Behold the brave new world of economic gardening.

But Christian Gibbons, considered the godfather of economic gardening, forewarns acolytes about this economic development initiative.

"Economic gardening is not a quick fix and it is not a silver bullet. It is a long-term strategy," Gibbons said in the 2010 summer issue of the Economic Development Journal.

"It is not a fad diet. It is a lifestyle change."

"It takes awhile to put the infrastructure in place and to get to a scale large enough to make a difference," Gibbons said.

Brian Snyder is the Founder and CEO of Madbrook Publishing, an educational/entertainment company that publishes Everything Butt Art. Snyder says Everything Butt Art’s mission is to “teach kids to draw, always starting with the butt shape” which is a format that “really engages kids.”

After presenting on-stage during TechCrunch Disrupt, New York Snyder came into our studio for an Office Hours session with Hunch’s Chris Dixon and First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman.

Most entrepreneurs who start a company alone soon come to the conclusion that two heads are better than one – someone to share the workload, the hard decisions, and the costs. In a moment of crisis, you may be tempted to take on the first person expressing interest. This would be a mistake, and could easily cost you your startup.

If you think about it, you should realize that not everyone is ‘ideal partner material.’ Most of us learn that in other partner relationships, like dating and marriage. First you have to be clear on who you are, and who you can co-exist with, what complementary skills and resources you need, and what decisions in the business you are willing to relegate.

Nearly half of recreational runners may be drinking too much fluid during races, according to a survey of runners by Loyola University Health System researchers.

Expert guidelines recommend runners drink only when thirsty. But the Loyola survey found that 36.5 percent of runners drink according to a preset schedule or to maintain a certain body weight and 8.9 percent drink as much as possible.

Nearly a third of runners (29.6 percent) incorrectly believe they need to ingest extra salt while running. And more than half (57.6 percent) say they drink sports drinks because the drinks have electrolytes that prevent low blood sodium. In fact, the main cause of low sodium in runners is drinking too much water or sports drinks.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that it is accepting proposals for Round 8 of its Grand Challenges Explorations, a $100 million grant initiative to encourage innovation in global health and development research. Proposals are being accepted through November 17, 2011 at 11:30 am Pacific Daylight Time.

The initiative offers scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs from around the world the opportunity to win $100,000 grants to pursue unconventional ideas that could transform health and agricultural development in the world’s poorest countries. The topics in this round are:

* Protect Crop Plants from Biotic Stresses From Field to Market

* Explore Nutrition for Healthy Growth of Infants and Children

* Apply Synthetic Biology to Global Health Challenges

Xconomy's latest "Guide to Venture Incubators" tallied 64 venture incubators in the United States. That 2011 count is triple the number that existed in 2009. The new trend caused Xconomy's Wade Roush to wonder if this incremental growth indicates a bubble.

Wade thinks so, which isn't unreasonable. And I'm sure this list is expanding even as I write this blog. In Ohio, for instance, The Ohio State University's Fisher College Center for Entrepreneurship announced 10-xelerator, a mentorship-driven investment program designed for high-tech entrepreneurs a few months ago.

Many people do not realize how  important a role universities play in creating technology commercialized by the private sector.  Every time a football team wins a big game, the players dump Gatorade – a licensed university invention – on the head coach.  When we look for information on the Internet, most of us use the Google search engine, which was a university invention.

University inventors have created many important drugs and medical treatments.  Researchers at Wake Forest University’s medical school, for instance, invented the vacuum assisted closure of wounds, which reduced by one third the time it takes wounds to heal. And researchers at the University of Wisconsin developed the anticoagulant Warfarin.

By now, most people who work in the developed world have gotten used to the idea that the old nine-to-five routine is gradually becoming a thing of the past; plenty of people have shifts that start and end at different times, or they use job-sharing and other forms of flex-time. Some don’t even have traditional jobs at all any more, thanks to the evolution of the “gig economy” and the increase in freelancing. All of which raises a question that seems even more appropriate with Labor Day around the corner: Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?

So far this year, venture-capital groups have raised $21 billion in 80 funds, according to Preqin, a research firm. That sum matches the total for 2009, gathered by 190 funds and $3 billion shy of that in 2010 (161 funds). Although this is encouraging news for the industry, the amount raised and the number of funds are still only half what they were before the financial crisis and significantly lower than in the dotcom boom. But social media and mobile technology—where some see a new bubble—have attracted recent waves of funding. In 2010, nearly a fifth of money raised was dedicated to IT and around a third to health care. Clean technology took 14% of capital investments in 2010, but this year its share has been only 6%.

A massive bill comes to the Senate this week as HR 1249, passed by the House in June 2011.   Under this reformed system, patent priority will no longer be set by date of invention. Priority will be set by date of filing. Inventors will have to file early and often to protect their work or see their rights evaporate. Inventors and serial entrepreneurs, can you imagine the expense and uncertainty? Furthermore, inventors may never see the advantage of their increased fees in terms of USPTO efficiency and expertise: nearly $1 billion in USPTO fees have been diverted by Congress away from the USPTO and to other uses over the past two decades.

The advantages will all be to deep pocket companies from new to old tech, from Microsoft to GE to GM, which will sniff out small inventors' new or merely different ideas, work them over and file first. The need for multiple patents at $50K each for one basic invention will mean nothing to the multinationals but failure to the entrepreneurs.

New Iowa Governor Terry Branstad met with the Iowa MicroLoan Board of Directors to express his interest in and support for Iowa's small business and entrepreneurial sector. An outgrowth of the Iowa Foundation for Micro-enterprise and Community Vitality (IFMCV), Iowa MicroLoan was created in 2007 to assist microbusinesses considered on the fringe of risk-bearing capacity for most traditional financial institutions.

Micro-enterprises—those with five or less employees—account for 86 percent of all businesses in Iowa. In the Internet age, home-based businesses and sole proprietors and micro-enterprises are the fastest growing segment of the entrepreneurial class. Representing a very important investment in Iowa's future, micro-enterprises pay dividends by adding jobs in the near future as well as 40 years down the road, as some grow to become the major rural community employers. In addition, the cost to the state appears to be minimal compared to some other strategies.

I’m a pretty good salesman, but I’m the worst negotiator. If I say, “buy my car for $10,000” and someone says “$8,000,” I’d just shrug my shoulders and say “ok”. In fact, that happened.

Some people could be good at both. But I think it’s very hard. By definition. When you’re a salesman you want the other guy to say “yes.” When you’re a negotiator you have to be willing to say “no”, regardless of what the other side says.

So although they aren’t total opposites, the goals are completely different. But big picture:

Negotiation is worthless. Sales is everything.

Recently, Prime Minister Singh of India declared the present decade to be the ‘Decade of Innovation’ and announced the creation of a National Innovation Council, which will promote innovation centers nationwide. When laying out, “A Strategy for American Innovation,” President Obama said: “The United States led the world’s economies in the 20th century because we led the world in innovation. Today, the competition is keener; the challenge is tougher; and that is why innovation is more important than ever.” Clearly, our leaders get the critical importance of innovation—the application of new inventions and technologies to solve old problems, address new challenges and generate economic growth.  What’s needed now is action from legislators on both sides to press ahead and enable innovation.  New drug discoveries, clean energy, energy efficient buildings, greater access to electricity and lower-cost healthcare, cold-chain technologies, expanded access to broadband and joint experiments in space can all be many steps closer to reality if policies are put in place to enhance bilateral cooperation between the U.S. and India.

Across books, songs, even news publications and social media sites, positives words are used more commonly than negative ones, according to a new study published Monday (August 29) on arXiv, an online prepublication site widely used in the physical sciences.

Hypotheses regarding the reasons language evolved as it did are varied, including purely practical explanations such as coordinating social behaviors, like hunting, and more cultural explanations, like the support of altruism and cooperation. The answer, some anthropologists believe, may be found in the language itself.

Let me make one thing clear. I love entrepreneurs. I admire their creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance. I have stood in their shoes as we built out Innosight's core business and explored new geographies and offerings. I have also funded many entrepreneurs through our company's venture investment arm.

I am writing today, however, to praise corporate innovation.

Right now start-ups have undeniable sex appeal. If you ask twenty-somethings where they could go to have an impact, they will tell you a start-up. They have read the stories of Andrew Mason from Groupon and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, peers who have created billions of dollars in value. Having a movie made about your start-up? Sexy. Joining a faceless corporation manned by drones? Not so sexy.

This article is for the surfers in our family especially Megan, Dominic, Adrienne, Richie and the best lifeguards in Wildwood Crest New Jersey , Matt and Chris in Chair 11.

WaveJet is a patented Personal Water Propulsion (PWP) engine designed for use in a range of personal watercraft, including surfboards and other light boats.

With WaveJet, Surfers can spend more time riding. And less time waiting. You will no longer have to depend solely on the strength of your arms or be towed into big waves. Kayakers will have an auxiliary power source beyond their paddles. So you can expend less energy fighting currents and have more fun riding them. SUPers can get up and running immediately and push the limits of their board’s capabilities. Lifeguards will save more swimmers.

Collecting logos. It seems to be all the fad in the startup and VC world these days. VCs are paying up at enormous prices to say that they have GroupOn, Facebook and Twitter on their roster irrespective of whether they really venture funded them or bought in late stage.

And entrepreneurs are working hard to make sure they have as many VC names and famous angels on their cap table for signaling value. As a result they end up taking money from many firms all at once.

I call this collecting logos because it seems that having fancy brands to brag about trumps the logic of maximizing the value of your investor. Here are the problems that I see increasingly crop up for entrepreneurs in collecting VC logos.

You don’t have to be likeable to everyone to be a great entrepreneur, just to the people who count. Of course, we can all point to apparent exceptions, like Ted Turner or Larry Ellison, who are sometimes seen as lions, downright predators, or even jerks. Yet I’m told that even these guys are considered quite likable by an intimate group of business and personal associates.

So likability is an elusive quality. It doesn’t mean always being perky and bright and constantly being happy. What makes each of us likable is distinct to us, and to some degree it’s in the mind of the beholder. But the basic drivers of likability are the same for most of us, and Michelle Tillis Lederman, in her new book “The 11 Laws of Likability” has summarized these nicely:

At a time when the above-ground economy seems to be stuck in perpetual neutral, something very interesting is happening in the underground economy. On do-it-yourself crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, significant amounts of capital are starting to flow to a group of ingenious projects that bridge the gap between the creative arts and cutting-edge technology — a sweet spot that’s pure money. In some cases, entrepreneurs are raising $100K or $200K at a time — even when they ask for only a fraction of that. In the post-downgrade economy, these instances are proof that a solid business plan, a way to reward passionate supporters and a little DIY mojo goes a long way.