If you agree with The Wall Street Journal's recent claim that Web startups have hit a cash crunch, you might just be in the wrong place at the right time.

According to a recent report by CB Insights, a New York City-based VC database, the cash is still flowing, to the tune of 790 firms receiving a total of $7.9 billion worth of VC in the third quarter of 2011. If that rate of investment continues through the fourth quarter, CB Insights estimates it'll be a $30 billion-plus year for venture capital, the highest level in a decade.

SSTI’s 15^th Annual Conference Nov. 8-9 in Columbus, OH is just a few weeks away and this year’s agenda includes thoughtful discussion, practical tips and workshops centered on relevant, timely issues that matter to those involved in tech-based economic development (TBED) policy and practice.  Featured topics include Capital Access, Research Commercialization, Nurturing Startups, and Innovation and Organizational Metrics.

SSTI’s plenary sessions incite dialogue and promote community building. Senior leaders from EDA, NIST and SBA will kick-off the event discussing how we communicate the value of investments in innovation, encourage collaboration, and adapt to changing economic and fiscal conditions. The conference wraps up with discussion and audience participation on the latest trends, the challenges ahead and their implications.  Networking opportunities, yoga, a morning run, and dinner with small groups is built in to maximize your conference experience.  Early registration is available through Oct. 24. Register now at: http://www.ssticonference.org/.

Funding announcements are very boring, both to read and to write.

But they're covered every day on tech sites, whether an entrepreneur has raised $400,000 or $400 million.

The amount of money raised has become a way some people benchmark a startup's success. The more an investor pours into a startup, the better the startup's idea and team must be. It will have enough money to live a little longer, at the very least.

That logic is a bit twisted.

The amount of IT spending on cloud computing services, such as data storage, is growing.

Looking for a job isn't just a concern for those under 65. Retirees and those past the traditional age for calling it quits increasingly need or want to work. The challenge, of course, is finding suitable work in an economy with chronically high unemployment.

Here's a look at five job categories with promising demand now — and in the years ahead — for retirees willing to tackle something different:

Every parent needs a break from time to time—a few minutes to prepare dinner, do the laundry or quickly check e-mail. That's when the television suddenly becomes the best invention ever—an instant free babysitter that enthralls even the youngest infants and might, fingers crossed, even teach them a thing or two. But a new policy statement published today by the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that not only do children under age two probably learn nothing from the television, but that watching too much can actually delay language development and cause attentional problems.

To be fair, it is impossible to keep kids from the TV entirely. "Screens are everywhere," remarks lead author Ari Brown, a pediatrician based in Austin, Texas. And studies have shown that some educational television programs, such as Dora the Explorer and Blue’s Clues , can improve vocabulary in older kids. "But that doesn't play out for this age group," Brown says.

The Center For Innovation (CFI) is pleased to be hosting the 18th annual National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) Conference. The conference, going through Wednesday at the Arlington Sheraton, features leaders of government innovation capital, state and regional funding programs, and angel and venture capital organizations working to advance innovation through new capital programs.

As part of the excitement generated at the conference, the CFI announced several new initiatives representing technology transfer; including a new partnership with the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) and a new consortium to support development for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) industry in Texas.

Ideas for new products occur often when we least expect them, when we’re walking the dog, weeding the garden, taking a shower or during a boring lecture.  You may not even notice that your mind has wandered, but suddenly, there it is – a ‘light’ goes on and you have a flash of inspiration.  You want to stop whatever it is that you’re doing to find a notebook to jot down your thoughts before you lose them.  But what are the next steps you need to take to get your product to market?

1. Check the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to determine if your idea has been commercialized and is ‘out there’.  Not finding a similar product does not necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist – it could just mean that you haven’t come up with the right keywords.

2. Do a literature and patent search – you could make an appointment with the Business & IP Centre at the British Library for help with this.

I’m about to head out to TechStars New York Demo Day. Our investment in SideTour – one of the TechStars New York companies – was announced yesterday and I’m excited to introduce them along with hanging out with all of the other great entrepreneurs from this session. If you’ve been watching the Bloomberg TechStars series, we are doing the finale tonight where we meet with all of the teams and see where they are six months after the program ended. It’ll be happening live at 9pm ET/PT.

Since I haven’t yet figured out how to be in two places at the same time, I ended up recording a short video for a meeting on entrepreneurial communities that I was invited to. In it, I talk about my first of four principles of entrepreneurial communities, specifically that entrepreneurial communities must be led by entrepreneurs.

I'm inclined to think Washington, D.C., constrains, frames, levels, directs, empowers, and topples -- all of which can be important. In contrast, the west coast of the United States -- and many corners of the country outside the Beltway -- builds, innovates, creates, launches, discovers, struggles, figures out stuff, and designs the future.

Anyone who has spent time in Silicon Valley or Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and more will quickly feel that innovators, scientists and engineers change the world far more than those of us in Washington.

Business owners pay incredible attention to detail — to even the most minute details — during a start-up. A maturing customer base, reasonably steady cash flow, and added layers of management naturally create a shift in focus and attention.

That shift in focus can be a good thing… unless in the process your business starts to drift away from what made it successful in the first place.

Here are eight easy ways to tell your business may be losing its edge — and jeopardizing its long-term future:

1. The parking lot is empty at 5.30 p.m. Once there weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done; now there aren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a “proper” work-life balance. Growing a small business requires tremendous effort, effort that doesn’t always stop at 5 p.m. If you or your employees aren’t staying late at least occasionally, that’s a sign you’ve lost the drive and excitement that once propelled your business. Employees want to stay late when their work is meaningful. Start projects or initiatives everyone can rally around. Find an “enemy.” Build a sense of mission; that’s your job.

From venture capitalists to founders, we rounded up 25 super stars who are creating big names for themselves in Silicon Valley despite their young ages. Take Ernestine Fu for example. At age 20, she's the youngest venture capitalist in the Bay Area. The Mensa member and Stanford undergrad has already been on the cover of Forbes Magazine. The crazy thing is that she's not the youngest person mixing it up in Silicon Valley.

Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker is better than anybody at summarizing the state of the technology business through slideshow presentations.

She's about to do it again at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Google Ventures, the search giant’s venture capital arm, will invest more than $200 million in more than 100 companies over the next year.

Bill Maris and Graham Spencer of Google Ventures discussed the VC firm’s investment philosophy at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Tuesday. Maris explained that Google Ventures combines quantitative analysis of each startup along with traditional venture capital signals and gut instincts.

For those who know me, I'm an Apple evangelist. I am a victim of Steve Jobs' famous reality distortion field: standing in line to buy each new mystical gadget. I owned the first iPod and the first iPhone. I wrote my last book entirely on an iPad. I've used Macs for years and have been a shareholder of Apple for quite a while. Needless to say, Steve Jobs has made my life better.

And whether you own any Apple products, he has made your life better too. His passion, vision and execution have made all of our lives simpler, more productive and, honestly, more enjoyable. As one pundit remarked on TV after Jobs' passing, "he closed the gap between technology and humanity." As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, Steve Jobs showed how that relationship should work. The technology should serve us, not the other way around.

Miguel Yeoman—known as the artist BeloZro and, now, as cofounder of the startup company BeloZro Visual Energy—was born and raised on Detroit’s hardscrabble east side. As he tried to stay out of trouble in 1980s Detroit—an extraordinarily violent period in the city’s history—he found his way to boxing, and then to art.

He spent a decade working on the line in local factories until he finally mustered the courage to try to make a living off his craft. He moved to Los Angeles and found limited success—a fairly big gallery show, but also an attorney who swindled him out of a quarter-million dollars. So, in 2008, back to Detroit he came.

Venture capital firms invested $6.95 billion in 876 deals throughout the United States during the three months that ended Sept. 30, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

The numbers marked a slowdown from the preceding quarter, when venture capitalists put $7.9 billion in 1,015 deals.

But look at what’s happened since June: Fresh worries about Europe’s debt crisis, U.S. market volatility, and waning economic confidence all followed a protracted political stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling and adopting a new federal budget. Are we better off than we were six months ago?

The Piedmont Triad Research Park (PTRP) is the largest urban life science research park in North Carolina, and among the largest in the U.S. at approximately 230 acres of which 55 acres are open green space. Administered by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, the research park is a science and technology-based economic development project with a particular concentration in the Life Sciences sector. Companies and the Wake Forest School of Medicine faculty in PTRP focus on pioneering breakthroughs in biotechnology and advanced medicine, and create innovative solutions to improve our lives, our future and the world around us. Piedmont Triad Research Park represents the Medical Center’s vision for the future of innovation in healthcare. It is a hub of scientific discovery where the treatments of tomorrow are discovered today.

The park’s mission is to expand to an urban, mixed-use biotechnology and related technology research park providing a formula for economic recovery for the city, the community, North Carolina’s Piedmont region, and the state while assuring the presence of a landmass for the long-term growth of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and its School of Medicine.

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Ben Horowitz, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says he and his famous partner Marc Andreessen hope to carve out a different path in creating a new kind of venture capital firm.

They hope to capitalize on their fame going back to the days of the founding of Netscape, their startup successes, and their love for technical CEOs to beat other venture capital firms to the best new startups. Horowitz also said he hoped to be more transparent about his firm’s approach by telling entrepreneurs what his company is doing.

Horowitz reflected on what it was like to start Netscape, which went public in 1994, just 15 months after its founding by Andreessen. He said that kind of accelerated growth, which is not so uncommon anymore, is tough on founders who have to learn how to run a big operation under the public limelight. Back in the old days, it was common for venture capital firms to bring in professional CEOs to run a company after the founders got it off the ground.

What is there to cheer in these grim days of public debt, political mismanagement and boundless, bureaucratic mediocrity, when opportunity taps at the doors of vacant homes and offices before it moves on to other, more promising pastures?

Still, if New Brunswick, whose population barely surpasses Mississauga's, authors its own misfortune with depressing reliability, it also manages to occasionally and pleasantly surprise, as it did yesterday when UNB unveiled its plans for a new innovation and entrepreneurship facility.

The Pond-Deshpande Centre (named for businessmen Gerry Pond and Gururaj Deshpande, whose gift makes the scheme possible) is modeled on a program Mr. Deshpande, a UNB alumnus, financed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. It has reportedly supported more than 90 technology projects and helped start 26 businesses that employ more than 400 people.