Venture capital firms provided a total of $8 billion of funding to start-up companies during the second quarter of 2011, marking a 5% decrease from the second quarter of 2010, Dow Jones VentureSource has reported.

The number of funding deals made between start-ups and venture capital firms also decreased by 2% between the two quarters. The healthcare sector experienced the greatest losses, with capital investments down 17% from Q2 2010, and deals down 12% from Q2 2010. The lone bright spot in the healthcare sector was in medical IT, where 19 deals worth $158 million amounted to a 27% increase in capital invested and a 58% increase in deals.

The success of IT companies was not limited to healthcare-specific firms. Overall, IT companies experienced a 9% increase in capital and a 5% increase in deals relative to 2010. Software companies – especially those targeting business applications and communication – accounted for more than half of the deal volume in the IT sector with 184 deals worth $1.2 billion.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R), on Tuesday, announced an ambitious plan for New York City to regain its historic role as “the technology capital of the United States — and the world” — and eclipse Silicon Valley. He is offering subsidized real estate and $100 million in infrastructure upgrades to any institution, university or consortium that builds a world-class science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, Governors Island or Brooklyn Navy Yard. Bloomberg projects that, within the first 30 years, this school will spin-off 400 new companies and create more than 22,000 permanent jobs.

Bloomberg has the right idea, but he’s going about it the wrong way. The mayor should indeed improve New York’s crumbling infrastructure, but the key to building innovation is not a new educational institution — it’ll take much more. If the presence of world-class universities could provide New York with a substantial advantage, then, as I’ve written before, Silicon Valley wouldn’t have left Boston’s Route 128 in the dust. And New York would not have raced ahead of Boston to become the second largest recipient of venture-capital funds in the United States, placing behind California.

As people, we’re creatures of habit. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, start a blog or train for your first marathon, to be successful in that goal, you must develop the habit of actually doing it. The habit of running, of eating, of finding that time to write and publish blog posts. And that takes practice.

I write a lot – for multiple blogs, multiple times a week. And in order for me to get that blogging done and still be able to run a business and take care of everything else that needs to get done, I’ve had to adopt the blogging habit. If you’re having trouble committing to blogging, here are some tips and tricks that have worked for me. I’d love it if you’d share what works (or even what doesn’t work) for you.

Nine universities and crown research institutes have launched the Kiwi Innovation Network (KiwiNet) to take more of a New Zealand Inc approach to commercialising science and technology research.

KiwiNet will act as a hub for its member organisations and other parties involved in innovation including local and overseas investors.

The KiwiNet members include three universities and six CRIs: WaikatoLink, Plant and Food Research, Otago Innovation, Lincoln University, AUT Enterprises, AgResearch, Canterbury University, Industrial Research and VicLink.

University College London is launching a five-year campaign to boost the role of enterprise at the university.

The ambitious aims include doubling income from licensing, sponsored research and other key commercial activities; creating 500 new enterprises on- and off-campus; offering courses in entrepreneurship to all students and training for staff; and providing sabbatical leave for academics involved in innovation.

“Being enterprising and having a broad portfolio of enterprise activities is central to the core mission of a university. And a core mission of the university is social good, through education, scholarship and relationships with the outside world,” Steve Caddick, professor of chemistry and UCL’s Vice-Provost (Enterprise) told Science|Business.

The question of how to better exploit the intellectual potential of Europe, through completing the European Research Area (ERA) by 2014, is being debated in a ministerial conference and an informal meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council, taking place in Sopot, Poland, this week.

This is the first ministerial conference to discuss strategic requirements for the realisation of ERA, the EU’s single market for knowledge. The vision is that ideas and those responsible for generating them circulate freely without legislative or economic barriers. The ERA therefore needs to remove obstacles to researcher mobility and to cross-border co-operation.

The completion of ERA is a formal objective of the Lisbon Treaty, and in February 2011 the European Council endorsed the Commission’s plan, as set out in the Innovation Union strategy, that ERA should be completed by 2014.

Who is going to create the new jobs America so desperately needs to get our economy back on track? This question is a subject of ongoing debate. Will small businesses create them? Big business? Well, according to a new survey by online employment platform oDesk, new jobs are already being generated by remote hiring.

oDesk found what it called “a significant shift” in how businesses are hiring and how workers are finding jobs:

“Businesses are growing by leveraging remote contractors to build distributed teams, and contractors, in turn, are earning more money and even starting their own small businesses.”

At present we are seemingly in a state of flux, we are learning to move from linear innovation models into more dynamic ones that are increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems.

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open (external orientation) thinking for accelerating and improving our innovation performances.

Regretfully we are not yet fully equipped to manage within these new innovation ecosystems. We need to give the factors an increasing focus and lead into a better emerging theory of leading or good practice.

These days, reading a headline that includes the word “economy” often means the text below contains some pretty depressing news. But a new program in Philadelphia proves that adding the word “creative” can reverse this effect.

Despite what the conservative PR machine might have you believe, it’s small to moderately-sized, locally-owned businesses that create the most jobs in America, not the giant corporations that are fighting so hard to avoid paying slightly higher taxes.

Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

Startup work environments are always chaos, but they can still be great environments to work in, or they can be terrible. Whether yours is terrible or great, that same tone flows out to your customers, and regulates your productivity inside. You as the founder are the starting point and definer, so you need to get it right.

What does it take to create a positive workplace culture? I did some research on this, and compared it with my own experience. I’ve concluded and the experts agree that it’s all about understanding people, and overtly optimizing the factors that drive them at work.

Recent college graduates who are interested in entrepreneurship but not yet ready to leap into self-employment may want to check out a new program that will soon place young workers at startups.

Based on the Teach for America model, Venture for America will offer 50 positions at a variety of new companies in Detroit, New Orleans, and Providence, R.I., with the goal of growing both numerically and geographically in coming years. The nonprofit organization aims to both provide jobs for smart-minded young people and help new companies succeed in cities that need them.

The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that makes the Firefox browser, released an experimental tool last week that could dramatically change the way people identify themselves online.

Instead of handing your log-in credentials over to countless different websites, or to a site like Facebook or Google that then confirms your identity with other sites, Mozilla's BrowserID tool stores your identity information inside your browser. This keeps that data out of the hands of companies that could be hacked, or that may track your log-in behavior for commercial purposes.

Global climate change, our ever-growing population and social disruption will set the stage for a host of new business opportunities. Some of these have already emerged while others are still in earlier stages of incubation.

Whether you're looking for a new career, an investment opportunity, or thinking about starting a new business, these are the areas to watch:

Desalination Water purification Alternative energy Energy efficiency Weatherization

One of the surest signs of a bubble is when you start to hear the phrase, “This time it’s different.” That’s my cue to clap my hand over my wallet and head for the nearest exit. That same mentality is starting to bubble up around seed stage valuations. Investors are justifying those higher valuations with comments like “social media and viral loops make marketing more effective” or “If things don’t work out, we can sell to Google as a talent acquisition.”

It all comes down to the fact that all the previous norms of seed stage investing have gone out the window. The problem is that this shift partially ignores two important factors: History and economics. Here’s why valuations still matter.

If you were to look under the hood of any big-name IPO these days – such as LinkedIn, Pandora, and someday, Facebook – you’d see a highly sophisticated coordination of capital sources that fueled each to that highly coveted spot: Seed or “Angel” money that got the idea off the ground was followed by early-stage venture capital investors who percolated the company to viability, making it attractive to up-round VC investors and maybe some “mezzanine” financiers. It’s all very integrated, deeply “vertical” and it’s why the $50 billion-a-year U.S. venture market is the envy of the world.

Contrast that with the $10 billion raised for social enterprises that are trying to solve stubborn social problems like food security, safe drinking water, or energy access and maybe one day make a profit as well.

A friend of mine received an anonymous offer for $120, via GoDaddy, for a domain he had owned for years called FuzzWire.com. He did not know the nature of the offer--that is, whether it was from a well-financed startup--but he at least knew that since it came from GoDaddy, and was not just some personalized plea sent by email, that he should test the offers limits. So my friend, an entrepreneur, matter-of-factly countered with $10,000. By the week's end, the interested party agreed to the offer and moved $10,000 to escrow.

Such transactions are common in Silicon Valley, where the right domain name can still propel a startup's chances of success. But given the increasing popularity of apps, there's a question of whether owning the right domain name is as important as it was when the world was driven by dot-coms and browsers rather than iPhones and Android devices. In other words, if you launch an app today--say, Foursquare, for example--is it necessary to purchase Foursquare.com if the primary use of the service is through the mobile app, which does not require a web address?

Ever since co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt in January, Google has been getting a lot more, well… businesslike. It has been closing down or winding up a variety of projects and experiments, including Google Health and Google PowerMeter, and now it has announced that it is closing the door on its entire Google Labs venture. Some features will be folded into existing products, but many may simply disappear altogether. While this may be an admirable sign of maturity, it could also make the Google culture less experimental — and therefore also less interesting, and ultimately less successful.

In his first major address as the new CEO of the company last week, discussing Google’s latest earnings results, Page described how he has been trying to get the web giant to focus on a smaller number of product groups and lines of business (his remarks were also simultaneously published as a Google+ post). The Google co-founder said that management had already done “substantial internal work simplifying and streamlining our product lines” because the company needs to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

In an effort to generate revenue and jobs, New York City is inviting universities to build a science and tech facility within city limits, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during a speech on Tuesday (July 19). The city is offering “prime New York City real estate—at virtually no cost—plus up to $100-million in infrastructure upgrades, in exchange for a university’s commitment to build or expand a world-class science and engineering campus here in our city,” Bloomberg said, adding that building sites are available at three “underutilized” locations in NYC: Governors Island, the Navy Yard, and Roosevelt Island.

The mayor estimated that in its first 30 years, an applied science campus could spin-off 400 new companies and create more than 22,000 permanent jobs.

Newswise — DURHAM, N.H. – New research from the University of New Hampshire Center for Venture Research shows that stereotypes about gender affect the investment decision-making of women, even among successful women.

The research by Jeffrey Sohl, director of the UNH Center for Venture Research, and John Becker-Blease, of Oregon State University, is presented in the July issue of the journal “Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice.” It relies on a sample of data from 183 angel investment groups from 2000 to 2006 collected by the Center for Venture Research, which holds the most complete database of angel groups in the United States.

Researchers found that when an angel investment group had a small percentage of women, the group was more cautious about investing. However, when women comprised more than 10 percent of the investment group, their presence became associated with increased investments. The results surprised the researchers.