On Friday someone linked me to a Facebook developers page about Social Design (I think it was Christian Hernandez, Head of International Business Development at Facebook).  Facebook’s purpose in putting the page together is pretty obvious – they want people to write better social apps on Facebook so they are giving out some helpful pointers.

Their advice to devs building social apps is:

• Use the existing community on Facebook rather than try and build your own community from scratch (surprise, surprise…)
• Encourage new conversations by building “tools and experiences that give people the power to connect and share, allowing them to effectively listen and learn from each other”
• Help individuals within the community build their own identity

Over the past year, the Russian government has been quietly constructing the Innograd project on roughly four square kilometers of land on the outskirts of Moscow which will soon house 30,000 scientists and engineers.

Innograd, a high-technology research hub in Skolkovo, is perhaps the largest state-directed effort to establish an innovation ecosystem for pioneering the next-generation technologies in the fields of telecommunications, life sciences and nuclear energy.

More investments are headed toward Grand Forks’ downtown, the area around the Grand Cities Mall and the area north of the Alerus Center, if the City Council gives its blessings to a group of investors.

The council’s Finance Committee recommended Monday that the full council agree to a “renaissance fund organization” being proposed by the Center for Innovation Foundation, affiliated with UND’s tech incubator.

The foundation is raising funds for a tech park near the Alerus Center.

Bruce Gjovig, the foundation’s CEO and the incubator’s director, said a private developer has plans for a new office building and a data center. That’s in addition to the North Dakota University System data center planned for the same area, he said.

I’m a professional blogger, like you. How do describe what you do?

I hate this question. Not your question, mind you, but the “What do you do?” one.

If I was a plumber, everyone would immediately understand what that means, even if they didn’t quite understand all of the various types of plumbing. Instead, no one has an frame of reference to understand what I do.

Starting a new business involves a seemingly endless line of important decisions, from company name, to logo, to even the product or service you’ll be offering. Among these decisions, one of the most important (and often overlooked) is business structure.

The business structure is the legal form of your company. The three most common structures in the U.S. are the C Corporation, S Corporation, and LLC. As an entrepreneur, you need to carefully consider which is right for you. Do you need to avoid personal liability if your company is sued? Will you have a partner and/or investors? Do you want the business to pay its own taxes or carry the profit/loss over to your personal returns? And lastly, are you planning on VC funding?

As a new model for raising capital, money raised through crowdfunding is making an impact across all of Europe. In German-speaking countries alone, more than a quarter-million Euros have been raised through crowdsourcing platforms to finance numerous start-ups, projects and good cause initiatives. This has attracted the attention of the European policy makers. At a conference in Poland this coming November, a European declaration on crowdfunding will be released. Naturally, the question of regulation has been raised;  given that both the model and rules of participation have yet to be defined and adopted in a consistent way, there remains much ambiguity.

Crowdfunding is used as a model for funding start-ups on platforms such as growvc.com, c-crowd.ch or seedmatch.com. For these type of platforms, it's much more likely that rules regarding investor protection, transparency issues and financial reporting could apply. Within the creative industry, where often funds are being raised for initiatives or to develop merchandise rather than to form legal entities, crowdfunding is much less likely to be regulated and the applicability of different rules across the European Union varies greatly from country to country. For instance, a lot of project initiators are not aware that the rewards given to the funders (for instance, when pre-selling CDs to crowdfund the production of a music album) are subject to sales tax and therefore should be incorporated in the financial planning of the crowdfunding project.

“The average time that a Venture Capitalist spends analysing a business plan is 22 seconds” – Speaker at the 26th Venture Capital Institute, Atlanta, 2000.

Since this realisation more than 10 years ago I’ve often wondered whether it was entirely fair towards entrepreneurs who spend significant time and resources to develop a comprehensive business plan. But top tier venture capitalists (VC’s) deal with hundreds of business plans a year, and a decision on whether to take the proposal to the next level or to reject it is often made in less than 30 seconds. This is how:

Consider the ‘Flight-Path’ of the Business Plan

With fear running amok on Wall Street and the future economic picture so uncertain, it can be hard to raise venture capital these days. Over the last 12 months, though, we’ve managed to secure $23 million from both institutions and friends and family.

Part of the trick, we found, was having a well-researched and clearly articulated business proposition that clearly demonstrated a very substantial upside for investors.  We cast our net wide, using our own personal networks as well as those of professional fundraisers.  And while we were prepared to be flexible on terms, we refused to entertain low-ball offers.

I recently returned from a visit to Chile, which launched an ambitious effort in 2000 to become an IT outsourcing hub. It did so in an effort to break its economic dependence on its mining industry. By offering massive subsidies, the Chilean government created an outsourcing industry that generated $800 million in revenue and employed 20,000 people in 2008. The Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) asked my research team at Duke University to advise them on a way to grow this to a $5 billion industry by 2015.

I told themit was impossible. Chile had a population of 16 million people, and its universities graduated only 1,400 engineers per year. That put getting 100,000 additional IT workers for its outsourcing industry out of reach. Before long, the industry would start cannibalizing other important, technical professions. Civil engineers, mining engineers and university professors would abandon their posts for higher-paying IT service jobs. And salaries would increase to a point where the industry would cease to be competitive. I recommended Chile try to be more like Israel and less like India. Israel’s smaller, entrepreneurial population makes it a better model for Chile, whereas India’s much larger population gives it an advantage in pursuing the more traditional outsourcing industry model.

The invasion is under way. The newest generation – those so-called Millennials born since the 1980s and raised on ever-present mobile devices, ubiquitous online access and social media – are entering the digital workplace in force.

How will the unique environment that this generation grew up in influence the way they work? There’s plenty of social and political research on Millennials but little geared at helping IT managers support and get the best out of this technology-engaged cohort. With that in mind, we surveyed 400 U.S. Millennials, ages 20 through 29, on their attitudes and behavior around at-work technology and tech support, communications preferences and problem-solving styles. We found that Millennials have distinctive characteristics around response time, communications channels and self-sufficiency that IT needs to address to make these workers productive and avoid potential problems.

When independent film producer Joe Avella sought funding last year for his Master of Inventions movie, he looked beyond the usual suspects – he turned to the crowd.

Avella and his filming cohorts posted a video plea for money on Kickstarter, one of dozens of websites where inventors and others with new products, ideas and projects can seek donations from family, friends and anonymous people in the ether.

Crowdfunding is a viable funding alternative for inventors who are serious about developing and commercializing their ideas. Crowdfunding, by its Darwinian nature, also serves as a viable means test. Ideas that have popular appeal get funded; ideas that suck, die a merciful death. And as the saying goes, it’s better to fail early.

Scott Maxwell grew up in Silicon Valley, but these days he is practically operating a shadow economic development agency in Massachusetts. As founder of OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm (and before that as the head of the Boston office of Insight Venture Partners), he has persuaded more than a half-dozen companies from around the world set up shop here.

OpenView targets software and Internet companies that have already created a product or service, and begun generating revenue. "We look for companies that have around $5 million in revenue when we invest," Maxwell says, "so it's really expansion investing, giving them the resources they need for growth." OpenView will invest in start-ups anywhere in the world, Maxwell adds, "but the company needs to have a North American strategy." Often, that entails setting up a new headquarters in the U.S. and hiring a CEO here. OpenView's current fund totals $233 million, Maxwell says, and typically the firm puts about $7 million or $8 million into a company as its initial investment.

I would argue, and often have, that while money, technology and innovation (I'll come back to this) are considered more glamorous and therefore more important, communication is the single most critical factor in the success of any endeavor.

Communication is what transforms an idea into a vision, defines how it's different, explains why it will work, and engages people in helping make it a reality. Communication is what keeps your vision alive, whether you are in the room explaining it to someone, or they are thinking about it in places far from where you've ever been or will ever go.

For millennia, the human race has relied on one powerful skill to build the world we now see around us - the ability to innovate.

From the discovery of fire to the invention of the spacecraft, innovation has driven us to achieve the unachievable.

Whether you call it ibtikar, as it is known in the Arab world, or "innovation", it all begins with a passion for excellence and an ability to bring together the collective experience and insight of the brightest minds.

Innovation thrives in an environment in which problems are perceived as opportunities and non-linear thinking is encouraged. It needs to be driven not merely by ambition, but by a vision and a culture of openness to sharing ideas and best practice.

With concerns about the global economy dominating the headlines, worries about the strength of our local economy are understandable. Fortunately, the Knoxville–Oak Ridge region is rich in opportunities for business and job growth.

Innovation Valley Inc. is capitalizing on these opportunities through a coordinated effort to move our region's economy forward. IVI is a partnership of six regional economic development agencies, supported by regional business and government partners, that was created to implement a five-year blueprint for business growth in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge region. This blueprint focuses on six program areas: technology and entrepreneurship, education and work-force development, global marketing, business retention and expansion, public policy, and resources for living. It is available online at http://www.innovationvalleyinc.org/strategic-blueprint.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans in Hawaii continued to set the national standard in wellbeing in the first half of 2011, followed closely by North Dakota. West Virginia and Kentucky maintained their status as the states with the lowest wellbeing. Nebraska, which showed the biggest gains in wellbeing rank from 2009 (25th) to 2010 (10th), continued to move up, landing in the top five.

These state-level data, from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, are meant to provide a preliminary reading on the wellbeing of U.S. states in anticipation of the complete 2011 rankings, to be released early next year.

Facebook's new Messenger app for Android phones and iPhones is designed to let groups of people communicate with one another in real time no matter where they are. It's the first instance in which Facebook has split a core part of its social network from the main product—a move that reflects a shift in how people are using social-media tools.

Messenger lets groups of Facebook users communicate with one another in the moment even if they're using different communication technologies—for example, with one person using instant messaging, another text, and a third e-mail. Messenger taps into Facebook's vast supply of data about contacts and connections, including users' e-mail addresses, instant-message handles, and phone numbers.

David Lauren was racked with anxiety. It was 2 a.m. in London and a small crowd of Ralph Lauren employees huddled outside the company's U.K. flagship on New Bond Street, trying desperately to make a technology come to life in an unprecedented way. David, the 39-year-old son of Ralph and the company's executive vice president, was planning to debut a novel 4-D light show in less than 24 hours, to celebrate the launch of Ralph Lauren e-commerce in the U.K. The 4-D project had been months in the making, relying on architectural light-mapping techniques to create an eight-minute holographic video that would be projected onto the storefront. If everything went right, the building would seemingly disappear, replaced by 3-D images of 15-foot-tall models walking down runways and giant polo players galloping across fields. A rendering of Ralph himself would wave to the throng of fans. The exorbitant fourth dimension: the scent of Big Pony cologne, which would be spritzed onto the crowd below.

When I first got into VC I decided I better have some investment themes. My macro theme was “great entrepreneurs” who mapped to my belief system about the kind of entrepreneurs I wanted to work with.

My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing & SaaS – so these two themes were a given.

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Electronic devices with muscles-like stretchability have long been pursued, but not achieved due to the requirement that all materials in the devices – electrodes, semiconductor, and dielectric – are stretchable. In their pursuit of fully flexible and stretchable electronic devices, researchers have already reported stretchable solar cells and transistors as well as stretchable active-matrix displays. The nanomaterials used for these purposes range from coiled nanowires to graphene ("Foaming for stretchable electronics").

Recently, researchers at UCLA have successfully demonstrated a stretchable polymer composite that is highly transparent and highly conductive, and applied this nanocomposite material to fabricating stretchable devices.