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.”

The website launched in November 2011 and is still in the alpha stage. The startup was initially self-funded with approximately $40,000. MentorMob is now about to close on an initial round of seed funding.

Chinosorn would not say what MentorMob’s metrics have been, but its traffic has been increasing by 91 percent month over month since its launch.

“It’s a fun, addictive way to learn,” says Chinosorn. “When you click on the next step you don’t know what part of the Internet you’re being sent to. Now not just educators, but enthusiasts with different hobbies are coming to use the platform to teach other people what they’re really passionate about.”

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.

What is the key to reaching the audience you wish to motivate?

There’s a whole set of things you can do to establish an empathy and dialogue with the prospect. They usually fall into three groups:

• Wants
• Needs
• Beliefs

Assume you’ll have a theory or hypothesis about the prospect after listening very carefully. Active listening is a very important skill. Then you can say there are three potential ways in which I can connect with that hidden agenda (what Allen calls core, credo and real ambition)

For someone starting to make pitches, how should they follow the advice in your book?

You have to ask three questions:

• Who are you talking to?
• Who is this person and what is their hidden agenda? What keeps this person up at night? What is it they emotionally seek?
• What is it I have either in my skill or my ambition that I can share with them or my value system that can connect with them?

Once I figure that out, I’ve connected to them in a profound way. Then how can I put that into an argument that is persuasive and in a way that has a touching human component to it.

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?’”

Goodman also recommends have a written security policy. Businesses need to ensure they have insurance coverage.

“They (small businesses) don’t want to find out after an incident that they don’t have coverage, “ says Goodman. “ I believe in having a back-up plan and the insurance side of it is important. We’re not talking a bunch of money. We’re talking free to $50 to a couple of hundred dollars on an annual policy that protects them, that will provide for remediation in case something happens or even getting money back in case there’s fraud. “

Using computer patches to fix holes and problems are also essential according to Goodman. “The system hasn’t been updated so it’s running in an environment that was safe two years, but there are holes in the network they’re not paying attention because they’re not regularly sealing them up.”

The Federal Communications Commission also has a cyberplanner to help small businesses come up with a cybersecurity plan.

Goodman recommends that businesses contact their banks, insurance companies and local police as soon as they think their security has been breached.

The consequence of a security breach depends on the type of business.

“Some businesses are bricks and mortar,” says Goodman.  “They get hacked into, but there’s not a lot of data there. Others are online sellers, when they get hacked everything gets exposed.”

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

As individuals, we have competencies and skills that make us unique. The problem is in life, we often find ourselves converging or becoming more similar. For some reason we don’t want to stand out because we’re afraid we’ll stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. In developing a bridge or a strategy for your life, you really gotta understand what makes you different. What makes you unique that other people would value.

Step three: Decide

Step three forces us to make allocations with our time and our talent. The reality is almost everyone has a to-do list. But not everyone has the discipline to create a not-to-do list. The reality is we try to do a little bit of everything in order to please as many people as possible. That’s not the best way to reach the goals that we want to reach and be a good family member, friend. The best leaders are the ones that really focus their time and talent on the few causes, activities or initiatives that really bring themselves the most value.

Step four: Design

Once we’ve thought about where we want to go, what makes us unique and where we are going to put our resources, step four asks us to develop a plan to channel those resources into activities that are going to help us reach the goals and objectives that we set for ourselves.

Step five: Drive

Execute your plan day in and day out. The drive step demands that we have the discipline not to create a plan and just follow it for a month but day in and day out to stay in tune with what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to do that.

Following the five-step plan requires an investment in time. What would the payoff be?

An average person spends 100,000 hours of their life working. From a career perspective if you haven’t developed a strategy for that aspect of your life, it’s 100,000 hours that you’ve wasted or spent miserable or frustrated and not really reaching your full potential. The hope is that by investing even an hour or two a week by thinking, planning or doing for yourself the strategy you’re trying to develop it’s gonna give you the best opportunity to realize your full potential.

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.

“By behaviors we mean work ethic and turning up on time,” said Doug.  “At the entry-level you can teach them how to make a widget. But you’re unlikely to teach someone a great work ethic.”

“Value things that have to do with communications skills, work ethic and a liking to be around other people,” said Polly. “Those are kinds of things are not something you’re going to teach to somebody else. It’s something that’s inherent in the person by the time they get to you.”

2. Understand what you have to offer

“One of the things we saw with small business people is that they’re often competing with the big guys in town,” said Doug. “What they find is when it comes to salary and benefits they can’t compete. So they have to identify what they offer that makes them an attractive place to work.”

3. Cast a wide net with a narrow focus

“We find many small businesses don’t consider a wide range of people, they consider people, friends and family,” said Doug. “We think it’s less likely you’re going to find the optimal candidate if you’re only consider a small handful of folks.”

Small businesses are often reluctant to post job ads on job search sites because they’re afraid of being inundated with resumes. “But if you know what you’re looking for you can narrow the resumes to a few which you want to pay particular attention to,” said Doug.

4. Leverage multiple methods and opinions

The Whites have seen entrepreneurs make hiring mistakes by doing all the hiring themselves. “What we find is if you bring other people into the process and get their input often times other people will see things that you didn’t see, maybe hear the same words but hear them in a different way and have a different perspective,” said Doug. “So you get a much more accurate read if you include other people.”

5. Trust, but verify

“It’s absolutely amazing to us the amount of trust, embezzlement and theft that goes on in companies,” said Doug. “You need to do background checks, you need to check into an employee’s past. You need to do reference checks. We find most employees are clever enough at finding someone to say kind things about them. So we talk about getting to the second level.”

“When you’re interviewing that reference,” continued Polly. “It’s okay to say ‘So who else worked closely with Fred at your office?’ If you get a name, ask to be transferred to them or get a phone number and see if you can get to someone else that wasn’t on Fred’s list.”

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.”

Bierman believes businesses are being very careful when it comes to any big investments such as increasing their staff.

“They’re testing their growth,” says Bierman. “Until they feel sure they won’t make this investment (hiring more employees).”

Courtesy of Sageworks Inc.

“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.”

Advanced ICU Care has 25 nationwide clients and is hoping get 12 more next year. Gorman is looking forward to the program’s business training and improving her company’s presentation skills. She’s also looking forward to participating in an international network of female entrepreneurs.

“The program will give us a platform to learn some things we can do differently and better in our organization because of the exposure I’m going to have to other successful entrepreneurs,” says Gorman.

The other 2011 recipients of the program include:

• Dr. Patricia Adams, Zeitgeist Expressions, Inc.
• Amy Buckner, AnswerLab
• Lani Hay, Lanmark Technology Inc.
• Patty Klein, A-Plus Meetings & Incentives
• Stephanie Point, Point 2 Point Global Security, Inc.
• Lisa Stone, BlogHer
• Dr. Rebecca Thomley, Orion Associates
• Alexa von Tobel, LearnVest
• Laura Zander, Jimmy Beans Wool

(This blog corrects the spelling of “Ernst” in the fourth paragraph)

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.

“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.”

But for McConnell, hiring online is the only way to go. Qittle plans to only hire workers from the cloud. “As a business we’d rather stay small and nimble and we’d rather contract out through individuals or businesses.”

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.