Located in the shadow of the historic Alamo and permeated by the multicultural significance of those who fought and died there for their independence, the River Walk in San Antonio is both a place to enjoy the allure of a beautiful city and its excellent cuisine and a place to ponder questions best left to such settings. During the past week, as a guest of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), I had just such an opportunity while serving as a member of their External Review Committee (ERC), an operation designed to review periodically the performance of UTSA centers and institutes.

Doctors in Austin launched a new incubator for physicians to honor the work of a colleague who died the day he finished his patent application.

Walters Pilot Project was started to finish the patent work that a hand surgeon started. Robert “Bob” Walters had just completed the paperwork for a new thumb joint when he died of a heart attack. Pilot in the group’s name is short for “physician incubator.”

It’s all about you. The strength of a founder is the deciding factor for angel investor Rick Timmins. He has two other questions for entrepreneurs looking for an investment, but the strengths of the founder carry the most weight. Timmins is a venture partner at G-51, which focuses on seed stage and early investments in start-up companies. He is also a member of the Central Texas Angel Network. Here are his criteria and his thinking behind them.

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are enthusiastic about the prospects for the U.S. economy and initial public offerings this year, despite some lackluster public-market debuts in 2012 and wider economic uncertainty, a recent poll says.

Reuters/Mike Segar The Wall Street Bull sculpture by Arturo Di Modica in lower Manhattan, New York. The world-wide survey, conducted by KPMG, included more than 700 venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and professionals.

About 60% of respondents said they expect the economy to improve in 2013. Twenty-six percent expect it to stay the same, and 15% expect an economic downturn.

ATHENS, Ohio – The Center for Advanced Professional Studies of the Blue Valley School District of Overland Park, Kan., has been named a finalist for the National Business Incubation Association’s 2013 Incubator Innovation Award for its CAPS Incubator program. The winner of the prestigious award will be announced April 9 at NBIA’s 27th International Conference on Business Incubation in Boston.

The CAPS Incubator program is designed for entrepreneurial-minded students seeking high-tech resources and multi-talented teams to innovate and accelerate their ideas. The program provides access to industry mentors, networking and collaboration opportunities, and assistance with prototyping and proof of concept, leading to the creation of successful businesses that commercialize the entrepreneurial students’ products or services.

The greater availability of data on entrepreneurship is one of the main drivers behind the rush to build better startup ecosystems around the world. By revealing weak areas in a country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and enabling cross-country benchmarking, more data is yielding important insights for better economic and regulatory policymaking.

Data projects have always varied in their methodology and even in their definitions of terms like “new business” and “entrepreneurial venture.” Further, parameters for business size and growth categories also vary widely across data sources. However, with more data sources emerging, we can now crosscheck or triangulate data to test whether a specific measure stands despite the differences in methodologies and definitions. For example, if the entrepreneurial pulse of a country is positive across methodologies, we can feel more confident about making a judgment about that nation’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Ever hear a song that just gets you pumped and makes you want to just get up and move? Inspirational music can affect your mood to an incredible extent. Motivation is the driving force behind your success.

Next time you’re feeling a little low, turn on some of these tunes.

If you’ve ever clicked on a link to see a picture posted on a site like reddit, Twitter or Facebook, more than likely it was hosted on imgur (pronounced "image-er"), one of the most popular image-hosting services on the web. At SXSW Interactive, founder and CEO Alan Schaaf and COO Matt Strader presented the San Francisco-based company as a case study for how to successfully bootstrap a startup.

In his new book, "Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State," Warburg Pincus partner Bill Janeway explains what the economy really needs: wasteful spending from the goverment and bubbles.

Entrepreneurs are all about firsts, and the most important is you making a great first impression – on investors, customers, new team members, and strategic partners. Poor first impressions can be avoided, but I’m amazed at the number of unnecessary mistakes I see at those critical first introductions, presentations, and meetings.

The key message here is “preparation.” People who think they can always “wing it,” bluff their way past tough questions, or expect the other party to bridge all the gaps, sadly often find that what they think is a win, is actually a loss which can never be regained.

Officials with the foundation spearheading development of the Medical Center of the Americas campus in Central El Paso, which includes the Texas Tech medical school and University Medical Center, want to start construction by next year on a $25 million research building and biomedical company incubator along Interstate 10.

The proposed four-story, 80,000-square-foot building, to be located just east of Raynolds, is the first step in the creation of the 13-acre Medical Center of Americas biomedical research and technology park, named the MCA Tech Park, on city-owned land just north of the medical school and the county-operated hospital.

The idea of working from home remains alive and well with small business owners.

Last week, news that Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, was discontinuing a policy of allowing company employees to work from home electrified the Web. A similar policy decision from Best Buy has also caused ripples.

In the U.S., an estimated 13 million, or one in 10 employees, work from home. Small business owners  and  entrepreneurs work from home as a way of reducing overhead and increasing flexibility. They often have their  employees working from home for the same reasons.

In honor of International Women’s day here’s a list of my favorite female innovators of all time.

Historical note: what’s most disturbing in the history of all innovation is how unfair history has been to women. Is hard to identify a singular cause but there’s evidence the shift to monotheism changed what had been a more balanced view of power, when there was still respect for male and female powers, into masculine centric cultures (See The Alphabet vs. The Goddess). Even by the time of the Western Enlightenment, women were still given few opportunities to study, work in pioneering fields or to receive acclaim for their work. It’d be wrong to blame monotheism alone, but its negative influence on opportunities for women is clear.

When New York-based entrepreneur Matthew Hogan quit his steady job in finance to work on a startup idea, he told his two closest friends during a road trip to Atlantic City. A few months later, they each wrote Hogan a $25,000 check.

Many tech entrepreneurs take investment from friends and family to test the viability of an idea. They raise just enough to fund a developer’s salary, office space, monthly rent, and a steady supply of ramen noodle soup.

What do you do if you're a leader in a large, successful organization with an entrenched bureaucracy, and you see the need for innovation? Can you change the way a large organization — such as the federal government — does its work, when all the forces are arrayed for stability and conservatism?

Consider the story of the Business Transformation Agency of the Department of Defense, which was founded in 2005 under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and "disestablished" in 2011 by Defense Secretary Gates. The Business Transformation Agency was populated by people brought in from the commercial sector. They were bold and brash and injected fresh new ideas that challenged existing policy and practice in many quarters of the Department of Defense administration (such as finance, human resources, procurement, and supply chain processes). They ran into many of the familiar challenges of making changes in the federal government: the difficulty of firing; the complexity of hiring at many levels of management; the need for contracts to be put out for competitive bidding; multiple stakeholders including civil servants, appointees, contractors, regulators; and Congress to be considered in almost all decisions. Unlike at commercial companies, there was no senior leader who could mandate changes. The Deputy Secretary of Defense that originally sponsored the agency under Rumsfeld left, and the new leader was less enthusiastic, ultimately leading to the agency's demise. The entrenched culture of the Department of Defense defeated attempts to change it.

Like so often, the hedge fund industry may smell blood and be looking to take advantage.

Hedge funds are encroaching on the venture space, according to today’s WSJ. They are getting in at a time when venture-capital firms are unsure about their coming ability to raise funds and exit investments.

Historically, venture capital has backed young companies and helped take them public whereby they become the target of hedge funds and public investors.

Below is a listing of angel groups that are members in good standing of the Angel Capital Association, as well as organizations that are affiliated with ACA.

The directory includes a link to the Web site of each organization so you may learn more about the group, including investment preferences and processes. Click on the group name to link to the corresponding Web site.

As the years pass we usually think back and cringe at the mistakes we made when we were younger. Though we can’t go back in time, it is possible for others to learn from our mistakes and for us to recognize them and prevent them from happening again.

1. Stop Waiting for Things to Come to You. Go Get Them!

Becoming complacent and thinking success will be thrust upon you is pretty easy to do. The harsh reality is that if you don’t care enough to get your name out there, others will care even less. Stop waiting and start making things happen.

In a country beseiged by economic woes and a well-known lack of infrastructure both politically and culturally to nurture a start-up culture, oddly, a feisty start up culture thrives.

French Internet pioneer, Loic Le Meur brought the tech world LeWeb in 2009 hoping to shine a spotlight on the start up world in France. He and his partner, Geraldine Le Meur, brought to town start ups from more than 80 countries to launch their start ups and rub elbows with the global technorati.

ACCORDING TO FROG RESEARCH, USERS AREN’T NECESSARILY CONCERNED ABOUT WHICH COMPANY INVENTS SOMETHING FIRST BUT WHICH STAYS SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF THE TREND.

China’s Four Great Inventions--papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, and printing--were innovations from bygone eras. When looking at China’s history over the past 50 years, it’s very difficult to find a single innovation that has made a significant impact on the world. Instead, the “Chinese version of something Western” phenomenon has characterized much of China’s recent product launches. For example, Taobao.com is essentially the Chinese version of eBay, and Youku.com is the Chinese version of YouTube.