Last week World Business Chicago hosted a delegation of visiting journalists from the United Nations Press Corps. The global contingent of reporters came from Chinese newspapers, Japanese magazines, Swedish public radio and more. We took them on a behind-the-scenes tour into the exciting world of Chicago’s innovation ecosystem, including Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, 600 West Chicago (home of Groupon & Lightbank) and the startup incubator, Excelerate Labs.

At Tribeca Flashpoint, CEO, Howard Tullman wowed the group with a sophisticated presentation of the technologies available to students and teachers at his school. The journalists asked questions about whether the technologies developed there are commercialized and what kinds of jobs the students get after graduation. Tullman explained their tech commercialization process and discussed the school’s industry connections with Hollywood, major videogame companies and more.

After watching startups like Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon explode in valuation, VCs are now pouring money into the next crop of startups.

Valuations are skyrocketing as VCs compete to get in the next hot deal. They don't want to miss out.

And suddenly, a lot of founders are finding themselves in the billion-dollar club.

Do they deserve it? Let us know in the comments.

In our country’s spirited debate over energy, innovation and the economy, perhaps no phrase has been uttered more often than “green jobs.” While the precise meaning of “green job” continues to be a topic of debate, I would submit that jobs in the algae industry are indeed at least a little shade of green.  Or maybe blue-green.

In today’s biofuels industry, most of the growth has centered on jobs for those workers who have already been trained in the fields of construction; engineering; chemistry and biology; sales and marketing; legal and administrative, and others. The industry now supports tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across the country and up and down the value chain – from Ph.D-level microbiologists to plant personnel to legal counsel to metal fabricators and truckers; from the labs of San Diego to the ethanol plants of Iowa to the offices of Silicon Valley.

That is something we rightly celebrate as an industry. It also something policymakers in Washington D.C. would be wise to recognize as they continue to seek ways to create jobs and spur economic growth.

The United States’ chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas asked during a May 23 meeting with academics, executives and lawyers at Stanford Law School what the government could do to help Silicon Valley. The response was unanimous: Fix the immigration system immediately.

Chopra and Mayorkas acknowledged that, in the current political climate, it would be extremely difficult to get any significant immigration legislation enacted. But they went on to say that there may be simple tweaks to policy — tweaks that don’t require congressional approval — that could make a difference. Then, on Aug. 2, Mayorkas and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced they would be making those tweaks a reality.

Jared Bernstein is an economist with roots firmly planted in the liberal side of American political thought. Before joining the Obama administration as an economic adviser for Vice President Biden, he was a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, known for its strong stands on labor issues. In May, Bernstein left the White House, accepted a position as a senior fellow at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and began blogging prolifically on economic policy.

So if you want to grasp just how hopeless the Obama administration's post-debt ceiling deal "pivot to jobs" will be, Bernstein's analysis is a good place to start. Because if he can't put a hopeful spin on the prospects for new job creation policies, no one can.

A week ago, an explosion in Oslo shocked the world. When most people heard about the tragic and unreal news, they instantly jumped to the conclusion that al Qaeda was behind it and a new war on terrorism was on its way. It was humbling and eye-opening to learn that a lone Norwegian extremist had plotted and executed the slaughter. Jens Stoltenberg, Norway's prime minister, announced that Norway would pursue "[m]ore democracy, more openness and greater political participation," thereby showing that the country would not be intimidated by violence. This is quite a different response to terror than what we have seen within the U.S.A. after 2001's Sept. 11 attacks or in the U.K. after the attack on the Underground train system in 2005. Does Stoltenberg's reaction reflect creative political thinking?

Politicians have a huge impact on countries' creativity and their subsequent economic development; however, it is rare to hear political institutions proposing creative new ideas. Roosevelt implemented the "New Deal," Truman the "Marshal Plan," Bush declared "Global War on Terrorism," and Obama bailed out the banks and the U.S. automotive industry. Whether you agree with the ideas or not, they were all radical and new.

I see both side of the table – right from startups sharing their term sheets (for feedback/suggestions) to VCs sharing how crazy have valuations moved up in the last few years. Over the last year or so, there is almost a ‘herd’ mentality (of funding ecommerce business) that has obscured the funding space in India.

Based on my interaction with startups, VC firms and their *off-the-record* reasons to invest in ecommerce business, here is probably the most apt correlation that I could come up with – that is of seven deadly sins and ecommerce space in India.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — If you build it (the right way), they will give.

The “it” is a website designed to encourage crowd funding, an online method of matching people willing to donate money for a cause. The “give,” of course, is money.

Rick Wash, an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, says existing crowd funding sites are good, but could be better. And he is using a grant of nearly $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to make these sites more effective.

In particular, Wash is interested in improving upon sites that can assist online news-gathering operations – sites such as “spot.us” – and those that can help college and university fundraising.

“On a typical crowd funding site, it’s difficult for people to find projects that are exact matches for their interests,” Wash said. “Our project will help identify ways to make it easier for matches between donors and projects to occur.”

Toronto - Young, smart and out of work, Robyn Brophy applied to 95 different jobs before she scored her first interview and job. For a part-time nanny position.

Brophy, 24 and a Bishop's University grad with a BA in sociology, is grateful for the work. But she also needs to hold down another part-time position to make ends meet.

"You get a little turned off when you get out of university with this great degree and you're so excited, and then you don't get hired," Brophy says. "It's very, very damaging to your confidence when you know you have a lot to offer and no one will let you offer it," she adds.

When 22-year-old Neal Cook started his summer internship with Lambertville, New Jersey software developer Front Rush LLC this past May, he thought he’d be making coffee and emptying trash . And he did, just like many other college interns in similar positions. But that was the first week on the job. By the second week, the Temple University sports management major was asked to develop – and run – his own technology business.

Running Front Rush, known for its software program that eases the recruiting process for college athletic coaches, is a full-time job for the firm’s co-founders Brad Downs and Sean Devlin. Recently, the pair developed a cloud-based tool that tracks sales online and creates friendly competition in the office, leading to increased productivity. Realizing this could be its own full-fledged business, Downs and Devlin entrusted Cook, the firm’s first college intern, with the full-scale start-up, launch and management of the business.

Are employees at your small business being rewarded fairly for their efforts? Think carefully—this is a loaded question. What matters isn’t whether you believe they are being rewarded fairly, but whether they think they are.

Why should you care what your employees think about this? Well, workers who don’t feel they are fairly rewarded are likely to become resentful and seek to leave your business at the first opportunity. With the current economy, of course, that might not happen right away. But while these workers are “stuck” at your business, do you think they’re putting forth their utmost effort?

Teacher Katie Rieser once purchased a $700 student response system, better known as “clickers,” for her high school classroom with money she raised online. Now a new startup called Socrative is offering a way for teachers like her to create a similar tool with smartphones or laptops — for free.

Buying the clickers several years ago allowed Rieser to ask students an “exit” question at the end of each class that checked for both individual understanding of new concepts and common mistakes.

“It’s really helpful for me to have that right in front of me and be able to see what kids are understanding and what they’re not,” she says. “Even if it just comes down to, ‘Did he understand directions?’ ”

Another bamboo bicycle? Yes--but the vehicle devised by Alexander Vittouris departs from the funky, tiki-bar-friendly lines made from this sustainable, globally-ubiquitous grass. A design student at Australia's Monash University, Vittouris envisions a bicycle that isn't built, but grown--the bamboo stalks of the frame being trained into shape while the plant is growing. Inspired by arborsculpture, in which tree branches are fixed in expressive shapes that they take as the plant grows, Vittouris wants to develop a reusable framework that would shape bamboo into nearly-finished bicycles.

While arboculture is a craft practice rather than a mass-production technique, its application to bamboo--which may be cultivated inexpensively, and grows with astonishing speed--offers at least a coy gleam of scalability. Manufacturing traditional bicycles expends energy and injects waste into the world, whether the frame is some space-age alloy or bamboo. Vittouris by contrast proposes "engaging the environment in (the) production phase through photosynthesis and carbon storage till ultimate destruction."

If you have a product that could potentially appeal to everyone, how do you pick which customers to go after first? In this episode of Founder Office Hours with investors Chris Dixon and Josh Kopelman, Dispatch.io founder Jesse Lamb asks whether his file-sharing service should focus first on early adopters, consumers, or small businesses.

Kopelman predicts, “You are going to reach them all the same way. A big believer in the “consumerization of the enterprise,”, he says, “I am not sure you would do anything fundamentally different if you are going after a small business or a consumer.”

But you have to start somewhere. Dixon suggests to “find the people with the greatest pain” like designers who have to send big files to clients, or perhaps partner with an established service that Dispatch.io is building on top of to gain initial distribution.

Massachussetts is out to plant deals that could both create jobs and spark innovation in its biotech sector, and to underscore their ambitions, the state’s Governor joined the mayor of Boston and representatives of key trade bodies for a series of public and private meetings at the recent 15,000-strong Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) convention in Washington, DC.

One result was that IDBS Ltd, a UK-based software company specialising in the R&D and healthcare sectors, said it was to establish a US healthcare headquarters at its existing office in Burlington, MA, where it also is expanding its staff.

Also at BIO, Massachusetts announced R&D collaborations with Northern Ireland, Finland and Israel.

In 1873, German immigrant Levi Strauss made the first pair of blue jeans. In 1968, Hungarian-born Andy Grove founded the world's largest computer chip maker, Intel. They're just two examples of a longstanding American tradition of immigrants who come to our country, start a small business, and create millions of jobs.

Unfortunately, due to an outdated visa system, too many of the world's brightest entrepreneurial minds aren't here. Some have come to the United States, received training at our excellent universities, and then been forced to leave. Others simply haven't been able to find a path here in the first place.

Over the last six months, the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the Small Business Administration, and leaders throughout the administration have traveled around the country and heard a resounding message from hundreds of entrepreneurs and small business owners: This needs to change.

Human memory has been shown again and again to be far from perfect. We overlook big things, forget details, conflate events. One famous experiment even demonstrated that many people asked to watch a video of people playing basketball failed to notice a person wearing a gorilla suit walk right through the middle of the scene.

So why does eyewitness testimony continue to hold water in courtrooms? A new nationwide survey of 1,500 U.S. adults shows that many people continue to have the wrong idea about how we remember—and what we forget.

A recent article on BetaBeat discussed how many tenants at the Varick Street Incubator in NY are former Wall Street workers who are now working on startups that their old employers will have to compete with, or end up using. The NYU-Poly incubator is currently filled with ex-Wall Street employees who either left by choice or were forced out of their previous jobs.

Michael Chuang used sell bonds and mortgaged-back securities for Lehman and UBS, but in 2008 he founded iTB Holdings. The company is an online brokerage dealing exclusively with bonds. He currently has five employees at the Varick Street incubator.

At the first ever New York City TechStars demo day in April, there were about as many cameras roaming around as there were startups that had just graduated from the three-month accelerator program. The audience was packed with journalists and investors, but nobody thought to ask why so much video documentation was taking place.

It turns out that the cameramen were busy creating a television show that will premiere on Bloomberg TV on September 13.

The 11 companies that participated in TechStars‘ inaugural New York program were told about the show when they were accepted. But most of them caught on long before that.

Scott Wiener loves pizza. Some people deliver pizza. But, Wiener delivers the people to the pizza with his tourism company, Scott’s Pizza Tours.

Even native New Yorkers rarely venture to the city’s secluded pizza havens. With the NYC Pizza Bus, you’ll taste some of the city’s best kept secrets as you learn everything there is to know about America’s favorite food.