Reporting from my first stop this year in Germany, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology has launched GEW / Germany (Gründerwoche Deutschland) with a balloon contest. The sky full of balloons all over Germany speaks for the many members of the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

GEW / Germany 2011 casted its shadow even before November arrived. Over 200 business start-up consulting and development stakeholders met for an exchange of views at the first nationwide Networking Congress in Berlin, hosted by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. At the event, participants attended various expert forums to discuss issues such as the role of social media in supporting start-ups or how a sense of entrepreneurship can be nurtured in school children. Ernst Burgbacher, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and Commissioner for SMEs and Tourism, stated at the opening of the Networking Congress that Global Entrepreneurship Week in Germany is a key measure of the Federal Economics Ministry’s start-up initiative.

How should the U.S. educate future entrepreneurs and create exceptional educational programs? Answering this question will give us far more than improved educational tools.  It could help make us again the preeminent world economy—and as a byproduct, solve our unemployment problems.

Roger Schank, a retired university professor and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, wrote an allegory for what he called a “story-centered curriculum,” featuring a delightful, if somewhat irreverent, tale of a town plagued by a dragon. In it, the prestigious local university quickly puts together a graduate curriculum on dragon slaying, producing 20 graduates in the first class. Various distractions derail many of the graduates, but one team eventually encounters the dragon.

The news, I’m afraid, is dire. The Internet is about to be destroyed by big media. It is about be killed by two Congressional bills – The ProtectIP and The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – that all-powerful big media lobbyists are now pushing through Congress. These bills will censor the Internet, turn it into China, censor it, destroy its innovation and value.

“Big media is going nuclear against the DMCA,” thus writes the author and serial entrepreneur Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, arguing that ProtectIP and COPA will “spell the end of the Internet as we know it.” Techcrunch’s Devin Coldeway, describing SOPA as “possibly unconstitutional” and as a “kill switch”, says it is a “desperate power grab by a diminishing elite”. CNET columnist Molly Wood chimes in that SOPA is “brazen” and “nightmarish” and warns that it will result in a “copyright police state”.  The Obama administration is “busy in bed with Hollywood,” she warns, “cheerfully ceding your rights to the MPAA and RIAA.”

Time and time again we've seen the same story play out: An established industry player ignores digital and ends up in a fight for survival against a brash startup, empowered by a little user focus and unencumbered by the burdens of maintaining the status quo.

But this week Barnes & Noble did something to turn the tables. With the launch of the Nook Tablet and the announcement that it expects to generate $1.8 billion from the Nook line this year, Barnes & Noble did something that anyone who cares about technology and business should find inspiring: It became a technology company.

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

You know Chutes and Ladders–the board game (Snakes and Ladders to those of you from the British Commonwealth). It’s popular among the younger set since the game is simple and requires no skill. In fact luck is a major component of success with the game. The goal is to be the first to move through the 100 spaces of the board. If you land on a ladder, you get to go up the ladder and advance a number of spaces equal to the length of the ladder. If you land on a chute, you slide down a number of spaces. Careful observers will note that landing on a ladder and advancing is the result of performing some virtuous task like baking cookies. And going backward down a chute is the punishment for a vice like breaking a window.

Jellyfishes rely on drifting to eat. They take their luck with currents, and create tiny eddies to guide food toward their tendrils. Yet in waters from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea, jellies today are thriving as many of their marine vertebrate and invertebrate competitors are eliminated by overfishing, dead zones and other human impacts. How have these drifters of the sea reversed millions of years of fish dominance, seemingly overnight?

Biologist José Luis Acuña of the University of Oviedo in Spain and his colleagues now suggest that jellyfishes are just as effective at mealtime as fishes when judged by the right measures. "Jellyfishes are ancient organisms, which use a primitive predation mechanism based on generating feeding currents to bring the prey into contact with their bodies," Acuña explains. "In spite of this primitivism, jellies are as effective as fishes in catching prey and in transforming the energy acquired (into) body growth and reproduction."

The provincial government will spend $450 million over three years to promote entrepreneurship among young people in the province, Premier Jean Charest said Tuesday.

The multi-pronged strategy is a bid to reverse a waning interest in business creation by implanting a “culture of entrepreneurship” and nurturing it, he told a Montreal audience.

Add support from the private sector along with existing investment funds and the strategy’s dollar value reaches $2.6 billion, Charest said.

Two months ago, a "next generation" IT startup launched in India, Happiest Minds.

Happiest Minds offers a suite of services that help IT departments keep up to speed with all of the new tech innovations that pop up.

Today, it's announcing a whopping $45 million Series A round Ied by Canaan Partners, Intel Capital and Ashok Soota.

Few things kindle the holiday spirit in a store or business like a decorated tree. But if you’re an eco-minded business owner, you might wonder: What’s the greener option – real or fake? The answer is not very clear-cut.

On one hand, fake trees are typically produced in factories in Asia and usually contain oil-derived, pollution-causing polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic. Plus, fake trees may contain unsafe levels of lead, and will ultimately end up in landfills, since they’re not biodegradable. Retailers and distributors use lots of fuel transporting them thousands of miles over the ocean and then on trucks to the stores where they’re bought.

London: Thomson Reuters released its list of the 100 most innovative organisations in the world. The list dominated by technology companies includes the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Intel, LG and Motorola. The struggling Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is not amongst the top 100.

"Innovation is a means of growth and prosperity for companies and nations seeking to overcome sluggish economies and achieve competitive advantage," said David Brown, president of the IP Solutions business of Thomson Reuters.

You sent me an email and didn’t hear back?  This might explain it:

OK so it’s not a serious decision chart.  But it’s beginning to look increasingly attractive!

Name: Identified

Quick Pitch: Identified is a professional marketplace that helps users improve their professional marketability.

Genius Idea: Provides users with real-time, interactive feedback on how companies evaluate your professional information online.

What do companies find when they search for you? Do they like what they find?

People naturally want to know what companies think about them and how they compare to other professionals in the job market. The problem is most resume databases and job sites don’t provide any feedback or responses.

Ever heard of Harvard Business School? Odds are that you have, since brand awareness has never been a Harvard problem. What was a Harvard problem was the perception of the school as a stuffy, arrogant, blue-blood playground. And so, back in 2008, Harvard Business School hired Brian Kenny to be its first chief marketing and communications officer and to help tell the Harvard story to alumni and prospective students.

Kenny’s background is in marketing — he spearheaded U.S. marketing for Genuity, Inc. and oversaw global marketing at The Monitor Group before moving to academia — and was the VP of marketing at Northeastern University prior to moving to HBS. As CMO, Kenny and the interactive marketing team are tasked with telling the Harvard story and providing information to the 70,000+ HBS alumni and anyone who’s learning about HBS, 70% of whom are getting information through digital means.

Over the course of a given quarter I will actively engage with a long list of entrepreneurs to discuss their business and fundraising objectives. These initial conversations are, in many instances, OpenView’s first touch point with some of the most exciting, high-growth startups in the software and tech world. A lot can be learned from these early interactions that will greatly shape the state of the relationship moving forward. Here are a few thoughts on how both parties can be sure they are sending the right signals on their “first date.”

Ask good questions

IMAGE CREDIT: KOREANBEACON.COM Asking the right questions is definitely a two-way street. I always stress to CEOs and founders that, just as I am looking to learn more about their business,  it is equally important they get to know their potential funding partners. (us) When an entrepreneur is asking the right questions in return, it is a very encouraging sign…whether it be trying to find out how we can help them execute against their go-to market strategy, or what relationships and doors we can open for them moving forward. These questions are equally as helpful for us as they help paint a clearer picture of the company’s vision and strategy. I try to be an open book when it comes to chatting about OpenView’s value-added proposition, and I find that by doing so it becomes far easier for these entrepreneurs to chat more openly about their business.

Driven in part by the explosion of vibrant social-networking media, the crowdfunding sensation now stretches to the far reaches of the globe. Fostering creativity, philanthropy, and growth, crowdfunding sites have fundamental social and economic impact, and are altering the allocation of capital.

Every generation rebels against their parents. When parents approve, their offspring disapproves. Parent says black, adolescent teen says white. Psychologists who are expert in these matters explain that rebellion is a factor in establishing identity. It’s part of the journey of growing up -- personalities are taking shape and a sense of self is being nurtured. Even if you haven’t quite worked out what you want, it helps to know what you don’t want.

But the times seem to be a-changing, yet again. Today’s teens are surprisingly in harmony with their parents. They wear the same branded jeans, have similar music in their iTunes library, are happy to accompany one another to a U2 concert, and if you ask them, many will talk about their friendly, supportive relationship.

How do you transform an opportunity into an idea? Well, the first thing is to get comfortable with the belief that any old ideas won’t do. What we’re interested in are disruptive ideas; that is, ideas with the power for great impact and influence. Ideas that challenge assumed boundaries and inspire a sense of what’s possible. In my experience, however, most ideas never get anywhere near this level. There are three major stumbling blocks:

1: Feeling overwhelmed, directionless, and without focus

In my experience, this is the direct result of relying on traditional brainstorming approaches, which, by the way, have been around since the 1930s, when ad-man Alex Faickney Osborn first popularized them in his book, Applied Imagination. But the problem is that traditional brainstorming has ignored the huge difference between generating lots of ideas and capturing quality ideas. As a result, brainstorming sessions often leave organizations and teams feeling overwhelmed and directionless—a state Beth Comstock at GE insightfully calls, “paralyzed by possibility.” Simply put, if your ideas are going to have any disruptive impact, you need to move beyond a shotgun approach to brainstorming and start pursuing creative effort with a laser-sharp focus.

This Friday the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) will release findings from its 2010 Economic Impact Report at their Governor’s Life Sciences Summit and WBBA Annual Meeting. With the sometimes volatile ups and downs of our industry, these findings have the potential to propel WBBA forward in both current and new initiatives and strategies to build Washington state’s life sciences sector.

Google is setting up an “incubator” for technology start-ups in Israel, one of several ways the California-based Internet giant is trying to get an early look at innovations.

Reuters The Google logo is seen on a door at the company’s office in Tel Aviv. A Google research director made the announcement Sunday at the company’s annual conference for developers in Israel, saying that the incubator will open in August of next year in the same building as Google’s office in Tel Aviv.