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

My company’s vice president of engineering, John Maddalozzo, attended the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here in Austin a few weeks ago to learn all the cool things happening right now in technology. One of the panels he attended was called “Stop Listening to Your Customers” . John noted that the three companies Silverback, Usabilla, and Ethnio were mentioned during the panel.

Only half of new small businesses survive beyond their fifth anniversary.

The New Consumers are here. They're youthful, wired, educated and mostly female--and they’re just as concerned with practical values like price, quality and convenience as they are with do-gooder values like local, organic and fair trade. These shoppers make up 30% of the U.S

Fashion may be cyclical, but who knew that you could get rich selling clothing that dates back 150 years? Alicia Allen and her husband, Chris, co-founders of Historical Emporium, have done just that, by peddling garments from Victorian England and the American Old West. Sales hit $2.4 million in 2009, helping the company capture the No.

Harvard Business School Taught by: Noam Wasserman Most entrepreneurship classes chase the strategy-innovation-finance trifecta. But people problems cause more than 60 percent of new-venture failures, research shows.

Greg Tseng, CEO of the social networking website Tagged, had just landed in Manila, on Saturday, June 6, 2009, to kick off a long-awaited vacation. As soon as he dragged his jet-lagged body up to his hotel room, though, an onslaught of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages from his co-founder, Johann Schleier-Smith, and other Tagged employees began: Something was seriously wrong with the site. In the 24 hours since Tseng had left his office in San Francisco, thousands of complaints had been filed by users—who claimed that Tagged's new registration process had somehow tricked them into spamming all of the contacts in their e-mail address books

THE PROBLEM In our September 2010 issue , we wrote about Capterra , an online directory of business software vendors. Company co-founders Michael Ortner and Rakesh Chilakapati faced a dilemma: whether to include reviews of their vendors' software on their website. Users of Capterra's online directory were clamoring for reviews to help them assess the software products listed.

How do you get people to speak more candidly than they might care to? In most cases, some amateur psychology does the trick, says Greg Hartley, a former U.S. Army interrogator and co-author of The Most Dangerous Business Book You'll Ever Read.

It's a dirty business, but searching a rival's trash is generally legal—as long as it does not involve trespassing on private property or taking the bags before they hit the curb, according to Richard Horowitz, a lawyer who works with Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals, an industry group. In fact, there are best practices associated with Dumpster diving, according to J.J. Gradoni, a private investigator in Houston.

A trade show may be the single best place to collect data about your industry—and your rivals. It teems with chatty salesmen, knowledgeable exhibitors, industry insiders, and high-level executive speakers. To John Nolan, a 22-year military intelligence veteran and business consultant, that's a "target-rich environment." Define your goals and do some homework beforehand, and you will come home with a lot more than a stack of business cards

"Deception detection" experts—often former CIA agents—are used by banks and hedge funds to assess the honesty of CEOs.

In a world in which knowledge is power, what you don't know can hurt you.

Syracuse University Taught by: Michael Haynie Michael Haynie wouldn't dream of reality-checking his students with the possibility of failure. He teaches disabled veterans, whose confidence was shattered along with their bodies.

Northwestern University Taught by: Faculty Most entrepreneurs possess deep knowledge of their industries.

Willamette University Taught by: Rob Wiltbank Investors excel at sizing up entrepreneurial companies, because they see so many. Rob Wiltbank wants students similarly exposed.