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.

Nebraska rose three spots to No. 21 in the latest State Entrepreneurship Index, a nationwide analysis and ranking system that compares how states stack up in terms of business formation and innovation.

The index was developed by economists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Bureau of Business Research and Department of Economics. Nebraska ranked No. 24 overall in 2008, the last time the index was calculated, said Eric Thompson, UNL associate professor of economics and director of the bureau.

"Nebraska's rank rose because of an improving business formation rate," Thompson said. "The number of firm births per capita rose in Nebraska between 2008 and 2010. By 2010, Nebraska ranked in the top half of states by this measure."

STANFORD, Calif.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--For just one example of entrepreneurship around the world, take a look at Argentina-based MercadoLibre Inc. It's a top Latin American e-commerce technology company and provides online systems to consumers and merchants doing business over the internet. Its CEO is Marcos Galperin, MBA'99. Operating in 12 Latin American countries plus Portugal, MercadoLibre went public in 2007, listing on the NASDAQ. The icing on the cake: getting on the Credit Suisse Research Institute's list of 27 "Great Brands of Tomorrow."

Governments worldwide should encourage more entrepreneurial ventures, such as MercadoLibre, as they build foundations for economic growth, says a report released by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Endeavor Global, a New York not-for-profit that supports entrepreneurs. Against the backdrop of ongoing turmoil in global finance, successful early-stage companies are forming around the globe and creating jobs and wealth.

The good news is that the deal is done and the President is expected to sign it imminently. The bad news is almost too long to list.

But let’s start on the positive side. By now it’s no secret that Congressional leaders and the President had little choice but to raise the debt ceiling. The consequences of not doing so were too dire to imagine. While there has been no shortage of analogies attempting to explain the negative impact of not raising the debt ceiling — on both the country and your business — the best I have seen so far is this:

It would have been akin to all of us, both collectively and individually, not paying the mortgage on the house.

The U.S. Federal Communication Commission released its first comprehensive study of broadband speeds across the United States on Tuesday, revealing that many Internet providers still advertise speeds higher than they deliver.

The report, "Measuring Broadband America," was commissioned as part of the FCC's efforts to promote improved broadband services across the United States. According to the Internet networking company Akamai, the U.S. ranks 14th in the world, in terms of average Internet speeds, behind the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Belgium. Some U.S. ISPs have also been criticized for delivering Internet speeds that are lower than those advertised to users. The new report suggests that most providers now operate within 20 percent of their advertised speeds, even during peak hours; an improvement over the figures recorded in a 2009 report from the FCC.

When people talk about the American Dream, it is usually discussed in decidedly materialistic terms – owning a home, creating a better standard of living for our children, or enjoying the annual vacation some place warm. Two years ago, ABC News polling czar, Gary Langer, said we were witnessing “no less than a diminution of the American dream” after polls showed that Americans were spending less on things like dining out, taking vacations and buying cars. After looking up the word “diminution” (when something is getting smaller), it’s hard to deny that fewer Americans are “livin’ the dream.” In fact, consumer confidence figures have been in the cellar for the longest period since this critical economic indicator was created. As a result, most commentators aren’t as polite as Mr. Langer, gleefully declaring that the American dream is dead. But is spending the metric by which we measure our happiness as a nation?

The Princeton Review has released its college rankings (my university topped the party-school list, to my chagrin), and tomorrow Forbes will release its own rankings of America’s institutions, beginning a season of rankings that should get considerable media attention for the next few weeks (if not upended by federal fiscal shenanigans or the like).

Full disclosure: I am one of the nefarious “rankers” myself, as the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which I direct, does the rankings for Forbes. I also maintain cordial relations with Bob Morse, who someone (George Will, I think) said was the most powerful man in collegiate America as the overseer of the US News & World Report rankings.

PALO ALTO -- As weeks of partisan battles over a 10-year debt-reduction plan ended with its approval Tuesday, leading U.S. technology innovators and entrepreneurs said they are upbeat about Silicon Valley's ability to boost the nation's ailing economy by creating jobs for Americans.

"Now that this debt issue is at least for the time being clarified, Washington needs to shift to jobs and the economy," America Online founder Steve Case said in Palo Alto at a jobs conference before hundreds of people.

For as long as social media has been taunting us with follower numbers and Likes, business owners have been trying to network with people deemed more influential than themselves. We strive to reach these people with the hope that if they like what we’re doing they’ll be inclined to share it with their audience and foster positive word of mouth. We want to tap into their audience to help grow our own. But before any of that can happen, before these influencers can help spread our message, it’s our job to get on their radar. Because the first step to partnering with an influencer is to make sure they know your name.

But how exactly do you do that?

One of the toughest challenges of an entrepreneur in building a startup is the fact that there are so many things that you don’t know how to do, or don’t like to do. Things like raising money, building a business plan, or hiring and firing people. These aren’t fun, especially for a visionary. That’s when the curse of procrastination steps in.

The result is that certain things just never seem to get done. Jan Yager, in her book, “Work Less, Do More” talks about procrastination as a primary obstacle to efficient time management. She describes how you can grow so busy doing everything but what you should be doing, that you’re unaware that you’re failing to address what’s really fundamental to your success.

MADISON – Even after the federal debt ceiling is raised, one thing is certain about federal spending over the next decade: There will be less of it than expected. To be precise, federal spending will drop by about $2.4 trillion from current estimates. That means a full range of programs, from social services to defense to academic research, are likely to feel the pinch.

For major research universities such as the UW-Madison, that could present a troubling scenario.

Year after year, the UW-Madison is among the nation’s leaders in attracting “sponsored” research, meaning research sponsored by federal agencies, private foundations, industry and, in small amounts, state government. In fact, the UW-Madison has ranked among the nation’s top five academic R&D powerhouses for more than 20 years running – with more than $1 billion in sponsored research from all sources in fiscal 2009, according to the National Science Foundation.

When a home-based business owner first starts out, they almost always feel excited and very motivated to achieve success. Sadly, these feelings can often begin to diminish when faced with the actual workload that will be required. Knowing exactly how to maintain your original feelings of excitement and motivation can be one of the best business tools a home-based entrepreneur can possess. Below are some tips that will help you maintain feelings of motivation and encouragement, which will aid in the success of your home-based business.

WASHINGTON—Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas today outlined a series of policy, operational, and outreach efforts to fuel the nation’s economy and stimulate investment by attracting foreign entrepreneurial talent of exceptional ability or who otherwise can create jobs, form startup companies, and invest capital in areas of high unemployment.

“The United States must continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to invest their talents, skills, and ideas to grow our economy and create American jobs,” said Secretary Napolitano. “Today’s announcements will help our nation fully realize the potential of existing immigration laws.”