Silicon Valley contributed nicely to the solid 35% year-over-year gain for venture capital funding in the first quarter – but Boston did more than its share.

The San Francisco Bay Area was home to 190 deals in the first three months of the year totaling $2.24 billion, a 44% increase over the $1.56 billion on 180 deals a year ago, according to VentureSource data. While impressive, that lagged behind the Boston metro area, which posted $862.9 million on 71 deals in the quarter, a 71% increase compared to the $505.6 million on 60 deals one year ago.

Boston’s gains were pretty strong across the board, but especially in the health care and energy/utilities sectors. (Sample-size disclaimer: Boston had just three deals in the energy sector, but all of them were sizable, including Harvest Power Inc.’s $51.7 million financing.)

Two seemingly disparate signaling pathways -- one that controls organ size in fruit flies and another important for the growth of embryos -- interact in embryonic mouse hearts to restrict cell proliferation and control heart size.

Mammalian hearts have only a scant capacity to regenerate heart muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes, to repair tissue damaged as a result of a heart attack or heart disease. The new research, published today (April 21) in Science, suggests it may be possible to interfere with signaling pathways that limit such regeneration to therapeutically promote the production of muscle cells in damaged hearts.

The achievement is impressive, but it is a wholly formal achievement that involves no knowledge…and it does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human thought.
—Law professor Stanley Fish, on Watson, the I.B.M.–built computer that won a game of “Jeopardy” (The New York Times Opinionator blog, Feb. 21, 2011)


By 2029, we’ll have reverse engineered and modeled and simulated all the regions of the brain. And that will provide us the software/algorithmic methods to….create machines that really do have the subtlety and suppleness of human intelligence.
—Futurist Ray Kurzweil, explaining what he calls the “coming singularity” (BigThink.com video, #14532)

Aaron Levie co-founded Box.net from his dorm room, but he quickly learned that there were some strong advantages and disadvantages to that. While the company’s overhead was minimal, providing customer service from an accounting class is hardly ideal – and investors are instinctively more wary of entrepreneurs who don’t commit. Levie discusses how he weighed the pros and cons in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture, given at Stanford University.

PitchBook has published its 2Q 2011 Private Equity Breakdown and Presentation Deck. The Report and Deck were compiled using data from the PitchBook Platform and cover trends in U.S. private equity investing, exits and fundraising with a focus on trends developing during the first quarter of 2011. Please feel free to use the deck slides for conferences, board meetings and other PE-related presentations.

Click Here to Download the PE Breakdown - 2.9MB (PDF)
Click Here to Download the PE Presentation Deck - 4.7MB (PPT)

Google posted a video tour of one of its data centers today, highlighting some of the steps it takes to keep data secure and maintain reliability.

Google has been notoriously tight-lipped about its data centers, and doesn't even disclose exactly how many it operates.

So why the sudden openness? There are several likely reasons:

* Yesterday's Amazon Web Services outage is creating new questions about the viability of cloud computing -- including services like Google Apps

With all the news that McDonald's is planning to add 50,000 new jobs to the country this year, why not see whose examples you can follow?

The company has employed several people we now know as singers, actors, or successful business people. CBS Moneywatch has this list of celebrities who worked for the fast food chain at one point in their lives before breaking through to their own success.

The idea: Bridg.me makes conference calling as easy as using Google Calenders.

Just create an event, enter the phone numbers of all participants and the hashtag #bridg. Bridg.me will call everyone at the scheduled time.

Whose idea: Justin Heilman and Jagdish Repaswal

Why it's brilliant: It's annoying to jot down all of the numbers needed to dial in. It's also frustrating to wait for other participants to arrive. Sometimes they forget and you're stuck waiting forever. This feature solves both of those problems.

Have you written a rap song that sparked a revolution, or won the top award in the soccer world twice?

We didn't think so.

But the people on this list have done such things, and they're all under 25.

We scanned through Time Magazine's list of The 100 Most Iinfluential People to pick out the youngest luminaries.

Today’s WSJ includes a review I wrote of an interesting new book about innovation, Little Bets, written by Peter Sims. His thesis is that innovation proceeds through a series of small, experimental steps, requiring an iterative, self-correcting process.

This raises a number of questions directly relevant for biopharma. While some of these issues are discussed elsewhere, one additional question to think about is the challenge of making evolutionary changes in a business – such as drug development — characterized by long cycle times and little robust intermediate insight into how well your approach is fundamentally working.

When do companies decide to innovate and when do they decide to go incremental or radical? Gijs van Wulfen discusses the dilemmas of decision making.

The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. In my new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ I try to solve them. My last blog on ‘unfuzzing the front end’ discussed X-factor ideas. But, how will you get ideas with the X-factor? There are at least five choices you have to make:

1. When: now or later?
2. Who: experts or internal team?
3. What: revolutionary or evolutionary ideas?
4. Which criteria to use?
5. How: the creative or structured way?

The more I hear from innovators (some successful, and others not so successful) on the importance of being able to make snap decisions based on intuition alone during critical stages of the innovation process, the more I’m convinced otherwise. Perhaps just the opposite may be true, and maybe what really matters in determining an innovation effort’s success is not so much intuition skills but a more systematic approach—something that resembles classic critical thinking skills.

I refer to a systematic approach to critical thinking made popular in the 1960s and ‘70s by researchers such as Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe, to name a few. These classic methods, which link problem solving and decision-making, have been all but discarded by latter-day innovators. Detractors argue that these methods are too cumbersome and laborious and certainly not suited to the rapid demands required of innovators today.

It looks like women have caught up with men in numbers in the workplace. For the first time in history, women in the USA now outnumber men in the workforce, and there are now more women in supervisory positions than there are males. The question is whether they will handle the downside of working any better than men.

According to an article by Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell, PhD, titled The 21st Century Workplace -- Are Women the New Men?, the economic downturn has hit men harder. They held nearly 80 percent of jobs that have been lost during what is now being called the "mancession." Will women now inherit the stress, pressure, exhaustion, burn out and heart attacks commonly associated with male leaders in business?

I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries.

The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. Rinse & repeat. Nobody really knows whether or not the idea is yet going to be big, so I believe in not over capitalizing too early. This benefits you, the entrepreneur. It’s the whole basis of my investment philosophy, which I call “The Entrepreneur Thesis.”

Micah Kotch, operations director of New York City’s only cleantech incubator, has developed a bit of a complex. The incubator, called NYC ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean & Renewable Economy), is housed within New York University’s better-known technology incubator on Varick Street. Since ACRE started up in July 2009, Kotch has watched a procession of media—from the Wall Street Journal to MSNBC—come to spotlight the tech side of the incubator, while virtually ignoring the ten or so companies on the cleantech side. Why? Because mobile apps and other emerging technologies are sexy, whereas “cleantech is viewed more as infrastructure,” Kotch says.

CARSON CITY, Nev., April 20, 2011 -- Gov. Brian Sandoval today announced the release of "The SILVER Spark for Nevada: Sustainable Innovation Leading a Vital Economic Renaissance," a report highlighting Nevada's industry innovation strength areas with the commercialization potential to form the foundation of a more diverse economy for the state. The report was jointly released by the Office of the Governor, the Office of the Lt. Governor, the Nevada Commission on Economic Development and the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization.

RICHARD SELINE WAS A CONSULTANT AND SENIOR ADVISOR ON THIS REPORT.

Fear can be good, and it can be bad too. It may prepare you to do your best, but if you’re not careful, fear can also stop you from reaching your full potential. Success Magazine has recently covered a few fears you should keep your eye on.

The fear of failing in business.

Businesses fail for many reasons: Competition grabs market share, funding disappears, society changes course or a recession blindsides you. “With every failure there comes—like a sort of secret toy surprise in the bottom of the cereal box—added value in strength, wisdom and knowledge,” Groover says. Failing inspires greater triumphs, especially when you use it to get your head straight.

The best survival guides tell you how to be proactive and avoid the probabilities of ending up in a worst case scenario. Of course you need to learn how to recognize a bad situation before it bites you, and you need to know all the secret ways to wiggle your way out, before you succumb.

The challenges stem from the simple fact that every entrepreneur is starting something new, where things are predictably unpredictable. There are unknowns at every turn, leading product development, attracting customers, managing cash, and dealing with human resources and office politics.

If you read this blog often you'll know that I'm a huge fan of First Round Capital.

They have totally changed the way you run a VC firm, investing heavily in systems & events for their founders that are pushing the boundaries of the way our industry works.

One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies. I'm a huge fan of this innovation.

The relative difficulty that women entrepreneurs have in finding financing for their businesses has long been a topic of concern. Now a new project is aiming to improve women’s access to capital by mentoring and training women to become angel investors and eventually fund other women’s companies.

Pipeline Fund, a social venture fund founded by Natalia Oberti Noguera that invests in women-led for-profit social ventures, recently launched its Pipeline Fund Fellowship, the New York Times reports. The Pipeline Fund Fellowship will train women philanthropists to become angel investors through education, mentorship and practice.