I remember in my school there was a painting which had two horses running through the woods and had a caption “Each must find it’s own way”. However, this blog post differs in someway and here’s how.

Last week I was in Venice and explored the city a lot by walking. Apart from hundreds of eager tourists, several museums/ churches I also found abundant businesses and as a tourist sometimes you have good experience dealing with them, while sometimes leaves a sour taste in your mouth (in my previous trip to Florence I ran into a horrible restaurant ripping off 48 euro for some for some trashy food). While spending good 3 days here, I thought a day would come when every tourist would do something mentioned below.

There would be “tracker” sitting on the phones of every tourist (yes and I am hoping that international data plan would be very very cheap or may be free ). Now this service would anonymously track the path of the traveler.  This application would do a lot of data mining on Best places to see in the given time constraint, restaurants to eat, mashup events, and not to mention hotels to stay and bars to hop into. The traveler can certainly attach experiences and put reviews for the activities/ businesses they dealt with. Services like Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr can be integrated.  It would also help the local authorities to plan and increase the infrastructure to serve the tourists in a better fashion. The possibilities are endless.

Social networking is not the main purpose of this application. What people “generally” do, is what it will tell.

However, the success of this depends on two important things (out of several other roadblocks)

- The willingness of the tourist to let the real time information published (even though it can be completely anonymous)

- Free international data roaming plan

May be someone is already working on making it work for making the life of tourists an easy experience.

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Recently I came across this study published by Kauffman Foundation. I was surprised to see  some of their findings as I believed/ heard/ trusted a different mantra on entrepreneurship. Here’s my top 10 favorite.

Myth 1 : A successful entrepreneur starts at an early age.

Finding : The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

Myth 2 : An entrepreneur should have a family which has business experience.

Finding : Entrepreneurs don’t always come from families of entrepreneurs; slightly more than half of the sample were the first in their families to launch businesses.

Myth 3 : After marriage or after having kids, launching a company is almost impossible.

Finding : Entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to be married and have children when they launch their first businesses

Myth 4 : Work experience eats up your time, fire, and the zeal to start a new business.

Finding: Entrepreneurs are far more likely to have worked for an employer for more than six years than to have quickly launched their own businesses.

Myth 5 : You should be very rich, to own a company.

Finding: Entrepreneurs are more likely to come from a middle-class or upperlower-class background, and very few come from backgrounds of extreme wealth or extreme poverty.

Myth 6 :  The entrepreneurs are *Super Stars* in their school/ colleges in the academics.

Finding: They performed well in high school and in college, with the vast majority ranking average or above in their respective institutions.

Myth 7 : The entrepreneur launches a company so that he has passion for new ideas, wants to generate employment, yada yada yada.

Finding : Their primary motivations for launching a business are to build wealth.

Myth 8 : An entrepreneur always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Finding: Roughly half of the entrepreneurs said they did not think about it.

Myth 9 : I became an entrepreneur because I did not get a job using traditional methods.

Finding :  Only 4.5 percent of respondents stated that inability to find traditional employment was an important motivator in starting their own businesses. In fact, 80.3 said that this was not at all a factor.

Myth 10 : You need a co-founder, or a friend’s or family support to launch a business.

Finding: Only 27% of the entrepreneurs felt that, so it means if you want to do it, do it.

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