Expanding into International is both necessary and positive for every company, including startups, but it has some unique challenges, as I have found out personally, like expected “under the table” payments in dealing with other cultures and bureaucracy. Some companies look at this as a “cost of doing business,” but it can easily cost you your reputation and your business.

In a recent update by Thomson-Reuters, the U.S. Justice Department and SEC reported imposing over $1.5 billion in penalties on companies in 2010. In a very recent international bribery case, Alcatel-Lucent decided to pay $137 million to settle charges that it paid millions of dollars in bribes to foreign officials to win and maintain contracts in Costa Rica, Hondurus, Taiwan and Malaysia. The days of a “slap on the wrist” for offenders are gone.

Time was, UK and European digital entrepreneurs celebrated the continent’s disconnected, disparate digital media ecosystem.

Unbound by the shackles of meatspace, innovators and investors would tell you how cool it was to flexibly build startup companies of no fixed abode, with developers in Bulgaria or Timbuktu, business staff somewhere in England and others in some other far-flung place.

As Index Ventures’ Saul Klein told paidContent:UK in 2007: “We used to say at Skype that our head office was the internet. You have amazing developers from eastern Europe who you either work with in eastern Europe or in London. That’s vastly increased the available talent pool for starting companies.”

It was an antithetical and defiant riposte, from those otherwise enamoured with centralised Silicon Valley, to Europe’s lack of an equivalent tech hub.

Steve Jobs gives employees a little speech when they're promoted to Vice President at Apple, according to Adam Lashinsky in a new article in Fortune that's not online yet.*

Lashinsky calls it the "Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President."

Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."

An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.

TechStars is a three-month program for startups that's harder to get into than an ivy league school.

While we were impressed by the companies at TechStars NYC Demo Day last month, we wondered how successful the program really was.

How many startups get funded? How many startups succeed, and how many fail?

We collected data from all seven TechStars events (excluding NYC, which was too recent to secure accurate data) and found that the program really is a huge success.

Sales are a weakness in so many startups. I will talk with tech entrepreneurs who work incessantly on their product thinking that is the path to success. Having a quality product is very important, true. In some cases product deficiencies may make the difference. But most of the time startups fail (or limp along disappointingly) because of insufficient cash. And cash boils down to sales.

Guide to Winning New Work ebook by Pawel GrabowskiYou see, no product is ever perfect. I was an executive in a publicly-traded tech company for almost a decade, and I can tell you that all of our products had deficiencies — some small, some large. And no one knew those deficiencies better than those of us working in the company, because we worked daily to improve the products. Despite not having perfect products, ours was a successful unit of the company. Part of the reason: we had strong sales processes and an experienced sales team.

The call for creativity in education is picking up steam. Educators around the globe are inventing new, innovative modes of teaching to help build creative thinking skills. In order for creativity to take hold, parents need to model creative behaviors at home. Sometimes, figuring out what not to do sheds light on the best practices to employ. Here are 7 surefire ways to crush a child's creativity. These are based on research by Amabile and Hennessy (1992):

1. Surveillance - putting your kids under a microscope and making them feel like they're being watched
2. Evaluation - judging your kids performance
3. Rewards - giving your kids trinkets and tokens for achievements
4. Competition - creating a situation where there can be only one winner (as opposed to competing against oneself)
5. Over-control - micromanaging how your children accomplish tasks

The Gotham Gal wrote a post last week about motherhood and work. In it she argued that motherhood is a given for many/most women and that it hasn't gotten in the way of many great accomplishments by women over the years and we should not penalize women for the fact that they have another side project that they will be doing for the rest of their lives. She ended the post with the assertion that women were designed for this and that they thrive on it.

I've watched the Gotham Gal go right back to work a week after our first child was born because it was a startup and they needed her. She managed it pretty well. We used to swap days we had to be home early to relieve Betty (our child caregiver at the time). I've watched her take on another startup working in an office in the basement of our house selling ad space in between driving the kids here and there. And as she says in the post, she always had dinner on the table, always made sure the kids had what they needed, and always made sure our home was functioning. She still does that even though she's got something like a couple dozen projects going right now.

In many ways mobile technologies are derivative of their desktop brethren. Your iPhone's e-mail app is like the e-mail client on your desktop, for example. The mobile world is the desktop world in miniature, a "lite" version.

But the mobile world is no longer just following; it's leading. PC sales are sagging, while sales of mobile devices—smart phones and tablets—are on the rise. As the operating systems that power these devices become the new norm, we can expect to see certain aspects of desktop and laptop operating systems start imitating the little upstarts that had initially imitated them.

Clusters of innovative firms are an old phenomenon. In the UK during the first Industrial Revolution, for example, the cotton industry was heavily concentrated in Lancashire within the Oldham-Bolton-Manchester triangle. In more recent times, clusters of high-tech firms, prime among which is Silicon Valley in California, have gained fame and are routinely referred to as role models for promoting innovation, successful commercialisation of research and economic growth. What is it that makes clusters so attractive?

here is extensive empirical evidence for thinking that clusters generate some tangible benefits, such as knowledge spillovers, the sharing of inputs and forward and backward linkages to research innovation, which make firms within the cluster more productive and innovative. Some firms might even never have been founded outside of such clusters.

Micro-finance is terrific in concept. All it's missing is a winning platform. In this installment of Work Smart, John Ferber of Microgiving.com describes the important differences between loansharking and micro-giving and lending that's estimated to have helped a billion people in need. Plus, learn about a few micro-lending and giving sites, including a Google-style search site for micro-finance services--proven to do good.

Dramatic shifts in population growth across the United States in the last decade should surprise no one. Some patterns are continuing trends of earlier decades, but other patterns show substantial change. I show these changes in three ways, first a conventional choropleth map coloring counties by broad classes from high losses to moderate and high percent gain, second a map in which absolute gains and losses are depicted by proportional symbols, with colors showing the rate of change, and third, a look a counties that experienced either extreme loss and gain.

There are four major regions that experienced population loss. The largest covers the rural high plains from Texas to Canada, and most marked in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, North and South Dakota, and eastern Montana in a continuation of at least 60 years, and no surprise, as farms get larger and more mechanized, small towns decline. Yet these losses are less pervasive than earlier, especially due to energy development in Wyoming, North and South Dakota and Montana, and energy and agricultural change in Oklahoma and Texas.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been exploring some of the more confusing terminology of VC term sheets. In my last post, I discussed “drag-along” or “bring-along” provisions, which grant to the investors the right to compel the founders and other stockholders to vote in favor of (or otherwise agree to) the sale, merger or other “deemed liquidation” of the company. In today’s post I examine so-called “pay-to-play” provisions, which can be an important protection for the company.

What are Pay-to-play provisions? Pay-to-play provisions are designed to provide a strong incentive for investors to participate in future financings. In their simplest form, such provisions require existing investors to invest on a pro rata basis in subsequent financing rounds or they will lose some or all of their preferential rights (such as anti-dilution protection, liquidation preferences or certain voting rights).

It is often said that one of the dividing lines between Europe and the U.S. is the attitude to failure. Over there failure is a stepping stone to success, over here failure is, well, just that. Failure.

Scott Gerber at Inc.com has drawn up his list of 10 things he learned. Who was it who said wise men learn by others’ mistakes; fools by their own. Well with that in mind, check out some of his.

I am proud to have learned such a great deal from my failures, and the fact that I get to share them—and, more important, the hard-knocks lessons learned—with a worldwide audience is a real thrill. After all, what’s the point of ending up in frivolous litigation, nearly losing your shirt, pitching VCs for tens of millions of dollars wth no revenue model, or being forced to move back in with your parents if you can’t have a few laughs as a result, right?

The Washington region’s start-up community has churned up investment dollars in big doses lately as entrepreneurs launch companies that look to shape industries as varied as childhood education, retail marketing and energy consumption.

There was $125 million for Herndon-based education provider K12. The District-based daily dealmaker LivingSocial fetched $400 million. Arlington-based energy conservation company GridPoint took in $23.6 million.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The tantalizing prospect of finding the next Facebook, Groupon or Twitter is driving the biggest rush of venture capital into the Internet start-up arena since dot-com mania first boomed and then fizzled more than a decade ago.

More than $5 billion of venture capital investment flowed into young web companies globally in the first four months of the year, data from Thomson Reuters Deals Intelligence shows.

Divya Gugnani, co-founder of fashion website Send The Trend, gathered employees in a New York conference room smelling faintly of garlic to talk about the company’s latest hit: bondage earrings.

The seven-month-old company, which markets jewelry and other accessories based on subscriber tastes, had promoted its black leather earrings with a blog entry featuring Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas and singer Taylor Momsen wrapped in studded leather. The result: Sales spiked.

I recently had the privilege of interviewing David S. Rose, who has been described as “the Father of Angel Investing in New York” by Crain’s New York Business, and a “world conquering entrepreneur” by BusinessWeek. He chairs New York Angels, one of the most active angel investment groups in the country, which has invested over $60 million into nearly 70 companies.

Marty: Welcome to Startup Professionals interviews. It sounds like you could be a full-time Angel investor, but I know you have other activities as well. Tell us a bit about these.

David: I’m also a serial entrepreneur who has founded half a dozen companies, including Angelsoft, which provides the underlying Internet infrastructure for most of the world’s organized angel investing ecosystem. I also spend close to half my time teaching, and in addition to serving on the entrepreneurship advisory boards at Columbia, Yale and NYU, I am Chair of the Finance, Entrepreneurship and Economics program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley.

From the minds of two Austrian inventors comes a website to help inventors commercialize their products.

Marijan Jordan and Gerhard Muthenthaler last year launched Inpama.com, which allows inventors to post and market their inventions using Inpama’s website and search optimization tools.

“Throughout our long careers as invention advisers and marketers, we have always stood behind the case that there are no inexpensive ways for market commercialization,” Jordan says.

Jordan and Muthenthaler call Inpama a “do-it-yourself” website for inventors.

The site shares some similarities to U.S.-based NventNode, an online inventors notebook and marketing platform Inventors Digest covered in the February 2011 edition (Shifting to Digital Mode – ‘Innovation Simplified’ with NventNode).

MADISON -- Legislation to bolster venture capital investments in Wisconsin companies was unveiled Thursday at a Capitol news conference held by the bill’s main sponsors, Sen. Randy Hopper, R-Fond du Lac, and Rep. Gary Tauchen, R-Bonduel.

Dubbed the Wisconsin Jobs Act, the bill is expected to be introduced within days with bipartisan support. The focal point of the legislation is the creation of two funds totaling $400 million under the umbrella of a new Wisconsin Venture Capital Authority. The complementary funds – the Jobs Now Fund and the Badger Jobs Fund – are designed, respectively, to address Wisconsin’s short-term and long-term investment needs.

The Wisconsin Jobs Act builds on the success of the widely acclaimed and often duplicated Act 255 Tax Credits, which were passed in 2005 and enhanced in 2009. Those tax credits have helped enhance early stage investing in Wisconsin – but largely at the “angel” capital level, thus creating a need for follow-up investing by venture capital firms in emerging companies.

If you find firing people easy, then something’s definitely wrong with you. That said, it’s an important part of managing that doesn’t get nearly enough attention for the simple reason that nobody likes to deal with it.

Well, deal with it. If you don’t, you’ll pay for it later; I guarantee that.

Yes, I know this is likely to be an unpopular position to take during a time of high unemployment. But 90 percent of you are working and, for you, life goes on. Not dealing with problem employees can be expensive and damaging to your organization in more ways than one:

• Opportunity cost: instead of that underperforming employee, you could have a star.