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

My entrepreneurial journey has seen me start and exit four companies, one of which, my research business, was acquired by a public company.

Each year , I help fellow entrepreneurs and investors judge the MBA business plan competition at Harvard Business School. This year, I noted which pitch approaches seemed to work best and which tactics fell flat. Here are five things that worked in this year's presentations—and that you should consider including in your next business plan pitch: 1

DIY survey platforms make constructing questionnaires easy, but the results could be biased, contradictory, or deeply misleading. Online surveys often have to compete for attention against the backdrop of Netflix , Gmail alerts, and 25 open browser tabs. The minimal cognitive effort given to answering questions may exacerbate all the problems that lead to biased or outright distorted results.

It's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com , the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you?

Photograph Daryl Visscher Illustration by Gluekit Amit Bhatia, Founder and CEO of Aspire. Illustration by Gluekit .blue { color:rgb(0,113,146); font-weight:bold; } BIG IDEA: To supply India's booming economy with millions of young workers who come from rural and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Ever since Johannes Kepler traipsed over half of Europe wooing aristocratic patrons, scientists have grumbled about money.

Fitting a gasoline-powered car engine with frikkin' laser spark plugs may seem like one sci-fi step too far, but since it improves the combustion and cleans-up the exhaust, it may be the gas engine's last gasp before the electric revolution comes. The design of the spark plug really hasn't changed very much since the gasoline engine was invented--they're a device that creates an electric spark across a very precise small gap to ignite the fuel mixture in each cylinder, and apart from improving their materials and reliability there's not much you can do to tweak that. The problem with spark plugs is that they're not particularly good at their raison d'être.

Greenpeace is on a mission to expose major corporations and government agencies involved in shady activities--and it wants your help. Greenpeace is on a mission to expose major corporations and government agencies involved in shady activities--by posting thousands of Freedom of Information Act documents on highly publicized websites. If Greenpeace's tactics work, the organization could change the way companies do business, or at least force them to better hide incriminating documents.

Ramon Ray, journalist and editor at Smallbiztechnology.com , sums it up perfectly: "Small businesses can do BIG things using low-cost technology and readily available expertise." It doesn't matter if you're running a business out of your home, the local Starbucks (free Internet), or an abandoned warehouse, if you have the right tools to reel in a large consumer base, it's not necessarily important how small your business is because it's doing big things.

Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Is this the end of hyperconsumption

Israel's cabinet on Sunday announced it had approved the country's membership in the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, becoming the research group's first non-European delegation.

An International team of scientists in the XENON collaboration, including several from the Weizmann Institute, announced on Thursday the results of their search for the elusive component of our universe known as dark matter. This search was conducted with greater sensitivity than ever before.

At South by Southwes t Interactive this year, one couldn't walk 10 feet without hearing about a new app that connected you to people, places, or deals near your present location. Many, like the location-aware app game Dokobots, use Foursquare as a template. Others, such as Yobongo or Meet Gatsby, match users up with people nearby to chat with, ask advice from, or meet

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

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