Austin is the U.S. market that is most conducive to the creation and development of small businesses, according to the latest On Numbers rankings.

Oklahoma City is second in the current standings, followed by Charleston, S.C., Charlotte and Seattle.

We used a six-part formula to analyze the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, searching for the places that offer the best climates for small businesses. See the bottom of this page for a database with the top-to-bottom standings.

People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior.

We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.

On Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced $130 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop five new program areas that could catalyze critical breakthrough technologies to secure America’s energy future. Today’s announcement creates program areas that will fund innovative projects seeking to discover rare earth alternatives and find advancements in biofuels, thermal storage, the electric grid and solar power electronics. The success of these program areas could reduce our country’s dependence of foreign oil, decrease the cost of clean electricity and develop a sustainable infrastructure for future generations of Americans.

Lots of entrepreneurs believe they want a mentor. In fact, they’re actually asking for a teacher or a coach. A mentor relationship is a two-way street. To make it work, you have to bring something to the party.

Recently when I was at a conference taking questions from the audience, I got a question that I had never heard before. Someone asked, “How do I get you, or someone like you to become my mentor?” It made me pause (actually cringe.) As I gathered my thoughts, I realized that I’ve never thought much about the mentors I had, how I got them, and the difference between mentors, coaches and teachers.

Teachers
What I do today is teach. At Stanford and Berkeley, I have students, with classes and office hours. For the brief time in the quarter I have students in my class, at worst I impart knowledge to them. At best, I try to help them to discover and acquire the knowledge themselves.

The Wall Street Journal recently listed the Top 10 Dying Industries, via research firm IBISWorld. Some industries didn’t just see temporary decline during the recession – some won’t recover and will slowly (or quickly) disappear. IBISWorld’s data format is a little different than ours, and its categories are somewhat obscure, but we thought it would be interesting to pull together a similar table with the associated job data.

With one major exception, all of these industries have seen some shakeup. But job loss by itself doesn’t tell the full story. Wired telecommunications carriers lost the most jobs, but are tied with newspaper publishing for the second smallest percentage change on the list. This is probably because these are entrenched industries and will take longer to become totally obsolete. Contrast those industries with photofinishing. Photofinishing has been a smaller industry all along, but its percent loss is at 68%. Consider the last time you looked at snapshots that weren’t digital, and then say a little prayer for the photofinishing industry.

Sri Lanka has been ranked as the number one tourist destination by the New York Times in its list of ‘31 Places to Go in 2010’.

Sri Lanka has received another nod as a top travel destination. National Geographic has listed Sri Lanka second in its “25 Best New Trips for 2010.” Even a study carried out by Newsweek magazine Sri Lanka has been ranked 66th in the world’s best countries. This study was conducted by the internationally acclaimed magazine on 100 of the world’s best countries. The study focused on five main aspects which included health, quality of life and the political environment. Sri Lanka was ranked above its neighbours with India ranked at No 78, Bangladesh at No 88, and Pakistan at No 89. So we can observe Sri Lanka now heading for a new era with economic development.

But still most of our export business etc depends upon to the traditional products like tea, rubber as well as garments. What we have to understand is to move away from the traditional markets such as manufacturing, and see the creative industries as a key component in a new knowledge economy.

6. They focus on fixing their weaknesses. Forget your weaknesses and focus on enhancing and blowing up your strengths so your weaknesses become irrelevant. Put in the hours of “Grind Time” honing your strengths, business expertise and building your brand. Your brand is simply the personality of your product. Allow people on social media and other mediums to get to know your brand and build a relationship with your target market first, before asking them to buy from you. Why not give them something FREE, intriguing and of value first! If your product is really that good, prove it and give away some samples and if really is that good people will talk about it and demand for it will increase.

5. They don’t understand and underestimate the power of marketing. Most entrepreneurs think their product/service is so much better than their competitors. But what they do not understand is that their product does not have to be the best to be successful. As long as their potential customers “perceive,” or think and believe that their product is the best, it will sell. Marketing is not about who has the best product, it’s about who is perceived to be the best or one of the best. There are so many people that I am sure can make a better sandwich than Subway or better burger than Mc Donald’s, but the rest of the world will never know or buy their product because of their failure to market effectively. You may be good, your product may be spectacular, but you will stay broke and your product won’t sell unless you have a ridiculous and relentless marketing plan.

In response to President Obama’s call to action to promote high-growth entrepreneurship across the country, the Startup America Partnership today announced a new wave of commitments secured from more than 15 companies and organizations to deliver strategic and substantive resources that accelerate entrepreneurs starting and scaling companies. These new private-sector partnerships deliver more than $400 million in value to U.S. entrepreneurs, building upon 20+ commitments already secured by the Startup America Partnership from companies like Intel and IBM.

“Young businesses have created 40 million jobs over the past 25 years, and the need to create a strong ecosystem for startups in our country is more paramount than ever,” said Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership. “These new partnerships will help ensure that startups have every best chance to succeed.”

Since part of my job at Redstar Ventures is to meet as many entrepreneurs as possible who might want to co-found a startup with us, I’ve swilled plenty of coffee at Voltage and Peet’s swapping ideas with many a bright, passionate, and inventive entrepreneur. Somewhere into my second gallon of cappuccino, I began to notice a simple pattern emerging in the fundamental approach entrepreneurs have to their ideas. Grossly speaking, the ideas and entrepreneurs that go with them tend to fall into one of four quadrants of the following matrix (with deference and apologies to the BCG Cash Cow)

Let’s look at the left half of the chart below first. A great example of the Technology driven / Me market quadrant (lower left) would have to be the entrepreneurs behind Rockmelt, who are building an integrated web and social media browser for, well, twenty-something hipster tech guys. In their homepage “what is it” video, the narrator and prototypical user is “a recent college grad who moved out to California to join the Rockmelt development team.” Can’t be any clearer than that—their initial target market is their own employees! I have no first-hand knowledge of Rockmelt’s early ideation, but it feels like a pretty classic tech-driven concept in the sense that it takes something people are doing already (web browsing, Facebook, Twitter) and tries to make it easier and more efficient through a unified, integrated user interface.

Duke University has established a new $20 million biomedical endowment to support a program that has had a knack for launching new medical companies, focusing in particular on medical technology.

The new endowment will allow the program to continue at Duke in perpetuity.

Duke was one of nine universities chosen by the Coulter Foundation in 2005 to accelerate technology transfer of university biomedical engineering projects into commercial products and clinical practices. Since then, 19 Duke projects have been funded in areas such as detecting prostate cancer and esophageal pre-cancerous lesions, treating hemophilia and controlling urinary function for paraplegics.

A group of original Trade Me investors is seeding a new venture capital fund to help more early-stage companies.

Wellington investment firm Movac, which consists of several of the first Trade Me shareholders, has announced a new growth capital fund in conjunction with the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund.

The fund, of between $25 million and $50m, aims to crash-start New Zealand's high-risk venture capital industry, which has been struggling to find financiers following the financial crisis.

Movac managing partner Phil McCaw said a growing number of angel-funded companies had no access to critical "follow-on" capital for expansion.

It's easy to think that the wife of a well-known & successful VC (Fred Wilson) would have had an easy and storied life of wealth and privilege. I had previously had the opportunity to spend time with Joanne Wilson, Fred's wife, and knew otherwise.

That's why I was so interested in having "The Gotham Gal" come on This Week in VC (video link on YouTube, download iTunes, episode 15)) and dispel those myths. In fact, as she tells it, in their early career when Fred was young in VC, Joanne was earning 3x more money. Well into their 30's "they were living paycheck-to-paycheck" as Joanne had taken time off of work to raise three children.

I gave a talk yesterday to a class of soon-to-graduate MBA students at CU Boulder yesterday. It was their last class in the course that had been filled with a bunch of interesting VC and entrepreneurial guest lecturers. We did Q&A for several hours, covered a lot of ground, and had plenty of fun (or at least I did.) At the end, the professor asked if I had any final words of advice to the room full of MBA’s who were about to graduate. I thought for a moment and then said an abbreviated version of the following.

Imagine that you are 45 and are looking back on your last 15-20 years. Is your work, and life, full of meaning?

Don’t worry about money right now. You can always get a job that pays you plenty of money. Don’t worry about your resume. Don’t worry about “am I positioning myself the right way for something five years from now.” I know way too many 45 year olds who have plenty of money, have done all the right career things, yet are unhappy with where they are in life, where they live, and what they do. Don’t be that guy or gal.

Just 1% of start-up companies create 40% of new jobs - a far smaller number of companies than had been thought - a World Economic Forum (WEF) study has found.

The WEF said governments looking for growth through entrepreneurship should examine what made these successful.

It said that they should do this rather than "replicate Silicon Valley".

Last month Prime Minister David Cameron told would-be entrepreneurs "now is the time" to launch their business.

Stanford wants to open a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island, which floats between Manhattan and Brooklyn in the East River.

Eventually, Stanford wants to move 2,400 people – masters candidates and professors, mostly – to the island.

Currently, about 12,000 people live on Roosevelt Island.

There will be business and engineering programs.

I love social media. As a marketer, a business owner, and a consumer, I love that social media introduces me to the people I need to network with and introduce myself to. To me, that’s its biggest asset – to connect me with the right people, at the right time, to make magic happen. But you can only do that if you’re not wasting your time and cluttering up your view with the wrong people. That’s why one of the most important things you can do in social media is to put steps in place to connect with the right people and avoid wasting your time talking to or seeing the updates of the wrong ones.

Who are the wrong people in social media? The people who you’d be much better off to avoid? In case you haven’t met them, let me introduce you to seven of my non-favorites.

A society without a strong manufacturing base will not have the financial means to sustain communities and the livelihood of its members without a significant contribution from government, which is what we are clearly seeing today.

I was reading your (April 2011 First Up) article, and I couldn't help but think to myself how right-on you are with your assessment of the state of manufacturing in our country. I was raised as a "factory" kid. My father, uncles, cousins, neighbors and friends all worked for a major automotive manufacturer in the area. We built our lives based on the premise that "the Plant" would always be there. There was no question in some people's minds that they would someday work at the place their grandfather and father worked. That dream was shattered when the plant closed, leaving thousands out of jobs and thousands more without a future. This tragedy could have been avoided, had our society been more focused on the value that manufacturing brings to our lives vs. the ideology that "my children will never work in a factory." The bottom line is just as you state -- there can only be so many executives and service employees. A society without a strong manufacturing base will not have the financial means to sustain communities and the livelihood of its members without a significant contribution from government, which is what we are clearly seeing today.

Once again, the New York Times throws its mighty weight and influence at the topic of unpaid internships, and once again everyone reacts.

This time last year, their paper-selling (sorry, “digital subscription” selling) headline was “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not”. And, right when the furor dies down – and right before the summer internship season begins – they throw in this year’s sh*t-stirring entry: “Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges”.

Really? We’re going there? Calling out college career centers for doing what they feel they must to help desperate soon-to-be graduates find real work?

Back in August 2010, the AIC brought you news of our Commercialisation RoadMap – an internal tool we developed to provide a framework to walk our customers through, and to provide an empirical method of documenting progress along the commercialisation journey.

The tool, based on a stage-gate model, visualises the commercialisation process through the graphical representation of the journey and provides structure and continual assessment capabilities.

This enables innovators, entrepreneurs, research organisations, government departments and businesses to determine their progress along the commercialisation pathway.

Significant interest was expressed by a number of our clients, which contributed to our recent decision to “open source” the tool to enable all innovators and their mentors to access the content freely.

Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger received the "Entrepreneurial Leadership Award" as the nation’s most Entrepreneurial University President at the “11th National Policy Forum on Innovation and Minority Entrepreneurship Education”.

“I’m flattered and honored to receive this recognition for the great education we provide and my role in helping to make it happen. Babson’s faculty and staff have created an enormously powerful living and learning laboratory that prepares our students with deep functional knowledge and the significant capability to take action in the face of uncertainty—an unusual combination that allows us to proudly say we’re the only school in the world that does what we do,” said Schlesinger.