Vinod Khosla admits he’s not really known as a polite guy. But he comes by it honestly.

“I sort of had a habit at age 12 of insulting priests in India, because it was fun for me. I was a troll,” Khosla said Friday. “There is fun in that. If there’s a lot of conventional wisdom, challenging it is fun.”

Khosla, a well-known venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems, had the crowd laughing at an education-focused Startup Weekend event in Seattle, organized by TeachStreet. But Khosla also was giving out some serious advice for entrepreneurs.

It is an article of American faith that family meals are important. Social science underscores our secular belief. Children who eat with their families have stronger vocabularies than those who do not. They do better in school. They are less likely to suffer from obesity. Family meals prevent teenage pregnancy. They are a bulwark against depression. Those who eat chicken around a table with kin tend not to sneak off to the park later to huff paint.

But what about the children of double-shift police officers and nurses, of corporate attorneys, night-shift laborers, key grips and regional sales reps, anyone for whom a nightly meal with the family borders on the impossible? What happens to those who simply cannot manage to join the roughly 50 percent of Americans who eat with their families every day? Are they doomed?

What about my kids, so long as we’re asking questions? For the past two years, as the restaurant critic for The New York Times, I have eaten out at restaurants nearly every day and night, mostly with people who are not my children or wife.

The University of Michigan struck 101 technology licensing deals with businesses and startup companies during its 2010-11 fiscal year, reflecting the most active year for deals in the Technology Transfer Office's history.

That was up from 2009-10, when the university signed 97 technology deals — then tied for its all-time high.

The Tech Transfer Office — which is responsible for commercializing intellectual property created by U-M faculty members — also spawned 11 startup companies in 2010-11. That was up from 10 in 2009-10 and eight in 2008-09. The office has created 104 startups over the last 11 years.

To support high-potential companies that are moving past the conceptual stage, Oxford Entrepreneurs is proud to offer a vibrant incubation centre.

If you’re a current Oxford University student or recent graduate of the University looking for value-priced office space to incubate your early-stage business in central Oxford, you’ve found it! Thanks to the generosity of Keble College and donations from alumni, OE has created the Oxford Entrepreneurs Incubation Centre based at Keble’s Acland site.

The OEIC proffers the use of ample desk space with 24/7 access for a mere £150 per month per desk. This monthly rate includes high-speed Internet access, a mailing address, use of a conference room (including data projector), printer, kitchenette, and exposure to key OE contacts in industries such as PR and venture capital.

When finance executive Ane Ohm joined Harqen, an early-stage company that makes tools to index and analyze recorded phone conversations, one of her reasons for taking the job was, in a sense, lofty: she hoped to meet angels. While the ones she was targeting are not quite as rare as the heavenly variety, angel investors are not as commonplace as smaller companies would like.

With bank financing still uncertain, small and midsize companies are looking to alternatives, with mixed results. Angel groups generally invest in only 1% to 10% of the opportunities that come before them, according to Marianne Hudson, executive director of Angel Capital Association. Those are slightly better odds than companies seeking venture funding or private-equity infusions will encounter, according to a recent survey by the Pepperdine Capital Markets Project, but just 13% of businesses that responded to that survey reported getting funding from any of those sources.

A couple of weeks ago, Wichita entrepreneur Jeremy Jones completed his start-up company's first big round of investment capital fundraising.

Reaching its $2 million fundraising goal puts Nitride Solutions much closer to beginning manufacturing aluminum nitride substrates, which are used in solid-state electronics, light-emitting diodes and ultraviolet laser diodes.

"We're pretty much there," said Jones, CEO and co-founder of Nitride.

Jones and others said raising private investment capital is easier locally and in the state than it was a few years ago. Attracting venture capital from outside Kansas is getting easier, too.

CELEBRITIES such as George Clooney may believe in aging gracefully - proudly displayed their greying locks - for many people the change is an unwelcome part of the aging process. Well soon, grey hair may become a thing of the past, with scientists from the world's largest cosmetics and beauty company claiming they have found a way to prevent it with a pill.

The daily medication, based on a fruit extract, is due to be launched within four years, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

It is the result of more than a decade's research at the laboratories of L'Oreal, the cosmetics and hair product company, which hopes to win the race to capture the world's £8 billion (approximately $12.9 billion) hair colour market.

THE government's long-awaited intellectual property reforms have been held up as instrumental to creating a better environment for innovation. But they are peripheral to what universities are most in need of right now.

Commercialisation has long been considered a nice to have, rather than a must have, for academia.

While he quality of university research is outstanding _ Australia was amongst the top 10 countries for quality research institutes in 2010, according to the World Economic Forum. But if we can't point to the social impact of that research, it will become even more difficult to attract government funding, inevitably eroding research quality. It's a vicious circle: no outcome, no funding, no funding, no outcome.

Alfie Kohn, author of  No Contest:The Case Against Competition writes:  Noncooperative approaches . . . almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else.

Sound familiar?  Look around and in almost every industry you see competitors beating each other into the ground while reducing the end value to the customer and increasing cost.

Julie Browser, of IBM writes “The traditional concept of business as a “winner takes all” contest is giving way to a realization that in the networked economy, companies must both co-operate and compete. Termed “co-opetition,” this new perspective requires companies to create business strategies that capitalize on relationships in order to create maximum value in the marketplace.

The world's most successful people have one thing in common: they think differently from everyone else.

This is how John C. Maxwell introduces his New York Times bestseller, How Successful People Think (he's also written a ton of leadership books, which have sold around 19 million copies worldwide).

Because we also believe that smart thinking will change your life, we picked up a copy from Barnes & Noble. Here are the best takeaways.

Social media now makes it easy for any business, no matter how small, to generate publicity.

But there's still a certain something about making the more traditional news. Getting a news outlet to cover what you're doing not only saves you time (if someone else is doing the promoting, you don't have to do as much of it yourself) but it also allows you to reach a larger, more diverse audience.

The basics to getting news coverage: Be concise, be interesting, be relevant. But what else can you do to get noticed? Here are six ways to make sure your news release isn't put in a pile with the rest of the no-gos.

In today’s episode of our convertible debt series, we discussion a few other terms that come into play with a transaction.

Interest Rate: We believe interest rates on convertible debt should be as low as possible. This isn’t bank debt and the funders are being fairly compensated through the use of whatever type of discount has been negotiated. If you are an entrepreneur, check out what the Applicable Federal Rates (AFRs) are to see the lowest legally allowable interest rates are and bump them up just a little bit (for volatility) and suggest whatever that number is. Typically we see an interest rate between 7% and 10%.

New research in The FASEB Journal suggests that rats fed homobrassinolide, found in the mustard plant, produced an anabolic effect, and increased appetite and muscle mass, as well as the number and size of muscle fibers.

Bethesda, MD—If you are looking to lean out, add muscle mass, and get ripped, a new research report published in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) suggests that you might want to look to your garden for a little help. That’s because scientists have found that when a specific plant steroid was given orally to rats, it triggered a response similar to anabolic steroids, with minimal side effects. In addition, the research found that the stimulatory effect of homobrassinolide (a type of brassinosteroid found in plants) on protein synthesis in muscle cells led to increases in lean body mass, muscle mass and physical performance.

Nikhil Sethi is 23 years old. He met his 22-year-old cofounder, Garret Ullom, at Northwestern University in a Probability of Statistics of Random Signals class.

Ullom was a computer science major; Sethi was studying electrical engineering and law.

Sethi's father had tried his hand at entrepreneurship, and Sethi began dabbling in it at an early age. He interned at True Ventures and HBO and, during his sophomore year, he tried to raise $80 million for a logistics company.

Eileen Walker, Chief Executive Officer of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP), has been selected for service as a Fulbright Specialist by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, on behalf of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.

The Fulbright Specialists Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It promotes linkages between United States academics and professionals and their counterparts at universities around the world. The program is designed to support qualified U.S. faculty and professionals, in select disciplines, to engage in collaborative projects at higher education institutions in over 100 countries. Project activities focus on the strengthening and development needs of higher education institutions. The program sends U.S. faculty and professionals abroad to serve as expert consultants on curriculum, faculty development and institutional planning at overseas academic institutions.

Jobs are the single biggest political issue of the day in the U.S., and rightly so. As of August, the official unemployment rate in the United States stood at 9.1 percent. That was down one point from the October 2009 peak of 10.1 percent, but still higher than at any time since the 1930s, with the exception of the worst months of the 1982-83 recession. And today’s real unemployment rate, if you include discouraged workers who have stopped searching for jobs and people who have settled for part-time positions, is much higher, at around 16 percent. That translates into 25 million Americans who need work.

That’s a terrifying number, because no one knows how the country might create that many new jobs. Let’s say President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill were enacted in its current form (an unlikely prospect, given the levels of partisan obstructionism in Congress). The most optimistic estimates from economists are that the new spending in the bill would add only 2 million jobs to the economy in 2012. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a tenth of what’s really needed.

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 amidst the ongoing employment crisis has opened a wide conversation about what ails America and what should be done about it. A vast ideological gap on macro-economic policy divides Washington and much of the nation, but there is almost universal agreement on one solution: innovation. Innovation is now perceived as a panacea for job creation, income generation, economic growth, dollar strength, and the revival of the U.S. as global hegemon.

But if innovation is going to save us, we must understand why is has so far failed us. Unpacking the past decade's experience with innovation can guide us. I'm working on a book, CQ — Creative Intelligence, that will, in part, explore that topic. Here's what I've been thinking.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida’s Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator program, which fosters the growth of startup bioscience companies with ties to UF, has released a study showing that over the last seven years its companies and graduates had a total economic impact on Alachua County of $753 million.

The $753 million is the result of total output, which includes value added to the local economy, labor income and all output factors — the total economic impact of the incubator companies’ economic activities. Sid Martin Biotechnology graduate companies that relocated outside the county were not included. The study also didn’t include portions of companies located elsewhere when a company had multiple locations such as Boston and Alachua.