On Friday 1st November, the Crowdfunding: Deep Impact Conference will be offering a once in a lifetime opportunity to hear from the founders of various crowdfunding platforms, as well as meet with likeminded business owners and investors. 

The fast data set revolution is being created by you. Every time we text, search, travel or buy we add to the data mountain of some 2.5 billion gigabytes a day that humanity is collectively writing, bringing a new consciousness into existence.

Any publisher who has taken note of the digital revolution knows that content analytics in all shapes and forms, from social media monitoring to web analytics, has completely transformed their business model. Today, media titles know more about their audiences than ever before, and are able to refine their offering as a result.

Mark Hoffman is an American-born entrepreneur who has spent most of his career founding billion dollar companies right out of the country's tech hub, Silicon Valley. He tells entrepreneurcountry what growing up in the US taught him about being an entrepreneur, why he’s now disrupting financial services with his latest start-up, Oxygen Finance, and what he thinks British businesses could learn from the US.

This month I spoke to Stefan Jeschonneck, Co-founder of SumUp. SumUp is a great example of Ecosystem Economics™ in action within the realm of financial services, offering a digital, disruptive solution to payments. SumUp empowers any business or sole trader to accept debit and credit card payments securely, using a smartphone and their portable card reader. With recent investment from American Express and daily deals company Groupon, I ask Stefan to share how his entrepreneurial journey began and to reveal his plans for the future.

In the romantic version, entrepreneurship and individualism are synonymous. He or she is a lone visionary, a Don Quixote tilting against the windmills of business as usual, with no resources beyond an impossible dream, a mulish stubbornness, and a maxed-out credit card.

I grew up near Palo Alto, so if I had a bias, it would be that Palo Alto is the epicentre of the tech world. And as ‘all things tech’ come to be understood as the driver of growth in business, like a massive snowball picking up speed down the mountain, it should be more important what’s happening in and around Palo Alto.

Today, 75 percent of people globally have access to a mobile phone. Of the six billion subscriptions worldwide, 77 percent are held by people in developing countries. And despite the great disparities among high and low-income regions globally, there is a reasonable parity in access to mobile phones.

Are the rules for entrepreneurial success different in the digital space from auto components or baked goods? Give or take some social-media buzz, I suspect they’re not. Taking a good idea, perfecting it, maintaining quality as demand grows, persuading target customers to pay a decent price: these are the essentials, whether that product is virtual, physical or edible. Here’s a couple of examples that have caught my eye.

For me, entrepreneurcountry represents what we need to do to embrace change for the future. Change for many is a very scary thing. For some, it is becoming the norm. And for a few, it is what makes them tick.