One of the greatest things about the entrepreneurial landscape is that it’s always changing: new startups are sprouting globally, companies are constantly acquired or merging, and the tech entrepreneurs that pop out of Silicon Valley keep getting younger and younger. It’s exciting to wake up in the morning, turn on the computer and read about the latest business trends, industry events and noteworthy entrepreneurs.

But with meetings all day and networking events on weekends, it’s difficult for any small business owner to keep up with the ever changing information. However, that’s still not a valid excuse — there’s an app for that, of course.

I asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs the following question:

What content apps do you use to get the best startup, tech and industry news on the go?

Here are eight mobile options that will deliver the business headlines you need to read — right to your fingertips:

1. Flipboard Is Fantastic

“Flipboard is probably one of the most frequently used apps on my mobile devices. By aggregating multiple blogs and presenting content in a timeline format, I’m able to easily keep up with the best startup and tech news. Flipboard has predefined “Technology” and “Business” channels which are fantastic, but the app also makes it easy to add other news sources.”

-Matt Mickiewicz, 99designs

Read about how Flipboard may soon have more downloads in China than the US.

2. Feeddler Feeds Daily

“Feeddler allows me to read all my Google Reader feeds on my iPhone and syncs with all my other devices. It’s the best way to stay on top of startup and tech news blogs that I follow.”

-Josh Weiss, Bluegala

3. Stick With Twitter

“I am on the Twitter app constantly for the best startup and technology news on mobile. If you follow the right lists and industry leaders, you’ll get all the news you need to stay current in an efficient way.”

-Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

Read about how with 140 million active users and 340 million tweets per day, Twitter is officially mainstream.

4. News.me Fuels Me

“This app helps brings all the most important links and news shared by your Twitter friends and those you follow. I love it because it allows certain lists of mine to bring me the updates I want or need — especially in the tech world.”

-Ashley Bodi, Business Beware

Read about how News.me now delivers important news from your social networks to your iPhone.

5. Quora Has the Answers

“I love this site! It informs you on the latest trends, insights, and topics that are shaping our society — specifically the technology and startup sectors.”

-Ash Kumra, DesiYou

7. Wheres’s Your Pulse?

“I have been promoting Pulse’s News app to friends and family because it is a great mobile news aggregator that makes it easy to stay on top of all the news you want — regardless of your interests and industry. Particularly great for multidisciplinary entrepreneurs.”

-Henry Glucroft, little skips / Airdrop

Read about How Pulse landed a pre-load spot on the explosive Kindle Fire.

8. Go With Google Reader

“Always has been the best for me. I use an Android phone and am totally immersed in the Google ecosystem, so it really is the best option!”

-Justin Nowak, Mobile Business Advisors

Eugene Grabkin via shutterstock

Every startup needs a stunning office space with tons of cool furniture and accessories to make its employees feel at home and to attract new talent.

Y Combinator company 42Floors is quickly becoming the source to find these office spaces and has launched a new feature today called “Showroom” to help you find all of the neat furniture to fill it.

Here’s how 42Floors CEO Jason Freedman explained the feature to me:

It’s a marketplace of inspiring products to make offices awesome. At a time when companies MUST have cool offices to attract talent, we make that whole process a little less painful, a little more awesome. (actually, a whole lot)

As you’re perusing the 42Floors site for a hip new office in downtown San Francisco, you can check out what the Showroom has to offer so you can get a better idea of the type of space you need:

The Showroom has everything you’d ever need to build out the perfect sanctuary for your new company. You can look into everything from bar stools to cloud phone services:

Along with furniture and phone services you can find things like kitchen accessories as well as necessary office services like interior design and links to services like EXEC and TaskRabbit to get more things done at your place of business.

The 42Floors Showroom has all of the contact information that you need to set up an appointment with someone or get a quote on a specific service. In some cases, 42Floors even provides a handy pre-filled contact form to get things started:

When small teams get their first funding, finding a place to call “home” is usually the first move before hiring new employees. What 42Floors is doing with its site is making that process a little bit easier by pulling listings in from all over the web and even setting up appointments for you to check out an office space.

➤ 42Floors

If you’re not the creative type, or just want a few lolz, a site called Nonstartr will generate nonsensical, but highly buzz-worthy, startup pitches for you.

I’m a fan of this one:

I’d write about it for sure.

So go ahead, visit the site and click the “I need to see more traction” button to generate a few and share your favorites in the comments.

➤ Nonstartr

If you’re wondering how to get started with your own company and are looking to Silicon Valley as a measuring stick, you might want to make sure you’re up on all of the latest buzzwords and who’s who in technology.

One of the best ways to learn things is by using flash cards. Being asked a question and then cycling through it over and over again until you’ve learned the answer is an age-old way of drilling new information into your brain.

An iOS app called Tech Startup Genius wants to help you learn everything there is to know about starting a new company and being a successful entrepreneur. The best part about it is you can do it while you’re on the go since it’s a mobile app.

You’ll be asked questions in the following categories; people you should know, orgs you should know, company formation basics, and fundraising basics. Do you know what three corporate structures are usually used for a new startup? No? Then be sure to check this app out.

I’ll take convertible notes for $500, Alex

While this might seem like a goofy idea for an app, the information it contains is actually quite helpful to budding startup creators. If you come up with a really killer idea and execute on the business end poorly, someone else will come along and do it better. Not only will they do it better, but they’ll actually profit from it and you’ll be left in the dust.

You can start answering questions by category or do a random mix of all of them. You’re shown a question and when you flip the card over to see the answer you’re asked how confident you are that you’ve retained the information. If you aren’t so sure on whether you’ve gotten the answer down pat, it’ll be tossed back into rotation as you start answering other questions.

While all of this random Q&A will help you learn about startup culture and business practices, you can search through the cards to brush up on something if you’d just like a refresher. The information appears to have been pulled from other online publications and resources like Wikipedia, so definitely take it all with a grain of salt.

This app is free so if you’re starting a company it’s not a bad idea to grab it and make sure you know what you’re doing before you start filing paperwork and signing contracts. Of course having a lawyer to do all of this for you is advised, but relying entirely on someone else to know the in’s and out’s of business laws pertaining to startups isn’t a smart move.

➤ Tech Startup Genius for iOS

President Barack Obama, one day after holding a very personal interview on Google+ Hangouts, has stayed true to his word and sent an official Startup America Legislative agenda to Congress to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive in the US.

Among the items President Obama proposed as part of the program include tax breaks for small businesses as well as reform around allowing immigrants to stay in the US by handling the current backlog of visa requests.

Here’s what the President had to say about the dedication to startups in America:

One year ago today, I called for an all hands on deck effort to ensure that America remains the best place on Earth to turn a great idea into a successful business. The private sector responded, with the Startup America Partnership launching new entrepreneurial networks all across the country. Today, we’re taking new steps that build on that progress, and I urge Congress to send me a common-sense bipartisan bill that does even more to expand access to capital and cut taxes for America’s entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Along with cutting taxes for small businesses, the President is supporting new ways of funding for startups, such as “crowdfunding”, and is calling for a national framework to be built to support the micro-donation avenue of funding.

Clearly the President has recognized that the United States is a leader in small businesses, and making it easier to start these companies in the US will not only keep the talent in the country, it will also attract talent and funding from outside of the country. During the State of the Union last week, Obama said that “Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed.” This appears to be exactly what he was referring to.

In addition to the agenda items sent to Congress, the President would like to see more involvement from schools and is introducing programs like the “National Education Startup Challenge”, which invites those in 6th grade and all the way up to college to come up with solutions to solve education and non-profit issues the US is currently facing.

Some may say that this is merely a part of Obama’s plan to get re-elected but of all of the things that he could support, startups aren’t the worst thing. Once Facebook goes public, many will be watching to see how the company does and it could set the tone for tech companies to come over the next twenty years.

One of the most brilliant minds in consumer internet today is Bing Gordon, partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He joined the firm in 2008, and watches over the sFund, which is dedicated to all things social.

Gordon currently serves on the board for Zynga and Klout, and draws from many years of experience as an executive at Electronic Arts (EA). He was the driving force behind the branding of EA Sports, which is arguably the company’s best known brand.

In the video below, Bing Gordon discusses his thoughts on how to be a CEO in the era of the “consumer internet”, which is a completely different era than the first big Dot Com boom. Everything is social these days by default, and Bing Gordon is a master in the field. This is a keynote address from the 2011 Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.

Listen and learn.

Over $15,000 dollars worth of prizes were given out to startups created at the 24-hour hackathon Angelhack this weekend. The hackathon was organized by Greg Gopman who arrived in Silicon Valley just four months ago from Miami. Gopman had the idea for a new kind of  hackathon where instead of being lumped in an unknown team, hackers were networked and ‘speed dated’ for the first few hours of the event.

Adobe sponsored the event by giving hackers access to their office space in SOMA. Over 300 people took part in the event, hacking together over 30 startups in teams from two to eight people and yours truly judged and moderated the final pitches where entrepreneurs had two minutes to pitch and one minute’s feedback from judges.

Below are some of the startups that emerged from Angelhack 2011.

GoonBuggy – your liver’s best friend. An app that helps keep track of alcohol consumption.

D2020 – an initiative to help people learn to make games, through games.

SwingDaddy – an app giving you professional golfing advice through video

Blogging is huge in South Korea, where most of the population go online everyday — through their phone, tablet device or personal computer — and local firm TNM is very much a major player in the space.

Strong community

The startup has built a 300 blogger strong platform of news and analysis based on partnering with some of the country’s most influential “power bloggers”, whose audiences are vast and dedicated. The company, which was founded in 2009 by Seung-eun Myung and Young Han, selects its contributors based on their levels of traffic and quality of content, with an emphasis on recruiting enthusiasts with expertise in their field.

TNM also helps foster a sense of community between bloggers with frequent events, workshops and parties that enable its partners to meet face to face.

Making money

The firm generates revenue in a number of ways, including the provision of content from its network to traditional media outlets which, for bloggers, can mean the negotiation of contracts that would be difficult to gain off their own back. Ads on the site are delivered through its own advertising network, which operates in a similar way to Federated Media in the US, while TNM provides social media and blog consultancy to clients through which it draws additional income.

Monetisation is not limited to the site itself however, and the company creates and sells mobile software and web platforms that are designed by its team of developers. In the past, its projects have included All That, a series of apps to promote operator SK Telecom’s flagship T-Store service, and its web development activities have produced more than 100 different apps, which have seen a total of 4,500,000 downloads.

Diverse activities and interests

Its diverse range of activities and interests have led to TNM being mistaken for a marketing company, but it is, in fact, a registered media organisation as well as a content provider. Its latest project has seen it partner with Yonhap, Korea’s largest news agency, to develop a crowdsourced news site which runs articles and photos from bloggers, whilst managing copyright issues.

The site is called Kurry – a mix of three Korean words, which mean ‘material’, ‘market place of ideas’, and ‘mixture of content’ – and it is designed to be simple and easy to use, a combination that TNM believes will make it a go-to resource for Koreans seeking breaking news and expert analysis.

Going mobile and beyond

TNM’s latest move in the mobile space saw it release TNM Reader, an app for both the iPhone and Android, which gives mobile users an optimised platform on which to read content from across its network. Articles can be perused by category, app users can create their own reading list to keep up with their favourite blogs and all content is easily shared thanks to in-built support for a range of social media sites.

TNM also has international plans as the firm is aiming to translate and distribute content from its Nanoomi network outside of Korea. English-language audiences are a prime target for the international push, as The Korea Herald reports.

You can find more information about TNM and its activity through the links below.

➤ TNM | On Twitter

Imagine what life would be like if all public trash cans automatically compressed the trash inside them. If the compressors were powered using solar energy? And the units could let city services know when they were full and ready to be collected?

That vision of the future is not so far away from South Korea where local startup Ecube Labs is working hard to turn its ideas into reality for trash cans around the country.

Soon-beom Kwon, who founded the environment-focused startup with a group of fellow students, came up with the idea after noticing bins overflowing with trash everyday. Figuring that the answer was to reduce the volume of trash in the bin, he investigating the possibility of using a solar-powered compressor.

During the market research stage of developing the idea, the team was surprised to find that a similar concept existed in the US. However, they continued with plan and refined their idea into a product that could bring the concept to reality.

The “smart bins” are equipped with solar panels and batteries which can operate for up to five days once fully charged. Waste is compressed to a fifth of its original size which allows the bin to hold a lot more than its usual capacity.

As it utilises space more efficiently, a smart bin need to be emptied less often which reduces the pollution created by garbage trucks that come to collect it. Each bin is equipped with a 3G transmitter which provides sanitation workers with a real time alert when it is full through a smartphone application that also displays its location.

Commenting on the product and benefits of the technology, Ecube Labs said:

If waste removal operations decrease by 10%, carbon emissions decrease by approximately 1,000 tons. If the 5,000 bins around Seoul are replaced with these bins, waste removal will decrease by over 20%. This is the same as planting 150,000 trees around Seoul.

The company is currently preparing a prototype model and plans to start trial operations within this month near Gangnam Station, the busiest subway station in Korea. The smart bins are expected to cost around $1,300-$1,700 but, as Kwon says, over time they have the potential to pay for themselves:

After three years the bins will actually end up reducing costs. We intend to offer a range of purchasing options for local governments who find the initial cost too much.

If the venture proves to be successful there is no doubt that everyday citizens will benefit from the system. While the situation has recently improved, Korea is well known for its lack of trash cans in public places due to commercial dumping and terrorism concerns.

➤ Ecube Labs

[Image courtesy of Huguette Roe / Shutterstock.com]

Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto.

In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world.

I’m going to be doing a few interviews with some of the companies in the near future, which include Goalbook, educreations, and Eduvant. This is a space that I’m very passionate about.

Each team had one thing in common, their belief in the importance of technology to make change happen in a system that hasn’t changed in decades.

That change could very well come out of the ImagineK12 incubator, which says this about itself:

We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded.

Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision. Over a three-month period, we will draw on our extensive entrepreneurial experience, understanding of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and knowledge of the education industry to help bring your idea to life, get your company funded, and to get your company on the road to success.

Last night wasn’t a pitch session for funding, although I’m sure most of the startups hoped that Reid Hoffman would take interest, as he is an extremely prolific VC now. Most of the nearly three hours were spent on presentation of the products, and Q&A by Mayor Booker on the nuts and bolts of education, and business advice and guidance from Reid Hoffman. For these companies, this type of audience is nearly unheard of, and each one took notes and paid full attention. And of course, vice versa.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker shared that he can no longer watch the way school systems have worked, there has to be change. Technology, he believes, can bring that change.

The theme of the night appeared to be data. Educational institutions have a huge flow of data, some not even digitized, and have no way to pour through it to make smart decisions for their schools or more importantly for their students. Some of the companies have come up with ways to use data to incentive students with behavioral issues, make better use of a Principal’s time by giving them a dashboard of student and financial data in real-time, as well as share lesson plans all over the world.

A few of these companies seemed to intrigue both Booker and Hoffman, causing Booker to set up meetings between the companies and schools in Newark immediately.

Why isn’t there more of a focus on technology in education? Lack of money. Schools are notorious for having financial issues, even though technology can help with that, and there isn’t a steady flow of VC funds for those who want to focus their efforts on the education space. It seems as if ImagineK12 is set to change all of that, and having Booker and Hoffman involved certainly doesn’t hurt its cause.

Let’s also not forget that if we put more technology in schools, we’ll have more technologists like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for years to come.

You can view more photos from last night below: