Serial entrepreneur Andrew Birt is looking for Melbourne-based start-ups to become the first group of participants for his latest venture AngelCube, an early stage incubator for web-based businesses.

Birt, who founded marketing agency StartUP Marketing in 2009, is also the founder of start-up job board Snowballer and co-founder of small cap investment firm Catvielle Capital.

He’s now focused on the early stage investment market, as the lead investor and chief executive of AngelCube.

The European Commission has set aside almost 7 billion euros to finance research for the promotion of European innovation. In addition to topics such as environmental research and nanotechnologies, the development of a strong bio-economy is also high on the EU’s political agenda.

The Innovation Union is to ensure that Europe is well equipped for global competition from emerging markets. In this regard, challenges such as climate change, energy and food security, health and population ageing are to be better addressed via far-ranging improvements to innovation performance. With the aid of research financing, the transition from innovative ideas to market-ready products is to be supported, e.g. through demonstrating the commercial potential of a new technology.

Ted Christopher moved to San Diego three years ago to work in his cousins sheet metal shop. Every weekend he tinkered on his own secret project. In 2009, he returned to Minneapolis and launched his own business, Verterra Energy Inc. Through Verterra he hopes to bring his “small” project to life.

Using power of water, he hopes to place his turbines at the bottom of certain rivers to generate energy.

Hydrokinetic turbines capture the power created by the current in waves underneath the water’s surface. Traditional hydropower, in contrast, uses a dam to create a reservoir above the river. Water flows downward through turbines to create energy then is released back into the river downstream from the dam.

I’ve been on a number of board calls this month while I’ve been in Paris. About half of them have been via Skype; the other half have been standard audio conferencing. I’ve also had a bunch of other meetings, discussions, and pitches via Skype.

The quality of the meeting and interaction – when all attendees are in person or via videoconference (in my case Skype on my laptop) – was 10x better than the ones via audio conference only.

I’ve been vacillating between a “physical attendance at all board meetings” approach or “video conference at all board meetings approach” to life. It’s impossible for me to physically attend all board meetings, but there’s no reason why I can’t attend by video conference. I’m now encouraging everyone I work with – as well as everyone that has a board meeting – to have a physical + video conference approach. It is so much better than having people on audio conference.

Some aspiring entrepreneurs are so desperate for funding, or naïve, that they ignore the obvious signs of scams and rip-offs on the Internet, praying for a windfall. One would think that with all the sad stories and tools published over the past twenty years, this problem would be behind us. But people are still begging for more technology or laws, often to protect them from themselves.

As examples, I present my list of ten of the most common ways to be victimized on the Internet by ignorance or greed, based on questions and stories I get from entrepreneurs and associates. The threats are organized from high to low avoidance ease, with common sense suggestions for each case:

Cash transfer assistance. I continue to be amazed that some government agency reportedly still gets 100 calls per day from victims of the Nigerian unclaimed cash scam alone. People who fall for this one must be really greedy. The best answer is the age-old wisdom that if it sounds too good to be true, it’s not true. Delete the message.

Focus put together this great infographic of salaries for various technical positions in Silicon Valley, noting that there are more tech jobs there than at the apex of the dotcom bubble. (Then again, after more than 10 years of growth, irrespective of bubbles, there ought to be.)

It doesn't take into account stock-based compensation, but it does take into account cost of living. So that great $92,000 pay in Silicon Valley will only buy you as much as $59,000 in San Diego. Worth keeping in mind.

Corporate valuation. It’s one of the two key metrics for a business owner. The first is cash flow/income in the short term. For some, that’s as far as they get. But, for the really successful ones, the second metric is how much cash they can realize upon exit from the business. My partner, Mike Oleksak, calls this “getting paid twice for the same effort.”

If you use both metrics, a private company can be a very exciting place to be. Because this perspective helps you balance short-term gains with sustainable value. It helps you think about how to build a business that will grow profitably and sustainably. (The lack of this kind of thinking is a huge problem for public companies today but that’s a topic for another day).

But the process of valuation is a mystery to many business owners. Even those that understand how it works, can’t always put their finger on why values end up the way that they do.

With a low birth rate, Canada will need immigrants to help drive economic growth. But does our system reward the immigrants most likely to create that growth?

We want skilled workers, or so goes the mantra. But the set of skills most likely to create jobs – entrepreneurship, or that intangible mix of creativity, personal drive and business acumen – gets short shrift in our immigration system.

The idea that the office is a specific place where our professional lives "happen" is becoming less universal, and less important. These days many knowledge workers can be productive anywhere, thanks to smarter, more numerous mobile devices, faster network access, and a growing number of online collaboration tools. Telecommuting is no longer merely something that the phone company is trying to sell you. And wherever "the office" may be, wider and better use of social networks, data analytics, and smart technologies such as voice recognition could be poised to increase productivity dramatically—meaning that both real and virtual offices may have fewer people in them.

But while the physical office is changing, certain connotations of the word "office" are not. I can think of two others —"hierarchical organization" and "place for human interaction"—and there's no indication that these are becoming any less important. Even the most progressive high-tech companies retain many of the organizational trappings of their industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will remain important in business. These spaces—whether they be conventional offices, temporary ones, or conference facilities—must be made conducive to collaboration. They must also become physically healthy places to spend hours of time, since sedentary work has emerged as a significant health threat.

In a dialogue with last week’s interviewee Tyler Moselle, we discussed our own experiences and observations to beginning a successful career in the social sector. Spanning passion and ambition, education and instinct, & creativity and energy, we wanted to share our insights with a broader audience for engagement.

Passion and Ambition:

Rahim Kanani: In search of discovering my own passions, I switched majors twice in college: from computer science to business, and from business to philosophy. After launching Canada’s first online DVD rental store in 1999 and while in high school—after observing the early success of Netflix—I thought a mastery of the digital world would be my destiny as I began my first year of college exactly ten years ago. However, the theories underpinning software programming were extremely dense, and the difficulty I had with learning and understanding code led to my first moment of realization: perhaps the world of computer science was not for me. Switching to business because of my early entrepreneurial success, I thought I would enjoy learning the skills of accounting, marketing, strategy and operations. While interesting, it was not fulfilling.

The last weeks have seen a growth in the number of firms doing crowdfunding for wines, for artists, for musicians, and even for newspapers. Is it possible to develop a crowdfunding market to raise capital for small companies? Not under the current regulations that implement the 1990 Penny Stock Reform Act in the United States. Nonetheless, there are some interesting opportunities for crowdfunding and some potential success in Europe.

Baxter International Inc. (NYSE:BAX) put aside $200 million in equity to invest in early-stage companies that “complement” its portfolio.

The newly established ” Baxter Ventures will invest globally and focus on innovative technologies with sustainable long-term growth” under the watch of the Deerfield, Ill.-based company’s chief scientific officer Norbert Riedel, according to a press release.

“Culture is one of the most precious things a company has,” insists Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines. “So you must work harder on it than anything else.”

For the entrepreneurial business, its culture begins on Day One. The culture is a reflection of the values the entrepreneur brings into the business.

Culture is important for an entrepreneurial venture because it’s the mechanism that institutionalizes the values of its founders. Culture serves to socialize new employees. It helps them understand how they should treat customers, how they should treat one another, how they should act in their jobs and how to generally fit in and be successful within the business.

Is your organization creative?  Should your organization be creative?  How do you change your organization's level of creativity?  Does creativity equal more new products and processes?  August is dedicated to answering these questions.

Here's some non-peer reviewed research to help.  It was inspired by the much better research of Teresa Amabile and with the same conclusions.

Over the years I've taught a graduate course in creativity six times.  The three day course always started with the dozen or so students working together for a few hours to define creativity and then to come up with ways that I could remember each of their names.

We tracked down some of the brightest minds in venture capital to learn more about what makes great companies tick. We asked Phin Barnes, Brad Feld, Rob Go and Alex Taussig to share the advice to they most often give to (and the mistakes they most often see from) the CEOs and founders in their portfolios.

Here’s what they had to say:

Phin Barnes, principal, First Round Capital – Recruit and hire a team you would be honored to work for, and create a culture of “no ego” where the best ideas win.

A startup is a race against time in a world of extremely limited resources and imperfect information. I worry when founders take too long to make a decision and work to collect more information rather than trusting their instincts and being decisive about strategy, staffing, or fund-raising.

In an industry dominated by men, at least three venture-capital firms are trying to raise funds that would go out of their way to help female entrepreneurs.

The latest is Women’s Venture Capital Fund, which is seeking $25 million for its first fund, Women’s Venture Capital Fund LP, VentureWire reports.

The firm is making early-stage investments in female entrepreneurs starting West Coast-based companies that have “a unique proprietary value proposition” in digital media and sustainability, according to its website. Management teams, however, must be “gender diverse.”

As I read this morning’s news about Syrian security forces renewing attacks on the city of Hama, I become even more committed to finding stories of Syrians looking beyond the divides of politics, class and religion, who can help shape the fate of the country and its four-months-long revolt against President Bashar al-Assad. This is particularly so because unemployment, which is always an underlying cause for any revolt, is essentially a youth issue in Syria, where young people represent nearly 80 percent of the unemployed.

An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to take a risk—seeing solutions and opportunity where others only see problems—and someone who has a drive to create value and wealth. Obviously, the current situation in Syria is not favorable for risk-taking. But as has happened in other strife-ridden countries, many people take control of their own lives through entrepreneurship, a career path that provides the opportunity for greater freedom and prosperity. It also helps that there is a tradition of entrepreneurship and commerce in Syrian culture at all levels of society. For thousands of years, it has been one of the great trading nations of the world.

A popular refrain from venture capitalists to entrepreneurs: We’re more than just money!

Getty Images While that may be true, will VCs meet with entrepreneurs when the subject is not about money?

Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund argues that entrepreneurs should never meet with VCs unless they’re formally pitching a start-up.  On his blog he writes:

“When the meeting is premised on the notion that it’s just ‘informational’, there is a risk that the entrepreneur is too casual, not well-prepared, lets down his guard and does not put his best foot forward. And, because they’re wired this way, that is what the VC is likely to remember: a lousy pitch.”

Wow. It isn’t often that I drop everything after I read an article and feel compelled to respond. But I was dumbstruck when I read this piece in the Washington Post.

It was titled: Five myths about entrepreneurs. In around 1000 words, the author went on to trash the National Venture Capital Association, Peter Thiel, Jason Calacanis and Fred Wilson, using “scientific research” to try to prove them wrong.

This just goes to show why academics don’t “get” entrepreneurs, don’t understand job creation and don’t make good VCs. It also proves that academics looking to make headlines can do so by using bogus statistics and misleading phrases.

So how did he get this so-called research SO wrong and backwards? I mean, his conclusions are mind-boggling in their naiveté. In a nutshell, the author confuses average with great. He looks at quantity instead of quality. And in doing so he reaches irrelevant and misleading conclusions. I downloaded the study and read it. You too can do so here. Part of the problem is that the author surveyed “549 company founders across a dozen fast-growth industries.” But nowhere could I find a list of the companies or founders surveyed. I am betting that they include no $100B companies, no $10B companies, no $1B companies, and probably few $100M companies. But perhaps he could prove me wrong. Again, his research looked at quantity, but I can’t tell if it included “quality” companies.

We have light bulbs made from glowing metal filaments, fluorescent gas, and LED diodes. And now we have one made of water. There is also a virtually unlimited supply since the "bulb" is composed  of nothing more than one-liter plastic bottle, water, and bleach. The simple technology can be installed in less than an hour, lasts for five years, and is equivalent to a 60 watt bulb.

It works simply: The water defracts the light, letting it spread throughout the house instead of focusing on one point. The bleach keeps the water clear and microbe-free.