Like passion, entrepreneur is such a loosely used word. Nowadays, every madman with a proclivity for risk and affinity for ruling is fast to call himself an entrepreneur. I beg to differ. Entrepreneurs are the ones saving the planet, colonizing space or pledging millions to charity. But fear not, you don’t need to be a billionaire in order to be called an entrepreneur. In fact, you don’t need money at all.

The word "entrepreneur” comes from French, where the verb entreprendre meant "to undertake”. Going back further in time and studying the Sanskrit language, you have anthaprerna meaning "self-motivation”. These two root words are great for describing the entrepreneur: a person who self-willingly undertakes the responsibility of not only himself, but many others.

Recommended Reading: 7 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Began As Freelancers

Definition Of An Entrepreneur

As I said, it’s not about having money or power. Entrepreneurs usually feel uneasy when they reach a certain level and they need to "boss” people around and move their office to the last floor. That’s because entrepreneurship is tied in with the "not having” paradigm: the lack of resources and the inevitable innovation that brings forth.

In fact, one brilliant definition of entrepreneurship comes from Harvard Business School Professor, Howard Stevenson:

"Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."

So basically, entrepreneurship is like daydreaming about a Ferrari and never waking up from your dream until you get it. It’s about assuming your present conditions and envisioning a better future, regardless of how things are now.

That’s not to say entrepreneurs are selfish creatures and only think about themselves. Business Magnate Richard Branson put it best in his linkedin article:

"…to me, being an entrepreneur simply means being someone who wants to make a difference to other people’s lives."

So, the entrepreneur is also the person whose job it is to create a better overall quality and standard of life in society.
What could be nobler than that?

Noble Career

An entrepreneur can do this by creating jobs, by advancing science, by coming up with solutions to the world’s various problems. A real entrepreneur is not the person seeking to fulfill his selfish goals. Every man aims to improve his life, but entrepreneurs, by creating businesses, knowingly or unknowingly, add value not only to their life, but also to the lives of many more human beings aside himself (or herself).

The Meta-Entrepreneur

While they do add value to people’s lives, spiritual leaders, inventors and philosophers are not entrepreneurs, per se. They add little to no value to the current world. Their advice is often theoretical, not empirical. As such, their work’s practical value isn’t improving the lives of others.

They are what you would call meta-entrepreneurs, offering guidance and information for the future generations of entrepreneurs. Their role is very important when analyzing the world through the ages. The Philosopher Socrates, working as a meta-entrepreneur, might have indirectly influenced far greater changes than any single entrepreneur could have.

A meta-entrepreneur is creating the informational platform for other entrepreneurs to draw upon and add real, practical value to others. But don’t mistake the two. An entrepreneur is the hands-on incarnation of merely theoretical principles offered by the meta-entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship Is NOT A Job

It may be argued that any man, by doing his job thoroughly and diligently, is adding value to other people lives, improving the world. That’s correct. Professions such as doctors, healers, teachers and even politicians are inevitably creating a better quality and standard of life for society as a whole.

Nevertheless, no doctor, teacher or politician can be called an entrepreneur. None of them undertake the responsibilities of other people. They work within the confines of their jobs. They have a job. They follow rules – rules created by entrepreneurs or meta-entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is not a job. An entrepreneur creates the framework for improving his life and the lives of others. That’s a state of mind, not a job. I think Media Mogul Ted Turner summed it up nicely:

"My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job."

Are you an entrepreneur?

In depends… in what sense. Creating a family absolutely qualifies you (considering our definition) to at least be called a "social entrepreneur”. As long as you take care of your family and make sure its members are respectable and working citizens, you’ve created a brilliant nucleus for society’s advancement.

But in the more practical, economic sense, you are an entrepreneur only if you’ve created a business which adheres to at least one of these rules:

• It creates jobs.
• It adds value by selling good products or services.
• It creates more wealth, not only for yourself.

And the worst part about it is that you can’t really call yourself an entrepreneur if you’ve had such a business in the past, but went bankrupt or sold it off. Being an entrepreneur is more than a job and it surely doesn’t grant you its title for life, like being a doctor does.

You either are one in the present moment or you’re not.

How To Be One

But if you’re not an entrepreneur now, what do you actually need to become one?

Well, according to billionaire Richard Branson, you just need to an powerful enough idea and a desire for fun:

"When making a start in business with Student Magazine, I didn’t even know what an entrepreneur was. All that interested me was starting a publication to protest against the Vietnam War – and having some fun along the way. If that meant becoming an entrepreneur, then that was fine too."

Can it really be that easy? Yes, absolutely.

Don’t Forget To Dream

Entrepreneurship is just a race to catch up with your dreams. I get called a serial entrepreneur a lot. I really don’t feel like one. I think the moment you call yourself an entrepreneur, that label draws power away from you. You stop being hungry.

As I said, entrepreneurship isn’t a job you get up and go to. It’s not a title. It’s a state of pursuit,, constant pursuit for your dreams beacuse you want those dreams to become a reality right? So you need to be an entrepreneur.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with this from the great Walt Disney:

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Have you ever came across something exclusive and limited you wanted to buy online but missed the opportunity by minutes because you were away? Maybe you’re someone who has a need to be updated with the latest gaming news, but you other responsibilities are stopping you from camping on the page. We have just the tool to help you with that. In fact, we have 5.

Here are 5 free tools you can use to track and monitor changes on websites. Monitor your favorite pages without having to access them frequently. We have three web-based tools and two browser extensions. Plus, some of these tools also allow for email notifications so you won’t miss out on any changes.

Recommended Reading: 30+ Free Web Services & Tools To Monitor Website Downtime

1. Versionista

Versionista requires an account to begin monitoring web pages. Once you add a page you want to monitor, it’ll scan the pages within the site. You can disable that if you only want to focus on a single page or on the the home page by unchecking "Look for more URLs".

Pages you monitor are checked automatically, once a day, otherwise you can access Versionista to manually check. If changes are found, you can compare it with an earlier version, up to 4 versions are saved before it starts overwriting.

In the settings, you can filter out numeric changes (for visit numbers), days of the week and HTML codes. This ensures that the changes you see are part of the content only. A free account allows you to monitor 5 sites. You can monitor more sites for a monthly fee ranging from $59 (200 sites) to $379 (2000 sites).

2. VisualPing

VisualPing is easy to use and requires no registration. All you have to do is go to the site, type in the website you want to track and provide an email they can send notifications to. These notifications can be set to come in hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

There’s also a trigger option to get notifications for tiny, medium or major changes. Based on your settings, VisualPing will send you two images – a before and an after – to show how the site you are tracking has changed.

One drawback to VisualPing is it cannot differentiate between content or ad changes. Thus, if you are using the Tiny Change option, you might get a notification even when there isn’t change in the content. No worries, if you don’t want to track the site any longer, there’s an unsubscribe button on the notification email to take care of that.

3. Follow That Page

Register to start using Follow That Page, then click on Your Pages to add a new page to monitor. The settings for this service is quite simple. You can set the frequency of checks from up to 20 pages daily or every hourly for only 1 page. Check more than one site hourly with a pro account, for €20/year.

The settings also allow you to receive site errors notifications like when it encounters a "Page Not Found" during a check.

Notifications only include text changes and will show what was added, removed and/or changed. One drawback is that it will show very minor changes like the "written 2 hours ago" line on a blog post. Otherwise it’s a simple and useful page monitor.

4. Page Monitor (Chrome)

Page Monitor is a Chrome extension that will monitor pages you want, and notify you of any changes to site. The Page Monitor button at the end of your Chrome address bar will have a number on it to signify that there’s a new notification.

In the options, you can also set the intervals from as short as every 5 seconds to once every 2 days. There is also the option to enable desktop notifications with a sound alert that will remain on your desktop until you remove it.

A cool option in Page Monitor is that you can select specific elements on webpages to monitor. So instead of monitoring the whole site, it can monitor just a specific HTML div wrapper of your choice. Because it’s a Chrome extension, there isn’t an email notification option, but everytime you log on to your browser, you will know when a change has been registered.

5. AlertBox (Firefox)

For Firefox users, there’s a similar add-on called AlertBox. After installing AlertBox, go to the site you want to monitor and click on the AlertBox button at the end of your Firefox address bar. With AlertBox you can choose specific areas to monitor, by selecting it with your mouse. It highlights boxes of content by selecting the HTML div.

Any changes will be reflected by a notification on Firefox, together with a sound. Check intervals can be set between every 2 minutes or every few hours. One advantage of AlertBox is that you can enable email notifications if you register for an account on PulsVu.

We’ve featured a lot of tools that can enhance your Gmail experience. You can get notified when your sent email is opened by the receiver, encrypt your email messages, schedule emails to be sent later and even view your Gmail stats. True, you have to install 4 different tools to make your Gmail more powerful, but if you aren’t saying no to new extensions yet, we’d like to introduce to you MxHero Toolbox.

If you are looking for an all-in-one solution, MxHero Toolbox is a Chrome extension that has 5 extra email functions. The best part is you can use more than one of these functions or all 5 of them together when sending an email. Let’s see what MxHero Toolbox can do for your Gmail.

Recommended Reading: 10 Ways To Tighten Up Your Gmail Security

Extra Functions For Gmail

MxHero Toolbox has the following functions:

Click Track – Notifies you when each recipient accesses attachments or links within the email body.

Self Destruct – Notifies the recipient that the email they have received will ‘self destruct’ after 5 minutes. MxHero turns your email content into an image and destroys the link at the end of the countdown.

Private Delivery – Recipients cannot view other email receivers addresses on To or CC fields.

Send Later – Schedule sending of the email on a later time determined by you.

Reply TimeOut – Get an email notification if the recipient doesn’t reply your email within the timeframe determined by you.

Picking A Feature

After installing the MxHero Toolbar Chrome Extension, you’ll find a new yellow button next to the send button when composing new mail.

Enter all the required details of an email (recipient address, subject and body content) before clicking the yellow MxHero button to choose your ‘extra’ functions.

You can use multiple functions for the same email. For examples, you can send a ‘Self Destructing’ email via private delivery to multiple recipients to be sent out at a scheduled time. Enabling Click Track lets you know whenever a recipient has checked your mail.

Conclusion

MxHero works well despite its beta status. But as it is still in beta, it is still buggy. We ran a few tests and found that the first email we send out upon authorizing mxHero wouldn’t work. It does work the second time around though. If you experience this too, let us know.

Also, if you have a secondary email address attached to your main account, emails sent via mxHero to your secondary email account won’t appear in your main one. You’ll have to login to your secondary email account to access emails sent by MxHero.

All in all, we look forward for more improvements and a more stable version soon.

I’m amazed at how the mobile phone evolved over the years. Today, mobile phones are touch-enabled, can be used to surf sites like on a desktop PC, and carry a lot of handy apps to help you be more productive. When we build responsive websites that aim for mobile devices, sometimes we want to include specific and extra capabilities for users to make use of its multi-touch capability.

But before that, we need to first identify if the device has support for touch interaction, and it is easy to do so with Modernizr.

Check out: Getting Started with Modernizr

Feature Detection with Modernizr

At the Modernizr download page, ensure that the Touch Event option is selected.

You can then add this Modernizr.touch in your script. Here is a simple example to tell whether the device supports for touch.

 if (Modernizr.touch) { alert('Touch Screen'); } else { alert('No Touch Screen'); } 

It’s a basic JavaScript that will show the following popup.

Furthermore, you can also use this method to load touchSwipe, a jQuery plugin for touch gestures, conditionally. You can do so with the Modernizr.load method as follows.

 Modernizr.load({ test: Modernizr.touch, yep : 'touchSwipe.js', }); 

The above code will test for touch capability. If it returns yep, meaning the browser/device is capable, it will load the touchSwipe.js.

Final Thought

As more and more people acquire touchscreen devices, it is a good idea to allow your site to be touch-enabled, where possible. This will leave a good impression for your visitors, and it is helpful with user engagement. Being able to detect whether the device is touch-enabled is the first step.