Kris Chinosorn is addicted to online learning. But the frustration of having too many windows open while trying to source good information took its toll. His answer was to create MentorMob, a site that allows users to curate online content into step-by-step lessons on any topic.

MentorMob calls these lessons learning playlists. The playlist topics range from the New Hampshire GOP primary to how to bake sourdough bread at home.

“We’re providing the platform for sharing information, but it’s really about anything you want to learn,” says Chinosorn.

He wants MentorMob to be a good source of educational content through the playlists.

“The learner playlist sets it all up for you into a specific order into a long, deep learning process as opposed to a search to find one specific piece of information. We want to focus on that good, deep information,” says Chinosorn, co-founder and CEO of MentorMob.

The website ensures quality control through its content management teams. But playlists can also be open to the public for editing.

“We have content management teams that check out the information and work with content creators to create the best content possible,” says Chinosorn. “People get really excited not only seeing their content learned, but seeing people flock around their playlists because they are passionate about the same thing. Once these people come in and are helping each other, they get excited about seeing that mobilization around one specific playlist or subject.”

According to Kevin Allen, we pitch business ideas every day. But how do we ensure our pitches will be successful? Allen’s forthcoming book, The Hidden Agenda, teaches readers how to connect to their audience on an emotional level in order to win pitches. Entrepreneurial spoke with Allen about how to find and connect to what he calls the hidden agenda.

You write in your book that each of us makes a pitch every day. What do you mean by that?

Whether you’re trying to get a group of people to follow you for the first time who you’ve hired or you’re running a small company, at the end of the day there’s an organization you’re trying to reach and connect with. In business (that’s) an audience that you’re trying to get to do what you want them to do and to buy your product. So the notion of pitching, that is reaching someone and connecting with them so they will follow you is a universal thing in business we do each and every day.

What do you mean by the title of your book, Hidden Agenda?

Over the years of pitching, I realized that behind every decision is an emotional desire. People don’t buy with their heads, they buy with their hearts.

While everyone was listening for the functional stuff (in meetings), my antenna would go up and I would say I think this person is nervous or this person has an ambition. If I could connect with that in the form of what makes me special or what I believe or maybe establishing a shared ambition, I’ll connect with them and they’ll believe in my business. Once I started to codify this and use this as a process, we won much of the time.

First, it’s putting yourself in a relationship of empathy with your prospect to understand what keeps them up at night, what they aspire to, what they believe in. But that’s only half the job. The other half is reaching inside yourself, your core, to see what makes me special? Or what is it I believe or what ambition do I have? Often connecting to that hidden agenda is the magic.

Small businesses can innocently expose themselves to cybercrime when an employee opens an email that appears to be from the CEO, not updating the anti-virus program or having a laptop lost or stolen.

Eduard Goodman, Chief Privacy Officer for Identity Theft 911 has seen an increase in small businesses being targeted for cybercrime within the last five to seven years. Highly desirable data include customer information lists and personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, dates of birth and account numbers.

A recent survey by Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance shows 85 percent of small business owners believe their company is safe from hackers, viruses, malware or a cyber-security breach. Sixty-nine percent rely on Internet security for their business’s success.

Yet, the same survey shows 77 percent don’t have a formal Internet security policy for employees and 49 percent don’t even have an informal policy.

So how can small businesses protect themselves?

Ensuring your business has the latest anti-virus, spyware and firewall programs is one method of protection, according to Goodman. Training on how to recognize phishing emails is essential as fraudsters will send emails from someone like the CEO of a company so employees think they have to open the email.

“Question what you’re clicking on, question where it’s coming from,” says Goodman. Have an awareness to take that extra 10 seconds to ask ‘Hey did you send me something? Is it legit?’”

The average worker spends about 100,000 hours of his/her life working. In Rich Horwath’s experience most people work at jobs they don’t like. Making a plan though can help one have the “greatest days of their lives” according to Horwath, a business strategist.

In his book Strategy for You: Building a bridge to the life you want (to be published in January 2012) Horwath outlines a five-step plan for building a bridge to the life you want. Entrepreneurial spoke with Horwath about how one can create a successful life for themselves.

What does the bridge symbolize in your book?

The bridge symbolizes how you get from where you are today to the goals and objectives that one sets for themselves. In the real world a bridge spans obstacles or barriers. Strategy helps you span or overcome the obstacles you might face.

Step one: Discover

Uncover your process through insight. How is our career? How are our finances, relationships? How is our health? It demands understanding where we are today, where we want to go and then building a bridge to get there.

Step two: Differentiation

Doug and Polly White have seen small businesses use all kinds of questionable hiring practices. There was the entrepreneur who hired anyone looking for work. Then there was the woman who hired and fired her sister twice. The list goes on.

In their book, Let Go to GROW: why some businesses thrive and others fail to reach their potential , the Whites found from their business consulting that entrepreneurs often don’t know how to hire employees.

“No one is born knowing how to hire and manage people,” said Polly. “You come into this with no clue how to hire and manage people. So entrepreneurs often end up hiring friends and family. While your friends and family may be right for a job in your organization it’s not always the right way to go.”

Entrepreneurial interviewed the Whites about the five steps businesses can follow in order to hire the right people.

1. Know what you need

Hire someone based on their behaviors and cognitive capabilities.

Many small business owners in the United States are reluctant to hire more employees in the near term as economic uncertainty and sagging sales continue to put pressure on company balance sheets, the latest index on small business optimism from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) shows.

Of the 2,077 small businesses in NFIB’s membership surveyed, the number of companies planning to increase staff is down two percentage points to just nine percent, while 12 percent plan to reduce their workforce over the next three months. The report also shows employment has been reduced for the fifth month in a row with an average reduction of 0.1 workers per company.

“Small businesses seem to have the right number of employees,” said Holly Wade, senior policy analyst at the NFIB. “They’re breaking even. But until they see a pick-up in consumer spending there’s no reason to hire.”

Economic uncertainty is affecting consumer confidence and in turn small businesses. Twenty-six percent of business owners surveyed said poor sales are their main concern.

Wade doesn’t see anything inspiring more consumer confidence in the near future. “We don’t see anything on the horizon that would get small businesses to hire more and consumers to spend more,” she said.

At the same time, Sageworks has seen an increase in private company profit per employee with average profit per employee rising by 50 percent since 2009. The profit per employee has so far been $15,000 this year.

“Private companies have seen revenue growth between four to six percent,” said Libby Bierman, an analyst with Sageworks. “The companies are growing, but they’re not adding a lot of employees.”

Dr. Mary Jo Gorman decided to help patients in intensive care units five years ago when she saw a problem brewing in hospitals.

“There’s a crisis in the intensive care units today based on the shortage of specialists taking care of patients in ICU combined with the aging population,” says the founder of Advanced ICU Care.

Gorman’s company uses telemedicine to allow communication between doctors, patients and their families. “Our physicians and staff are watching and interacting with patients 24 hours a day from our central office in St.Louis, Missouri,” says Gorman.

Her company is one of 10 recipients of Ernst & Young LLP’s 2011 Entrepreneurial Winning Women program. The winners from different industry sectors and geographies will be provided with advisors, resources and insight with the goal of becoming reaching their full potential. The program coaches its recipients in the following areas:

Setting higher goals

• Building a public profile
• Working on the business, rather than in it
• Establishing key advisory networks
• Evaluating financing for expansion

“Through our 25-year history of working with and supporting entrepreneurs, we’ve seen that the biggest challenges women business owners face is lack of access to capital and not having the same business networks as male entrepreneurs,” says Herb Engert, Americas Strategic Growth Markets Leader for Ernst & Young LLP.  “We launched the Entrepreneurial Winning Women program to eliminate these barriers by providing women with know-how and access to valuable networks.”

Shares of one-time Wall Street darling Netflix Inc plunged 34 percent in heavy trading, a day after the battered movie rental company warned of more subscriber defections and mounting costs.

Target Corp’s website crashed for the second time in six weeks, interrupting online shopping for the discount chain. The website also crashed on September 13, after an overwhelming rush to the site from shoppers interested in a new line of Missoni apparel and other goods.

The New York Times is reporting that a virus has infected the computers in Japan’s Parliament, prompting fears of the loss of sensitive information.

Tony Fadell, known as the godfather of the iPod, has made a new thermostat with the help of a small army of engineers and designers from Apple Inc and other tech giants including Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.

When Casey McConnell started text messaging marketing company Qittle he took the traditional route of hiring onsite employees. But he soon realized it was more advantageous to hire workers online.

“We found it was easy to find these specialists or people that we could hire for a certain amount,” said McConnell, the CEO of Qittle. “We didn’t have the extra overhead and we just got the project done. It’s really easy for us to ramp up our needs or pull back using contractors. If we had an internal staff it’s pretty hard to fluctuate like that.”

Qittle’s preference to hire workers in the cloud is reflected in Elance’s recent survey that shows 83 percent of small businesses plan to hire half their workers online within the next 12 months. Only 10 percent of those surveyed plan to hire predominantly onsite workers (90 percent).

Elance, a marketplace for online workers, has posted more than 600,000 jobs ranging from programers to virtual assistants. Small businesses prefer to hire online because of flexibility, speed and economy of the process cost, according to Fabio Rosati, the CEO of Elance.

“So if you’re a small business owner, you can think of a hybrid model of hiring (online and onsite workers),” said Rosati. “You can think about what skills and what talent you need onsite. You can also decide what skill set you need to be in the cloud which is much more cost-effective and much more flexible.”

Elance’s Online Employment Report shows the number of businesses hiring online has increased 107 percent since last year. Elancers earned 51 percent more last year and earned a record $38 million in Q3 2011.

Rosati said more and more companies will decide to hire in the cloud. “I predict that at some point 99 percent of businesses will have between 5-10 percent of their hiring done online because it makes so much sense.”

Disruptions to BlackBerry services spread to Latin America on Tuesday, more than a day after users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India suffered extended outages. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd, which is losing share of the corporate email market it once took for granted, said it was working on the problem but gave no details of the cause.

Adding to RIM’s woes, a growing mass of its investors backs calls for a sale or break-up of the company and wants a new, “transformational leader” at its helm, according to a shareholder leading the drive for change.

Business-software company Box has won $81 million in funding to expand its business, illustrating investors’ continued appreciation for start-up companies that tap into the cloud.

Social games company Zynga is releasing 10 new products including a bingo game and a lineup of casino-themed games, its chief executive Mark Pincus said.