Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter was interviewed by Liz Claman on Fox Business this afternoon.

At the end of the interview, Dorsey, a New York University dropout (one semester short of graduating), summed up what it really takes to start a company:Continue Reading...

What's your take on the world today?

New York Magazine surveyed 200-plus graduates across 10 schools (including NYU, Columbia and Brooklyn College) to find out where their heads are at. And for the most part, this group of New York-based grads are optimistic about the future.

When asked, "Will your life be better or worse in five years?," 95% said, "Better."

Even though "this wasn’t a highly scientific survey" and "the risk of misinterpretation is high," here are a few nuggets for you to chew on:Continue Reading...

You don't always have to do something high tech or outrageously innovative to win a business plan competition or start a company in general. Sometimes it just comes down the right baby food formula. At least that the case with Sustainabites, a start-up that just won the first annual UC Santa Cruz Business Plan Competition. Founder, Jackie Olin who took the $12,000 prize, is set out to provide organic baby food that is produced locally or within 150 miles from Santa Cruz. I would be shocked if I couldn't find any similar type products on the market. But, either way, you can bet Mothers will love it.

However, I'm a bit surprised that Pherica didn't do better than the $500 People's choice award. Jarrett Fishpaw, a graduate student of Economics, is aiming to develop a tracking service to monitor patients intake of medicine. The pharmaceuticals industry is a huge market and patient compliance has always been a growing problem for reasons beyond just jeopardizing health. Continue Reading...

Recharge your mogul engine with this week's start-up insights from around the Web:Continue Reading...

Burn rate is simply the rate of cash, or venture capital financing, that a start-up is burning per month in order to generate positive cash flow from operations. Burn rate generally dictates the amount of runway space an entrepreneur has to get their new company off the ground and is why Elon Musk told students at Wharton that it should be "ridiculously tiny".

Crowdsourcing various parts of business is one way to reduce burn rate while still receiving quality services that you need such as design, advertising, coding, and application testing. Companies are beginning to realize they can solve real problems less expensively by utilizing the power of the crowd.

An article I wrote for Xconomy explains how several start-ups are using crowdsourcing as a new business model in the automobile, design, application testing, and open source markets. The general process works like a competition where a company puts out an open call for the completion of a desired project that members of the crowd can compete on to win a desired prize. This process can not only yield better results than hiring a company or single employee, but also saves thousands of dollars in many cases.

Here is a list of crowdsourcing services to decrease your burn rate: Continue Reading...

WebNotes, a Web-based highlighting and sticky note research tool, just announced the public availability of WebNotes Pro. Ryan Damico, CEO and co-founder, describes it as a "streamlined professional research offering that can revolutionize the way people collect, organize and share valuable information on the Internet."

The service, accessed through a browser plugin, is designed to make compiling research on the Web incredibly easy for professionals, corporations and educational institutions. The plugin enables users to apply virtual sticky notes on Web pages and PDFs, highlight text, and compile those annotations in a logical folder system.

They've come along way since we covered WebNotes back in January. Since then, they've managed to rack up a handful of case studies that prove the application's ability to save time and money.

 Continue Reading...

Monday, at the EconAffinity: Capitalizing on User Engagement conference in New York, paidContent.org announced its first "Fresh Faces in Tech: 10 Kid Entrepreneurs to Watch." Here are a few highlights from the inaugural list (with official links and a video).

3. Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein,  MobileEdu/Terriblyclever Design (Stanford University)

4. Ben Gulak, Uno/BGP Inc. (MIT)

7. Jessica Mah and Andy Su, InternshipIN and Indinero (University of California, Berkeley)

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In a recent interview with Knowledge@Wharton, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla Motors) dropped some hard-earned knowledge on how to budget a college-born business.

"Knowledge@Wharton: Could you help us understand how did you evaluate that business opportunity [PayPal] and, again, what were some of the lessons that other entrepreneurs could learn from your experience?

Musk: ...there is a company that I started that predated PayPal, which was called Zip2. That's the company that I started in the summer of '95 and then decided to continue ... and [so] deferred graduate studies at Stanford...  

[One] lesson [is], spend very little money. That was a case where I had very little money, so there really wasn't any choice. I only had a few thousand dollars. And then my brother came down and he had several thousand dollars. We just rented an office for $400 or $500 a month -- some really tiny little office in Palo Alto. [It] was cheaper than an apartment. And then [we] bought futons that converted into a couch, which was sort of like a meeting area during the day. We would sleep there at night and shower at the YMCA, which was just a few blocks away. That was [an] extremely low burn rate. [It was] way cheaper than a garage. Garages are ... expensive. So we were able to ... putter along for several months until we got venture funding. I think that's a good lesson.... When you are first starting out you really need to make your burn-rate ridiculously tiny. Don't spend more than you are sure you have."

For more advice and insight from this cutting-edge mogul, read the full interview at Knowledge@Wharton.

Today's energy problems can't be tackled with technology alone. The energy crisis requires collaboration that fuses multiple disciplines that form solutions that fit economically, socially, and technologically within today's environment and restraints.

Entrepreneurs cannot go this alone either, they need to work with engineers, legal counsel, government agencies, social scientists, researchers, and others to make sure all pieces fit to ensure the adoption of clean technologies.

The MIT Clean Energy Prize is a step in the right direction, aimed at pulling all those resources together to catalyze clean energy entrepreneurship in a conducive environment. The competition combines academia, government, and industry to bring perspective and strategy from all angles.

Amongst the many industry sponsors, MIT teamed up with NSTAR and the United States Department of Energy to award $500,000 worth of prizes to turbocharge clean tech start-ups. These new companies not only have to be logically innovative, but need to be economically viable and utilize technology that can produce leverage in reducing today's energy dependence.

Continue Reading...

Related links:

• "CBA Students Advance to Finals in Nissan Marketing Competition"
• University of Pittsburgh's Marketing Programs
• Pitt's Marketing Professor Gilbert
• San Diego State University's SDcube.com
• Cal State University Fullerton's CSUFcube.com
• San Jose State University's myspace.com/thecubeiscomingtosjsu