ReadWriteWeb

No ambitious young person wants to wait until graduation to start working on projects, developing ideas, and building teams. As a case in point, consider how many success stories from the dotcom and Web 2.0 eras have begun with brilliant twenty-somethings dropping out of college to pursue their passions.

Speaking directly to this concern (or phenomenon, depending on your perspective), two students at the New York University Stern School of Business and a former MySpace IT director have started FledgeWing, a new social network that aims to connect aspiring student entrepreneurs with one another as well as with mentors, investors, and industry professionals.

"Now is the time for people who care, who want to invent, who have skills in specific scientific and information technology areas, to get out there and add to the productivity of the economy," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said during the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford University last week.

"The question is," he continued, "will you have the passion and the tenacity and the interest to really start something that's important?"

Earlier this week, the open-source music player built on Mozilla technology, Songbird, finally made its 1.0 release. After being in development for two years, this version feels like the kind of solid media player we've been expecting and hoping for all along. Although nothing is entirely bug-free, this release worked smoothly, with both performance and stability seeming greatly improved. Combine that with its extendibility through the the use of add-ons, and you'll find Songbird has a lot of promise as a worthwhile iTunes replacement.

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

Who will turn this crisis around? We will. Who else? And how else but with innovation and entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurs: this is your time to step up to the plate. Hard as the times may be, you must remember, many, many great companies were born during recessions. And many others almost died in the midst of recessions but managed to survive through their founders' tremendous grit and resilience.

In our search for that rare beast - the profitable VC backed venture - I interviewed Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb. Blurb does Print On Demand publishing for both consumer and professional markets. They compete with Lulu, which announced today that it is "laying off 24 workers at its North Carolina plant because of the slowing economy". That is 25% of their workforce and includes their President. Eileen and I both had the same reaction: "you mean you only just learned that hard times are coming?!".

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week Nokia launched an iPhone competitor called the Tube, Netflix released an API, Google Blog Search re-designed, and we ran a poll about Flash coming to iPhone. On the trends side, we investigated the lack of commercial RDF apps in the Semantic Web, reviewed 5 insightful science books, launched our 'Gritty Entrepreneurs' series, and interviewed a co-founder of last.fm. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Seen the headlines recently? These are scary times. Entrepreneurs are far too busy to focus on the mayhem in the markets - and they know that they cannot do anything about it. So the standard response is just to deal with it as a background worry. But some re-assessing of the external market reality can be useful at times like this. I have had lots of calls along the lines of "what the heck is going on and how does this impact the business we are working on?" This is my condensed, hopefully practical, advice to entrepreneurs.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Times are now tougher. Which makes most people head home. The half-hearted entrepreneurs, the wannabes who thought it was going to be easy, the folks with connections to VCs who could get a $5m Series A for a copycat app. Who will be left? The gritty entrepreneur of the old school who knows that it is really, really tough to build a great company. At ReadWriteWeb we celebrate these gritty entrepreneurs and in a series kicking off today we will be writing about them - and for them.

Often people start a company without any clear idea of what a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code. While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers, there's more to a startup than passion.

In this post, we explore the basics behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure every company should have.

I'm a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The genius of Murakami is in his discipline, focus and determination. I see him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom, passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master.

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. Below is a list of 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.