Think back to your days in school. If there was one thing that you could get your hands on (besides the teacher’s edition of your textbook), what would it be? Your teacher’s gradebook, obviously. Not only could you change your own grades (which apparently can get you a felony charge if you do it on a computer), but you’d also have access to all of your friends’ grades. Fortunately, the gradebook with gridded paper that can be locked in a desk drawer is becoming an anachronism. Some teachers have been using computers for grade entry for years, but others stick to the old fashioned way. LearnBoost is a San Francisco, CA based startup that is trying to change the way that teachers manage their classes. They’re starting by offering teachers an easy to use online gradebook, but their aspirations are to offer a simple, fully featured suite of tools for teachers to manage relationships with both students and parents.
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. It’s a great follow-up to the original 
, and it once again shows how changing your mindset can lead you to all kinds of new ideas (this is a really important lesson for your career). One of the companies that is mentioned in the book is Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, WA based invention company. They’re all about ideas. Things like product design, product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service all come later, and Intellectual Ventures doesn’t want anything thing to do with those processes. They just invent, invent, invent. The company isn’t tied to one specific area—they’re working on problems like stopping Malaria, preventing hurricanes, and counteracting negative effects from climate change should they ever happen. 
