Small scale investors wanting a piece of burgeoning private companies such as Zynga, Groupon or Facebook before they go public may have a new friend in MicroAngel Capital Partners.

The alternative fund management company is launching Thursday to offer first-time venture fund investors and those looking to invest smaller chunks of cash a chance to invest anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 in some of the most coveted internet startups.

MicroAngel Capital Partners will pool investments in individual funds for hot pre-IPO technology, social media, green tech and mobile companies. Regional funds will also be available. Once it raises roughly $1 million per fund, MicroAngel Capital Partners will buy up stock via sellers on secondary stock markets and dole out shares to fund participants.

NEW YORK, June 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Venture capitalists from around the world say the current level of IPO activity is too low to support the health of the venture capital industry in their respective countries, according to the 2011 Global Venture Capital Survey sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association.

More than 80 percent of global venture capitalists surveyed stated that current IPO activity levels in their home countries are too low. The survey, conducted annually, reveals that venture capitalists believe high returns generated by IPOs are critical in providing superior returns to limited partners and growth capital to developing portfolio companies.

Venture capitalists in the United States, China, Brazil, India and France found it most important to have an active IPO market in their home countries, followed closely by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Israel. In the U.S., where there has been a large and active venture capital and entrepreneurial community for many years, 91 percent of venture capitalists deemed the U.S. IPO market a critical element of the U.S. venture capital industry. In contrast to the global trend, only 36 percent of U.S. venture capitalists said that IPO markets in other geographies were essential to the success of the U.S. venture capital industry.

The lady from the corporate IT department wants to meet with you tomorrow morning. You recall that she wears Anne Klein and has a background in finance. She wants to talk with you about whether her group’s newly launched collaborative innovation program would benefit you. Her group’s senior vice president mentioned to her that you—your business unit—face critical challenges that will affect your P&L in the new fiscal year. Challenges that require you to think of new ways to keep your most important (read: profitable) clients in the fold. Challenges that require you to deliver more with less by identifying and eliminating waste.

You know: the same old, same old—only more of it.

Let’s be honest, you tell yourself, neither you nor the people who know you expected you to remain in your current role for this long. The recession has been rough. However, you told yourself years ago that plateaus were for camping on, not for defining careers—not your career, at least. You have more to offer. Maybe fresh approaches and thinking are just what the doctor ordered for your staff and you. The board seems to be talking the language of innovation of late, as well.

In the future, if ever you find yourself in a house on fire, perhaps a few of your emergency responders will not be people at all.

Rather, they could be expertly programmed circuit boards with a knack for analyzing events around them without any help from humans and cooperating with one another to respond in the most effective manner. In other words, they may be robots that are independent, adaptive and cooperative.

This is what two University of Delaware professors — mechanical engineer Bert Tanner and linguist Jeffrey Heinz — are working on with support from the National Science Foundation.

"If you have an idea about how a fire is likely to spread, you reposition your resources to be as effective and efficient as possible," Tanner told InnovationNewsDaily. "Experienced humans can do that almost subconsciously. If we can enable machines to do that, it can lift the pressure off the shoulders of human supervisors."

I’ve been doing deals as a corporate lawyer for 17+ years, and there are certain fundamental mistakes that I’ve seen entrepreneurs make over and over again.  Accordingly, I thought it would be helpful to share certain basic tips in connection with doing deals.  This is part two of a three-part series.  In part one, I discussed the importance of (i) being careful with letters of intent, (ii) creating a competitive environment and (iii) using your lawyer as a “bad cop.”

Some employees are great starters but lousy finishers. Lousy finishers seem to take forever to move the football across the goal line. They get distracted by other work, or even get themselves assigned to another project before finishing the first.

You could use the whip to get these people focused on completing the job, but there is a more subtle tool that comes out of the world of psychology. We’ll get to that in a minute. (”Geez, can’t he just finish the point without an interruption?”).

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Google is using its dominance in Web search to give its own services an unfair advantage. The FTC is also looking into whether Twitter is abusing its position to lock out competitors. But government intervention here is misguided. These investigations, and whatever results from them, won’t level the playing field. They will only stifle innovation and yank lawyers out of unemployment lines.

The technology sector moves so quickly that when a company becomes obsessed with defending and abusing its dominant market position, countervailing forces cause it to get left behind. Consider: The FTC spent years investigating IBM and Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices, yet it wasn’t government that saved the day; their monopolies became irrelevant because both companies could not keep pace with rapid changes in technology — changes the rest of the industry embraced. The personal-computer revolution did IBM in; Microsoft’s Waterloo was the Internet. This — not punishment from Uncle Sam — is the real threat to Google and Twitter if they behave as IBM and Microsoft did in their heydays.

Friends matter.

He may be the world’s youngest billionaire, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get to that point without making a few enemies along the way.

From a Harvard dorm room to the courtroom, The Social Network film is based on the Facebook creator’s (played by Jesse Eisenberg) trials and triumphs as he builds the social network into the billion-dollar empire.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., July 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Expensive drug development processes, rising competition and evolving market needs are leading biopharmaceutical companies into implementing commercialization strategies earlier and earlier into the new product development process. In fact, Best Practices, LLC, study, Pharmaceutical New Product Commercialization: Preparing for Market Success (click link to download complimentary research excerpt), reveals that 61% of benchmarked companies begin early stage commercialization activities in at least one functional area during the pre-clinical phase.

The report also shares the insights on why the work done through early stage commercialization group is invaluable and how other biopharmaceutical companies' Early Stage Commercialization functions are structured, how leaders of these groups manage their functions, and for what activities and role Early-Stage Commercialization leaders have responsibility.

Poland received the largest amount of private equity and venture capital investment in Central and Eastern Europe last year, absorbing €657 million in total. That's according to a report by the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EVCA), as quoted by daily Parkiet.

The Czech Republic came second, with €193 million invested there, followed by Romania (€119 million) and Ukraine (€96 million).

"Poland is interesting for investors because it is perceived as a strong and safe country, a leader in its region and a developing market with an important number of private business initiatives growing beyond Poland's borders," Robert Manz, managing partner at private equity fund manager Enterprise Investors, told Parkiet.

Picture a camera that has no lens, no moving parts, costs fractions of a penny to make, and sees as dimly as a short-sighted worm. Doesn't exactly sound like a game changer--but it is.

Cornell scientists have achieved the breakthrough by producing what's called a Planar Fourier Capture Array camera from a super-cheap material, doped silicon, that's currently used in all sorts of chip technology. It's just one-hundredth of a millimeter deep and a half a millimeter on each side, which means several of them could fit on the head of a pin. The magical aspect of the cam is that it doesn't need a lens because it makes use of the wave-like properties of light to work out what it's looking at, and all the image construction is done by algorithms in a computer later.

West Des Moines leaders celebrated the graduation of one tech company from the city's business incubator last week and welcomed another startup into the fold.

Appcore, a cloud computing firm which had joined the center six months ago, shifted its operations to downtown Des Moines on Friday. Ironclad Systems, a computer and network company, became the incubator's newest tenant.

MANILA, Philippines - June 2011: I was sent on an official international spy mission to infiltrate another country’s design headquarters. Well, at least that’s what I’m going to say in my future autobiography.

But if you promise to keep this off the record, here’s the real deal: I was asked by Senator TG Guingona to interrupt my supposedly work-free Bangkok trip to visit Thailand’s world-class creative hub as an official representative of the Philippines. My marching orders were to see what we could learn from their country about how they support their local creative industry. That’s how I found myself on a special tour of the Thailand Creative and Design Center (TCDC).

Want to build a device that takes video in 360 degrees? That can communicate with a car's onboard computer, or connect to sensors that can measure your heart rate or blood pressure? It used to be that to build a self-designed gadget, you had to know how to make it entirely from scratch. And if, after testing it, you wanted to sell a few, you had to build each one by hand—large manufacturing companies generally wouldn't pick up the phone to take orders that numbered fewer than hundreds of thousands.

A process called mass customization is changing that, offering a way to use the technology of mass production to manufacture devices in small quantities. Taking off in sectors ranging from electronics to fashion, it lets design-savvy consumers get exactly the products they need. It also offers a heavy assist to small businesses that want to get started without huge capital investments, or to give their customers some input into design.

The GII is compiled by French business school INSEAD and uses an average score from a country's innovation-fostering environment – assessed through institutions, infrastructure and general business climate – and a measurement of actual scientific and creative results.

Apart from Switzerland, five EU member states took top-ten positions: Sweden followed Switzerland in second place, Finland and Denmark came fifth and sixth respectively, whilst the Netherlands and United Kingdom came ninth and tenth.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – Peter Thiel is the first outside investor in Facebook, the guy who sold PayPal to eBay for billions, and a Founders Fund partner.

He told today's Ice Ideas conference audience that there is one question he asks entrepreneur looking to begin a startup.

He asks: Why will employee number 20 join your company?

Thiel says it's easy to figure out why someone wants to be a CEO or another very early employee in a startup; they'd like to run a company and get rich doing it.

It’s great to be a green business. But even better is being a green business with customers who are highly passionate about your sustainability initiatives.

Many of today’s popular “green” brands – think Seventh Generation or Whole Foods – have found ways to get their customers involved with their environmental good work, whether it’s offering free parking spots to hybrid drivers or giving tips on how to be eco-friendlier at home. This is certainly not a quick process, but rather an evolution that involves thoughtful and ongoing communications.

Over the last few years, it’s become routine to note that Silicon Valley is more a state of mind than a geographic location. That is, the means, motive, and opportunity for tech innovation that converged around the Bay Area have now diffused to the edges of the globe, where ambitious young entrepreneurs are carrying the ball forward in ingenious and interesting ways.

It’s one thing to propound the theory. It’s another to come face to face with the entrepreneurial brainpower that’s rapidly scaling up world-class tech businesses in locations as diverse as Chile, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, and Lebanon.

The state's biotech tax credits drew more than 180 applications within three minutes of the window opening for the $8 million available this fiscal year, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development said Thursday.

The credits go to investors pumping money into fledgling Maryland biotechnology firms in need of capital. The credits will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis to those that qualify — thus the rush.

Initial credit certifications will be issued within 30 calendar days, DBED said.

The Summer Venture Program is a 10-week intensive experience designed to accelerate the development of student entrepreneurial ventures. This program is offered to both Babson undergraduates and graduate students, and students of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Up to 20 teams are chosen to participate in the program each summer.

Teams receive housing, work space, mentors, a speaker series, and other resources to help their businesses develop throughout the 10 weeks. The program concludes with a Demo Day where each team presents in front of professional investors and the Babson community.

This year Demo Day will take place afternoon of Thursday, July 28, 2011.