Featuring profiles of cutting-edge firms, weekly interviews with famous entrepreneurs, feature articles and a weekly TV show called "Venture with Chris Valerio," Bloomberg says that Bloomberg Entrepreneurs "is well-positioned and committed to meeting the needs of this growing community. This section is driven by people and growth businesses. Our readers will get an inside look into innovative entrepreneurs such as Loopt’s Sam Altman and companies such as On Deck Capital."

Loopt, a location based service akin to Foursquare, was founded by Sam Altman when he was an extraordinarily young entrepreneur – just 20 years old.

The site also features profiles of a trio of young entrepreneurs who turned away from a declining finance industry to create a custom online chocolate business, and a report about Michael O’Leary – the chief executive officer of Ryanair Holdings, Europe’s biggest low-cost airline – and his ideas to cut flight costs by stripping out the copilot and creating standing-room-only planes.

The site began life in 2007 as simple website created by two University of Wisconsin – Madison students who wanted a website that would make studying for tests and class preparation easier.

The site has now expanded to a number of other colleges, integrating students and professors’ needs to create shared files, study guides, curricula and flash cards.

It’s backed by a team of experts in the web technology field with decades of experience with Silicon Valley start-ups between them.

StudyBlue features practical study tips for college students as well as technological solutions. With iPhone and iPad integration, it’s possible to carry reams and reams of carefully organized, annotated study materials in the palm of your hand.

The software can keep track of which topics you’ve mastered, meaning that you don’t have to flip through page after page of redundant review. And there’s no chance of forgetting your study materials or not having them at an opportune moment – unless you leave your phone or computer at home, of course.

The service is initially free, although there’s an annual price tag for accessing the iPhone app and other premium features.

Many, not entirely unfairly, regard modern technological innovations like the iPad as more distracting than illuminating to the mission of learning. It’s true that without the right framework, these technologies can lead high school and college students astray.

However, they are also powerful learning tools that allow unprecedented access to a broad range of knowledge with powerful organizational and studying tools.

"The primary and perhaps revolutionary benefit of reading on the iPad is its ability to allow students to interact with content like they’ve never interacted before. Research definitively shows being an active, engaged reader increases comprehension and retention. And the iPad platform supports software that allows students to engage with texts they’re reading," writes the company on its blog.

With that in mind, and the usefulness of internet marketing still in doubt, a Utah-based company called Varolo has turned the traditional model of advertising on its head. Instead of paying big media companies to show you ads, Varolo pays you to watch them, and rewards you for bringing more people into the Varolo fold.

By building a "village" of friends, you can earn money on the ads watched by all the people in your Varolo social network, and you guarantee that the ads will be relevant to you and your peers. If you’re shopping for a car, you could earn rewards on Varolo by watching auto ads.

The same principle applies if you’re looking to go on vacation, buy new clothes or purchase a computer.

There’s no cost at all – Varolo won’t charge you. Of course, to actually earn money you need to spread the word and get other people into your "village." Watching ads on your own will enter you into weekly rewards drawings, which grow in size as more people watch.

The Varolo model takes something people spend millions of hours a week doing – watching online video – and transforms it into a revenue source. So you might consider switching some of your weekly YouTube viewing time to Varolo.

When Take-Two releases GTA games, it makes huge profits; so much so that Electronic Arts once attempted to take over the company for $2 billion, or $25.74 per share. Management resisted, however, and the company’s shares have struggled ever since, slumping as low as $6.

In years without a GTA game, though, it typically struggles.

With its latest game Take-Two took the industry and the markets by surprise. Rockstar San Diego’s Red Dead Redemption, a Western open-world epic in the style of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Deadwood, has garnered universal critical acclaim, including rave reviews from mainstream outlets like the New York Times. Red Dead Redemption and its grizzled hero John Marston sold two million copies in its first month.

The game’s sales helped Take-Two beat analysts’ expectations of losses of 20 cents per share, instead posting profits of 14 cents per share; not a huge amount, but far better than third-quarter 2009 losses of 68 cents per share.

The company has a few more rounds left its six-shooter, too: It recently released a sequel to the cult hit Mafia, and it’s scheduled to release NBA 2K11 and Civilization V, the latest iteration of Sid Meier’s incredibly popular strategy series, this year.

Finally, the company released some news that upended the gaming media on Friday: next year, it will publish Duke Nukem Forever, a famous sequel that was so long in development it became a byword for vaporware: software which is endlessly promised but never materializes. The news surprised almost everyone in the industry, which had long ago written the game off.

Take-Two still has hurdles to overcome; a culture of auteurs and perfectionists in its star Rockstar Studio has led to endless delays (Red Dead Redemption was stalled for years before it was finally released), and declining sales in the videogame sector as a whole threaten profitability.

But its backers, including the takeover king Carl Icahn, appear to have faith in the company. And there’s always takeover speculation to keep the stock trading upwards – "We expect the company could be acquired, if share price levels remain low into the release of Grand Theft Auto V," Mike Hickey, an analyst with Janco Partners in Greenwood Village, Colorado, told Businessweek / Bloomberg today.

The news is grim – every month, 125,000 people enter the labor force, most of them young, and not enough jobs are not being created for them.

The Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project found that because so few jobs are being created, and so many workers young and old are tenaciously clinging to the jobs they already have, the change in the employment-to-population ratio is worst for those in 16-to-19 age range, and second worst for those in the 20-24 range.

Graduating into the teeth of a recession, studies have found, means that young workers will earn more than 15 percent less per year than peers graduating in good times. That adds up to about $70,000 over the next decade.

The news looking forward isn’t good, either. Currently, the "job gap" – the number of jobs the economy needs to add to reach pre-recession levels – will take twelve years to close if the economy adds jobs at a monthly rate of 208,000 per month (the best rate in the past decade).

Since the economy is currently losing jobs every month, that recovery is a long way off.

One of the most important overlooked bank services is the CD – which works basically like a bank-issued, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured bond. CDs have a maturity – from as short as three months to as long as five years – and an annual percentage rate, which will usually be around 1 and 3 percent.

With laddering, you purchase CDs of varying maturities – one at 6 months, one at 12 months and one at 24 months, for instance.

Longer-term CDs generally have higher rates, but they lock your money up more completely than most other investments. With laddering, you can spread your money out across a variety of products, and when the shorter-term CDs mature, you can withdraw the money you need and renew the rest of the funds at a higher, long-term rate.

Spread over a number of years, you end up with a "ladder" of relatively high-yield CDs maturing every year, giving you access to your funds as well as decent – and extraordinarily safe – ROI.

A large number of well-paid construction and manufacturing jobs have been eliminated, replaced with jobs in the service industry and administrative work. The fastest-growing job category, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study cited by the Times, was "Administrative, support, waste management and remedial services" with a median hourly wage of $12.76.

This category has added 208,000 positions since December 2009. Construction, with a median wage of $19.24, has shed 123,000 positions, while finance and insurance jobs have declined by 54,000.

People in top managerial jobs are doing well, and opportunities, such as they are, remain open on the bottom of the heap. It’s the "broad middle" that’s taken the hardest hit – what David Autor, the labor economist who compiled the MIT study, called "middle-skill, middle-wage" positions.

Chelsea Nelson, a former secretary who now makes a bit more than minimum wage working as a waitress at an Arkansas truck stop, told the Times reporter "I don’t know, with the jobs we have, if we’re ever going to be able to make it on our own."

There are two basic types of bankruptcy filing for individuals: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. The latter is more inclusive; almost anyone can file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, provided that they owe no more than $360,475 in unsecured debts and $1,081,400 in secured debts.

Chapter 7 filers, on the other hand, are "means-tested" and have to undergo a counseling session with a credit counselor. Basically, you have to be pretty much broke.

When you file for Chapter 13, you can keep the majority of your property, so home equity or other investments won’t get wiped out. You get a few years of interest-free payments to a single "trustee" which handles distribution to your creditors.

In Chapter 7, much of your property is forfeit – which is why it makes more sense for people who have less to lose.

Whether you fall under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 filing, it’s also important to find a trusted bankruptcy management service or professional to help guide you through the complex legal pitfalls of the process.

Interest isn’t the only thing that compounds – whenever gains are reinvested, the principle of compounding gains applies. The math here is simple, though it gets more complicated with more sophisticated investments.

Let’s say that your initial investment totals $20,000 and that after dividends are reinvested, you are earning a fairly unremarkable 5 percent annual return on your investment.

After five years, that $10,000 will have become $25,525. Over ten years, it will become $32,577; over 20 years, $53,065. Compounding explains why investing when you’re young is such a powerful strategy – returns become more valuable every year.

If at the end of every year you added $1,000, after 20 years you’d have over $85,000 for an investment of just $40,000.

In addition, reinvesting dividends has tax benefits – because you don’t have to pay taxes on reinvested dividend payments – and most brokers will do it automatically at no charge.

First of all, you want to inquire into their professional certification and experience. A planner should probably be a certified public accountant (CPA), having completed a professional course in tax preparation. A personal financial specialist (PFS) is a sub-designation of CPAs, one who has completed further training in estate, retirement, risk management and investment planning.

With the internet on your side, look into the planner’s track record, as well as asking for documents proving performance. If someone’s investments consistently underperform the S&P 500 over a ten- or twenty-year period, there’s not much point investing with them.

Payment schedules are another area to consider. Ideally, you want to avoid commission-based structures – there’s a real conflict of interest when an adviser gets paid more to make more trades, eating up your returns with fees.

Depending on your net worth, fees based on percentage of total assets or an hourly rate make much more sense.

Finally, ask around among your network, particularly among individuals with a lot of business and finance experience. If someone has a proven track record of making money, they probably know how to keep it, too.