The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill (Colorado Bill HB 10-1193) that basically seeks to improve the state’s ability to collect use tax on internet sales. This is a tax that most buyers of the covered products technically should be paying anyway but are rarely collected. Most people think those things they buy online are tax-free when really they were supposed to have paid the tax on their own rather than having it collected by the retailer. As we all know, people rarely do.

Colorado and other states have tried to fix this for a couple primary reasons. The first is simply money. They’d like to collect more revenue. The second is to level the playing field for in-state companies. It’s not fair competition if local companies effectively have to charge buyers more fo...

“I’ve decided to write a book,” I told my wife over a year ago.

She gave me that what-the-bleep-are-you-talking-about look.  You may be familiar with your spouse.

“You’ve what?”

“I’ve decided to write a book,” I repeated, slightly less confidently.

“On what?”

“Venture capital and entreneurship.”

“Why?”

“Well, when I was an entrepreneur, I couldn’t find any good books on how this mysterious capital-raising process worked and how to harness the resources and knowledge of the VC industry to help build my start-up. Now that I’ve seen it from the other side, I want to explain to entrepreneurs how it all works to help them be successful....

Recently an entrepreneur/investor/blogger extraordinaire I admire by the name of Chris Dixon touched on the two general paradigms people/institutions can adopt towards one another when conducting business. He first referenced the transactional/legalistic approach wherein labor is exchanged for money in the form of a contract that is enforced by organizations, (especially the legal system). The other approach is one based on trust, verbal agreements, reputation and is “enforced” (so to speak) by the community. As Dixon points out, the world of startups is overwhelmingly governed by the trust/reputation/community approach. 

Let’s just juxtapose these very different paradigms against the backdrop of the modern American university.  As we’ve established in e...

All eyes are on Toyota’s recall of 8.5 million vehicles due to faulty gas pedals and brakes. The recall has sparked congressional hearings, a probe by the U.S. Department of Transportation, possible criminal charges stemming from a federal grand jury investigation and numerous civil lawsuits, all in the name of driver safety.

This aggressive response to Toyota’s mistakes is appropriate, even though the human toll from its miscues has been, thankfully, relatively modest – 34 alleged deaths and a few hundred injuries. Not to downplay this misery, but in stunning contrast, consider this: More than 100,000 Americans die annually in U.S. hospitals because of avoidable medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which also says that medical errors rank as Americ...

I’ll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard, “chip shot” comments. At one point he asked the guy next to me to opine on the case we were discussing, which involved launching a new consumer product. “Well,” my neighbor answered confidently, “I think it will be a hit because I can see my mother-in-law buying it.”

“I see,” replied my professor dryly and then turned to the class with a withering look on his face, “Steve appears to have fallen into that fatal trap of ‘Mother In Law Market Research’ - believing this new product will be a hit just because his mother-in-law likes it. Instead, let’s look at ...

* Jim McTague: FINRA must heal itself before receiving added responsibilities

* The No Prick Rule: “Hire the good, humble, kind human being first … skill-set second.”

* Morning Call: U.S. futures look flat, London opens higher, European shares climb, the Nikkei gains 0.3% and Hong Kong shares jump nearly 2%.

* Nick Hasell: Have London’s listed private equity firms turned a corner?

* Kevin Kelleher: The spark that could ignite Web M&A

* ABI Research: RFID market to reach $5.3...

* Business schools revamp their applications

* Bijan Salehizadeh: Friendly advice for first-time CEOs

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London falls early, European shares slip, the Nikkei loses 0.1% and Hong Kong shares gain. 

* The end of WiMAX? Cisco is the latest to bail

* Liz Gannes: When it comes to social sharing, don’t forget about email

* Tickets are now on sale for the next peHUB Shindig. Takes place March 31 in Boston (details about a San Francisco event will come next week).

* Jo...

* Gregor Macdonald: The myth of energy breakthroughs

* Ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz: “I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too.”

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises early, European shares flatten, the Nikkei remains unchanged and Chinese shares slip.

* The perils of nonprofit recruiting

* Bank books reveal depth of problems

* Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet: Scale first, monetize second

* Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley: Facebook isn’...

He’s running his second startup, Hunch, after selling his first company, SiteAdvisor, for $74 million dollars four years ago. He’s an active angel investor in nascent startups and co-founded the $40 million seed-stage fund, Founder Collective, last year. He’s a champion of the early-stage scene in New York, where he lives and works. And Dixon, who’s as connected as they come on both coasts, is a prolific blogger who writes in plain English about the challenges of entrepreneurship, technology and venture capital.

I talked...