It's always fun to mix the word "entrepreneur" with another word to focus on entrepreneurship in that area. As today is Halloween, I decided to see if I could write an article on Hallowpreneurs, or entrepreneurs focusing on Halloween.

I assumed that in today's society, where new ideas, products and services are constantly being conceived, that someone would be making advancements in Halloween costumes, events, candies, etc.

Today I was listening to the summary of the book Break From the Pack by Oren Harari. In the book, which dicusses how companies can excel over competitors, Harari explains that companies must make leaps that go beyond traditional thinking.

He exclaims, "who would have thought people would wait on line to pay $4 for a Starbucks coffee from a paper cup." This started me thinking about entrepreneurial market research. I'm sure that if Starbucks conducted a market research study years ago asking if people would pay $4 for a cup of coffee, they would have balked.

A few months ago I bought some Blik for our conference room.

So, what is Blik? Blik surface graphics are oversized, geometric decals that allow anyone to quickly and easily create custom wallscapes in no time. The decals are self- adhesive and removable, so your blank walls have no excuse to be bare.

We went with the multi-colored dancers pictured to the left.

A great baseball player will get out 70% of the time.

A great venture capital firm will fund companies which fail 70% of the time.

So what does this mean? It means that failure IS an option. If we are not prepared to fail, then we will never take chances; we will never try new things; we will never launch new ventures.

While we shouldn't plan for failure, and we should constantly focus on success, we need not be afraid of failure. Conversely, we should embrace the lessons that failure offers us - why did we fail? what can we do differently next time?

According to Venture Beat, Charles River Ventures (CRV), an early stage venturecapital firm, has launched a new investment strategy, offering rapid but tiny $250,000 checks to Internet start-ups.

As a follow-up to last week's post on Charles River Ventures' QuickStart program, we created an online equity calculator based on the CRV QuickStart formula.

The calculator allows up to 5 rounds of financing and shows the equity that the management team, CRV, and other investors get. You can view the calculator here: http://www.growthink.com/CRVCalculator.htm.

Nothing too fancy, but it works.

About three months ago, I went dual screen. That is, I switched from a single computer monitor to a dual screen monitor.

I had read that a dual screen monitor can increase productivity by 50%. While I don't believe this statistic, the dual screen monitor definitely saves me 10 - 15 minutes/day.

The dual screen is really helpful if I want to comment on website, for instance. I'm able to have my email open in one window and my Internet browser in the other, so I don't need to constantly toggle back and forth between screens.

Great article in the Washington Post today by Shankar Vedantam entitled "The Pain is Never as Bad as We Fear." Basic premise is that studies have shown that human beings greatly over-estimate the pain they think they will feel regarding a prospective future loss. For example, when it comes to money, people are much more able to emotionally "connect" with the pain of a hypothetical loss of a sum of money than they are to to connect with the pleasure/joy associated with a hypothetical gain.

Advertisers often say that people need seven or eight exposures to a new product in order to really take notice. This is approximately the number of times I heard about Second Life before I decided to give it a try.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world built and owned by its residents. Second Life launched to the public in 2003, and has grown dramatically since then. Currently, the site has nearly 1.7 million members/inhabitants worldwide.