The closest point of contact between a brand and a user online is… just a click, says Nicola Farronato, Italian entrepreneur in Ireland with B-Smark.

In its first birthday, the company launched a Beta version of its online service MySmark, giving users  the possibility to attach an emotional tag to content on social networks.

A Smark is a one-click tag, which allows to personalize and calibrate feedbacks, opinions and recommendations. A way to tag content emotionally.

The first question most people seem to ask when contemplating a new startup is where they will get the money. That’s certainly a valid question, but all the money in the world won’t make your business a success if you hate what you are doing, and you aren’t prepared to do the job. I suggest that there are several other questions even more important than the money one.

The best way to assure the success of your startup is to do something you love, as opposed to something that will make you a lot of money. Of course, all these things and many more are critical, so it’s important that you keep your priorities straight. Here are the right questions to ask yourself, in the right order, before asking others about money:

President Barack Obama announced seven initiatives to speed up the transfer of research from the lab to the market. Involving the government, universities, and private groups, the initiatives include a prize, public-private collaborations, and federal programs to encourage commercialization, enhance technology transfer, and assist entrepreneurs.

Obama described the initiatives during the signing of the historic patent overhaul legislation at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 16. “This is the economy we need to build—one where innovation is encouraged, education is a national mission, and new jobs and businesses take root right here in America,” Obama said.

Boston, Massachusetts, defined by its prestigious universities and vibrant young startup scene, has maintained a reputation of excellence and entrepreneurial American spirit since its first epic Tea Party in 1773.

At the forefront of excellence and prestige is the Boston-based non-profit, MassChallenge, which bills itself as “the world’s largest startup competition”. MassChallenge is a very special kind of accelerator, as it is both an independent non-profit and does not take equity. Now, in its second year, MassChallenge is incubating 125 companies in its Boston waterfront offices, and each team is competing for $1 million in prizes. The competition is open to anyone in the world, for any new startup, in any industry.

In the book BORROWING BRILLIANCE, David Murray contends, “… there’s a fine line between plagiarism and creativity—that creative thought begins with copying, that you build new ideas out of existing ideas, and that originality is a perception and not a reality.”

In other words, developing innovative ideas is really an exercise in borrowing brilliance. Smart. Counter-intuitive thinking.

Anyone walking past Lincoln Center during the last few days, and glancing downward at its new access road, Jaffe Drive, would have seen what seemed to be a slightly eccentric art installation. A long band of animated colored lights would snake across a 123-foot-long wall of LEDs as a digital clock counted backward. Then that band might suddenly twist and wind around itself, erupt into curves, contort into waves, and, just as unexpectedly, subside again into temporary linear calm.

Or else, if you watched long enough, the wall might go blank, and when lighted again, would resemble a kind of elongated container. Bluish lights would pour inside it, mounting and sloshing about like some kind of luminous liquid, until the entire wall’s array would be filled to overflowing. And then the “liquid” would seem to spill from the sides, dripping down in cascades as the container emptied.

While the latest unemployment numbers are unnerving, there are still many companies struggling to find the right employees for their organizations — especially when it comes to startups.

While there’s no such thing as a typical startup — which is why the startup environment is an adventure — one thing is certain: The traditional route of placing an employment ad, accepting resumes, conducting interviews and making an offer isn’t the norm. As evidence, here are the success stories of several startups and how they found the top talent they were looking for.

The past few weeks have seen a perfect storm of misinformation on green jobs: What they are, how many there are, how much they contribute to the economy. Many of those throwing numbers around have relied on one source, a recent report from the Brookings Institution, which worked with Battelle's Technology Partnership Practice to attempt to define, evaluate, and count green jobs as a part of the economy from 2003-2010.

It is clear to those of us who have been deeply engaged in making the case for green jobs for years that the Brookings report has been almost universally misunderstood. Hence this post to try and clear up some of the details. But first, a digression about green jobs.

Non-practicing entities (better known as patent trolls) have cost companies approximately half a trillion dollars in recent decades, according to Boston University researchers. After gauging tangible costs such as legal expenses and settlement payouts, James E. Bessen, Mike J. Meurer and Jennifer Laurissa Ford concluded that patent trolls such as Rambus have sucked about $500 billion out of innovating defendants since 1990.

That figure only includes publicly-traded companies it was derived by measuring stock market events. The theory is that if a firm's stock drops by a certain percentage following news of a lawsuit, that's how much the market believes the company will lose. Investors respond to litigation by lowering their earnings expectations, which reflects costs directly associated with the suit, lost business, settlement fees and so on.

It’s March. I’m running a chainsaw, the Cantos of Dante pounding in my headphones over a techno beat. While this might seem like a confused union -- European trance music and high art -- for Robert Harrison’s small online audience it is just another typical opening segment for Entitled Opinions, a literary podcast. Topics range from the extraterrestrial origins of Jimi Hendrix’s musical genius to the ritual of sacrifice. Bizarre at times, pretentious for some, and unapologetically devoted to the aestheticism of literature, Entitled Opinions is not your traditional literary podcast. But it’s a show that has perhaps done more for promoting the humanities than any scholarly monograph in my recent memory.

In July, a consortium led by Microsoft, Apple and wireless industry players such as Research in Motion paid $4.5 billion for 6,000 patents from the now liquidated networking company Nortel. Last month, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in part to gain access to the company's 17,000 patents. And Eastman Kodak, a company struggling to navigate the digital era, has multiple parties bidding to buy its patent portfolio.

Welcome to the patent bull market. "There is clearly a patent-hoarding mentality in technology -- and in mobile communications, specifically," says Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton. "The game is to amass as many patents as you can."

Part of the reason for the run on patents is the surge in lawsuits among key industry players. Oracle is suing Google for Android royalties, alleging that the search giant's mobile operating system infringes on the patents for its Java programming language. Microsoft is suing Motorola, claiming that the cell phone manufacturer has violated its software patents. Meanwhile, Apple and mobile phone manufacturer HTC have also filed suits against each other. Pick any company in the wireless industry, and you are likely to find a patent lawsuit associated with it, say experts at Wharton.

We continue our convertible debt series today with a discussion about conversion mechanics. This is a very important term, but usually one that everyone can be happy with at the end if they concentrate on it.

In general, debt holders have traditionally enjoyed superior control rights over companies with the ability to force nasty things like bankruptcy and involuntary liquidations. Therefore, having outstanding debt (that doesn’t convert) can be a bad thing if an entrepreneur ever gets “sideways” with one of the debt holders. While it’s not talked about that much, it happens often and we’ve seen it many times leaving the debt holder in a great position of leverage in negotiations.

Have you ever thought about the names of the marquee companies, headquartered in Wisconsin, that are our economic calling cards – Oshkosh Corp., S.C. Johnson, Johnson Controls, Manitowoc Company, Harley-Davidson, Briggs & Stratton, Johnsonville, Kohl’s, Kohler and Quad Graphics? These companies all have one thing in common: They were named after the Wisconsin municipality of their founding or the last name of their founders.

There is no truer evidence of entrepreneurial spark.

However, spark requires fuel to ignite and entrepreneurial spark requires capital.

That’s the problem. There is not enough venture capital in Wisconsin, a state that has all the other elements for success in today’s tech-based economy. The state’s assets include a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, above-average research and development investment, high production of patents and other intellectual property, and a skilled work force created, in large part, by the state’s education system. Wisconsin also has one of the strongest angel capital foundations in the country.

Hewlett-Packard replaced its embattled chief executive on Thursday with the former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, saying that the company’s strategy to transform its business was sound, but that it needed new leadership to carry out the plan.

The upheaval at H.P. came after several weeks of mounting concerns among board members, senior executives and investors about how the former chief, Léo Apotheker, had handled a major strategy shift at the company announced last month, according to interviews with several people briefed on the board’s discussions.

While the board still endorses the strategy change — which includes a possible spinoff of its personal computer business, the closing of a line of mobile devices and the $11.7 billion acquisition of the software maker Autonomy — its members felt that Mr. Apotheker had bungled communicating the plans to H.P. employees and outsiders.

There is so much written these days about how to attract investors that most entrepreneurs “assume” they need funding, and don’t even consider a plan for “bootstrapping,” or self-financing their startup. Yet, according to many sources, over 90 percent of all businesses are started and grown with no equity financing, and many others would have been better off without it.

According to a new book, “Small Business, Big Vision,” by self-made entrepreneurs Adam and Matthew Toren, it’s really a question of need versus want. We all want to have our vision realized sooner rather than later, but it can be a big mistake to bring in investors rather than patiently building your business at a slow, steady pace (organic growth).

Starting a business is a lot of work, and it takes a certain personality type to succeed where others have failed. VentureBeat looks at some of the traits you need to succeed. Are there any you would add to this list?

Are you self-confident?

Do you believe in your convictions so strongly that you would argue your view with anybody, anytime to win your case? Entrepreneurs often create new products or even new markets that few will initially believe in. (Think: Chia pets, Beanie Babies, the pet rock and the Internet). Would you have the confidence to see your idea or product through?

Remember the 1996 movie Bio-Dome, where two guys mistakenly became trapped in a closed ecological system and were forced to learn how to protect the Earth? Fifteen years later, a project with a similar mission has been planned, though no one will remain inside.

In fact, there is no "inside." It will be a ghost town that an international technology development firm wants to build on up to 20 square miles of open, unimproved land in New Mexico. The town, designed to replicate a modern U.S. city, would give public- and private-sector entities a place to test projects like renewable energy systems, smart grid cybersecurity and the limits of wireless systems before implementing them in a real city.

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development.

One of the problems they run into is building a website. If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Nodes.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.)

But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?”

For an industry that is based on diving into the unknown, the news business has been notoriously adverse to exploring real innovation in its own industry—despite the fact that it has been floating in a sea of disruption for at least a decade.

That’s why the work of The Washington Post Company and its two-year-old WaPo Labs is notable. The principles under which the Labs were founded serve as a roadmap for reinvention—not just for the news business but for any company whose once-firmly entrenched industry is now being shaken up.

Founded in 2009, the Labs experiment with new possible news products. They do everything from exploring new infrastructure, to developing new products (like Trove), and experimenting with widgets that can be deployed within the company’s existing publications, like the Washington Post and Slate.

Summer is traditionally a time for Congress to focus on enacting various appropriations and authorization bills that fund federal agencies. This summer was no exception, and the stakes were even higher than normal due to the recent debt-ceiling debate. In early August, both the House of Representatives and the Senate approved S. 365, the Budget Control Act of 2011, to raise the federal debt limit and cut government spending. In addition, Congress is moving ahead with several other pieces of legislation of interest, as highlighted here.

SBIR reauthorization

The reauthorization saga for Small Business Innovation Research program continues. With the June passage of S. 1082, the Small Business Additional Temporary Extension Act of 2011, the program has been extended in its current form – yet again – until Sept. 30. The battle lines in the debate surrounding the program remain the same as in recent years.