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.

Clean energy/clean technology (CECT) is a significant and expanding market opportunity in the U.S. and around the world. For that reason, NBIA, in conjunction with the Clean Energy Alliance, has developed a two-day workshop that will teach you how to start a CECT incubator or restructure your current incubator to attract CECT clients and how to obtain funding for your incubation program and CECT clients.

The Clean Energy/Clean Technology Incubation Workshop and Meeting the Funding Challenge Seminar is scheduled for May 24-25 in Baton Rouge, La. The Louisiana Business and Technology Center, a member of both NBIA and CEA and a best-practice clean-technology incubator, will host the event.

The central theme of the 2011 Conference of Montreal is an exceptional challenge: the challenge of properly understanding the real- ities of the new world economic order imposed on us in these times of a still fragile recovery. This once again brings up our obligation to innovate and find new growth models so we can avoid our past mistakes and see to it that future develop- ment is more balanced and equitable in a multi-polar world undergoing profound change.

On behalf of the entire Conference team, I wish to thank the government of Canada and the government of Québec as well as our partners and sponsors for their unfailing support, which has made this 17th edition possible. We are expecting over 3,000 participants from the world of business, government, international organizations, public administration, uni- versities and civil society. They will have access to privileged information provided by some 169 high-profile conference speakers and delegates attending from all regions of the world. Moreover, this unique event will offer them opportunities to forge business ties that will facilitate their success in a world market that is as demanding as it is stimulating.

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Silicon Valley venture capital numbers continue their rapid ascent in 2011, leading many to buzz about a tech boom and some to murmur about another tech bubble. Venture capital in Silicon Valley rose in 2010, for the first time in three years, to $21.8 billion, from a 12-year low of $18.3 billion in 2009. Those figures increased by another $7 billion in the first quarter of 2011 -- a 76 percent increase over the first quarter of 2010.

Some major recent Silicon Valley VC deals include $200 million for Twitter in December 2010 and $27.5 million for Square, which allows both businesses and customers to accept credit-card payments on mobile devices.

Click to enlargeThe University of Florida announced two new buildings in the works for Innovation Square, a 120,000-square-foot home for existing science and technology companies and a dormitory for students interested in starting tech companies.

The first, to be known as the Infusion Technology Center, is being built by Gainesville development company Trimark Properties and will include ground floor space for retail, restaurants and cafes.

Luck, in our everyday understanding, is a random gift of the universe. The superstitious might go in for rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clovers and the religious for prayer, but otherwise there’s nothing you can do to attract good fortune or repel bad luck. Or is there?

Believe it or not, this is something science has looked into. Experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman has spent over a decade investigating whether lucky and unlucky people actually do anything differently.

To do this he used a newspaper advertisement to solicit hundreds of volunteers who felt they were exceptionally lucky or unlucky then conducted a series experiments to determine what, if anything, set one group apart from the other.

Apr. 18, 2011 (Business Wire) — A 3-year-old child born without fingers on the dominant hand is able to use a pencil, thanks to a device created by a FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®) team comprised of all girls, ages 11 to 13. The device earned the team, known as the “Flying Monkeys,” the inaugural FIRST Global Innovation Award, presented by the X PRIZE Foundation.

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology, today announced the selection of the winning team and runner–up teams of the Global Innovation Award, presented by the X PRIZE Foundation. All three teams will participate in a private awards ceremony in June at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, Va.

Take a quick look at your schedule. Most of us have calendars that are packed to the gills with endless appointments, meetings, conference calls, and deadlines. When, in this insanely-busy schedule, are you planning to come up with your best ideas?

In today's always-on, 24/7 business world, when are we supposed to generate creative breakthroughs? In-between checking our iPhones, responding to email, and updating our Facebook status? We're so busy being "heads down" on our to-do lists, that we fail to spend time being "heads up" to explore the possibilities.

In fact, very few people actually schedule time to think, create, and invent. But those that do are the ones that make history.

Trends on the Internet are fun to watch and move very quickly compared to some other markets. For instance, while the Web’s trends tend to go in cycles of one or two years, trends in food and restaurants tend to go in cycles of nearly a decade. So the fast-changing world of the Internet can be exciting.

The latest trend to be noted amongst those who watch such things is that social media is losing some of its lustre with some users. A visible decline has been seen starting in February of this year, denoting a possible plateau during the Christmas Holiday and now falling steadily.

The Trend Itself

The trend is a 10-day moving average in terms of number of tweets on Twitter using The Daily’s iPad application. The app’s usage peaked at about 220 tweets per day in early February, then dropped quickly and significantly down to about 85 per day by the end of the month.

MENLO PARK, Calif.—Travis Kalanick is the founder of a start-up that lets people order up a car service from a cellphone. Recently, the 34-year-old found himself in the driver's seat.

Several major venture-capital firms were vying to fund Uber, his fledgling company. While presenting his business plan at the offices of Benchmark Capital, Mr. Kalanick briefly excused himself to phone three other potential investors. His message: They needed to move fast.

One Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, wouldn't have it. "No need to talk to those guys," he told Mr. Kalanick. "Let's get the deal done here."

TNG Pharmaceuticals from the University of Louisville took home the grand prize at the Rice Business Plan Competition.

TNG won a $300,000 Investment Prize from the Goose Society of Texas, a $100,000 Owl Investment Prize and other cash awards for a total of more than $500,000. TNG is developing a vaccine that greatly reduces the damage caused by the horn fly on cattle.

The competition is hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, and the winners were announced over the weekend.