startup

Suppose you have an idea for a new digital services business -- a business that delivers some value to others over the Internet. No matter how good your idea might be, getting such a business off the ground requires a given amount of capital. And this business might require business skills that you do not possess. You could check around with friends to see if any of them are interested in joining you in such a venture, but you could spend months finding the right friends who are interested and available.

Before the dotcom boom shook everything up and changed the employment landscape forever, conventional wisdom held that larger companies were inherently more stable, and were better targets for people on a job hunt.

If you're contemplating employment at a startup, get ready for an exhilarating -- if bumpy -- ride, say four IT managers who have made the jump from corporate IT to a startup.

Enterprise 2.0, the market of vendors that sell technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networking applications to companies, is likely to become more competitive as IT budgets get trimmed.

Microsoft is giving away free software to early-stage Web start-up companies as part of a worldwide program called BizSpark launched on Wednesday

Silicon Valley is the stage where wunderkinds emerge and are feted: Yahoo's Jerry Yang and David Filo, Netscape's Marc Andreessen, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -- all in their 20s when they hit it big. But there are exceptions to the rule.

The sound of a tech start-up crashing to Earth is loudest when it's unexpected. However, there are several warning signs that investors and customers can look for that almost always spell trouble: