NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- What's happening in small business today?

1.Daily deals sites need a reboot. Daily deals promotions have become the norm for consumers to see in their inboxes and Facebook pages, but many small businesses say the deals are not worth the effort -- most lose money from them. A new batch of daily deal sites are looking to change that, including one called LevelUp.

2. Entrepreneurial lessons from Guitar Hero. Mashable has a Q&A with Charles and Kai Huang, founders of RedOctane, the publisher of Guitar Hero. Lessons from their experience in going into business for themselves: Make sure you control the whole product and don't need to rely on outsourcing certain components; keep careful watch over cash flow; don't overproduce; and finally, have some very close -- and rich -- friends.

What do Millennials in the work force really want? One thing is loud and clear: They want their Facebook, Twitter and smartphones—and if your business doesn’t give them what they want, they’ll find an employer that will.

That’s a major finding from the second annual “Cisco Connected World Technology Report” which surveyed 1,400 college students and 1,400 young professionals under age of 30.  The report states:

“The growing use of the Internet and mobile devices in the workplace is creating a significant impact on job decisions, hiring and work-life balance.  The ability to use social media, mobile devices, and the Internet more freely in the workplace is strong enough to influence job choice, sometimes more than salary.”

“If there are only a very limited number of jobs available, training, and education are solutions only of a temporary nature. The answer is in fostering entrepreneurship,” Matjašič said, responding to new - and bleak - data underlined by the European Commission yesterday (23 November) in the Annual Growth Survey 2012.

For Matjašič, entrepreneurship is not only a form of employment but also a way of realising innovative ideas and solutions.

“Entrepreneurship creates jobs, fosters wealth for society as a whole and particularly via social entrepreneurship, including green entrepreneurship, contributes to community development, supports environmental sustainability and produces social capital,” he said.

I still remember, it was Sunday morning, having our Grande family break-fast and my Dad suddenly had an outburst to give out his Wisdom Pearls to me.

I was 10 when he looked at me with his clairvoyant charm and uttered the golden words “You are not a born entrepreneur, so go make yourself one” (the way Chris Tucker talks to Jackie Chan in Rush Hour – like he dint understand which language he was talking!)

Well, that’s the only secret he told me “loud” & “clear” and my entire life till date has revolved around this 1 sentence figuring out how to make it happen ? Well, he said 1 more thing : “Here is the #1 rule to become a great entrepreneur and everything else crap !” :

PUTRAJAYA: Six high impact programmes have been underlined to boost the growth of small and medium enterprises from an annual growth of 6.5% to 8.7% by 2020.

Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said the programmes were among 32 key measures that the Government would introduce to achieve the new SME growth target which would be achievable through Phase Two of the SME Masterplan (2012-2020).

“Without government intervention, the SMEs are expected to grow by 6.5% annually,” the Prime Minister said after chairing the SME Development Council at his office here.

Chris Loo is a man who wants to turn everyone into time travellers and he reckons the Chinese can help him step into the future.

The co-founder of Singapore-based firm Time Voyager is developing an online time travel game. And while his game is pushing the scientific barriers in the virtual world, Mr Loo is challenging the norms of funding in the real one.

His company is one of the few outside China that has received funding from a Chinese venture capital firm.

China's Gobi Partners along with South Korea's East Gate Capital, invested $3.3m (£2.1m) in Mr Loo's business in July this year, a cash injection that has come just at the right time.

While most people only gain about a pound of weight during the holiday season, that pound may never come off, increasing the likelihood of becoming overweight or obese and the risk of related health problems, according to a National Institutes of Health study.University of Missouri dietitians recommend families maintain healthy diet and exercise habits during the holiday season beginning with Thanksgiving.

Donna Mehrle, registered dietitian and extension associate in theDepartment of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, reminds people to consider how they feel when they eat healthy foods and are physically active, so they’re more likely to continue those behaviors when holiday stress and cold weather offer convenient excuses. Feeling better is a great motivator, she says.

A healthy diet and the right amount of exercise are key players in treating and preventing obesity but we still know little about the relationship both factors have with each other. A new study now reveals that an increase in physical activity is linked to an improvement in diet quality.

Many questions arise when trying to lose weight. Would it be better to start on a diet and then do exercise, or the other way around? And how much does one compensate the other?

“Understanding the interaction between exercise and a healthy diet could improve preventative and therapeutic measures against obesity by strengthening current approaches and treatments,” explains Miguel Alonso Alonso, researcher at Harvard University (USA) who has published a bibliographical compilation on the subject, to SINC.

Both entrepreneurs and innovators are important but only a small number of ideas can ever achieve commercial success. A market is needed and sometimes a product or service can create one.

In Ireland as in many other countries searching for a solution for unemployment, innovation is viewed by politicians as the philosopher's stone that will produce a miracle but billions of euros spent on Irish university research produce little - - Science Foundation, the Irish State agency, reported in September, that it supported four university spinout  companies in 2010 - - and in a small country, there isn't a big market or maybe none and that key fact gets little attention.

Kick-starting this year’s Seedcamp Week in London is Ilya Segalovich, Chief Technology Officer at Yandex. If you’ve never heard of it, you might want to get Googling.

What you’ll find is that the search company is much bigger in its home market of Russia than Google, handling 65% of all searches there.

It’s just had the biggest IPO on New York’s Nasdaq since Google, raising $1.4 billion when it listed in May… and it’s recently launched an English language search engine.

“If you address the right product with a good technology, you’ll be successful.”

Yandex isn’t the only Russian tech company to enjoy a blockbuster IPO over the past year. Mail.ru raised around $1 billion when it listed in London last November.

Creativity and innovative thinking are not genetic traits. What makes people great innovators is not their genetic makeup, but a set of skills and behaviors. The good news: anyone can learn, practice, and master the skills necessary to become a disruptive innovator.

Hear Clay Christensen and Hal Gregersen, authors of The Innovator's DNA, talk about the ways in which leaders can improve their organization's innovative skills.

Intro: this post has been triggered by an innocent DM from Zuzanna Stanska of GammaRebels, asking me nicely if I would like to write about their increased funding news. So I spent the whole day pulling together interview notes, bookmarks and emails to prepare this post, which was long overdue.

My personal view is that the accelerator programs have become MBA2.0 for entrepreneurs. Compared to a standard MBA degree, which covers generic topics from macroeconomics, to general management and corporate finance, accelerator programs have a more focused approach to teach and prepare tech entrepreneurs to do one thing very well: build and grow their tech businesses. Of course they are as good as their mentor network.

We may be closer to Thanksgiving than Halloween, but I hope this piece scares you. A lot.

Today, we take for granted that we will have full Internet access and connectivity to the world 24/7/365 on our smartphones, tablets and notebooks. We expect to be able to check a sports score or connect with a loved one in 10 seconds or less.

However, we don’t really consider that our smartphones and wireless device are connected to cell sites and cell towers. Which in turn are connected to the wireless operator’s main switching facility. All that needs lots of power, which after a blackout is provided by backup systems. If and when those systems run out of juice, at about 96 hours, we have a big problem.

Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?

Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe, Russia, and Israel, there are “a legion of companies that are capable of achieving billion dollar valuations and in some cases are likely to be able to do close to a billion dollars in revenues over the next 3 to 5 years.”

Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.

A strong commitment to innovation and R&D by both the public and private sectors has played a crucial role in Finland's development into one of the leading knowledge-based economies in the world. Finland's R&D expenditure has consistently been above 3% of GDP since the turn of the millennium. As a result, Finland is now ranked among the most R&D-intensive countries globally.

In 2008, total R&D expenditure in Finland was €6.871bn – or 3.72% of GDP – in 2008, according to Statistics Finland. The share of business enterprises from the total expenditure was 71.4%, or €4.847bn, while the share of the university sector was 18.9% and the public sector 9.7%.

Finland and Sweden are the only countries that have reached the 3% target for research intensity set by the EU. In 2009 and 2010, Finland's R&D expenditure has been around 4% of GDP, which is also Finland's target rate for the year 2020. The private sector takes the lead in financing domestic R&D activities; in 2009, Finland had the highest gross domestic expenditure on R&D financed by business enterprises at 2.7% of GDP. Private sources contributed 68.1% of the gross R&D expenditure in Finland, compared to the EU average of 54.8%.

Iʼm writing this white sitting in a hotel room. To my left is the Pacific Ocean and all the magical San Francisco fog stuff people kept whispering to me about. About 12 floors downstairs Claudia is doing yoga in the gym.

About four feet directly behind me is a woman that is a complete stranger to me who is having an unbelievably long orgasm. Thereʼs a wall between us. Hold on a second while I take a glass and listen against the wall.

If there was no wall there then this whole thing would probably have been pretty awkward. I probably would not have been able to keep staring at the computer screen, for instance.

During the past 25 years, I've asked more than 10,000 people where and when they get their best ideas. I get all kinds of answers, but the one that has always fascinated me is "the shower" -- maybe because I also get so many of my good ideas there.

And so, at the risk of overstating my case, I hereby offer you 20 reasons WHY the shower is so conducive to new ideas.

1. Showering signals "a new day" or "new beginning."

2. You're usually alone, with time to reflect.

3. Interruptions are rare.

4. The rush of water creates a kind of "white noise" that makes concentration easier.

5. Shower stalls look like little incubation chambers.

It’s not about one marketing piece, it’s about the whole thing. To be effective, your business needs a presence both offline and online. It needs to use print and digital marketing tools. It needs both advertising (paid) and publicity (free). It’s the marketing mix that gets and keeps your company message “out there” in front of your target audience.

Here are five marketing mix tips to seriously consider and implement:

1. Brochures & Business Cards

Print marketing items are not dead yet. Sometimes our technology doesn’t work like it should, and having that business card and brochure as a backup could save your marketing opportunity. Besides, there are a lot of people who just need to have something in their hands in order to remember you, so give it to them.  Have your calling card ready.

Henk Manschot, a Professor of Ethics and Sustainable Development at the Kosmopolis Institute in the Netherlands, shocked a global gathering at a conference in the Hague late last year when he revealed how `global footprint’ increases as people move up the human development index. As people consume resources to go up on the index, their ecological footprint stretches on additional hectares of land on the planet. `If the resource poor billion plus were to gain improved access to basic services such as health, education and portable water, the planet will run out of its hectares,’ warned Manschot.

The warning is imminent although there is no international consensus on how to reach out to the deprived billions. While global food security has yet to be achieved, the outlook for freshwater scarcity and improved sanitation looks bleak. Collectively, these crises are severely impacting the possibility of sustaining prosperity to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for reducing extreme poverty. Top it with growing fossil fuel and energy demand and the cup of woes will spill over like a never-before tsunami of unprecedented nature. The signs are ominous!