Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

The iPad might only be 18 months old, but she and her Android siblings are getting users to pay attention and click. Tablets are also taking the lion's share of mobile advertising dollars.

Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computers who died this week, had a reputation as a passionate business leader and a modern folk hero. In 1999 one of Jobs's friends said, "He is single-minded, almost manic, in his pursuit of excellence." That's certainly a character trait we scientists can admire

So says a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. "If we’re looking for an answer to jobs," Kauffman vice president Lesa Mitchell tells us, "it’s right in front of our face." The country is in a recession, and Washington is tangling over how to create new jobs , but, according to a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, there’s a fairly simple potential source of them sitting right under our noses.

Some businesses are using social networks to find mentors for their staff. Kathleen Lim wanted to move up the learning curve.

Bill Nguyen recently told Fast Company "Facebook is broken." So why is he planning to re-introduce Color, his flop of a $41 million app, in conjunction with Facebook and its f8 developers conference? Nguyen explains.

Communication problems aside, Netflix's decision to break apart the business is part two of its plan for the future, a company spokesperson tells Fast Company. Netflix's announcement that it is splitting its DVD service off into an entirely new business may have some wondering if that decision was a reaction to all the negative response to the announcement earlier this summer that it was raising rates on its hybrid DVD-streaming business

Quitting college at 18 to move to Silicon Valley and pursue your startup is the stuff of Hollywood dreams.

Can you build a long-term business on other people's platforms? Illustration by Brian Staufferr The oxpecker is an African bird that ekes out a living from the ticks that live on the backs of rhinoceroses. I imagine even it would be embarrassed by Zynga 's dependency on Facebook.

Instead of focusing on how much investment they get, startups should make something that solves problems. If they do, they'll get loyal customers, and that's more important than investors

EdSurge--a weekly handbook for the "edsurgents" of the digital education revolution--is sharing notable news with Fast Company every week.

This and more important news from your Fast Company editors, with updates all day. Foxconn's Huge Profit . Foxconn , maker of hardware for Apple and a number of peer computing firms, has reported $943 billion profits for the first half of 2011, a significant turnaround from its $218 million loss for all of 2010.

The ski resort is betting it will get more bang for its buck from letting happy vacationers post the photos taken by its hillside photographers to Facebook--for free--than it will from selling them hardcopies. One of the hardest things to do for any company that wants to innovate is to willingly cannibalize a profitable line of business.

Today, Blackbox launched the Startup Genome Compass, a benchmarking tool designed to help entrepreneurs keep track of their startups' progress and know what to do next, based on data from more than 3,200 startups and research from Berkeley and Stanford. Many a bright-eyed entrepreneur heads west hoping to strike it big in the Silicon Valley startup game, yet 94% of them fail

A few months ago, the team at Blackbox seed accelerator set out to decode the "genetics" behind successful startups (See this short piece at Fast Company and also " Love in Startup Land ."). Their initial report, the Startup Genome Project , surveyed over 600 tech startup companies in Silicon Valley and around the world and gave them insights that let them continue their survey.

At the Designer Fund’s first Designer Fair, IDEO’s Elle Luna explains how brands are increasingly seeking to gain customers and build loyalty by showing their human side. Want to build your brand? Traditionally that’s meant a lot of chest thumping