Diving into an extremely competitive and capital-intensive business in which customers generally don’t appreciate having access to beta products is not a good way to enhance your personal fortune. In fact, if Elon Musk is being honest in the latest court filings related to his divorce proceedings, it looks like a great way to vaporize a fortune.
After selling Paypal to eBay in 2002, Musk and his partners netted $1.5 billion. An unknown portion of that went to Musk, who promptly turned around and invested several hundred million into not …

May has been a bad month for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just turned 26 last Friday but spent his birthday wrestling with an uproar over Facebook’s privacy practices. The latest unwelcome gift: accusations of securities fraud from former Harvard schoolmates who say he and other Facebook executives tricked them into a supposed $65 million settlement that was actually worth far less.
Divya Narendra and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (pictured above) contend that they hired Zuckerberg to work on their social network, ConnectU, when they were all students at …

A group of twelve Massachusetts-based CEOs and 12 venture capitalists have formed a new initiative in which they will pair off and form 12 new businesses during the next year, the group announced on Friday at The Nantucket Conference, an annual conference that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, and executives. The first “12×12” company, LighterLiving, was also announced today. The company is an online “community, blog, and marketplace for holistic fitness and well-being,” founded by Marjolein Brugman, a Pilates expert. Scott Savitz, founder and CEO of Shoebuy.com, will serve …

As founder of the Internet’s hottest startup, Foursquare Dennis Crowley knows a thing or two about growing a small business.
Foursquare is a location-sharing mobile app that lets users check-in to venues, share that check-in with their friends and social media sites, and discover friends, tips, and popular places nearby. The startup launched one year ago, has attracted massive press coverage, and has grown to around 600,000 members.
This isn’t Crowley’s first success story as a technology entrepreneur, and given that he’s also worked for Google, his perspective is colored with …

When I came to the U.S. in 1980, I was young and naïve. I used to think that corruption and ethical lapses were just a third-world ill. Eventually, I became a tech CEO and learned the harsh realities of American business. Yes, standards are much higher, and breaches are punished, but the temptations are just the same here as they are in any other country. Ethical lapses (which are a form of corruption) are quite common. You watch stories about these on TV every other day and read about …

As Peter Drucker once wrote, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times.
After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort.
To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different …

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson …

People often attempt to have conversations with others on Twitter, but if it goes more than a few tweets deep, it’s a mess. FriendFeed was a better haven for conversations, but those were often just based on tweets moved over to a small community — a community which is quickly fading. A new service launching in beta today, LiveFyre, is focused on reworking how we have conversations on the web.
“What doesn’t exist is a place to have intelligent, face-paced, realtime conversations,” LiveFyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer tells us. He notes …

The magazine industry is falling over itself over a new shiny object. It wants to remake its product for a new class of digital tablets with color screens and touch screens. Today, a group of big publishers—Condé Nast, Time Inc., News Corp. Hearst, and Meredith—announced a joint venture to create standards for digital magazines to be read on tablets, e-readers, Web phones, and the like. The consortium will also create a digital newsstand to sell electronic copies of its magazines. These will be more like downloadable apps than Websites—think …

Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the service desk all with a built in analytics system.
On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring …

You can now own the trademarks, patents, designs and data that made American IronHorse a legend in its own time.

American IronHorse Motorcycle Company was once the country’s #1 production-custom motorcycle manufacturer. During its 14 years of business, the company ascended to unparalleled success by offering some of the industry’s most innovative bike designs and developing more than 350 proprietary parts.
Building heavyweight cruisers and choppers, American IronHorse earned recognition for head-turning designs with asphalt-melting horsepower. Over 14,000 passionate American IronHorse owners enjoyed a “never be tamed” attitude that was built …

A buzz technology right now, augmented reality apps are quickly gaining momentum on the iPhone. So to add to the quick overview of six AR apps we brought you earlier, we sort the digital wheat from the pixellated chaff to bring you ten AR apps for the iPhone that vary from functional, to educational, to just plain fun.
Read more (including the list and links) at: Mashable
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{Photography by Brett L.}

I wasn’t sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we’d funded. What hadn’t I written about yet?
I’m in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.
So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This …

Kids these days. It seems like they’re writing HTML before they learn how to talk. And a lot of them are starting companies before they graduate from high school.
Here’s a list of some of our favorite teen entrepreneurs. And please keep in mind that there are lots of startups we’ve yet to hear about. So if you are a young entrepreneur, make sure to leave a comment below and add you bio and startup information to CrunchBase.
Read more at: TechCrunch
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{Photography by Rodrigo Favera}

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working …

Given cutbacks, not all employees are playing nice when they quit

Richard Laermer, CEO of New York-based RLM PR, has noticed a disturbing trend lately. Employees who quit aren’t giving the customary two weeks’ notice, and some are even breaking noncompete agreements they signed.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” he says. “After 19 years of doing this job, as a CEO no less, I find myself shocked at how people are doing this.”
Laermer suspects it all started after he announced layoffs in November and then canceled the Christmas party.
Many of the employees …

It’s wildly popular – and thought to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now questions are being asked about the future of YouTube. Rhodri Marsden investigates a mystery of digital-age ‘freeconomics’

It must surely rank as the most mundane business launch in history. Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, shuffles timidly in front of a video camera while standing in front of a group of elephants at San Diego zoo, with precious little idea of what he was starting. “The cool thing about these guys,” …

These are the companies with the right mix of the right stuff — business acumen, a great plug-in product and a marketing plan. Don’t be surprised if at least one of these companies becomes as big as (or bigger than) General Motors. (Read more at: mnn / Mother Nature Network)
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{Photography by Ed Callow/TorqueSkeak}

The Chromomulator takes the top 100 Google searches at the moment (from Google Trends) and scours the web, collecting related news, blog posts, pictures, and videos for each search. If you need to know everything about what’s hot on the net right now, the Chromomulator can tell you. Updated several times daily. (Read more at: chromomulator.com)