The government is extending its underwrite of the Crown-funded start-up investor, New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, through to 2022 and allowing $12 million to be transferred to the investor's cash-constrained seed fund, but the level of support will drop from 2018.

The Crown's $100 million underwrite facility will be extended until 2018 and then reduced to $60 million until 2020, as returns to NZVIF from earlier investments become available for reinvestment. The move, along with a $470,000 increase in operational funding, allows the fund to make co-funding commitments to new venture capital funds and partnerships.

Image: Franceska Banga, chief executive of the NZ Venture Investment Fund. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Your summer schedule's probably filled with weekend getaways, extra downtime, and happy hours galore. And, well, basically anything that's relaxing. While we're all for chilling out (it's good for you!), wouldn't it also be nice to use that extra time to do something you couldn't normally fit in during the busier months?

Mohammed Islam and Tom Lewry present a formidable duo.

Islam is a professor of internal medicine and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. Lewry is a patent litigation attorney at Southfield-based Brooks Kushman PC. Together they teach patent courses for engineers at UM. Lewry also teaches at Wayne State University.

Time is one of the most precious assets to most business owners. But with so many different time wasting tasks taking up space on your to-do list, you need to prioritize and make cuts wherever possible. However, there are ways to save time without actually skipping any important items on your list.

Here are some common time wasting tasks that you can easily automate to get more done in your business.

You don't need to be born in Silicon Valley to make it as a tech entrepreneur.

As this list proves, founders come from every corner of the U.S., and each state has someone who has changed the tech landscape

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com/

California is in danger of turning into a divided state. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: A state divided against itself cannot stand.

As a former technology executive and public official, I’ve seen all sides of California. I was privileged to serve as an elected official and as director of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development. Yet, while I was inspired by California’s capacity to create world-altering products and services, I was also disturbed by cities struggling with stalled industrial economies.

How should society think about technological innovation? Enthusiastically embrace it? Vigorously reject it, Neo-Luddite style? Worry, but remain tentatively optimistic?

There is an increasingly vocal debate on these questions in the public and political spheres. Technology is being singled out for killing more jobs than it creates, depressing wages, exacerbating inequality, destroying personal privacy—and even for posing a potentially mortal threat to mankind. But is the pace of technological change really accelerating? And if it is, should we be worried, or should we rejoice?

This morning, the House of Representatives passed the 21st Century Cures Act by a vote of 344-77, achieving a truly bipartisan result in a difficult political environment.  (I’ve blogged about the Act several times now, and the House Energy & Commerce Committee has a clear section-by-section summary here.)  There is much to like in the bill (such as the increased NIH funding), much to be concerned about (such as some of the provisions abbreviating FDA review of drugs and devices), and much whose value will depend on implementation.  It’s also not certain that any of these provisions will ultimately become law – the Senate has yet to even introduce its own draft bill, let alone vote on it or achieve a consensus with the House.  But I wanted to use this post to draw attention to a new amendment to the Act that was introduced a few days ago and approved by the House this morning prior to the vote on the full bill.

It’s easy to put things off, from starting a big project at work to making a dental appointment. Everybody procrastinates, says Joseph Ferrari, PhD, professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, but not everybody is a procrastinator.

"Twenty to 25% of adults are chronic procrastinators; it affects their home, school, relationships, and job—wherever they have to do something," says Ferrari, author of Still Procrastinating: The No-Regrets Guide to Getting It Done. "That’s higher than the rate for depression, substance abuse, phobias, and other psychological abnormalities. People think it’s humorous, but it can be a serious problem."

Question: What is the main benefit of entrepreneurship that traditional career paths don't offer?

The Ability to Create Your Own Destiny

"Entrepreneurship can be very rewarding. You can create your own hours and make your thoughts a reality. We now employ 10 people and we are still growing. I love looking around the office and seeing how collaborative everyone is. It feels good to know that I have created a working environment that people love." — Courtney Spritzer| SOCIALFLY

As a mentor and advisor to entrepreneurs, I find it’s easy to recognize “street smarts” when I see them, but it’s hard to explain the specifics to someone on the other end of the spectrum, even if they are willing to learn. Some people argue that street smarts are only a natural born skill, but I disagree. I believe they are disciplines that can be taught and learned.

It’s no secret that most startups fail. What’s a bit less obvious is that most startup accelerators also fail. While a few top-tier programs get the cream of the crop unicorns of the future, the hundreds of others struggle to attract teams that will produce the investment-grade companies on which their models so depend.

Through a combination of evolving technology and regulations, many believe that the arrival of equity crowdfunding is now poised to disrupt every aspect of startup funding.

That disruption is at the same time exciting and a cause for legitimate concern. On the one hand, the platforms let investors put money into startups they might never have heard of, and give startups a chance at funding from investors that only recently would have been barred from participating in their funding rounds. But on the other hand, more investors may mean more complications and risk, with possibly dire consequences for startups and investors, and that's not even mentioning how unscrupulous people might try to game the new system.

Innovation is such a heady, ill-defined concept. Innovation is one of those words – like strategy or creativity – that means either nothing or something different to anyone who hears it. But when handled correctly, genuine innovations are the lifeblood of any company’s continued health and success.

How do genuine innovations get measured?

Money.

Among my innovation peers, we have talked about how crucial executive commitment is, and some organizations have responded by hiring Innovation Managers, Innovation Directors, VP’s of Innovation, and Chief Innovation Officers (CINO’s not CIO’s so there is no confusion with Chief Information Officers).

One of the dangers of putting people in charge of innovation though, is that unless you carefully craft the positions and communicate their place and purpose across the organization, you can leave people feeling that innovation is not their job.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com

One of the most popular and least successful models I see in new business plans for startups is the so-called Facebook model, providing free services to users while collecting revenue from ads to offset costs and grow the business. To make this work, you need heavy traffic on your site -- probably at least a million page views per month -- which most sites never achieve in their lifetimes.

A couple of years ago, Angelos Angelou helped a Greek entrepreneur move his company to the U.S. Angelou, founder of Angelou Economics and a long-time economic adviser to the tech industry in Austin, found the process of opening a bank account for the new entrepreneur, getting a Visa, and all the rest of the paperwork tedious and time consuming.

Image: Angelos Angelou, founded the International Accelerator in Austin.

Today The Walt Disney Company (DIS) announced the 2015 class of the Disney Accelerator program powered by Techstars. The second Disney Accelerator program features ten startup companies that will participate in a three-month mentorship and investment program beginning today and concluding with a Demo Day on October 6, 2015.

The companies selected for the 2015 Disney Accelerator program include:

Startup fundraising is a long and arduous process. There’s just no way around it. Even for those startups with big names and help from major incubators, there’s always a lot of time and hard work involved. Aihui Ong, founder and CEO of Love With Food, a startup that helps food companies with brand awareness, learned that funding lesson the hard way. A graduate of the 500 Startups accelerator program, Ong thought that raising startup capital might be a simple task.

This week, presidential candidate Jeb Bush was harshly criticized for saying that the solution to some of America’s economic woes could be solved if Americans worked more hours. Republican politicians in Wisconsin are trying to make this theory reality, with a proposal to allow seven-day workweeks.

Wisconsin’s GOP is trying to nix an existing law that requires employers in the manufacturing and retail sectors to give employees at least 24 hours off during each consecutive seven-day period. Currently, for an employee to skip his or her weekly day off, an employer has to get approval from the state’s Department of Workforce Development.