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Welcome to the world of sales training 2.0, where innovators are leveraging new technologyand new thinkingto make better sales people. Eric Richardson believes there's a serious disconnect in the world of sales.

Back in November I took the Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac program, a boot camp for aspiring entrepreneurs. I spent seven days over four weeks immersed in researching, developing, and vetting my business idea with 26 other would-be entrepreneurs from across New York City. It was intense and an experience I can’t recommend enough.

The medical cannabis industry is exploding.

Though some experts would argue that a company name doesn't affect the success of a business, there is a thing or two that small businesses can learn from the corporate giants that have turned their names into high-profile brands. When it came to finding a simple company name, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company had its hands full.

I think it's possible. However even more possible, I think, is that a Steve Ballmer departure is inevitable. Last year, I wrote a posting on this blog (tongue in cheek at the time) entitled "Why I want Bill Gates Back"

The news prompted its PR team to send out a self-congratulatory note to journalists featuring the provocative subject-line, "Dropbox who?" File-sharing service YouSendIt.com recently shared some impressive numbers with us: The Campbell, California-based company surpassed 30 million unique users in the past 12 months. The news prompted its PR team to send out a self-congratulatory note to journalists featuring the provocative subject-line, "Dropbox who?" The goosed growth comes on the heels of YouSendIt's partnership with Yahoo Mail, which helped add a million users in roughly two months. But the uptick also comes at a difficult time for file-sharing services, which have been joined by more and more competitors eager to enter the lucrative cloud space

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong didn't have to go very far to discover his company was struggling. He just asked one of his employees

For Amazon, the deep discount wasn't a random bout of charity--it represented a huge opportunity to present consumers with an alternative to iTunes, and to introduce its cloud-based music service. How'd that go? Behold, the power of Lady Gaga.

Good news: Bee deaths aren't getting worse. Bad news: Bees are still dying at an alarming rate

Don't get him wrong: Fred Gittes is, in his words, "extremely squeamish."

"My life and biz is so intertwined in every way that it's hard to make that clean separation on and offline." That's what Candace Alper (@ NameYourTuneCDs ) said on Twitter when I asked about the importance of separating your personal and business life on Facebook. As an entrepreneur who runs a made-to-order children's CD company, she is comfortable mixing business with pleasure online

A 25-year-old Columbia Professor of Journalism, Vadim Lavrusik, is Mark Zuckerberg's media macher. Facebook now accounts for more than 5% of traffic for many major news outlets. As the Internet floods users with options from every possible newspaper simultaneously, many began filtering the firehouse of information through Mark Zuckerberg's site, using their friends' recommendations as an alternative to visiting the websites themselves.

The cheap furniture giant's products are getting more stable, and they are now making more from less. Everyone's favorite Swedish furniture superstore is among the best places to buy cheap, easy-to-assemble furniture

New experiments find that cell phone signals don't just confuse bees, they off them.

In a four-decade, Holy Grail-like quest to fully understand what it means to be in a "supersolid" state, physicists have found that supersolid isn't always super solid. In other words, this exotic state of frozen helium appears to have liquid-like properties, says a new paper published in the journal Science on May 13, 2011.