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

Everything that needs to be said of Steve Jobs has already been written. Here's the most meta version of the story you will read online, offline, and everywhere else. If you read only one story about Steve Jobs today (yeah, right) make it this one

It's often tough to explain startups and new tech and what they do, especially if no one's ever done it before.

In the future, students will use social networks for more than planning keggers. If Groupon's backers have anything to say about it

"She doesn’t need customization," WePay co-founder Rich Aberman says of a Nebraska theater major. "She just wants to get up and running quickly." Let’s say you’re a 20 year-old college student, and you want a simple way to sell the crafts you make as a hobby to help fund a summer trip. Where do you go?

Sending young entrepreneurs to companies outside of major cities gives struggling economies an infusion of new talent, and budding business people a chance to be at the front lines of innovative startups. Schools and startups in economically challenged areas share a similar problem: a difficulty in attracting and retaining young talent. Teach For America has worked for decades towards fixing the education issue by placing top-notch college graduates in struggling schools.

Every week, the guys who funded the daily-deals powerhouse Groupon toss out a lottery ticket of sorts and let six completely unvetted entrepreneurs come in and pitch them. They’re calling it “Office Hours,” and while they’re hoping it will help them find the next big thing, they also believe it will simply play a role in juiceing up the entrepreneurial community in their home base of Chicago, which, they say, will produce long-term benefits of its own.

B Lab--a nonprofit that certifies sustainable businesses--is riding a wave of interest in social responsibility for corporations. Now it has plans to expand even wider as states around the country begin to give tax breaks to its companies

With 750 million members, the social network will no longer base success on user numbers but on the cool stuff they make using Facebook. This week Google launched its first step in revolutionizing the social network as you know it

Screw austerity: The E.U.'s science spending, which is running at about US$79 billion for the current 2007-2013 period, is getting a boost to $114 billion for 2014-2020. The E.U.'s proposal recognizes that only by spending money on innovation and future tech can income growth be assured.

I recently ran into an entrepreneur on whose board I sat during my venture capital years. We awkwardly shook hands and then quickly slipped into a conversation that seemed to pick back up on the last one we had years ago. Back when I was the VC and he was the entrepreneur, we had been on opposite sides of a tense situation.

In Silicon Valley the Campbell Union School District 's sprinklers used to dutifully water the soccer fields and gardens at 12 campuses even during spring showers. Temporarily shutting off each of the 45 irrigation control boxes, by hand, wasn't worth the custodians' time.

A big chunk of change dropped into the mobile payments company’s lap this week when Kleiner Perkins signed on as an investor. Square's COO, Keith Rabois, tells us where the dough will go.

When business owners want a new logo, website, or graphic design work, it's often an arduous and intimidating process that can involve filtering through vast numbers of freelancers' portfolios. Enter 99designs , a four-year-old online marketplace that is quickly becoming to graphic design what Craigslist is to housing listings

In the midst of the Egyptian revolution, David Gorodyansky and Eugene Malobrodsky, co-founders of AnchorFree , came in to work one sunny morning and realized something peculiar: Overnight, their company had scored about a million new customers in Egypt. "It was absolutely fascinating," says Gorodyansky. "Our original idea for AnchorFree was to make your Facebook and e-mail become just as secure as a banking site.

What do you do if creative agencies are constantly bugging you to create new ways to promote brands on your network? Hold a competition