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

George Doriot, the father of venture capitalism, liked to quip "Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete." Doriot died in 1987, but his ideas about venture funding can be seen to this day; Intel, Apple, and Cisco (to name a few) are some of the first companies to be funded by venture capitalists. The VCs that followed in his footsteps—including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine—have, through their work, trailblazed a path of American innovation.

We continue our examination of the business book First, Break All the Rules with an interview of author Marcus Buckingham. Why did he write the book, and why are managers more important than leaders?

Social networking in a powdery paradise. About the "Baked In" series: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that social dynamics are going to work their way into every industry, and the companies of the future will be the ones that bake them in from the beginning, rather than slapping them on as an afterthought.

Starting a small business takes a lot of hard work and talent. Keeping a small business going takes even more of the same. According to labor statistics, more than 80 percent of businesses fail within the first year—but very few reports explain why.

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs.

As applications for the 2010 Inc. 500|5000 arrive, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs.

"What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?" says a senior VP of Applied Predictive Technologies, which runs data analytics for Starbucks and Subway. "You've got your Groupon and Living Social , and your Foursquare and Facebook Places," says Jonathan Marek. "What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?" That's the question on the mind of most every marketer and retailer--and Marek might finally have an answer

Walk into any bank in the country and ask for a loan to start a business and the knee jerk reaction of the banker behind the desk will be to ask you to write a business plan—even though they themselves have likely never written one and will not base their lending decision on its content. The problem with writing a business plan as a start-up is that it will be based on one assumption on top of another. If your first assumption is flawed, then the whole thing is useless.

Illustration by Brock Davis Water is becoming a high-stakes business where there's money to be made everywhere you look -- from greasy wool to microchips. In the rangeland of Australia, sheep get frightfully dirty

Recently, I was asked why it's important to have a company page on LinkedIn. To make sure we covered all of the bases, I turned to one of my favorite LinkedIn Guru 's, Barbara Rozgonyi.

Hot start-ups in the coming year will likely be thinking outside of Silicon Valley. It's not that technology and software are on their ways out; rather, a softly stabilizing economy has heightened consumer confidence and opened up growth in areas such as brick-and-mortar retail, boutique consulting firms, and education companies, industry data from three private research firms show

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs.

As applications for the 2011 Inc. 500 | 5000 arrive, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. (For more information and to apply, go to http://www.inc.com/inc5000apply/2011/index.html .) One that caught our eye was Tagged , one of the first social networks (it was founded in 2004), which aims to foster new social connections through games and linking people with shared interests

Next year, U.S. electronics companies will be required by law to disclose and trace their use of conflict minerals (gold, tungsten, tantalum, and tin deposits that fund war in Central Africa). Instead of waiting to be attacked by human rights groups, Apple and Intel, and other companies involved in the Conflict-Free Smelter program opted to avoid embarrassment and ditch the minerals altogether--and the decision is causing some problems.