Want to live in a world of less digital clutter? Try this email management app.

I tend to get about 100 messages a day. That's down from about 300 before I started actively managing my inbox.

In a fairly recent column in the magazine, I wrote about both SaneBox and Unroll.me and how they helped me get some sanity. I'm still using both on a regular basis, but I can't say they have completely solved the email crisis for me.

Part of the problem is the nature of my job: I'm a tech columnist so I'm inundated with pitches, edits, feedback letters--the whole works. It's a win for me--I receive great ideas and communicate directly with some incredibly smart people, but the influx is also a time-suck.

Inbox zero is an admirable goal. Studies show we're more productive when we have less clutter around us. But many of the tools I've tried focus on broad categorization and not action.

Recently, I tried a new app called Mailstrom. First off, I really like the name. It's a play on maelstrom ("a violent or turbulent situation," indeed). The sign-up process is painless: You just type in your email account and password, then approve the access.

Analyzing my inbox took a good 30 minutes; then I received a notice informing me I could start using the app. The idea is to do some housecleaning and stay at zero each day. I'm a good test subject because I had a few dozen emails--some waiting to be archived, a few that only needed some minor attention, and plenty of extra fluff.

The app splits email into buckets but they're not intended to stay there. The one for Sender shows grouped emails. If you don't really need to deal with that topic anymore, you can delete all the related messages in two clicks. You can also view by time--say, all messages older than three months ago. You can continue to chop away at your inbox by removing social networking notices and shopping-related messages.

My favorite feature is the size bucket. You can see messages over 10MB, between one and 10MB, and under one MB. In a few seconds, you can remove huge emails with attachments that tend to slow down email processing. In all, I culled all of my Gmail messages down to zero in about 10 minutes, which is impressive. The same management chore would have taken three times as long without Mailstrom, especially since Gmail provides no way to see large emails. (An upcoming version of Gmail will provide similar categorization.)

Mailstrom works with Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL, or any IMAP email service. It's entirely free. You'll see some nifty charts as well that show your time of use (say, if you mostly get emails in the morning or at night) and a quick tally of your zero-state (how many messages you've received today and how close you are to zero).

I plan to keep using it--and living with less email clutter.

These days you can learn more than ever before, and do it when you want, and where you want to. That's a great thing.

To make a virtual office function well, you may need to take some extreme measures. These companies did--and they're better off for it.

Do you have employees in multiple locations? Do you have employees working from home?

Great--but how do you ensure a distributed workforce comes together to create an outstanding team?

The following is a guest post from Walter Chen, co-founder of iDoneThis, a team management tool that makes it easy for people to share what they've gotten done. (Here's a post of mine about essential online tools that includes a description of iDoneThis.)

Here's Walter:

Distributed work run entirely against the way we've been socialized to work: We commute to an office, we make small talk at the water cooler, we shuffle into conference rooms for meetings... that's how we get stuff done.

You wouldn't put a physical office together without putting some thought into layout, furniture, and environment. Just because virtual offices do away with those traditional considerations doesn't mean there's less to think about.

That's why successful teams not only acknowledge and address the challenges of having a distributed team, they take exaggerated measures to ensure that they succeed.

To make a virtual office function well, you may need to take extreme measures and invent new ways to work together:

1. Share everything about yourself with your team.

Your employees probably don't know how much their co-workers make (much less their bosses, or even you), how much they sleep, or the specific steps they're taking to improve themselves. But those are exactly the details they share every day at Buffer, a social media marketing start-up with team members around the world.

When you're co-located with your team you gain an incredible wealth of contextual information about your teammates just by being around them. While those details may seem superfluous or trivial, that richness of context breeds trust.

Distributed teams get none of that, and that's why Buffer took such a deliberate approach to making sure that its team has context. Extreme transparency is a fundamental value in their company. Every employee at Buffer receives a Jawbone UP wristband that tracks how you're sleeping, if you're walking enough, and more, which is all shared with the team.

They also use our productivity app, iDoneThis. Everyone at Buffer, including the executive team, logs what they got done, what they're doing, and how they can improve--and they do that every single day.

2. Turn your webcam on--and leave it on all day.

Tapping someone on the shoulder to talk feels so easy, it seems strange that spontaneously Skyping your colleague seems like such an intrusion. The distinction is big enough that I personally never Skype someone without a prearranged meeting.

And since scheduling is a nuisance too, that often means I let opportunities for virtual face-to-face moments with my colleagues slip.

When Foursquare opened its first office outside of New York in San Francisco, they proactively took a drastic step to address the problem and make sure their teams on opposite coasts would stay connected. They took the typical idea of videoconferencing and gave it an unconventional twist, creating what they call "The Portal."

While most videoconferencing takes place according to preplanned meetings in separate conference rooms, the Foursquare team devised The Portal as a video conference system that was always turned on and running in the primary work area rather than in a little-used room.

You can walk up to The Portal in San Francisco and wave good morning to your colleague in New York and start a spontaneous conversation. Daily stand-ups take place in front of The Portal, bypassing all the nuisances associated with setting up a call, like struggling to connect, reconnecting after a call drops, and waiting to invite other participants.

For distributed teams without a Foursquare-sized budget there's Sqwiggle, an always-on video chat system that shows your team what you look like in your pajamas. Sqwiggle works like The Portal except that it only uses your webcam and monitor, not thousands of dollars of Cisco videoconferencing equipment.

3. Wake up at 3 a.m. every morning. Seriously.

If your teammate is sleeping while you're working because you live in different time zones it can take an entire two-day cycle to resolve an issue that would otherwise take minutes. Projects fall behind schedule, but worse yet, small frustrations and setbacks accumulate and become hugely demoralizing.

Qualtrics, a rapidly growing analytics company, solved this problem--but the solution required every employee to start work at 3 a.m. every day for a year: They synced time zones with their European customers to share the exact same work day.

Imagine selling that to your team.

Qualtrics took this extreme measure to ensure they could work synchronously with their clients and resolve issues in real time rather than let time zone issues force problems to roll over from one day to the next without resolution.

In addition, since the second-hardest part of time zone syncing is time zone math (the hardest part of time zone syncing is starting your workday at an ungodly hour) Every Time Zone is an invaluable tool, providing a visual guide to the local time around the world.

4. Overcommunicate, overcommunicate, and overcommunicate some more.

When you work in a virtual team you lose the primary way you have communicated with people your whole life: face-to-face conversations. Without face-to-face access, communication often flags, creating inefficiencies or, worse, loneliness and disengagement.

Laura Roeder, founder of LKR Social Media, a social media education company with a distributed team, had an insight on how communication happens on distributed teams that led her to adopt an extreme policy.

When a team works virtually, it loses the power of shared physical space. So instead, technology becomes that shared space. Just like a company might have an office area, a kitchen, a conference room, and a relaxation area--all kinds of physical spaces to catalyze different types of employee interaction--a virtual team must use a varied range of technological conversation channels.

Rather than be like some companies that only use email, at LKR Social Media they use six times as many tools. They use Yammer for water cooler conversation, iDoneThis to keep everyone in the loop on work status, Google Hangout for video conferencing, Skype for one-on-one calls, PB Works as an internal Wiki, and Wrike for structured conversation about projects.

Forget the one-hour interview, says the founder of energy drink company Solixir. Try these tactics instead.

In a start-up company, every employee counts, and it's important to have a talented, smart, enthusiastic person in every job. But you can't afford to pay the salaries such employees usually command.

"The reality is you're not going to be able to pay market rates as an entrepreneur. You need to compensate for the higher level of talent you can't initially pay for," says Scott Lerner, founder of Solixir, a seven-person company which makes all-natural energy drinks. "So you need to take a step back and take a careful look at the talent you're hiring."

That's why the standard interview process won't cut it for a start-up, Lerner says. "It's not plug-and-play like it was when we hired at Pepsi," he adds. (Lerner was a PepsiCo executive before starting his own company.) "You need to move beyond the resume and get insight into the person. You can't do that in an hour-long interview--and references really don't amount to anything."

What does Lerner recommend instead?

1. Try them before you hire them.

For lower level positions, give prospective employees a thorough test by first hiring them as interns, or give college students part-time jobs with a view to possible full-time employment when they graduate. "If I can find those opportunities, especially for inexperienced folks, it covers our backside and gives them a chance to see how our company works," Lerner says.

It's important not to let people know they're being considered for full-time employment during this trial period. "I've told them in the past it was a tryout, and it was a mistake," he says. "It corrupts the process. If they know that's in front of them, they may take less money, or work harder."

And, he notes, most of the people he tries out wouldn't make it as full-time employees. "It's a weeding-out process," he says. "It's not over the course of a week, it's over two or three months seeing them in action."

This means Lerner must plan well in advance. For instance, if he knows he'll need a new field marketing person in December, he'll start looking in June for appropriate college students to hire as interns or part time. "By October or November I'll feel comfortable offering someone a full-time position," he says.

2. Go to lunch.

Internships and part-time tryouts work great for hiring lower level employees, but not for senior positions, Lerner notes. Yet getting the right employees in responsible positions is crucial, and start-ups can't afford to pay competitive rates for them. "We can't hire someone from Red Bull at a senior level position," he says. "I'd rather hire someone with less experience but an extremely aggressive personality who's ready to grow."

To identify candidates who fit that profile, Lerner says it's important to get to know a job-seeker outside the confines of the interview. Often he takes them out to one or more lunches. "First and foremost, I like to get them out of the standard environment and understand who the candidate is as a person," he says. "Will they want to work for me? Will they work well in our culture?"

When seeking to get to know someone, it's important to keep in mind that asking certain questions of a job candidate remains illegal, whether you do it in your office or over a burger. Lerner says he only asks candidates the same questions he'd ask as part of a standard job interview.

3. Take a tour.

You learn a lot about a potential candidate by walking him or her through your operation or marketplace. "That might be having them come along with me, shadowing me on an in-store demonstration or walking through a store and chatting about the candidates' experiences and the energy drink category," Lerner says. "What I've found is that I can learn their thought process, whether they're going to gel with how I think about the category and how aggressive their thinking is."

4. Don't talk titles.

"If a person is really into titles, in my opinion, that's the kiss of death in a start-up," Lerner says. It might mean the candidate will be rigid about the parameters of his or her job. "You might need someone in a CFO position, but that person will also have to do other things--that's the nature of the beast. It's such a flat structure that you have to be a generalist."

For instance, he says, on a recent day his company's CFO headed to a grocery store with other Solixir employees to put drinks on the shelves. "We'd just gotten into the store and we had to put the product out," Lerner explains. (He himself was back at the office packing up boxes for a UPS pick-up.)

In fact, he prefers to have people start their jobs with no title at all. "There's always a job description," he says. "But when it comes to titles, a better way is, 'Hey Tom, you're working for us. And we'll figure out later what your title is.'"

Think requiring companies to pay interns is a good idea? It's not.

When a U.S. federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight had illegally not paid a couple of interns, people started to freak out. This is fantastic! Now all interns will be paid! Yeah, peace on earth! Prosperity for all!

Make no mistake. The law has not changed. This ruling is not shocking. The former interns won at the summary judgment phase, which means there was no courtroom drama. ("And then the boss told me to get lunch!" countered with, "He volunteered! It wasn't part of his assigned duties!") It just means that the court considered what happened and said, "Well, this was patently wrong."

What has changed is people's perceptions of the law. And while it is a good thing that companies will not be able to blatantly break the law, the end result will be bad for college students.

Why? We already know that college is expensive, and that having a degree does not guarantee a job. We also know that your best chance of getting a job after getting that shiny new degree is if you have a slew of internships on your resume. Without those, you don't stand out. It's hard to convince a hiring manager that you are ready to be a financial analyst with a transcript and three summers working fast food. They want someone who has experience.

Internships have been the way people gained experience. Companies were willing to take on interns as a sort of community service as well as the ability to get some of grunt work done for free. Though the latter has been illegal for a very long time, it's mostly ignored. Now, it can't be.

More companies will be paying for their interns: It sounds good on its face. But it also means that some companies, particularly small ones, will just skip the interns altogether. If they have to pay, then why hire someone completely inexperienced who will only be there for three months anyway? Why not hire a real person who has experience and will stick around past the training phase? Which means the number of internships available will drop.

This is not good news. Because up until now, college students were willing to exchange 20 hours a week for three to six months in return for something on their resumes and a recommendation from someone other than a professor or the lady they used to babysit for. With fewer internships available, competition for internships will increase.

And who will get the internships when there are fewer slots available? The students at the top colleges, and the ones with the most connections. Which means those who have powerful parents will be the ones getting the more limited supply of internships. This is not helpful to the average person whose mom is not a senior VP at a Fortune 100 company or whose dad doesn't own his own business.

While some are clamoring for an Intern Bill of Rights, and other interns are filing lawsuits, which prompted Reuters to declare that a wave of intern lawsuits was just beginning, I'm saying why should we prevent students from exchanging 20 hours a week of their time for some experience and a reference? Why take that opportunity away from them?

We already allow people go go into debt to obtain degrees that are unlikely to help them be profitable. Companies aren't charging students to be interns, like colleges charge them to be students, and at the end of it, an internship will make you far more marketable than an A in any number of classes.

People don't take jobs--or internships--unless they think they will be better off than they would be without the experience. If no interns want to sign up for a free internship, the companies will rapidly learn that they have to pay. On the other hand, if people are lining up around the block for the experience, it has shown itself to have more value than just a scant paycheck.

The reason so many companies were able to get away with violating the law (because it really was so clear that Connecticut Employment lawyer, Daniel Schwartz, described the ruling as "far from shocking," on Twitter) was because interns didn't want to complain because they were afraid they wouldn't get any internships, which then lowers their chance of getting a real job upon graduation. In other words, they were choosing to work for free because the benefits of doing so were greater than the benefits of working for pay in an area unrelated to their chosen fields.

What I want to see is more college students getting real world experience, not less. And the more regulation we heap on internships, the less real world experience will be available.

For businesses driven by creativity, hard work doesn't always result in success. In fact, it could hold you back.

Why are some entrepreneurs luckier than others? You are not imagining it-some people truly do have better, more predictable outcomes than others. Some serial entrepreneurs may have several successful hits in a row, and others may struggle through several businesses and never get traction.

The popular thought is that if you work hard, you will succeed. This may be true for many smaller service businesses--an accounting firm, say, or a dental practice--since there isn't a lot of mystery about market timing or product-market fit. For these businesses, the model is well defined and there are numerous predecessors that serve as models. For innovation-driven businesses, however, the outcome is much more uncertain. You can work hard, but you may not succeed. Even more vexing are stories about reluctant entrepreneurs who succeed despite themselves.

Clearly, there is more to the story than simply working hard. The key appears to be your ability to encounter and recognize opportunities. In a 1999 psychology experiment at Harvard University known as "Gorillas In Our Midst," Dr. Daniel Simmons asked a number of study participants to watch a group dribbling basketballs and to count the total number of times the balls were dribbled. Halfway through the video, a six-foot tall man in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the spectacle, stopped in the middle, and pounded his chest a few times, before walking away. Afterwards, the study participants were asked who saw the gorilla. Surprisingly, more than half of them did not.

A later study by European Sociologist Dr. Richard Wiseman expanded on this research in a book called The Luck Factor. In Wiseman's seminal study on the subject, he asked a group of participants to count the number of images inside a newspaper. They were given two minutes to complete the exercise, and most people used the full amount of time given to count and doublecheck their answers. A couple of participants however confidently completed the activity within mere seconds, both of them having the right answer. It turns out that, on page two of the newspaper, Dr Wiseman had taken out a one-half page advertisement that read, "Stop counting. The answer is 43. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250."

These studies illustrate a concept called inattention blindness. When we're too focused on solving problems, we often do not observe the opportunities right in front of us. Ironically, the answer to improving your luck, then, is not working harder-it actually might be the opposite. If you find that you are always doing "heads down" work and frustrated that you're not reaching your goals, it may be time to turn off the computer and go to an industry networking event or mingle with your customers. Have a drink and engage in conversation. Not only might you have the opportunity to reframe the problem in a way you hadn't thought about before, you might even make a few connections who can help you reach your destination a little faster.

When you are trying to innovate and create new opportunity, it is important to be able to step back to see the big picture. Sometimes, it is only when you've stepped back and stopped thinking about the problems you're trying to solve that you can see things from a new perspective. So don't forget to take a little time to step back from productive work. You might feel guilty, but it could be the only way you'll see opportunity right under your nose.

You can't keep working 18 hour days and expect to be uber productive. What you need is a good night's sleep. Here's how to get it.

To be truly productive, you have to start with a good night's sleep. Easier said than done, right? Well, the good news is there are plenty of sleep apps on the market that can help you monitor and improve your sleep--whether you want to get a full eight hours rest or just want to maximize nap time.

So for you, busy entrepreneur, here are seven apps each with a unique approach to helping you catch some healthful zzz's.

JetLag Genie

For the traveling entrepreneur: After you submit your flight information and personal sleep pattern data to JetLag Genie, the iPhone sleep travel app formulates a plan to ward off the haze of jet lag. Personalized plans prepare you to shift your sleep schedule pre-departure, during the flight, and at your destination, so you can remain a step ahead of looming jet lag. JetLag Genie also includes a melatonin guide, so that you know when the naturally occurring compound, which regulates circadian rhythms needs a boost.

Pzizz

Have trouble falling asleep? Pzizz uses the combination of a calming voice and relaxing music to lull you to sleep, and offers sleep and power nap modules, the latter of which can be used for as little as 10 minutes. The app, available on iPhone and Android, also generates a new, unique soundscape every time you use it so that you won't get bored with a repetitive set of sounds.

Sleep Cycle

If you're getting enough sleep, but never feel rested, here's the problem: you're likely waking up from a deep sleep phase. Sleep Cycle is an app that uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor movement and analyze sleep patters to determine when to wake you, the bio-alarm clock only nudging you to consciousness when you're in the lightest phase of sleep.

Relax Completely

There isn't, of course, always time to slip into eight hours of proper sleep. When all you have is a short time to take a break, Relax Completely offers a hypnosis session, on iPhone or Android, guided by one of the UK's leading hypnotherapists and trainers, Darren Marks.

Sleep Talk Recorder

Ever wondered what, or whether, you mumble during sleep? Sleep Talk Recorder, available for Android and iOS, can help you get to the bottom of your nocturnal musings, recording everything you say while you snooze. The app only records sounds, usually in short intervals, so there's no prolonged or blank recording. You can even go public with nighttime mumblings, sharing via Sleep Talk's main feed.

Jawbone Up

Want to get a sense of how sleep is effecting your overall health? Jawbone Up, a wristband that tracks your movement and sleep, keeps tabs on your light and deep sleep, waking moments, every movement, food intake, moods, and reminds you to get moving when you've been inactive for too long. It connects with a dashboard app on iPhone or Android to organize and evaluate your data. Jawbone Up can also link to other apps such as RunKeeper, MyFitnessPal, or MapMyFitness to evaluate your progress and devise a holistic plan to get healthy.

SnoreLab

Snoring keeping you up? Using the microphone in your iPhone, SnoreLab monitors your nightly snores and measures their intensity. This means you can test the effectiveness of snoring remedies and measure the impact of outside factors, such as alcohol, on your snoring. The app, which can be paired with anti-snoring mouthpiece VitalSleep to advance the lower jaw and reduce obstruction of the airways, is said to be particularly beneficial to snorers who are overweight, experience pauses in breathing while sleeping, or have mild to moderate obstructive-sleep apnea.

If you examine Amazon's grocery delivery service, AmazonFresh, you can clearly see a strategy centered on failure.

Only one father of the dot-com boom is still innovating today--Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Let's look at one of Bezos’ innovation initiatives; its grocery delivery service, AmazonFresh. E-groceries is a small, unprofitable market, but Bezos views that as a challenge to his innovative spirit.

After all, the $603 billion grocery industry sports 1.1 percent profit margin. And with consumers buying 1.2 percent of that amount online, it remains to be seen whether anyone can make a decent return on investment in e-groceries.

Take a look at the landscape: Webvan is the best example of a company that tried and failed in that quest. It raised $375 million in its November 1999 initial public offering, achieving a peak stock market value of $1.2 billion. The company bragged about its 26-city expansion plan, signing a $1 billion Bechtel contract to build high-tech warehouses worth $30 million each. Then, it filed for bankruptcy in July 2001, after losing money every year.

A better model of online grocery delivery is FreshDirect. As I learned in a May 2010 interview with its CEO, Richard Braddock, a former Citigroup executive, FreshDirect was founded in 2004 on the idea of making a profit.

And FreshDirect has done that. “In 2009, FreshDirect generated more than $250 million in revenue and it has been profitable since 2008 and was substantially profitable in 2009.”Braddock made the business profitable by operating in the densely populated New York region before expanding to Philadelphia in 2012,

Bezos clearly took a lesson from FreshDirect’s success. AmazonFresh started in 2007 in the Medina and Mercer Island neighborhoods of Seattle and by 2012 had spread to other Seattle communities. On June 10, the service rolled out to a limited number of Los Angeles zipcodes.

Bezos, as I see it, has also taken four lessons from Webvan’s failure:

1. Hire those in charge of a failed strategy.

If you wanted to get into a new business, you could not be faulted for hiring someone who had been spectacularly successful in that new business to run your operation. But Bezos did the opposite-- hiring executives responsible for Webvan’s failed strategy.

AmazonFresh is led by Doug Herrington, Peter Ham, Mick Mountz and Mark Mastandrea, former Webvan officials who had spent years analyzing and fixing the problems that led to its demise.

Hiring people who have failed is hardly a guarantee of future success. But it seems to be working for Bezos because these four Webvan vets know the business intimately, have thought about what they did wrong, and are eager to prove that they can apply the lessons learned to revive their reputations.

2. Acquire technology invented by the failed executive.

A few years ago, a colleague who studied at MIT with Mountz invited me to meet him at his robotics company, Kiva Systems. Mountz built Kiva on ideas and technologies originally developed at Webvan and that are a key part of AmazonFresh’s strategy.

When I saw Kiva’s product in action, I was blown away. It consisted of huge frisbee-shaped robots that could be steered via a grid of floor magnets. The robots picked up the warehouse rack containing the item in the customer order and delivered it to the operator. He picked the item from the rack; scanned its barcode to verify that it was correct; and put the item in a carboard box with that customer’s shipping label.

In 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva for $775 million in one of its largest-ever acquisitions.

3. Focus on attractive micro-segments.

While the grocery industry is huge, only a tiny fraction of that market is attractive as a place to operate an online grocery business. Finding those micro-segments is a crucial element of AmazonDirect’s strategy.

Webvan executives later realized that it makes sense to segment markets based on mean travel time between delivery stops. For example, a single block in San Francisco may house 200 people, while one block in Moraga only has six.

AmazonFresh and FreshDirect only deliver to densely populated areas. Certain neighborhoods in Seattle have many front doors with AmazonFresh totes. That’s where Amazon saw the lowest mean travel time between deliveries.

4. Fix the business model before expanding.

One of the most interesting points of the Webvan case that I taught in my Competitive Environment and Strategy class was the company’s obsession with getting big fast-- its then-CEO, George Shaheen, likened running Webvan to building a rocket to Mars.

Mike Moritz, a Webvan board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, said that Webvan “committed the cardinal sin of retail, which is to expand into a new territory before we had demonstrated success in the first market.” According to Moritz, Webvan was failing in the Bay Area market even as it expanded into other regions.

Through AmazonFresh’s very gradual expansion, Bezos demonstrated that he learned from that Webvan mistake.

The four lessons he applied from Webvan’s flop highlight Bezos’ broader lesson for start-ups: winning flows from focusing the best brains and technology on making life better for consumers.

Having trouble staying productive when you're not in the office? These apps improve your workflow by storing data in the cloud.

Working in the cloud can feel like you're disconnected from reality. You don't have a desk or an office, so even those minor accouterments of business (say, paper clips and a stapler) are not available.

Yet, the benefits of working in the cloud often outweigh this weightlessness: being able to write up a Google Doc report from your own living room or finishing up your accounting while waiting in the lobby of a hotel. Mobility means freedom.

For smart mobile workers, having the right tools can make all of the difference. You can replicate that real cubicle setting and still work at your local coffee shop. Here are a few of my recent discoveries, along with a few reasons why they help you stay productive.

1. OfficeScope
What I like most about the doc-sharing app OfficeScope is that it is designed for real business. We're not just living on an island, sharing documents with co-workers. You can set up a central repository and let vendors, partners, and contractors share docs. There are scanning features that help you move paper documents to the cloud as well.

2. Producteev
Some advocates of working only at the office (I'm looking at you, Yahoo) say it is hard to stay productive otherwise. They probably don't use Producteev, a social task management app for teams. The app runs on multiple browsers, major mobile operating systems, and even as a Mac app. For those in a hurry, you can check an activity stream to find out who is working on what.

3. SweetProcess
That old-school knowledge-base that runs only on your corporate server? It's not exactly accessible from your phone when you're at the mall. SweetProcess addresses the problem. You can capture company knowledge in the cloud, then tap in from anywhere. Say you need to fill out an HR form properly--SweetProcess works on the Web, tablets, and as a phone app. You can check training and procedures for your particular job.

4. MailBox App
Hardcore e-mail apps like Outlook are great--if you're in the office or using a computer. Mailbox App is different because it speeds up your workflow. (You do know you are working when you check e-mail, right? It's one of the most repetitive things we do.) You can tap to snooze on an unimportant e-mail, or swipe to archive messages.

5. Blue Jeans
No, I'm not talking about a new pair of Levis. This videoconferencing app, which lets you chat with up to 25 people, knows how entrepreneurs operate. It runs without as many distracting features--you just see someone talking and can interact as a team. The "one-click" meeting saves times because you get the same spontaneous chats as you would in the office.

6. eVoice
I'm a big fan of Google Voice and use it for recording interviews. But for more serious business phone management, eVoice is a smarter way to go. It runs on your iPad and you can route calls to another employee, hold a quick conference call, and get voice-to-text voice e-mail. But the best part is the appearance of having a brick-and-mortar office. You can set up an attendant that routes callers through a departmental tree, just like a PBX.

7. Lettuce
This oddly named app--maybe all the good ones were taken--is designed to help you stay productive from anywhere, even if you have to manage your inventory. You can process orders and credit cards, set up deliveries (with direct ties to FedEx and UPS), and keep track of what is in your warehouse. The app even integrates with e-commerce tools like Shopify.

8. HopTo
Quick, name the number one problem of working in the cloud? That's right: getting access to your work computer. There are plenty of remote access tools, but hopTo is one of the easiest to use. You punch up the app on your iPad and can see your desktop in seconds. The app also lets you search for files stored on your remote PC.

Not everyone is cut out to be a leader. But if you have these three traits, you might be a natural born leader.

Reading leadership literature (including this column), you'd sometimes think that it was written in the stars that everyone has the potential to be an effective leader.

I don't believe that to be true. In fact, I see way fewer truly effective leaders than I see people stuck in positions of leadership who are woefully incompetent at worst and seriously misguided about their own abilities at best.

Part of the reason this happens is a lack of honest self-assessment by those who aspire to leadership in the first place. And so, in the interest of increasing the quality of next-generation leadership, I give you this simple three-point self-assessment tool.

To paraphrase a certain comedian, "you might be a potential leader if..."

You lead only when you have to, not all the time. We've all met the type of individual who simply must take charge. Whether it's a strategic brainstorming session, a pick-up basketball game, or a family outing, they can't help grabbing the lead dog position and clinging on to it for dear life.

Always opinionated, usually impatient and frequently brusque, these gotta-be-in-fronters get so used to other people describing them as natural born leaders that sooner or later--to their own and everyone else's detriment--they begin to believe it.

Truth is, they're most always nothing of the sort. True leaders don't presume that it's their divine right to take charge every time two or more people get together. Quite the opposite. A great leader will assess each situation on it's merits, and will only take charge when their position, the situation, and/or the needs of the moment demand it.

Oh, and if you read that last paragraph with a sneaking belief that in most situations you are the right person to take charge, you're most likely a gotta-be-in-fronter, not a leader.

You see much more than you do. Many business executives confuse leadership with action. These Tasmanian Devils believe that constant motion somehow generates leadership as a byproduct. Consequently, the more ambitious they are for a leadership role, the more furious their momentum becomes.

Leaving us mere mortals in their wake, the Tasmanian Devil works harder, faster, longer than everyone else. Faced with any situation that can't be solved by the sheer brute force of activity, they generate a dust cloud of impatience. Their one leadership tool is volume: if they think you aren't working as hard as they are--or as hard as they think you should--their demands become increasingly louder and more strident.

You'd think that such a blunt, one-club-fits-all mentality would preclude our action-at-all-costs executive from attaining any degree of seniority in a mature organization, but you'd be wrong. Sadly, many organizations, some of them Fortune 100 companies, encourage just such a chest-beating, fire-aim-ready definition of leadership.

True leaders understand the value of action, of course, but it isn't their only tool. In fact, it isn't even their primary tool. Great leaders see more than everyone else: answers, solutions, patterns, problems, opportunities, threats. They know it's vitally important to do, but they also know that thinking, understanding, contemplation and interpretation are equally important.

You change people. They achieve outcomes. Executive A hits his targets and burns out his team in the process. Executive B builds a great team, but they miss their goal. Which is the better leader?

It's a false dichotomy, and sadly, one that I see in organizations all the time. A true leader is option C: someone who develops his or her team so that they can and do hit their targets, achieve their goals.

If you're fixated on outcomes to the extent that you manipulate and bully others to achieve those outcomes (I know, you call it motivation--it isn't), then you aren't leading at all, you're dictating. And don't think this means that being a door mat is leadership either (we talked about the destructive nature of needing to be liked here). True leadership means building strong, capable teams that are goal- achievement-oriented.

Download a free chapter from the author's book, "The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success" which provides a comprehensive model for developing yourself or others as an exceptional, world class leader.

Ignoring tradition can be a path to success--but only if you dare.

When an entrepreneur challenges the status quo, he or she is either squashed and forgotten about or they hit a nerve and a paradigm shift occurs. The latter happens when the entrepreneur is a true disruptor.

Inc. has been following disruptors for years, and here are four companies that pushed the boundaries--and what you can learn from them.

Story: This barely 2-year-old company allows users to access live broadcast TV through any Internet connected device. Founded by Chet Kanojia, the New York-based company has already raised $63 million in three rounds of funding and key investors include Barry Diller's IAC.

Last year, a collective of big cable companies (including Comcast, Disney, and CBS) sued Aereo for copyright infringement. The battle got so heated that a few of the big company heads threatened to turn their networks into cable channels if the courts didn't shut Aereo down. But after months in court, the lawsuit was thrown out and the big guys haven't figured out a way to shutter Aereo. In fact, the company just announced their expansion into Boston and Atlanta.

Lesson: Forget a back-up plan. "There is no plan," Kanojia recently said. "I really do approach this in a very simplistic way, which is there's absolutely nothing that should not allow a consumer to have an antennae. I have a firm belief that will be the case all the way through." He added: "Start-ups live with that risk on a daily basis. That's why we succeed, because we apply all of our resources on a very narrow area of innovation or focus. I have a great degree of faith that the amount of consumer reaction we're getting, will bear fruit."

Story: The start-up, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom, aims to push the Ivy League off its pedestal. Set to open in the fall of 2015, the online school has already raised $25 million from Benchmark Capital and has gotten much press for its gusto in taking on the very established collegiate education space. But founder Ben Nelson, former CEO of Snapfish, has his critics too.

Academics from schools are skeptical of Nelson's vision -- prospective students may be dissuaded by the lack of lab spaces, sports, and even brand name. Minerva will reportedly hire new PhDs and scientists, without the promise of tenure -- a thing rarely seen in academia. And, to top it all off, Nelson has said he will create a prize to rival the Nobel, $500,000 for innovative teaching, open to any professor worldwide.

Lesson: Challenge the archetype. "Our only criterion will be whether you have the intellectual werewithal to do the work," Nelson said, jabbing at universities' oft-referenced needs for intellectual diversity. "But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in." He's dreaming big: "We want to create the world’s greatest educational experience."

Story: The online radio company wasn't always the blockbuster it is now. Founder Tim Westergren struggled for over a decade to get Pandora out of start-up mode. The company has raised just over $30 million in total funding, most recently from Hearst Interactive Media.

Over the years, Westergren dealt with bankruptcy, lawsuits, and anxious creditors. The company has seen its far share of pivots: from a recommendation machine to an in-store kiosk, and finally, the streaming radio station based on user profiles. When royalty rates skyrocketed, he considered shutting it down. Instead of conceding defeat, he rallied his colleagues and customers and lobbied Congress. Recently, the company bought a terrestrial radio station in an attempt to lower its licensing fees.

Lesson: Be persistent, but adaptive. "I've never, ever given up, even when we were in the most depressive bleak times," said Westergren. "I always thought Pandora was a good idea and would have a day."

Story: Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, created Square when his friend lost out on a $2,500 sale because he couldn't accept a credit card. The payment company transforms devices into a credit card processor. Raising over $341 million in total financing, Square forced credit card companies to reevaluate their restrictions. It was a miracle for small business owners, who were used to paying egregious fees for any transaction: now they only paid 2.75 percent per swipe, or a flat fee of $275 per month.

In Square's early days, most credit cards wouldn't allow for mobile aggregators. So Dorsey took a prototype to the banks and changed their minds. Now, many of the same companies who once blocked Square are trying to imitate it. Square Wallet, Dorsey's newest product, permits merchants to charge clients simply by typing in their name and charging their account.

Lesson: Don't be intimidated. "I didn't have a finance background, my co-founders didn't, and we didn't hire anyone who worked in finance until we reached 25 employees," Dorsey said recently. "You fail and you get back up. That's part of doing anything that people find to be revolutionary or important. You'll have tons of people saying, 'No, you can't do this,' but you do it again, anyway, and you don't let them stop you."

Relevance is the only job security that exists in today's uncertain business world.

We live in a time of vast and uneasy change, where economic, social and political turmoil has become the rule, rather than the exception. Nowhere is this clearer than in the world of business.

The tsunami of change is hitting everyone:

• Gen-Y unemployment is approaching a staggering 25 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Gen-X is "on track to be the first generation to do worse in retirement than their parents," according to NPR.
• Baby boomers are more likely to remain unemployed if they lose their jobs, according to the AARP.

Everyone seems lost and unmoored in a world where promises of the past--a stable job, a clear career path, a comfortable retirement--have become impossible dreams.

Not everyone, however, is caught in this miasma of helplessness. Many people--regardless of their age--are rising to the occasion, creating and renewing their role in a shifting world, according to Philip Styrlund, CEO of the Summit Group and Tom Hayes, founder of the ad firm Riley Hayes.

Their secret? They've figured out how to be relevant.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "relevance" as "the state of being closely connected or appropriate to the matter in hand." To be relevant is thus to be important, but the term implies more than that.

Trivial things--appointments, events, accidents--that intrude themselves into life can easily become "important," at least for a time. To be relevant, an action or person must be connected to a larger scheme, a grander plan--the ultimate "matter in hand."

In the business world, to be relevant means being an integral part of your organization, of your company, of the economy, and of the future. It means being the kind of person on whom others depend, whether for leadership, expertise, acumen, or emotional support.

Put another way, being relevant means never worrying about losing a job or being able to find another. Because you are valued. Because you are relevant.

Styrlund and Hayes are working on a book (I helped with the book proposal, but am not involved in the project now) that provides a "recipe for relevance." Here it is:

Being authentic entails knowing who you are at the deepest level, "being" that person in your internal thought processes, and finally appearing to others as you are, without pretense or phoniness. Authenticity is the foundation of relevance because if you don't understand who you are, and where you're "coming from, you can't possibly lead or influence others."

You achieve authenticity through a rigorous inventory of your strengths and a systematic mapping of the moments in your life when you've been both highly effective and extremely satisfied. When put into practice, authenticity allows you to "be real" and "in the moment," to effortlessly practice the fine art of listening, and to have the courage to speak the truth, without "signing up" for how you think others might perceive you.

Mastery is essential because, if you have no useful skills, you cannot be useful to others. Mastery goes beyond mere competence and skills. It means approaching one's life and relationships as an act of creation, rather than a reaction to people and events. It means approaching lifelong learning with a sense of fun that adds pleasure and energy to the tasks at hand. It means expanding your principles and practices so that they serve a greater purpose.

You achieve mastery through a process of continuous improvement of your talents and abilities, combined with a life model that stresses the importance of both the professional and the personal. Developing mastery requires the ability to put first things first, to take action before it is forced upon you, and to stay mindful while taking action. This requires a clear view of reality, a willingness to get beyond deeply rooted beliefs, awareness of your subconscious desires, and a commitment to truth.

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) being experienced by another being. It is the source of compassion, caring for other people, and the desire to help. It means the ability to experience the same emotions that another is feeling, without unnecessary judgment. Empathy creates relevance because it creates the deep connection that brings people together.

In business, there are three levels of empathy. The first is "on-demand" empathy, which is the ability to sense what customers want. The second is "solution" empathy, which entails understanding a customer's problem and figuring out how to address it. The third is "transcendent" empathy where you create solutions to problems that customers don't even know that they have.

It is your actions, ultimately, that make you relevant to others. All the authenticity, mastery and empathy in the world remain sterile, until and unless put into motion. It is through action that you change yourself and change the world. Without action, even a great and brilliant mind and soul remains entirely irrelevant.

Action has four elements: impetus, vector, acceleration and velocity. Impetus determines whether you consider the action important enough to take. Vector is the direction your action takes you: either towards your goals or away from it. Acceleration reflect your level of commitment and how much action you're willing to take. Velocity is the energy that carries you forward, even when you're not fully aware of it.

IMHO, Styrlund and Hayes are onto something big, so I'll keep you posted as their book moves forward.

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Vishal Sankhla, the founder of a VC-backed start-up in Silicon Valley, explains what it feels like to have his visa status hang in the balance of the current immigration debate.

Over the next several weeks, the Senate is set to debate immigration reform legislation.

Some following the debate will be trying to divine the future ambitions of various Republicans or the general direction of the recently troubled party, others will argue the economic and demographic impact of reform. But in his office in San Mateo, California, Vishal Sankhla will watch closely for other reasons.

His professional and personal life both hang in the balance.

A U.S.-trained engineer originally from India, Sankhla was employed on a H1b visa when he got the idea for Viralheat, the social media start-up he has since co-founded.

"In late 2008, I got together with [his co-founder] Raj and we started toying around with ideas. That’s when we came up with the idea. I was itching to start my own company and my only option was to either stick with Cisco till I get my Green card, which could take several years, or take a risk and start Viralheat. I decided to take the risk," he explained to Inc. in an email.

In some ways that’s a gamble that paid off. The company has 17 employees and is planning to add more, and has also managed to raise $4.25 million in Series A funding. By just about every standard that’s a promising beginning for a start-up and a plus for our job-hungry economy. But Sankla’s success hasn’t been enough to win him a stable immigration status. After spending a year applying for a Green card, he was denied. Now he says he is applying through another category, but the uncertainty has an outsized impact on his business.

"I was on an H1b visa that made it impossible for me to join my own company that I had founded. I was lucky to have a co-founder who was a US citizen to even be able to explore this opportunity and get the company to where we are today," Sankhla says. The current immigration system affects his start-up in other ways too.

"We also have employees who are on H1b visas, so we have to spend a lot of time, resources and energy on their immigration paperwork. Being a small company we do not have full-time HR resources who focus on this, so it ends up taking my precious time away in making sure everything is going smoothly," he says.

All of which sounds like a nightmare for any growing business, but Sankhla notes that his immigration struggles have taken a personal toll as well. "It became very tedious to travel outside the country. Every time I travelled, I had to get a stamping done in India. The stamping process takes up a lot of time in terms of collecting all the immigration paperwork, employment paperwork, employment verification, pay-stubs. A lot of people end up getting stuck in their countries. The process never ends, you are always worried. Your immigration status becomes your number one source of stress," he reports.

And immigration challenges have affected other members of his family as well: "My wife is currently with Netflix on an H1b visa and her Green card is stuck Perm. audit so basically we are still quite far from getting a Green card done. Also, I worry about my mom. She has a visitor's visa that allows her to stay for up to six months in the U.S. after which she has to travel back to India. It becomes harder and harder for us to stay together, especially as she grows older."

Unsurprisingly, Sankhla has joined efforts to get immigration reform through Congress and is watching the debate closely. He’s optimistic, he says, but nervous.

"I worry because the debate is still largely focused on whether to create a path to citizenship for low-skilled, undocumented workers or illegal immigrants. The issues of legal immigrants go largely unnoticed and our issues are bundled tightly, so any delays around the former provision, also ends up delaying issues for people like me."

What’s he hoping for? A higher number of H1b visas, so that employers can access talent from abroad and "an easy way for people to apply and get their Green cards in a reasonable amount of time and a clear and timely pathway to US citizenship."

As a business owner, you can keep Sankla and his family in mind as the immigration debate unfolds in the coming weeks for humanitarian reasons, but he makes a far more hard-nosed business case for fellow entrepreneurs to get involved in the conversation.

"We need to recognize that and double down on entrepreneurs, because other nations are figuring this out. There is a billboard up on the freeway here inviting people having immigration issues to Canada. In the end, if US cannot attract, engage and retain top talent, it will be left behind."

Are you following the progress of immigration reform? What are you hoping to see come out of the process?

At Bloomberg's Next Big Thing conference, industry thinkers talked about what they think will be the wave(s) of the future. Do you agree?

What's the next biggest thing in technology? Depends on who you ask.

A number of industry thinkers and innovators did some crystal ball-gazing Monday at Bloomberg's Next Big Thing conference held in Half Moon Bay, California.

Here's a round-up of some of their more interesting predictions.

1. Bitcoin. Tim Draper, managing director of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, initially tried to wriggle out of pinpointing one specific big thing but when pressed he said without hesitation, "Bitcoin," the digital currency platform. "I like when our government is challenged by the private sector."

2. Devices that understand who we are as people. This was one a number of speakers mentioned. The more jargon-laced term for the idea is "contextually aware systems" and it refers to devices that detect where you are and what you want next, before you need to ask. So, for example, think of your car doing more than simply getting you from point a to point b. Imagine a car that not only gives you directions but takes you through the process of parking your car by identifying the location of parking spots and then delivering you to your ultimate address by anticipating what you'll encounter along the few blocks you'll walk.

Draper, too, liked this idea--although his ideal device, he suggested, might be a wristband that detect your low blood sugar and then signals a nearby drone to drop off a pizza. "You get a pizza before you even know you want one!"

But these "devices" in the end may not be devices at all. "You shouldn't need a device to tell you if your glucose is too high," said Intel CTO Justin Rattner. "Your clothes should tell you."

3. You'll know about important news before you need to look for it. Already feel like you get too many alerts on your phone? Prepare for a few more. Michael Sippey, VP of product at Twitter, mentioned the company is testing a new service that will direct message you if suddenly a bunch of people you follow all decide to follow the same person. This sort of activity could indicate a news event that you might want to know about. So Twitter wouldn't wait for you to find about it in your newsfeed; it might just buzz your phone so that you're the first to know.

4. The sharing economy is the auto industry's next design challenge. Kevin Hunter, president of Calty Design Research at Toyota, addressed the elephant in the room-- at least in the car industry. Car-sharing start-ups like Lyft, Uber, and Zipcar have introduced a new challenge for automakers.

Never mind that these services may very well take more cars off the road; they may also change how they're designed. Up until now, cars have been personal machines designed specifically for the owner of the vehicle and, say, her family. But how do you design a car for an ever-changing group of drivers, rather than one person? What they look like, arguably, matters less, while their functionality matters a lot more. Toyota doesn't necessarily have the answer--at least not one Hunter was willing to share--but it will have to think about it soon.

5. Data privacy is key--but it doesn't have to scare people. It's not terribly surprising to go to a tech conference and find yourself swimming in a strong current of optimism. Technology folks tend to equate the future with progress and see entrepreneurs as the bearers of this progress. Even so, a handful of speakers, including SRI Ventures VP Norman Winarsky, raised the possibility of one area in particular that won't necessarily improve with time: consumers' problems with their own data and privacy may get worse.

But, not surprisingly, the optimists in the room see the situation differently. Rattner of Intel sees a "data economy" in the future. In other words, data privacy will still be very important, but "people will control their own personal data." They'll take ownership over it and even sell it to marketing companies to make a profit on the side.

What do you think? What are your predictions?

What's holding you back? Rob Ashkenas, managing partner of Shaffer Consulting, points out the root of the problem, and smart ways to fix it.

Slowdowns are inevitable, but to get through those slumps, you've got to know what's behind them, says Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Shaffer Consulting, in The Harvard Business Review.

Here are three signs you've been stunted:

The law of large numbers. "As a company gets bigger, each percentage of incremental revenue suddenly represents a fundamentally larger number," says Ashkenas. There's also more pressure on the sales team to find new markets, categories, and geographies.

Market maturity. As a market moves through its life cycle, it becomes more crowded, prices stabilize, and the opportunity to grow through price increases, well, decreases. When a market gets saturated, it becomes that much harder to lure away buyers who are loyal to particular brands.

Psychological self-protection. Innovation is hard. So it's no suprise that rather than take a risk with a new product, many companies succumb to the pressure to preserve the base business and focus on "adapting existing products and services," says Ashkenas. Sadly, playing it safe leaves the door wide open for disruptive competitors.

There are two ways to keep up the growth, he continues:

Regularly re-examine your business model. "Don't limit your innovation and research to the development of new products and services, but also focus on the possibility of new business models," says Ashkenas.

Next, consider downsizing. Are all your products producing sufficient returns? Would you be better off shedding some customers? Acting on the answers "can liberate you and your resources to focus on new opportunities and will lead to more growth in the long term," he says.

Are you a technical founder? Regardless, take "Startup Engineering," Stanford's now-available free online course.

Today Stanford is launching "Startup Engineering," a free online course through Coursera.

According to the professors, you need to commit just two to 20 hours per week for 10 weeks to complete the class. And if you pass, you'll receive a nifty little certificate.

It's not surprising that Stanford would offer a class geared towards future entrepreneurs. It's a school known for entrepreneurship, and it already offers several free online courses meant to help would-be entrepreneurs. Startup Engineering was also offered on its real-world campus this spring.

But what's notable about Startup Engineering is how the course's professors--a biophysicist and an entrepreneur--focus on the technical side of starting and scaling a company far more than anything else.

They write, in the website course description:

The first part of the course will cover modern software engineering principles with a focus on mobile HTML5 development, taught via 5-minute to 10-minute video lectures with in-video quizzes, programming assignments, and multiple-choice questions. Guest lecturers from top Silicon Valley start-ups will bring these concepts to life with real engineering problems from their work.

In the second part, you will apply these concepts to develop a simple command line application, expose it as a webservice, and then integrate other students' command line apps and webservices together with yours to create an open-source mobile HTML5 app as a final project. Lectures will continue in the second part, but will be focused on the design, marketing, and logistical aspects of creating and scaling a start-up.

Of course, there's not much in there about the "soft" side of entrepreneurship--hiring the right people, marketing, and company culture, for instance--but that's not really the point of an engineering class.

But it does indicate just how essential the "software" layer of businesses are becoming for Silicon Valley start-ups.

In response to criticism about the course's narrow technical focus, Balaji S. Srinivasan, one of the course's professors, wrote on HackerNews:

It's a good strategy these days to build one's business on top of a software core, with APIs for all major business functions and physical interface layers only when absolutely necessary. That's really the overall principle that I'm trying to communicate, along with examples in practice.

In other words, entrepreneurs should be thinking about the technical layer of their business from Day 1, and founders that build their businesses with the right technical architecture are best-positioned in the long-run.

As one former student of the class writes:

Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company building APIs to monitor consumption and efficiency at client sites and adjusting their work accordingly--that's huge. This class does a lot more than teach you how to build webapps; it teaches you to think in an automation mindset and happens to teach you a lot of useful skills along the way.

You can't beat the nightlife or business opportunities, said Michael Bloomberg during his Stanford commencement speech Sunday. Translation: Silicon Alley should be the next tech hub.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg believes in Silicon Alley so much, he wouldn't be surprised if Stanford graduates started moving there.

“I believe that more and more Stanford graduates will find themselves moving to Silicon Alley, not only because we’re the hottest new tech scene in the country, but also because there’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale,” he said during his Stanford commencement speech Sunday.

"Leland Stanford, in addition to being an entrepreneur, an elected official, a philanthropist, and a great supporter of higher education, was originally a New Yorker," he added. "No other university in the world has so profoundly shaped our modern age. Without Stanford, there's no Silicon Valley, and without SV, there's no tech revolution, no information revolution, no communications revolution, at least not as we know it."

In his apparent bid to lure the techies of Silicon Valley to his city, Bloomberg quipped, "Apparently, every single person here has a great idea for a new startup. I've been here two days, and so far 27 students 14 professors and the checkout guy at Axiom Palmer have approached me about VC funding."

The mayor's dream of turning the Big Apple into the next tech mecca might not so be far-fetched. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion, which prompted many in the New York tech sector like John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, to tell GigaOm this type of social media sale "helps solidify and legitimize the entire New York startup ecosystem."

Or as Ken Lerer, the New Yorker behind Lerer Ventures, put it, "If you stand on Broadway and look above 34th street, you can see the media of the past. Look down the Broadway, you see the future."

Do you agree with Bloomberg that Silicon Valley's finest should move to New York?

More than 80 percent of manufacturers see health care costs as their top business concern

Another day, another survey about Obamacare.

About a week ago, we reported on a survey of hiring among small- and medium-sized businesses, which found the Affordable Care Act to be only a minor factor in determining the number, and type, of employees on their payroll. [http://www.inc.com/Adam-Bluestein/Obamacare-hiring.html] Apparently, few of those survey respondents were manufacturers-;who are viewing the approaching implementation of Obamacare with dread.

Among the 317 companies who participated in the National Association of Manufacturers/Industry Week Q2 Survey, 82.2 percent said that “rising health care/insurance costs” was their top business concern-;ahead of taxes and regulations, uncertainties about the political climate (each cited by 66.9 percent of respondents), and well ahead of worries about weaker domestic and foreign sales of their products (cited by 50 percent and 27 percent, respectively).

Health-care anxiety is up from last quarter’s survey, when 74 percent of respondents listed insurance costs as a top concern. “Even in three months, it’s ticked up in a way that’s statistically relevant,” says Joe Trauger, NAM’s vice president of human-resources policy. “It’s having an impact on how they’re conducting business-;trying to decide whether to decide additional people and making other long-term planning decisions.”

Ninety-nine percent of manufacturers surveyed already offer health benefits to their employees. So their big concern isn’t about having paying a bunch of new premiums, but rather seeing their existing premiums go up even more than they already have-;8.5 percent on average in each of the past two years. The respondents anticipate an average premium increase of 14 percent in 2014, but that’s an estimate: While some companies have already started negotiating next year’s rates, many are simply guessing guess based on past experience and their internal utilization data. “I think the larger message here,” says Trauger, “is that no one is expecting rates to go down. Everyone expects moderate to significant increases.”

The certainty about which way premiums are headed is countered by confusion about almost everything else having to do with Obamacare: About 56 percent of those surveyed said they were either not prepared or uncertain about how they planned to implement the ACA at the beginning of 2014. And more than 41 percent said they were uncertain if their business would participate in a health insurance exchange.

Kvetching about health-care and politics aside, 51.6 percent of manufacturers surveyed expected their payrolls to hold steady, and more than twice as many companies expected to add full-timers (32.5 percent) than to cut them (15.9 percent).

Check out the survey here: http://www.industryweek.com/global-economy/namindustryweek-2013-q2-survey-outlook-positive-face-mediocre-growth

Even Chris Poole, who founded the 4chan online community when he was 15, says he hasn't a clue what teens do online today.

When Chris Poole created 4chan, an image-centric forum site, he was just 15 years old. Today, he's 25--and admits he's already out of touch with what young people are doing online these days.

In recent years, while 4chan became a birthplace for popular memes that draws 25 million unique monthly views, Poole has become a prominent free-speech advocate, founded a different venture-backed drawing-and-image site, and taken on a role at a New York-based VC firm--all very grown up occupations. On Friday he shed perhaps his last vestige of the enfant terrible years: He claimed to be out of touch with kids these days.

Here's what happened when The Next Web's Harrison Weber asked Pool during the Northside Festival in Brooklyn where teenagers go online these days:

Poole: I don't fucking know!

Weber: [Laughs] My sister knew about Snapchat before me. I bring her up because she's 16, in high school, and a pretty typical teenager. And I write about technology professionally.

Poole: Dude, tell your parents.

At this point Weber mumbled something mock-defensively about his little sister not sexting (obviously), and the conversation diverted into the significance of privacy via anonymity online--and whether that's even possible anymore.

Poole's indoctrination into the Internet was in the '90s, when you dialed up on modems, and "browsing" was the trickiest part of navigating what was unironically dubbed the information superhighway.

"For a lot of people, myself included, AOL was the training wheels for the Internet. It was structured around keywords and chat rooms, and buddy lists," Poole said.

It's that chat-room style of interactive anonymity that helped inspire 4chan. Built on a series of continuous message boards, the site is filled with user-generated content that's ephemeral, and never becomes a permanent record. Most boards are limited to roughly a dozen pages, so content is usually available for only a few hours or days before it is removed. Also, 4chan's users are anonymous with un-verified identities: Poole was known on 4chan as "moot," and the most popular identity there is "Anonymous".

That's one way Poole may still understand young people.

"Being able to put yourself out there and take risks and be vulnerable without it coming back to haunt you is really powerful," Poole said.

Are you a crocodile salesperson? Do you sell and tell? Here's a better approach to identifying a sales prospect's problems.

In my first enterprise software company, we developed a sales methodology that we called PUCCKA. The point was to develop a common methodology to make sure our whole team approaches sales with the same mindset and to give us a language to talk with each other about our prospects. Having a methodology, instead of just going on random sales visits, helped force a bit of rigor and honesty among team members in terms of how well--or poorly--we thought we were doing.

This post is about the Pain aspect of our methodology, as in, “Have you identified your customer's pain point yet?” Pain is a reminder that unless your prospect has a need to solve a problem, they are not going to buy a product. Customers sometimes buy things spontaneously without thinking through what they actually need. But, often, there is an underlying reason for a purchase, even if the buyer doesn’t bring it to the surface.

For instance, between the years of 2010 and 2012, every brand out there seemed to be buying Facebook "Likes." In truth, many companies had no idea why they actually needed Facebook Likes. But there was still a pain point. The pain was that somebody senior in the organization had read about the importance of Facebook for business and had begun asking loud questions about why the organization didn't have a strong Facebook presence. That is still "pain." It's a reason a company would buy something, even if a boss is a dolt with no economic rationale for what he is asking to be achieved. Just watch Mad Men and you'll see what I mean.

So how do you identify a pain point? Rule number one: Don't be a crocodile. Too many sales reps use what I refer to as a "tell and sell" approach. They walk into customer meetings with pre-canned sales decks and proudly squawk through 30 of their favorite slides without engaging the customer in a discussion. I call them crocodile salespeople, because they have small ears and big mouths. The reason they tell and sell is that it’s far easier to go through talking points you’ve regurgitated 100 times than to engage the customer in a dialog about their business challenges. Crocodiles might leave meetings feeling great about themselves, but they come away without any further knowledge of the customer's “pain.”

I’ve also seen sales reps go to the opposite extreme, walking into a meeting and spouting out, “So, tell us what’s not working in your manufacturing process!” I hate when people do this to me. My first thought is, “You asked for the meeting--why am I going to give you a bunch of ammunition to sell to me?”

So where's the happy medium? The best sales meetings are discussions. The goal is to get customers speaking about their organizations. And the best way to do so is by asking open-ended questions. There is an art to teasing out pain points. I recommend starting with a brief overview of you, your company, and your solution. And by brief, I mean BRIEF! You’d be amazed at how long some people rattle on about their life stories in an introduction. Nobody wants to hear your life story other than your mom.

After the overview, I recommend offering up some examples of clients you’ve worked with (you obviously need their approval first). These references make for great discussions with customers. If you have enough references in your arsenal, you obviously want to pick out ones that you believe will resonate with your prospect due to job function or industry.

And then there’s the key transition slide, which I call “What We Find” (WWF). WWF gives you the ability to tease out the problem having just shown similar cases where customers have this problem. For example: “What we find is that many of our customers have been accumulating Facebook Likes, because they thought they were supposed to. Now they have a few thousand Likes, but haven’t been able to figure out whether this is improving their bottom line. They don’t have a way to measure the effectiveness of a Like.” Then, use that as a seque to ask your prospect if they have the same problem: “Do you see that at all inside your department? Have you found a way to best link your potential marketing leads in social media into activity that leads to more business?”

This approach is often successful. When you have a real business disussion about a pain point, rather than simply pitching your solution, prospects are more likely to open up about their own problems. Even if they debate whether the problem is real, you’re having a much better meeting then just flipping through slides. If they’re going to take the time, energy, and logic to try and debate with you, it's must better if they’re at least engaged.

Another point to keep in mind: People prefer to hear themselves speak rather than to listen to you. It’s just human nature. Your job is to tease out as many discrete pain points that are near enough to your solution set as possible. Then, you can begin talking about what it is that you do. Write down the customer pain points so you don't forget them and ask questions the whole time. The best form of sales is “active listening,” when you’re engaged in what the customer is telling you.

And please resist the temptation to cut off the customer with a story of your own. ("I heard you, but now let ME tell you this great story I have.") Most people naturally do this at cocktail parties, but it's not a good idea in sales meetings. When you cut off customers with your stories, you lose valuable insights that might be exposing more pain points. Show your knowledge and charm through great questions, not great anecdotes. Frankly if you can’t sit with prospects and tease out pain points then you ought to be working in a different department than sales or executive leadership.

Everybody has pain points. If you find out what your prospects' problems are, you’ve answered the question, “Why Buy Anything?” Importantly, once you tease out some problems, you can begin to pivot the meeting to your solution and how it may solve their problem. I'll delve deeper into “Unique Selling Propositions” in my next column.

We've got you covered: Here's a rundown of the top events you can watch on the Web.

Call it a tale of five cities. Unlike previous years, the SBA's National Small Business Week (kicking off today) is being held across the country: in Seattle, Dallas, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, before wrapping up at the end of the week in Washington.

Now, you're probably too busy to travel all over the country as if the year were 1975 and the SBA was actually the Grateful Dead. Fortunately, much of the program will be live streamed on the SBA's website, at sba.gov/nsbw.

You can find the full schedule here, but since you're probably also busy enough that you can't sit in front of your computer watching the whole thing, here's my take on the top 10 things on the agenda:

1. Seattle Day

Monday is basically Microsoft Day. The kickoff takes place on the computer giant's campus. Among the highlights are keynote speaker Lee Rhodes, founder of glassybaby (12:15 p.m. Eastern). You'll also find an "armchair interview" with Cindy Bates, vice president of the U.S. Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMB) organization at Microsoft Corp, the head of the SBA, Karen Mills, and others.

(Watch it here.)

2. "Getting Started With Social Media" Google+ Hangout

Each day at 4 p.m. Eastern, the SBA will host a series of Google+ hangouts, designed to bring together experts and give you a leg up in your business.

Guess who's hosting the first of them? (Me.) The first panel is on "Getting Started With Social Media." I'll be talking with marketing representatives from Google, the head of small business marketing at Twitter, an expert from Constant Contact, and the managing director of a leading digital marketing strategy firm. (Again, this is Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern.)

(Watch it here. For the Google+ hangout, you can also tweet questions at @billmurphyjr.)

3. Dallas Day

On Tuesday, the program shifts to Dallas. Highlights will include a panel on the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem" and one on growing globally, led by a senior manager at Lockheed Martin.

In the afternoon, there will be a session on government contracting. It doesn't seem that this will be livestreamed, which is too bad, but you can check out my report from last year's event: 6 Tips for Getting Government Contracts.

4. "Managing Your Business's Online Reputation" Google+ Hangout

Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of GrowBiz Media, will moderate an all-star panel on business reputation online. You'll find the head of marketing for the "Get Your Business Online Initiative" at Google, along with representatives from Yelp, LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet, and others. I'll definitely be watching--it's at 4 p.m. Eastern, again.

(Watch it here.)

5. St. Louis Day

Your best bet for the third day of the conference, Wednesday, includes a discussion with David Steward, co-founder of St. Louis-based World Wide Technology, Inc, starting at 10:15 a.m. Eastern. (Watch it here.)

6. "How a Mentor Can Help Your Business" Google+ Hangout
NFL Hall-of-Famer and entrepreneur Fran Tarkenton will host Wednesday's hangout event, on coaching and mentorship. It starts at 4 p.m. Eastern. (Watch it here.)

7. Pittsburgh Day

There are some interesting sessions planned on certifications and crowdsourcing that you might want to check out if you're in the area, but as far as livestreaming programs, Thursday's events include an introduction to the Pittsburgh entrepreneurship ecosystem, at 9:45 a.m. Eastern.

(Watch it here.)

8. "How to Get a Loan for Your Business" Google+ Hangout

Calvin Goings, an SBA regional administrator, will host this talk on how to get money. (Can you think of anything more interesting?) He'll be talking with an SBA Business Lending Executive at Wells Fargo, the CEO of Ninkasi Brewing Co., which received an SBA loan, and others. It's at 4 p.m. Eastern again.

(Watch it here.)

9. D.C. Days

Washington actually gets two days of events, overlapping with Pittsburgh on Thursday and wrapping things up on Friday. Highlights include Square CEO Jack Dorsey's talk on Thursday evening (7 p.m., livestreamed), and a keynote address by Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, on Friday (12 p.m.)

(Watch it here.)

10. Small Business Person of the Year

Finally, you'll find the SBA's Small Business Person of the Year award on Friday. The SBA is extremely tight-lipped about who they'll be honoring in advance of the event. In advance, you might want to check out all 54 "state" nominees, or read up on Victoria Tifft, last year's winner. (Watch it here.)

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In many ways, office politics is like a Bureaucratic Disease. Here's the cure. (It also works against workplace bullies and bad bosses, too).

Some people play political games at work. Not most, but enough to cause serious issues for the rest of us. It seems to be particularly common in government bureaucracies and mature industries, but you'll find it in any company where management is clueless, employees aren't held accountable, and it takes an act of God to fire someone.

This is probably a mischaracterization, but I've always seen office politics as something of a disease--a bureaucratic disease. Here's how to fight it, from the CBDC (Center for Bureaucratic Disease Control):

Symptoms

Symptoms of Bureaucratic Disease include backstabbing, torpedoing, manipulating, controlling, grandstanding, finger pointing, power grabbing, sugar coating, idea stealing, and passive aggressive behavior.

Pathology

The pathology of this particularly insidious disease tends to follow a common pattern: Avoiding anything remotely associated with actual work, taking as much undeserved credit for success as possible, and ensuring that someone else takes the blame when things go terribly wrong, as they inevitably do.

What to do if you're exposed

Close and repeated contact with someone infected with the disease is not advised as it can cause dangerous levels of stress and anxiety. In some cases, it has been known to cause bouts of depression and burnout. In rare instances of chronic contact, some victims have actually been seen to "fall apart at the seams."

If you have an infected coworker and are exhibiting some of the above signs, you are advised to seek immediate treatment.

Course of treatment

1. Take a long hard look in the mirror. Not to blame the victim here, but in many cases, the person reporting the disease in someone else is actually the one who was initially infected. "Reacting in kind" can actually be a defense mechanism employed by the other person's bureaucratic autoimmune system. If that diagnosis is found to be false, proceed to Step 2.

2. Self medicate and wait. Studies have found "waiting" to be an effective strategy. There's an old Japanese proverb that goes something like this, "If you stand by the river long enough, you'll see the body of your enemy float by." No, it's not some sort of hokey holistic cure; it really works because the disease tends to cause infected individuals to eventually self-destruct.

If, on the other hand, your signs are becoming severe, discontinue this treatment at once and proceed to Step 3.

3. Quit and try your luck elsewhere. Although the disease has a widely variable and potentially long range, it quickly loses its potency once you leave the proximity of the organization or company. Once you're safely out of range, the effects of the disease should subside precipitously.

While this is the only cure that's known to be 100 percent effective, it does have some potentially severe side effects, including loss of income, feelings of failure, and diminished pride. Our advice: get over it and move on.

Homegrown remedies

Taking the problem to human resources or management will rarely result in a positive outcome. That course of action has far more frequently resulted in 1) nothing, 2) the victim being labeled a troublemaker, or 3) both victim and infected coworker getting fired.

Under NO circumstances should you try to reason or go head-to-head with the infected individuals. Once the disease has reached the pathological stage, those infected are more or less beyond help or hope. Engaging them will only serve to reinforce and embolden their behavior. It's their game and their rules; you will be no match for their deranged and psychopathic manipulations.

Similar diseases

While the pathology is different, the same course of treatment has been found to be effective in the event of repeated contact with workplace bullies and dysfunctional bosses.

Small print: Don't let the comedic tone fool you. The advice is absolutely genuine. No joking.

The interview coach of the future is here, and it goes by the name of MACH. Developed by MIT, the computer software tells you exactly where you need to improve just by hearing the sound of your voice.

We've all been there: Your ideas are fresh and your team is top-notch, but you still aren't attracting investors.

Perhaps it's time to brush up on your interview skills.

The Automated Conversation coacH (nicknamed MACH) might be able to help. Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the robot functions as a career coach, giving mock interviews while monitoring facial expressions and prosody (speech pattern and intonation) to see where participants need to improve. Such feedback might include the number of times an interviewer paused or turned to crutch phrases like "you know."

Shortly after MACH was designed, researchers tested it on 90 students. After lumping them in three groups--one that watched a taped interview, another that used MACH and watched a taped interview, and a third that received feedback from MACH, the video, and an interview coach--they found the latter group made the most strides.

Soon small business owners will be able to reap the same benefits via desktop--all they'll need is a camera and microphone. MACH's software will arrive on mobile platforms shortly.

Beyond pinpointing areas in need of improvement, MACH can help entrepreneurs gain an edge over the competition. It'll do so by gauging reactions to interviewers of the opposite sex and see how they fare when asked certain questions. Eventually MACH will analyze sentiment and how well a respondent explained a topic.

Watch the video below to see it in action: