Algae biofuels are often considered one of those technologies --- like hydrogen fuel cells --- that are always "ten years away." Well, one company says it might have just cracked the code and could be supplying lots of algae jet fuel and diesel in the coming years. In the race for algae biofuel commercialization, people usually compare open ponds with photobioreactors. Solazyme, however, bypasses photosynthesis (and conventional wisdom) by growing algae in dark fermentation tanks. Grow algae in dark tanks?! Isn't that like putting solar panels on the dark side of the moon?!

For several years there has been growing consensus among economic developers about the importance of the creative economy, and many organizations have sprung up to examine and promote its concepts. In Canada, for example, the Creative City Network of Canada (www.creativecity.ca) offers many kinds of resources to municipal staff and the recent annual conference of the Economic Developers Council of Ontario (www.edco.on.ca) was built on the theme of “Defining and Capturing the New Economy,” with Rebecca Ryan, founder of Next Generation Consulting, as the keynote speaker.

In the US, preparations are under way as this is written for the third annual Creative Cities Summit to be held April 7-9 in Lexington, KY. Another thought-leadership organization, the Seattle-based International Regions Benchmarking Consortium http://www.internationalregions.org, released a report in December 2009 confirming that the springboard for economic growth these days is talent, not industrial resources or infrastructure.

The report, A Tale of 10 Cities: Attracting and Retaining Talent, lays out the typical growth pattern in the creative economy: “A region begins by attracting capable people though existing employers, its university system and an attractive local lifestyle. A growing talent pool then attracts new employers who seek a skilled workforce. This growth in knowledge-based industries, in turn, attracts even more well-educated and skilled people, and so on.

Sunshiny days have come to government, as transparency Web sites, iPhone apps, online dashboards and data feeds have proliferated across the Internet. The movement is changing the playing field for how citizens obtain government information. Since President Barack Obama made transparency and open data early priorities of his administration, public agencies have put thousands (if not millions) of data sources online, creating a rich pool of material that once was hidden in dusty file cabinets and available only through freedom-of-information requests.

Although most agree that openness is a welcome aim, this newfound abundance of data has spawned new questions and challenges: Can government agencies link together these far-flung data sources coherently so that citizens can find what they're looking for? And can open data be packaged and presented in a manner that decision-makers and the public can use to affect policymaking?

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital.  I’m writing this series because if you better understand how VC firms work you can better target which firms make sense for you to speak with.

It is not uncommon to see a VC talk about “total assets under management” as in “We have $1.5 billion under management.” I don’t really understand why VCs do this since it’s mostly a meaningless number. I’m writing this post to explain to entrepreneurs what you should be thinking about in terms of the VC’s you approach and the size and stage of their funds.

What is total assets under management? - VC’s often talk about this term as in the total amount of funds EVER raised by that VC. Example: if a VC is on their fourth $200 million fund that they just raised in 2009 then you might hear them talk about $800 million under management. This is ONLY relevant in so much as it will tell you that they’ve been able to raise a lot of money historically. But without knowing whether they had a $700 million fund and now have a $100 million fund or whether they’re a first time fund of $800 million it’s pretty meaningless. It’s also meaningless if they had four $200 million funds and the last one they closed was in 2000.

There’s nothing like a tough economy – and unemployment – to encourage people to take the plunge and open their own businesses. Some have more business experience than others. Some have more education than others. When I started my company, I went through a series of surprises and shocks and the occasional nightmare. With all of the recent interest in entrepreneurship, I thought I would highlight six warning signs that you are about to be broadsided by one of the classic and inevitable struggles of business ownership. If you hear yourself saying these words, take a step back and think about what you’re doing. My hope is that by being more aware you will be better prepared.

1. “Where’s all the business from our marketing launch?” Marketing can be very expensive, and it is difficult to know what will work. It can propel your company, or it can have minimal or no impact. There will be no shortage of people looking to take your money to help you with your advertising and marketing. The people who sell advertising are usually not marketing experts — they’re salespeople. It is their job to sell. It is your job to be discerning. If you can, test before you invest.

2. “The accountant must be wrong! We must be making money! We’re so busy I can hardly keep up.” You can’t just be a salesperson. You need to do the math. It’s about margins, cost accounting and discounting. It is about the bottom line, not the top line. Plenty of people are very busy right up until the day they run out money. Accounting can be exciting — exciting like finding out you are going broke, or exciting like driving a big profit.

No longer are the rigors of entrepreneurship meant only for the young and restless. Youthful energy has been dethroned by experience and pragmatism. Increasingly, senior citizens close to retirement are trying their hand at small businesses and making their mark too. So if you think you’re past it…take heart!

Why the surge in the number of older people turning entrepreneurs, one might ask. The reasons are not too hard to guess…..

Security: Senior citizens look for financial security as they approach retirement. Starting their own enterprise gives them the kind of security that a hot-shot job with a mega corporation does not guarantee anymore.

In the bad old dotcom days, startups used to be hatched in incubators — idea factories that spewed out companies to meet the ’90s bull market’s demand for tech stocks. (The most famous one, Idealab, was once valued at $8 billion.) Now there’s a new kind of startup booster: the accelerator, a camp-like program that brings entrepreneurs together to benefit from both mentors and peers.

Accelerators have proliferated recently, bringing more opportunities to entrepreneurs who need guidance as much as money. But the sector’s growth means picking one is no longer a simple choice. And now’s the season when many of them start taking applications (including my own accelerator, Capital Factory). How do you choose?

Each program has its own flavor, and no two are really alike. One key consideration: location. Accelerator participants must pick up and move, at least temporarily, to the program’s home base. (Face time is the whole point, after all.) So think about the city in which each program is located. Does it fit your style?

San Francisco — Clean technology venture capital investments in North America, Europe, China and India during the first quarter of 2010 totaled $1.9 billion — a record high — according to statistics just released by The Cleantech Group and the financial advisory and accounting firm Deloitte.

One hundred eighty companies in the clean technology and smart grid sectors obtained venture capital financing during the most recent quarter, with new transportation and energy efficiency being the largest two recipients of VC investment by sector, according to the report.

There were 13 initial public offerings of clean technology companies during the quarter, raising a total of $1.5 billion, which was a decrease from the $2.9 billion raised by clean technology firms in their initial public offerings during the fourth quarter of 2009. The largest single IPO of a clean technology business during the most recent quarter was that of Sensata Technologies, a Dutch producer of sensors and controls for solar panels and alternative fuel vehicles, which raised $569 million in its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

This is part of a series that I’ve [Mark Suster] been working on called Understanding Venture Capital.

In one of the posts I spoke about how the size and vintage of funds might affect you when you’re raising money.   This led Roy Rodenstein (whose company Going.com was sold to AOL) and others to discuss, what happens when VC’s need to invest across multiple funds.  Specifically Roy commented

“your company may go long enough that its vintage fund gets cramped and you may get painted into a corner for followons. Even more complicated, VCs often invest from multiple funds or sub-funds into a single deal. So as an entrepreneur it’s hard to navigate those waters over time. As usual the rule is, if you’re doing well, they’ll find the money for your next round.”

Everything that Roy mentions is true.  And VC’s don’t like to invest across multiple funds.  I thought I’d do a quick post on why VC’s don’t like to cross funds so entrepreneurs can better understand the situation and how to talk with their investors about it.

Is there anything more frightening to a business owner than this question:  “Do you have a business plan?”

Well, not having enough money to pay your bills, or getting threatened by legal actions are also frightening.  But since I’m reviewing “The One Page Business Plan for Women in Business,” I’ll stick with the first example.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first.  If we’re not approaching someone for financing, do we really need a business plan?

The short answer is yes. Every business should have one.  And I would say, as would the authors of this book, that for most businesses, the one page business plan is sufficient.

I [Margie Zable Fisher] was sent this book by one of the authors, Tamara Monosoff, who has written several other great books for women business owners.  This time she teamed up with “One Page Business Plan” expert Jim Horan to create a book specifically for women in business.

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity — and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make. It was just reported that Social Security this year will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes — a red line we were not expected to cross until at least 2016.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Even with Herculean efforts of small rural communities to keep “their spot on the map” by trying to retain the young most highly educated youth, the siphoning of human and social capital necessary to sustain smaller rural communities to more urban locations will continue to incrementally neuter economic and civic sustainability of smaller rural communities.

New population growth will be necessary to sustain rural community institutions and infrastructure. New residents must come from urban “transplants”, foreign immigration and an increased native population “birth rate”.

Without this remedy – significant population infusion – modern era ghost towns will take the place of many American small town rural communities.

Our rural education system sponsors and contributes to this trend, according to Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas authors of Hollowing Out the Middle – The Rural Brain Drain and What it means to America.

For this Sunday's Globe column, I spoke with (and e-mailed with) about fifteen techies, designers, entrepreneurs, and executives around Boston. Rather than talking specifically about the way-too-ballyhooed iPad, I asked them what lessons — positive and negative — they've learned from Apple and Steve Jobs.

- Antonio Rodriguez, venture capitalist at Matrix Partners and founder of Tabblo

- Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen, the Boston marketing agency

- Avid Technology founder Bill Warner

- Harvard Business School professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter

- Harry West and Ed Milano of the West Newton design firm Continuum

- OfficeDrop chief executive Prasad Thammineni

- Philip Greenspun, entrepreneur, MIT instructor, flight school owner

- Vijay Kailas, founder of the start-up Numote

There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.

There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.

1. Maintain a list of problems that are relevant to the research and technologies in the pipeline.

Technology transfer offices typically get involved in research commercialization efforts late in the research and testing process. Get involved earlier in the process and start developing a list of problems of which the research can be applied.

At 8.35am, the Apple staff counted down to the dropping of the black curtain, which had shrouded the store windows. As it got closer to 9am and the opening of the doors, the excitement of the crowd was tangible.

The morning survey of news items yielded a find that inspired me to revisit all the recent articles I've collected about migration. Albeit pre-Great Recession, deconstructing the rush to Atlanta:

This week the Atlanta Regional Commission released one of its periodic Regional Snapshots -- the topic was "Domestic Migration: Who's Moving In and Where Are They Coming From?" The snapshot looked at the 20-county greater metro area that includes Coweta County from 2000 through 2007. The source of the report was IRS tax records. That makes the report somewhat skewed because everyone does not file a tax return, but the report is a good indicator of where people are coming and going.

The first revelation is that most moves are local. In fact, 52.1 percent of the people on the move in metro Atlanta moved from one of the 20 counties within the region. Slightly more than 37 percent of those moving to the region came from a different state. And 7.5 percent moved from another county in Georgia outside the 20-county region. Other migration made up slightly more than 3 percent of the incoming population.

A local firm has developed a new type of scanner that can see through concrete and steel and save companies millions in lost operational days, and the company is getting set to commercialize its product.

“ We are going through an exciting time right now because we are trying to scale up to do a more commercialization effort , ” said John Bowles, vice-president of Inversa Systems Ltd.

Based at the University of New Brunswick campus, Inversa uses “deep backscatter tomography” technology to peer into the insides of all kinds of dense materials and create images of what it sees inside.

Bowles said the technology is a spinoff from one originally developed for medical use.

I [Author] am not convinced that blind innovation is categorically bad—if it’s a meaningful concept at all. Starting from scratch and trying to make a game that is unique is a great way for game designers to get out of their comfort zone and produce something that aggressively explores and opens up the space of possible game rule combinations.

The Naive View

Let’s assume that innovation and fun can be objectively defined and universally acknowledged. In this case, I see innovation through the improvement of existing systems as moving a particular genre of game forward towards “perfection.” A perfect game is one where the mechanics, if changed incrementally, cannot be made more fun. If you don’t fundamentally alter the rules of a perfect game, you cannot make it more fun. It has reached the end of its evolutionary development. Innovation for innovation’s sake is not moving forward, it is moving laterally. Different paths towards the perfect game are found by discarding what mechanics have come before and coming up with something entirely new. Discarding mechanics can happen at any level: you can discard really basic mechanics like the character being in one world; you can discard mechanics like character death upon reaching 0 HP; you can discard relatively superficial mechanics like instanced raids. Through discarding the old in favor of building the new from scratch, new passageways to perfect games can be opened and these new perfect games have the potential to be more fun than past perfect games.

Running your startup, don't waste time on tasks that apps can help you do -- especially if those apps are free or cheap.

Thankfully, there's a post on the Flexvite blog that put together a list of 12 cheap or free web tools that help you with that.

More investment in public-private partnerships and prioritizing key technologies are crucial if America is to avoid losing its competitive edge in manufacturing, industry and policy leaders warned Congress in recent testimony.

With a heavy focus on manufacturing innovation and government’s role in stimulating new technologies, experts from private, public and academic backgrounds said rival economies have already mobilized their resources in more efficient, targeted areas.

“In order to be relevant, we need to ensure that government R&D programs are focused on ways to provide high-quality assembly, non-destructive evaluation, and high rates of repeatability at large volumes,” said Susan Smyth, director of General Motors’ manufacturing systems research lab, in testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 17.