Sitting around a table at a hookah bar in New York’s East Village with three women and a gay man, all of them in their 20s and 30s and all resolved to remain childless, a few things quickly became clear: First, for many younger Americans and especially those in cities, having children is no longer an obvious or inevitable choice. Second, many of those opting for childlessness have legitimate, if perhaps selfish, reasons for their decision.

“I like seeing people with their children, because they have their special bond, and that’s really sweet, but it’s not something I look at for myself,” says Tiffany Jordan, a lively 30-year-old freelance wardrobe stylist who lives in Queens in a rent-stabilized apartment and dates a man who “practically lives there.”

1_Tencent

For building a suite of communications apps that 300 million Chinese are talking through. That massive audience has flocked to Tencent's WeChat (or Weixin, as it's known in China), the Chinese Internet giant's suite of social networking plug-ins, in less than two years. Why? WeChat is less expensive, clearer, and faster than calling people on the phone. Late last spring, Tencent opened up its platform to other developers to create cool things for WeChat. Plus, Tencent's aggressive international rollout--rare for a Chinese company--has added millions of expats who can now communicate with folks back home, increasing its popularity. In America, WeChat is a top 20 free social networking app in Apple's App Store.

With more than half of Spain's and Greece’s young people jobless, those with in-demand digital skills are increasingly seeking work in stabler Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. Thousands of young Spanish and Greek professionals are leaving their homeland in search of employment. The result is a mass exodus of young, educated Spaniards – a brain drain, the likes of which has not been seen since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.

Most worrying from a European perspective, they are not simply leaving for northern Europe. Although firm figures are difficult to come by, Mexico's immigration office, the Instituto Nacional de Migracion, reports the number of Spaniards granted work permits in the last quarter of 2012 alone at 7,630.

Since the launch of reform and opening-up policy in 1978, "made in China" products have established China as the world's factory.

However, the high-value work of innovation, design and development tended to originate outside of China. This is starting to change, and while China has a long way to go, its leadership is well aware of the challenge.

"Chinese capacity for indigenous innovation is weak, Chinese industrial technology is at a low level, and both Chinese basic and cutting-edge research are relatively unimpressive," Premier Wen Jiabao said in July 2011.

San Francisco’s Rock Health startup accelerator held its fourth semi-annual Demo Day at UCSF’s Genentech Hall Wednesday afternoon. Investors and journalists heard pitches from 14 startups working to introduce new health-related services for consumers and new ways to improve the efficiency of the U.S. healthcare system.

On the consumer side, one intriguing presenter was Beam Technologies, which is building a toothbrush embedded with motion sensors to detect how long a person has been brushing. A Bluetooth radio sends the data to a smartphone app. (Perhaps it should have been called the Bluetoothbrush.)

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama made a big deal about manufacturing jobs as a central part of his economic vision for the country. “Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs in manufacturing”, he proclaimed. I support the president’s aim and passion to revive manufacturing, but to accomplish it we first have to jettison industrial era thinking. The industrial era and the 7.1 million manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. from 1979 to 2012 aren’t coming back. We must create new 21st century manufacturing jobs that leverage what America is great at, creativity and innovation. Manufacturing will grow in the U.S. when we accelerate the use of technology to increase productivity, enable new business models designed for mass customization and unleash the manufacturers in all of us.

When it comes to funding an early-stage company, the options are often limited.  They usually include angel and venture rounds.

So it seems reasonable that there should be some more approaches, right?  Well, this is what Jed Simon believes.  Back in 2010, he started FastPay, which allows digital companies to finance their growth from receivables.

This post is for everyone who thinks venture capital is an easy business. I'd like to dispel that notion.

Here are short term and long term returns for the venture capital business over the past ten years compared to the public equity markets in the US.

These numbers don't include the internet bubble of the late 90s, so they are just for the past ten years.

Typically, the offline fundraising process can be long, frustrating, and oftentimes fruitless. The traditional fundraising path typically goes like this:

Comb through your network to find appropriate investors you are connected to, introduce yourself or get a warm introduction from mutual friends or lawyers, send over your executive summary for consideration, schedule a phone call with investor (if you peaked their interest), submit your business plan (pitch), wait for investor consideration, continue the dialogue, investor due diligence, and finally, receive an investment.

If you’re thinking about applying to dotforge, here’s some insight from a founder’s point of view into what happens when you take your startup through the accelerator process.

Dan Dukeson is co-founder of Sheffield-based OrderHarmony which provides online stock & order management for retail shops and online stores. Dan and co-founder Ed successfully completed a similar programme to dotforge in December last year.

dotforge: Before OrderHarmony applied for the programme, what state was the company in? How long had you been trading for?

The days are gone when a techie or a genius could build things in his garage and customers would find and buy the product, based purely on the “wow factor” of the technology. New technologies are everywhere today. People have seen so much that they are blasé, or actually fear pure technology. They want a personable brand, before they will consider the product.

They are overloaded by the media with amazing advertising messages, and people now realize that you can’t believe anything you see in pictures, and even videos can be edited to deliver any message. In fact, we are all media companies now, with our cell phones, computers, and professional-looking publishing tools.

The international agreement establishing a Unified Patent Court (UPC) was signed by ministers in Brussels on Tuesday (19 February), heralding the uniform applicability of the new Single Patent law in the 24 countries signing up.

The new court will provide a single jurisdiction for patent disputes, avoiding the need to go to law in more than one country to defend a patent, preventing contradictory court rulings on the same issues and reducing the costs of patent litigation.

Following the signing of the agreement, the ratification process by national parliaments can now start, with at least 13 member states required to ratify the agreement for it to enter into force

In this in-depth article we present how Open innovation meshes with crowd sourcing, drawing on ideation, market needs and opportunities, to fuel a balanced portfolio with actionable innovation challenges, or « the right things to do », and converges these with a need driven approach to source the ways of « doing things right ». We will illustrate this innovation continuity with a number of examples and a focus onto the food and drink industry.

Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent billionaires are making a big push to guide the tech world's entrepreneurs into biotech. Backing the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences are Yuri Milner; Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki; and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Fittingly, they're making the announcement at the University of California at San Francisco's Genentech Hall, a building named after one of the Bay Area's biotech standouts. Those names are tech royalty. Milner, the head of DST Group, made a prescient private investment in Facebook that has grown almost tenfold in value. Zuckerberg is the cofounder of Facebook, and is married to Chan, a physician who graduated from Stanford's medical school last year. Brin is the cofounder of Google; he is married to Wojcicki, who is the cofounder of a biotech startup, 23andMe. 

Forget the empty platitudes; your star employee is not a "godsend." They are a person deserving of your not infrequent acknowledgment and worthy of appreciation and respect. When was the last time you thanked them — really thanked them?

In my line of work, I frequently communicate with CEOs and their executive assistants, and nowhere is the need for gratitude more clear.

After one CEO's assistant had been particularly helpful, I replied to her email with a grateful, "I hope your company and your boss know and let you know how valuable and special you are."

Stanford last year became the first university to raise more than $1 billion in a single year, according to the Council for Aid to Education’s annual college fund-raising survey.

Partly because of large donations from entrepreneurial alumni who have made their fortunes in Silicon Valley, Stanford has been the top fund-raiser for eight straight years.

Last year, the university, near Palo Alto, said its five-year capital campaign, which ended in December 2011, had taken in a record-setting $6.23 billion, far exceeding its original goal of $4.3 billion, and surpassing by more than $2 billion any other single higher-education campaign.

The Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research announced today that it has finalized a funding agreement with Heart Genomics, LLC, an early-stage  biotechnology company focused on providing non-invasive, genomic-based, clinical diagnostic tests for patients with heart failure. The Institute works with Florida’s research universities and institutions to support new company creation and job growth, and the program bridges funding gaps, enabling recipients to reach critical milestones and attract additional private investment capital.

Heart Genomics is at the forefront of the burgeoning molecular diagnostics market. The new diagnostic tests will provide personalized and individualized information to each patient and their physician through the genomic analysis of the patient's heart tissue or blood sample, and with this information, the heart patient and physician can make substantially improved and clear treatment decisions.

The Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research (the Institute) announced today that it has finalized a funding agreement with Modulation Therapeutics, an early-stage pharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of novel treatments for multiple myeloma. The Institute works with Florida’s research universities and institutions to support new company creation and job growth, and this program bridges funding gaps, enabling recipients to reach critical milestones and attract additional private investment capital.

“Companies like Modulation Therapeutics are developing novel therapies targeting some of the most dreaded diseases we face today, and contribute much to the development of Florida’s life sciences industry cluster.” Modulation Therapeutics, based on technology licensed from the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, focuses on cancers such as multiple myeloma that home or metastasize to the bone. The company is developing MTI-101, a drug with a novel, first in class mechanism of action for myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. “Support from the Institute will enable us to trigger studies to better understand the dosing, toxicology and optimal clinical program for MTI-101, bringing us closer to our goal of IND filing by Q4 2013,” said Michael Cerio, interim CEO of Modulation Therapeutics. “This funding comes at a critical time in our development and, paired with funding we recently received from the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, the company is poised to take its first in class therapy into the clinic.

The role of universities is changing. In the last century the primary focus of universities was on education and research, with the key goals of creating and diffusing information and knowledge. A third and equally important role is now emerging, with its accompanying expectations and responsibilities - that of value creation. 'Value' in this context refers to both business value and societal value. With tertiary sector funding coming under increasing scrutiny, governments and the public alike are demanding more accountability and proof of added value from universities. A 'university ecosystem' approach can unleash much of the potential energy in universities and transform it into kinetic energy, with graduates emerging not just in a state of readiness to be employees, but often as highly motivated entrepreneurs with business or social innovation initiatives in flight. An ecosystem can be defined in this context as a network of interdependent organizations or people in a specific environment with partly shared perspectives, resources, aspirations and directions. This new form of positioning equates to what Etzkowitz (2004) and Andersson et al (2010) have called the 'entrepreneurial university'.

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I recently asked fellow members of the Young Entrepreneur Council--an invite-only organization made up of the world's most successful young entrepreneurs--just what it is that makes them work so hard. Money? Success? Autonomy? Or do entrepreneurs just have big egos?

Being an entrepreneur myself, I wanted to know why others work with such persistence and dedication. I know that for me, it's not about money. Money is just a byproduct. So is it the same for others?