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Entrepreneurs demonstrating their latest ideas at the EMO Spring 2012 conference showed that inspiration travels in many directions. The young companies that took the stage Wednesday to kick off the three-day startup fest in Santa Clara, California, demonstrated a surprisingly wide variety of software and Web services.

Unfortunately, one thing most of the new companies share is the lack of a clear plan for building a profitable business. Typical for today's startups - particularly in the mobile and cloud markets, but even in e-commerce - the strategy of choice seems to be building as large of a user base as possible, then trying to figure out how to make money later.

With its billion-dollar sale to Facebook, Instagram instantly became the latest poster child for startup success. In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times.

An amazing run, and it wasn't all just luck, though the company enjoyed plenty of that. To boost its chances to win the startup lottery, Instagram did eight very important things right.

Just about every weekend someplace on the planet a peculiar series of meetups is happening called Startup Weekend. The idea is to bring together a group of people, many of whom have never set eyes on each other before, to form new ventures, many of which are tech-related. So far the model seems to be working: each weekend on average has produced two or three companies. According to the master website, more than 5,000 startups have been created since the process began, and some 2,000 just in the last year alone. We last wrote about the process last April and here is more information about the process and the role that the Kauffman Foundation has played.

The collegiate calendaring system DormNoise announced today that it has secured a $500,000 investment from DN Ventures LLC and PRESENT e-Learning Systems Inc. The funding will be used to support the company's sales and marketing endeavors.

DormNoise was founded by 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Jay Rodrigues, who recognized the need for universities, campus groups and college students to have a centralized, online resource in order to share and track campus activities.

U.K. startup BandCentral announced its official launch today. Describing itself as a "Basecamp for bands," the service is an online tool for bands, record labels and managers to track finances, manage tours, update social media profiles, and handle merchandising.

Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight Graphic.ly - a company that opted to release early (and imperfectly) in exchange for valuable user feedback. As companies look to their peers and audiences to help define product features, there's a greater need for scalable testing platforms. Here's a summary of eight useful services that will help put you on the path to product greatness.