolve.

A recent study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Evan Polman of New York University and Kyle Emich of Cornell University made me wonder if it’s more difficult to be a creative entrepreneur than a creative employee. For those of you who didn’t read the study, the punch line is this: In a series of four lab experiments conducted on college students, the authors found “that people are more creative for others than for themselves.”

This is one of those studies that are too indirect to provide specific answers about entrepreneurship. After all, the researchers were conducting experiments on undergraduate students and were examining creativity in exercises that have nothing to do with starting or running a business – drawing pictures of an alien and solving a brain teaser. Therefore, it’s quite possible that the authors’ findings wouldn’t hold for the kind of creativity that real business people employ in running their own or others’ businesses.

The planet’s deep oceans at times may absorb enough heat to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade even in the midst of longer-term warming, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the “missing heat” during periods such as the past decade when global air temperatures showed little trend. The findings also suggest that several more intervals like this can be expected over the next century, even as the trend toward overall warming continues.

The crowd-funding community is split over a proposal that would let businesses sell equity stakes through the social-networking function.

Some operators of crowd-funding platforms are eager for the new opportunity. Others say the change runs counter to their underlying mission.

Yesterday we showed you Asana, the productivity startup.

It's a web app that relies on keyboard shortcuts to help users zip around and create an interactive to-do list. The keyboard shortcuts, plus the sparse interface makes us think Asana is going to have a hard time getting users on board.

But, because it comes from Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, both former Facebook employees, it's getting a lot of press. Moskovitz is more than a former Facebook employee: He's a cofounder, and thanks to his stake in the company, he's the world's youngest billionaire.

High-value financings for venture-backed private internet and digital media companies seem to be happening at a rapid pace. Dropbox, Tumblr, AirBnB, Foursquare, and Spotify have all raked in big fundings and attained record valuations in recent months. Meanwhile, public investors are decidedly less sanguine. The Nasdaq Composite index is flat for the year – and the average internet and digital media company is down 50% from 52-week highs.

So why such a disconnect? Will the recent class of high-priced venture rounds produce strong results for entrepreneurs, VCs and LPs? Or, will the public market continue to bump along and provide little opportunity for spectacular exits?

Not everyone can be a Gates, Allen, Jobs, or Zuckerberg—founders who dropped out of college and went on to change the technology industry by starting landmark companies.

But there are more options available for budding entrepreneurs these days, most notably the explosion of incubators, accelerators, and other startup nurseries that help young companies get off the ground.

Today in Seattle, the local branch of the national TechStars program will unleash its latest crop of 10 proto-companies on the press and investors, showing off what they’ve been able to accomplish over the past few months. It’s TechStars’ second-ever class to graduate in Seattle.

The federal government’s Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant program is scheduled to expire Nov. 18, and the House and Senate are still trying to resolve their differences on legislation to reauthorize it.

Any changes to the SBIR program would impact small Minnesota companies that rely on such federal funds to further research and development. A combined $25.8 million in SBIR grants went to 45 Minnesota businesses during the 2010 fiscal year, according to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Small Business Administration    ’s Tech-Net    website.

The digital revolution has rewritten the laws of marketing. So why do B-schools insist on teaching outmoded notions of price, place, and promotion?

In 1960, Jerome McCarthy got a bright and amazingly resilient idea. All the components of a marketing strategy could be reduced to just Four P’s (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), the 32-year-old marketing professor claimed.

And he was right, at least at the time. Those Four P’s have since become a tremendously influential guide in marketing programs. Although the world of marketing has changed significantly since the '60s, all MBA students, marketers, and strategy consultants are still expected to know and apply the Four P’s as if they were laws of nature. Some would argue that the digital revolution has yet to radically change the teachings of the Four P’s.

Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason may need to wait a little while longer before joining the billionaire-on-paper club.

The daily-deal company’s investment bankers priced the company’s initial public offering at $20 a share last night, valuing the company at $12.65 billion.

That places Mason’s worth just below $1 billion, not that he’s shedding tears over it.

Here’s a breakdown of the largest shareholders’ worth, which of course will fluctuate along with the stock price:

Bloomberg News Eric Lefkofsky Eric Lefkofsky: $2.56 billion

Not bad for the guy who bet $1 million on ThePoint.com, the predecessor to Groupon started by Mason. Talk about “wildly profitable.” This is on top of the $386 million of stock he redeemed earlier this year–shares he paid just $546 for. Yes, $546. Lefkofsky, who now invests in start-ups through his firm, Lightbank, was previously Mason’s boss at a Chicago printing company.

Founders of NYU start-ups – including Foursquare, Symbol Technologies, The Knot, Audible, Etsy, area/code, deTect Biosciences, Interwoven, Media6Degrees, Anaderm, OMGPOP, and Diaspora, among many others – will gather at Washington Square for The NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, where they will share their successes, experiences, and challenges with hundreds of students, faculty, and alums.

“The Festival is the latest demonstration of how vibrant and energetic the entrepreneurial spirit is across NYU’s 18 schools, colleges, and institutes,” said Frank Rimalovski, the Managing Director of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund.  “We have an outstanding line-up of panelists and presenters that reflect the diversity of innovations that come out of NYU labs and schools, and we’ll have a great crowd of people looking to be the next generation of NYU entrepreneurs.”

The shopworn adage “It takes all kinds of people to make a world” is never more controversial than when applied to technology startups.

“It takes all kinds of people to make a product” is much less accepted; diversity often gets short shrift when meritocracy is a supposed ideal and both time and funding are short.

However, having diversity of all kinds on a startup team can actually end up saving time and money. In this interview, Julia Hu, founder of Lark, explains exactly how and why founders should go out and consciously create diverse teams.

In 1998, Google was still a dream in the eyes of Larry and Sergey. Today, it employs 31,000 people and made about $35 billion in the past year. In 2004, Facebook was still a figment of Mark Zuckerberg’s imagination. Today? It’s expected to generate $4 billion this year and has 3,000 employees. In those two stats, you can see the question and answer to the debate: Do startups create jobs, or more accurately, do they create jobs the way they used to?

A laboratory test that evaluates how close cancer cells are to a specific form of cell death could help oncologists predict which patients will benefit from chemotherapy drugs. Researchers tested samples from patients at several hospitals and showed that those whose cancer cells were on the edge of self-destructing responded better to various kinds of chemotherapy.

The test helps explain a long-standing puzzle in oncology. Cancer biology dogma holds that chemotherapy drugs target all rapidly dividing cells, leading to both tumor death and side effects such as hair loss and gastrointestinal distress. But some rapidly dividing tumors, such as pancreatic cancers, tend to be highly resistant to chemotherapy, while some slow-growing cancers, such as chronic myelogenous leukemia, respond well to the drugs.

You might have noticed that there's been an explosion of infographics over the last year or two. Unfortunately, they seem to have  jumped the shark a bit lately with companies cranking out any old thing and sticking the "infographic" title on it. We get tons of pitches from companies about their latest infographics, but only a small fraction actually make the cut. While we love infographics at ReadWriteWeb, we want them to be high quality. Want to have a shot at getting traction with your infographics? Avoid these six flaws that doom any infographic.

Originally developed as a therapeutic tool to help autistic children with social communication, this robot is now being released as a toy that can dance in time to music or clapping. Sensors make the robot sensitive to types of touch, allowing it to respond differently to, say, pokes and squeezes.

1. IBM 1 of 25 HQ: Armonk, N.Y. Revenue: $99.9 billion

Employees: 426,751

Fact: IBM sends leadership SWAT teams around the world to coach local staff.