The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt.

Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft. They can loft enormous payloads without requiring the acres of tarmac or miles of roadway necessary for conventional air and truck transport. And they do so at a fraction of the fuel and cost of aircraft.

In the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory. Baez and his co-author John Huerta wrote, "If string theory is right, the octonions are not a useless curiosity; on the contrary, they provide the deep reason why the universe must have 10 dimensions: in 10 dimensions, matter and force particles are embodied in the same type of numbers—the octonions."

“He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

What do you think of this idea?

I disagree with the notion that we should avoid traveling with the souls of other "men." I think that fellow traveling is why we read, why we make art, why we court our mates, why we love our children -- in short, why we're alive. Just yesterday, my editor and I were talking about our shared obsession with Leonard Cohen's music. We both saw his recent concert, and agreed that experiencing Leonard communally, in an auditorium packed with fellow travelers, made the evening magical.

Companies today are paranoid, afraid that even their friends will steal their business. Yet a creative collaboration with your biggest competitor may be the best opportunity for revenue and survival. But remember that “dancing with the wolves” can also get you eaten for lunch. You have to take the risk, but keep your wits about you.

Your goal is “coopetition” - to find a way to partner with your competitor in such a way that both parties can substantially benefit from the other's resources - without stealing customers or damaging anyone's credibility. It’s a great survival strategy for small companies or entrepreneurs, and a good expansion strategy for even the largest companies.

There's an old saying in startups: "being early is the same as being wrong."

And it's true.

For every huge successful startup you can name, there's someone who tried to do it before and failed. Sometimes they failed on their own, but often they failed because they were just too early. They had everything but the market just wasn't ready.

On the 5th of every month, Wikio.com publishes its updated ranking of blogs, in various categories, including business blogs. This month they gave us a sneak peek at the new rankings for the Business Blog category.

For blog rankings, Wikio takes into account the number of tweets and the weight and number of other sites linking to the blogs, among other things. As a result, Wikio generates an up-to-date blog ranking and the Wikio Blog Ranking makes it a place to find blogs to scope out.

Venture capitalists only make money if they exit companies successfully, and in this context ‘successfully’ means at a big profit for the investors within a few years of making the original investment. Making a big profit quickly usually means that the company exits at a high valuation relative to its revenues and profits (if indeed there are any profits).

These sorts of exits aren’t achieved by many companies and the term ‘exit strategy’ is a short hand phrase used to describe the analysis that goes into determining how likely a company is to achieve a high value, high multiple exit in a relatively short period of time.

It is an exciting time to be an entrpreneur and an investor in tech startups. The history of tech investing is a series of waves or megatrends that come one after another. Mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to client server to Internet, for example. But right now we are in the midst of a number of these megatrends all happening at the same time. There are at least four big ones going on at the same time:

- Mobile - yesterday I wrote that at least 16% of the visits to this blog are coming from mobile devices and that number is up from essentially zero six quarters ago

Startup company MC10 is commercializing stretchable silicon for smart surgical tools and wearable sensors. One of its first products will be a surgical tool that can quickly map and treat electrical problems in the heart.

A friend of mine has long held that a vaccination his son received as an infant triggered his child’s autism. He clings to this belief despite a string of scientific studies that show no link between autism and vaccines. When the original paper on such a link was recently discredited as a fraud, my friend’s reaction was that it will now be more difficult to persuade people of the dangers of vaccination. He is not alone: nearly half of all Americans believe in the vaccine-autism link or are unsure about it.

The paradox goes deeper. My friend insists that he trusts scientists—and again, in this respect, he is like most Americans. In a 2008 survey by the National Science Foundation, more respondents expressed “a great deal” of confidence in science leaders than in leaders of any other institution except the military. On public policy issues, Americans believe that science leaders are more knowledgeable and impartial than leaders in other sectors of society, such as business or government. Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?

The college-is-a-bubble meme just keeps growing. Student-loan debt surpassed credit-card debt for the first time in history last year. Tuition is rising at three times the rate of inflation, and there are growing concerns about the quality of education offered at even our nation's fanciest schools. Meanwhile, prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel is paying young entrepreneurs to drop out of school. It's become more fashionable than ever to equate higher education with homeownership: once a rock-solid piece of the American Dream, now a fool's bet and a sad reminder of overinflated expectations.

But in reality, demand for an American-style college education, and the long-term value of said degree, is unlikely to decline any time soon. Here's why:

1. College degrees are still relatively scarce in the U.S. Less than 30 percent of the population have BAs, and we're 12th in the world in the rate of young workers that have associate's degrees or more. President Obama's goal is to increase the percentage of young people with some kind of postsecondary certification to 60%.

When it comes to brainstorming, questions have the potential to disrupt the flow of ideas. When one comes up, everyone zooms out from their individual mental flights and focuses on the question. This, in turn, typically leads to extensive discussion, and you can lose an incredible amount of your brainstorm time to unproductive conversation. Worse yet, all too often the question is not actually a question!

From our extensive experience in the innovation space, we’ve found that, more often than not, questions tend to be masked ideas. People wary of having an idea criticized couch their offers in the form of a question – “What if we…?” This not only has the aforementioned side effects, but can even result in the idea going unnoticed. It is our job as facilitators to pick up on when this happens, and then extract and capture the idea. This restores order to the group, and builds confidence in the ideator.

Go to any news source these days and you will certainly see stories about the looming technology bubble. Are we approaching a bubble? Are we in one? And more importantly, how do we prevent it from being like the dot-com bust in the late ’90s?

For entrepreneurs looking to outlive the hype of a commoditized market, technology or offering, there are three key areas to focus on:

Innovation – Is your company legitimately improving on a current solution? Expanding an established market? Or is your company simply copying the hottest industry trend? As you’re creating and refining your business strategy, it’s important to ask yourself these questions to ensure that you are actually bringing innovation to market. The companies that survive long-term always create new categories.

The challenging environment for health-care investing is not causing VCs to lose hope, but rather to get more resourceful and creative, said several investors at the Allicense biotechnology conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Bloomberg News

The IPO market remains sluggish at best, and even acquisitions don’t guarantee big, immediate returns, as milestone-structured deals in which acquirers pay less up front are becoming more common. The uncertainty brought about by health care reform and Food and Drug Administration policies add to the tough landscape.

In response, investors are employing a range of strategies, including spinning out “stranded assets” from big pharma companies, tailoring drug candidates specifically for acquisition, targeting rare diseases, going after orphan indications and targeting emerging markets.

Staying on top of the ever-evolving world of consumer trends is an almost impossible task for businesses to tackle. But Jeremy Gutsche, the Ontario-based founder of Trend Hunter Inc., has plans to make trend-spotting and reporting a simpler, hands-off process.

The Trend Hunter website monitors trending topics in pop culture, fashion, technology, art and business through a combination of contributor posts (they have 50,000 contributors around the world), data and research—all found online. The data are then sorted into various topics,

Hoping to capitalize on Tennessee's "entrepreneurial spirit," Gov. Bill Haslam today announced a $50 million innovation strategy as part of his regional jobs plan outlined last month. The initiative centers on four components: providing co-investment funds, targeting funds and resources toward technology commercialization, supporting entrepreneurship by creating a statewide incubator network, and mapping a strategic economic development plan for each of the state's nine regions...

With economists assuring that a recovery is underway, one very large question remains: Where are all the jobs? GDP may be expanding again, but both unemployment statistics (especially among the young) and anecdotal evidence reveal that this good news hasn’t translated into the millions of jobs Americans need to get back to work. The jobs drought continues. But there is hope.

Although every startup is unique, there are certain common avoidable mistakes that can lead to legal complications which jeopardize the long-term success of the business. I’m not suggesting that every startup needs a lawyer, but you should definitely pay attention, and not be afraid to consult legal counsel if any of these raise qualms for you.

Like other environments, most legal issues don’t result from fraud, but from ignorance on specific requirements, or simply never getting around to doing the things that common sense would tell you to do. Here are five of the most common examples:

1. Failure to document a founder agreement at the beginning. This oversight can lead to the so-called “forgotten founder” problem. Early co-founders often drop out of the picture due to disagreements, and you forget about them, but they don’t forget about the verbal promises you made.

Dear SBIR Insider,

It's 2:00am (local time) and I'm sitting in a hotel room in Nashville with some vital SBIR/STTR information I just received, which you should be made aware of. With blurry eyes, let's get started.

This coming Wednesday morning, May 4, 2011 the full Senate will vote on their SBIR reauthorization bill (S.493). This bill has been a victim of circumstance (over 120 amendments) and is in grave danger of not passing.

The Senate will try to invoke cloture (close the bill to additional amendments) and then immediately vote to try and pass the bill. If passed, the Senate will have this bill as a tool to negotiate with the House when they pass their bill. Both bodies will then work in conference to pass a final SBIR/STTR reauthorization.

Iowa entrepreneurs could attract as much as $10 million each year in investment under a bill that proposes making $2 million in tax credits available annually for early-stage investors.

House File 688 calls for providing investors with a 20 percent tax credit, based on their investment in startups or community-based seed funds.

Bill supporters would like to boost the tax credit amount by $10 million annually, so an additional $50 million could be available for early-stage investment.