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Facebook allows users of its social networking site to comment on its pages without Liking them now.

This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.

The hot movie at theaters right now is the mind-melting thriller Inception in which thieves steal ideas by entering people's subconscious by way of their dreams. The thing about our subconscious is that it is at work even when we are awake and it can affect the nature and focus of our thoughts. For startups, maintaining focus on the most important goals of your company is imperative to success, and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says he has learned to train his brain to do just that.

So you want to be the next big shot entrepreneur to come up with an idea that will change the world, but can't seem to come up with that golden ticket of an idea? Well perhaps you need to look no further than the world of art for inspiration. While looking through Hacker News posts, I stumbled across an illustrated SlideShare presentation from San Francisco-based cartoonist Betsy Streeter that suggests ways artists can unleash their "creative beasts" hiding within - an interesting approach to creativity that aspiring entrepreneurs can also take advantage of.

In our recent discussions of branding for startups and entrepreneurs, we've mentioned that marketing and branding is always harder to do when what you're trying to sell isn't a quality product. Successful startup products tend to fit into an equation involving the ideas and the people who are executing those ideas. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and previously Flickr, says that it wasn't just the idea that attracted her to Hunch; the people behind it were just as important.

Yahoo today announced that it is bucket testing a new design of its front page. The new design was built on top of the latest version of Yahoo's UI Library, which, according to Yahoo, will accelerate performance and give third-party developers the ability to easily create applications for the new front page. It is not clear when this new design will become widely available, but for now, it is only available to a random subset of Yahoo's users.