ReleaseWire Connect

That one big client you wanted to land just turned you down; that star employee you wanted to hire left you hanging; and, the thousands of dollars you spent on marketing are having little effect. Meanwhile, your competitors seem to be getting everything right.

When was the last time you wrote on somebody’s wall? We’re not talking about when you were five years old and you took crayons to your mother’s gleaming white living room walls. We’re talking about on Facebook, the Palo Alto-based online networking site that is taking the world by storm. If you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have an answer to that question, or if you don’t even know what that question means then your business is in trouble.

Love them or hate them, these days it seems as if everybody has one. No, we’re not talking about mothers-in-law or Blackberries. We’re talking about blogs, those online hubs that often seem to find themselves at the centre of so much controversy. But what used to be platforms used by tech-savvy teenagers to rant and rave about social woes are now becoming sophisticated tools in a company’s arsenal of weapons.

Yahoo! eagerly snatched up the photo-sharing site Flickr, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hedged his bets on MySpace, and Google recently agreed to purchase the video entertainment site YouTube for $1.65 billion. Wherever you look, entrepreneurs who were once struggling to make a presence for their fledgling companies in the vast maze of the Internet are now seeing their hard work pay off, quite literally.

Gone are the days when you graduate from university and are forced to send out your resume to so many places that you lose count in the hopes that someone, somewhere – anywhere – will give you a chance and hire you. It didn’t matter if your degree was in Latin American history and you were offered a job as a clerical assistant with the Ministry of Transportation – “I’ll take it!”

The International Energy Association predicts that by 2030, there will be a worldwide increase of over 50% in the demand for primary energy. And, as the pundits have been saying for years, traditional energy sources will not be able to meet this growing demand.

“Dreams offer little collateral.” So said the great entrepreneur Walt Disney, who was no stranger to the challenges of finding ways to finance those dreams. He was describing the difficult environment in which small businesses today find themselves: little capital and a lot of risk.