The first diamondback terrapin hatchling of 2011 emerged on Friday afternoon after 63 days of incubation under the hot summer sands of Lieutenant Island in South Wellfleet.  Terrapins are medium sized coastal turtles found along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.  They can be found in Southern New England estuaries and salt marsh ecosystems, and are protected as a threatened species in Massachusetts and an endangered species in Rhode Island.  Wellfleet Bay on Outer Cape Cod marks the northernmost habitat in the world for this rare hard-shelled reptile.

In June and July terrapin females crawl ashore from brackish estuaries to lay nests in sandy uplands.  They deposit an average of 12-to-13 eggs in each clutch, and usually lay two nests a year.  As many as 90% of unprotected nests can be devoured by a host of predators, large and small, from raccoons, skunks, foxes and coyotes to fly larvae, red ants and beach grass roots.  Once hatchlings emerge from the nest, they fall prey to these same large predators, augmented by crows, gulls and raptors, as they scramble to the safety of nursery habitat in the salt marsh.  As the tide floods in, crabs and fish join the attack on these tiny, yet tasty critters.

A startup begins with a great idea, but all too often, that’s where it ends. Ideas have to be implemented well to get the desired results. Good implementation requires a plan, and a good plan and good operational decisions come from good people. That’s why investors invest in entrepreneurs, rather than ideas.

People and operational excellence have to converge in every business, large or small. Microsoft found this out last year when their market capitalization, once at $560 billion in the year 2000, had fallen to $219 billion, allowing them to be passed by Apple at $222 billion, who grew from $15.6 billion during the same period. Both had access to the same technology, people, and market.

Whenever I’m about to make a new investment, I always think about the 2×2 matrix I learned from Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital.

The idea is that if you make a new venture investment (or start a company), you can either be “right” or “wrong” and you can either be “consensus” (following the crowd) or “non-consensus.” Everyone knows that if you’re wrong, you’re not making any money. But the interesting part of the chart above is that being right and consensus isn’t great for your returns either. The big money, as any horse racing handicapper can tell you, comes when you’re right and you don’t follow the crowd.

What kind of business are you creating? Is it one of innovative products or services and unique solutions? Anyone can create what’s required, can see a need and fill it. What sets your business apart? How to you distinguish your brand?

Changing Direction

Small business aims at a new kind of publishing. Great innovation should start simply, like this plan to reinvent the publishing industry with a single book. When innovating, make bold, meaningful and simple changes and then build on that blueprint. Do you have an innovative idea for a product or service? WSJ

Entrepreneurs may need extra help. What can political leaders really learn from entrepreneurs, assuming, of course, that they have the interest in listening? It’s certain that a new and innovative way of looking at the economy may be necessary in these tough times. Can entrepreneurs provide the answer? You’re the Boss

Graduate students in the sciences who both teach and conduct research show greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work, says a report to be published in the August 19 issue of Science.

The report, "Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills," is notable for being among the first to examine gains in the actual research skills of graduate students rather than what they report about themselves.

A question that I often hear debated these days is whether a new startup should focus on growth or profits. First of all, the glory days of “dot.coms” are gone, when investors “didn’t care” about profitability, and all the money went to growth.

In the long run, everyone wants both profitability and growth, but the question is still which comes first. Most startups and investors I know don’t have unlimited funds, so the first question they should ask and do ask today, is “When is your company going to be profitable (self-sustaining)?”

Speaking shortly after her appointment as head of ETUC, Ségol insisted that the FTT should not be seen as a replacement for member states' contributions to the European budget.

"If we have an FTT it should be more for additional investment, growth and jobs, which is our priority, and not to replace income that should be there anyway," she said, alluding to the proposed EU budget for 2014-2020, presented by the European Commission on 29 June.

According to Ségol, social rights have been under attack and even the Commission's recommendations to EU countries on delivering growth and jobs, in the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy, have diminished the European social model.

A growing body of recent research indicates that, in Earth’s warming climate, there is no “tipping point,” or threshold warm temperature, beyond which polar sea ice cannot recover if temperatures come back down. New University of Washington research indicates that even if Earth warmed enough to melt all polar sea ice, the ice could recover if the planet cooled again.

In recent years scientists have closely monitored the shrinking area of the Arctic covered by sea ice in warmer summer months, a development that has created new shipping lanes but also raised concerns about humans living in the region and the survival of species such as polar bears.

Mayor Bloomberg detailed the wide array of affordable workspaces available to small start-up businesses through New York City's incubator program on Thursday while visiting the Entrepreneur Space, a 12,500-square-foot City-sponsored food-manufacturing and business incubator in Long Island City, Queens.

The incubator program was launched in 2009 to promote entrepreneurship and make it easier to start businesses and create jobs. The City has opened nine incubators in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, featuring 125,000 square feet of affordable space, with additional projects in the pipeline.

If you believe the numbers, it’s hard to deny that we’re in the midst of an incubator bubble.

An Xconomy survey recently found that the number of venture incubators in the U.S. has risen to 64 in 2011, nearly double the 34 of the prior year, and more than triple the amount in 2009.

Ohio has seen its share of entrants into the competition, including one incubator in Hudson that recently opened. LaunchHouse came to Shaker Heights earlier this year, while even the state itself has gotten into the act with an incubator-like summer venture competition it called OneFund that was sponsored by the Ohio Department of Development. Add those to several existing incubators in the state, such as one that was established at Ohio University in 1983, and it’s clear that Ohio has no shortage of incubators — though the number recently dropped by one when a Cincinnati biotech incubator shut it doors.

“This is a $2.4 trillion industry run on handwritten notes,” says 33-year-old Dr. Jay Parkinson. “We’re using 3,000-year-old tools to deliver health care in the richest country on the planet.” His prescription: a Facebook-like platform that uses technology, from IM to video chat, to restore the traditional doctor-patient relationship that has been lost in today’s high-pressure, high-volume, eight-minute-appointment practice model, which is often blamed for the shortage of primary-care physicians.

Global spending on information and communications technologies is fueling higher valuations for public software companies, according to a quarterly report released by the San Diego-based Software Equity Group. Much of that increased spending, however, reflects an intensifying demand for cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS), as big-company CIOs increasingly accept the notion of outsourcing many programs that were previously installed on corporate networks.

As a result, valuations of public SaaS companies have continued to climb, and more SaaS companies got acquired during the second quarter that ended in June.

Researchers at Stanford University are using computers and genomic information to predict new uses for existing medicines by analyzing genomic and drug data.

The scientists drew their data from the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus, a publicly available database that contains the results of thousands of genomic studies on a wide range of topics, submitted by researchers across the globe.

The database catalogs changes in gene activity under various conditions, such as in diseased tissues or in response to medications.

The researchers focused on 100 diseases and 164 drugs. They created a computer program to search through the thousands of possible drug-disease combinations to find drugs and diseases whose gene expression patterns essentially cancelled each other out.

Now that email has been around for 30 years or so, you’d think that common messaging activities — like using the Reply and Reply All buttons — would just be common sense. Alas, based on all the pain I see at work, in email from BNET readers, and out there on the Web in general, it’s clearly not the case.  Here’s my take on when and how you should use Reply and Reply All to avoid causing problems in the office.

Use Reply All

In general, all the time. What? That’s crazy, right? Nope. Someone crafted the addressees in the email you are reading for a reason, and respect that. I’m referring, of course, to typical email threads with a small group of people — there are exceptions, and I’ll get to those in a moment.  But if you click reply to a mail with a bunch of addressees on it, you identify yourself as either clumsy and thoughtless or someone who doesn’t respect the people on the CC line enough to include them in the conversation. Which of those would you like to be known as?

Today, many companies offer their employees the option to work from home, even if they live relatively close to the office. But common sense tells us that for some employees, this may not be the best option. As you can imagine, some unsupervised employees would sooner fill their day playing World of Warcraft than actually working. This decision tree will help you decide if you should let your employees work remotely, or if they should be required to work in-house.

In the September issue of Scientific American, Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser describes how education and entrepreneurship can make or break cities. In a series of case studies around the Web, Glaeser has explored how those factors and others have allowed some U.S. cities to thrive as others continue to struggle. Below are links to his writings, plus related articles, on five American metropolises.

DETROIT Detroit's mayor David Bing has adopted a promising strategy to save his city: shrink it to a sustainable size. By focusing public services on healthy neighborhoods and pulling back from the others, the plan acknowledges that Detroit and other cities of the Great Lakes region will never return to their former greatness (pdf). Those glory years depended on specific historical factors conductive to heavy industry, such as proximity to mines and waterways. But Detroit can become a vibrant, livable smaller city.

Minneapolis has launched a unique service that helps connect inventors with lawyers who will work on their case pro bono.

Each participant needs to attend a training program on intellectual property and is required to do a patent search to see if their ideas are new.

There is a list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the last time it was updated, back in June this year, Fujitsu’s “K” (pictured) came out on top, taking the No. 1 spot from Tianhe-1A (a supercomputer from China).

It was the first time since 2004 for Japan to get to claim those bragging rights, and now the country’s largest business newspaper The Nikkei reports that the government is already thinking about what will happen in 2020: by then, the plan is to develop a computer that handles exascale computing or, in other words, one million trillion operations per second (that computer would be 100 times more powerful than K).

Apple plans to leave a lasting mark in Silicon Valley, giving the place a real landmark for innovation. That’s the impression I get from the latest details about its planned spaceship-like circular headquarters, as revealed by Apple Insider.

The city of Cupertino, Calif., where Apple is based, has released more details and drawings of Apple’s plan to create a 2.8 million-square-feet headquarters in the city. The circular building is located on land that Apple has purchased from Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech giant.

The city is reviewing the proposed plan from Apple and is doing an environmental impact report. It will look at traffic, noise, air quality and other impacts. Apple still has to get through a development review and publiic hearings at the planning commission and city council. As you can see from the images, Apple’s building will be like no other and it will be surrounded by greenery. Apple says it will exceed “economic, social, and environmental sustainability” goals.

As financial turmoil swirls in the wake of the S&P’s recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, it is evident that our economy needs help.  Much of what we need as a nation lies in the hands of our elected officials.  However, we also need a steady crop of new entrepreneurs to boost employment by creating more businesses. And with respect to these entrepreneurs and their businesses, I say the more boring the better.

In the modern era, entrepreneurship conjures up exciting notions of high-tech, consumer-oriented software that will change the way of life for people across the globe. Indeed, many brilliant startup founders have made dramatic technological or scientific contributions to the world, as well as made a mint along the way.  Think cancer-fighting drugs, Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Countless entrepreneurs are motivated by these high-risk, high-return opportunities, and we need more such individuals to keep our economy on the cutting edge of innovation. However, in a flailing economy with discouraging employment data, it is worth recognizing that these are not the only entrepreneurs we need.