An unusual sea creature is emerging from Loch Ness in Scotland: a monster-sized floating doughnut.

Wave energy startup AWS Ocean Energy recently tested this novel wave power device on the surface of the famous lake. Now, thanks to a recent investment from Alstom, a large French power equipment manufacturer, a 60-meter-diameter version could soon produce megawatts of power as it bobs in the open ocean.

VCs are notorious for coming to meetings with entrepreneurs late and unprepared. This can be very frustrating for entrepreneurs for whom a meeting with a VC can be life or death, and who is contemplating a 5-10 year relationship with a guy who shows up late, flips through his BlackBerry during the pitch, etc.

Phin Barnes, a Principal at First Round Capital, has a solution: after each meeting with an entrepreneur, he will send them a feedback form so they can rate him.

Europe's first £1m startup accelerator is currently taking applications. Ten companies will come together in the North East with £100,000 each and support from mentors to push forward their startup ideas.

The programme, run by Ignite100, has a short application period of just three weeks and closes on July17th. The accelerator will start in Newcastle in September. There are four parts to the programme:

Shape: Through a series of mentor events with entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and significant businesses each start-up is challenged to help the founders answer: are the underlying assumptions correct? Is the business proposition the best it can be or should it be re-shaped?

Build: Each start-up develops their product, their business model and their customer proposition. Concepts and prototypes are tested in sessions with potential customers under the guidance of the teams' mentors.

The annual Worldview Bio-Innovation Scorecard produced by Scientific American shows notable advances by Spain and Portugal in the development of their biotech sectors.

The Scorecard covers a number of measures including work force availability, education and intellectual property protection, and highlights what countries need to do to improve their capacity for creating biotech innovation locally.

“It’s fascinating to see the countries that have challenging environments in terms of innovation capacity, show consistent growth within our index,” said Jeremy Abbate, Publishing Director of Scientific American Worldview. “Some of the most notable gains come from Portugal and Spain. They have consistently climbed in their overall innovation score since we began this special report in 2009.”

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Join your colleagues in early stage capital formation and participate in lively discussions such as this: Emerging Best Practices in Entrepreneurship: Successful Approaches for a Changed Market

This panel will introduce cutting edge best practices with examples from the emerging areas of Social Entrepreneurship, peer mentoring from the Peer-to-Peer Collaborative, and Nail It Then Scale It for creating the right business model for start-ups. These emerging best practices have been gleaned by the panel from working with entrepreneurs in the US as well as in international markets. The panel will explore in more detail what these new best practices are and offer recommendations on how to practically implement them. The goal is to have a rich give-and-take session with the audience with plenty of time for Q&A.

The 18th Annual NASVF conference is coming to Arlington, TX, October 17 – 19, 2011.  The program agenda may be viewed on line:  CLICK HERE

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As companies start to incorporate technology into everyday practice, distance no longer prevents U.S. businesses from recruiting international vendors to help with sales, development and IT efforts. Despite this reality, there are still a lot of misconceptions about outsourcing and it’s benefits for U.S. businesses.

The emergence of new global IT hubs – particularly those in Latin American countries like Chile, Brazil and Argentina – has redefined the model for outsourcing and what it can bring to the table. However, most U.S. businesses are skeptical or unaware of the benefits of incorporating international IT companies in their business models.

With IT spending expected to reach $3.6 trillion this year, businesses can look to vendor specialists based outside of the U.S. for support as they grow and expand IT efforts.  This approach is especially important for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to effectively compete with the bigger players in their respective markets.

Kids may have a knack for predicting the future technology, according to a new study.

A report from international research consultancy firm Latitude found that kids are predicting that the future of media and technology lies in better integrating digital experiences with real-world places and activities, citing some initiatives that are already on the horizon.

Children across the world anticipate recent updates to Google image search, new applications for robots, real-world gaming and other cutting-edge possibilities for tech. They're also suggesting that more intuitive, human-like interactions with devices, such as those provided by fluid interfaces or robots, are a key area for development.

KC Chamber is compiling public input on strategic goals for KC region.

A couple of months ago, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce encouraged Kansas Citians to “think bigger” and submit ideas for strategic goals for the region.

The challenge followed up on a Chamber poll that showed 80 percent of respondents thought “the level of cooperation among political leaders” was the number one issue keeping Greater Kansas City from reaching its full potential. The state line was seen as a barrier to progress for the Kansas City area as a whole.

“One of the messages we consistently heard was an understanding of the importance of regional collaboration and the desire for decisive action,” said Jim Heeter, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber. “People in both Kansas and Missouri talked a lot about looking ‘above’ the state line and working together on those projects that make sense.”

Just as the Web has brought us untold advances in innovation, collaboration and productivity, it has also given us things like this Tumblr blog curating animated GIFs of Tom Hanks portraying various animals, not to mention Farmville, Twitter or the 35 hours of video that are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

With so many digital distractions, it's a wonder we can get anything done. For those of us for whom being productive means stringing words together, whether we're bloggers, marketing copy writers or aspiring novelists, the Internet can be a mixed blessing. Fortunately, there are a number of writing applications that attempt to block out the distractions so we can finally focus.

“Innovation: Sparking the Flame”

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Location: H&R Block Headquarters One H&R Block Way Kansas City , MO 64105 RSVP online >>

Revitalize your team at The Chamber's 2011 Innovation Conference scheduled for July 14 at H&R Block World Headquarters. We can help you inspire great ideas from those around you and learn how to turn those concepts into reality.

Our high-energy, resource-packed, full-day conference begins with a keynote from Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist for NASA's Langley Research Center. He'll discuss the concept of IDEATION, the creation & evaluation of ideas.

While a number of limited partners are eschewing new venture capital commitments, the New Jersey Investment Council remains bullish on the sector.

So said Robert Grady, the council’s chairman who spoke during last week’s Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Limited Partners Summit in New York on Tuesday.

After learning from the team at Hamilton Lane that “one-third of limited partners were reducing their commitments to venture capital, one-third were keeping the same allocation and one-third were planning to get out,” Grady, a former venture capitalist, said it was time to “get in.”

He said the investment council is looking to “graduate” top performing general partners from its fund of funds portfolio across the asset class, including venture capital managers.

What cities are best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming decade?

To determine the next boom towns in the U.S., with the help of Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, we took the 52 largest metro areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on various data indicating past, present and future vitality.

We started with job growth, not only looking at performance over the past decade but also focusing on growth in the past two years, to account for the possible long-term effects of the Great Recession. That accounted for roughly one-third of the score.  The other two-thirds were made up of a a broad range of demographic factors, all weighted equally. These included rates of family formation (percentage growth in children 5-17), growth in educated migration, population growth and, finally, a broad measurement of attractiveness to immigrants — as places to settle, make money and start businesses.

Mobile phones have helped close the gap between people, connecting friends, family and co-workers across wide distances. But the lines of communication don’t follow traditional state and city boundaries and instead reflect different social influences and relationships that are sometimes harder to understand.

But a new data and visualization project called the Connected States of America helps bring some focus into the way mobile phones facilitate communications and shows how conversations and text-messages bind areas and regions together, even ones that are far apart. Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research showed off their work Wednesday, which takes anonymous aggregated AT&T mobile phone data and creates interactive maps illustrating where calls and text messages are placed and where they connect to.

Spectacular new technology and research parks are under way or in the planning stages around the globe. These parks are increasingly focusing on specific technologies such as clean technology or aerospace.

Singapore is no stranger to world-renowned research parks. JTC Corp., which developed the Biopolis life sciences research complex, is under way with parks focusing on clean technology and digital media.

The 50-hectare (123.5-acre) CleanTech Park is slated to be developed over the next two decades with a completion date of 2030. Developers say its first building, known as CleanTech One, will be completed by the end of 2011. The six-story, two-tower building will have 37,500 sq. m. (403,875 sq. ft.) of floor space. It will provide lab and office space for cleantech companies and will also serve as the gateway into the park.

How much food did you eat yesterday? What about the day before? You probably know generally, but we're in an age now of hyper measurements of personal data and it's high time you could track what you had eaten every day and every meal. That's what new startup

Foodzy helps you do. There are also obvious health benefits. If you can measure your food, you can measure your calories, and then eat fewer of them. Especially if your friends are there keeping you honest. Foodzy, a self-funded startup based in Amsterdam, launched in private beta in April and opened to the public this week. Users can save their data for a limited time for free, or get full access to your data, charts, and diet planning for $15 a year. Says Marjolijn Kamphuis, one of Foodzy's founders: "Being a big food lover, I've always had a hard time keeping my weight steady. The problem is that in the long term, diets are extremely unhealthy and they are hard to maintain. The best way to stay fit is by eating varied, not too much and not too little."

The newly published Global Innovation Index 2011 report ranks 125 countries/economies across the world in terms of their innovation capabilities and results. The Report highlights those countries that achieve more innovation outputs surmounting weaknesses from the input side -- the efficient innovators -- and those that lag behind in fulfilling their innovation potential. Innovation performances are analyzed in reference to the income and regional groups.

The research defines Innovation to include new or significantly improved product, processes and methods in the provision of services; in business and organizational models; in low-tech industries; through creative imitation and technological catch-up; at the public level or at the level of society, all constitute innovations.

I always advise software startups to file patents to protect their “secret sauce” from competitors, and to increase their valuation. The good news is that a patent can scare off or at least delay competitors, and as a “rule of thumb” every patent can add up to $1M to your startup valuation for investors, or for M&A exits (merger and acquisition).

The bad news is that patent trolls can squeeze the lifeblood out of innocent and unsuspecting entrepreneurs, as exemplified by the current mess around Lodsys patent No. 7222078. This patent holding company is charging infringement and demanding royalties from every app developer for the iPhone and Android, for a feature most agree has been in apps for many years.

Is being an entrepreneur in your DNA, or can it be taught? A new study from Babson College finds the evidence is "overwhelming" that if business students take at least two core entrepreneurship classes, that can "positively influence" them to go on to start up a business.

Professors at the Wellesley, Massachusetts-based college analyzed a survey of some 3,755 alumni and found that two ("or better yet three") entrepreneurship classes strongly affected students’ decisions to pursue start-ups, and that writing a student business plan also had some influence, though not as strong.

Successful entrepreneurs and innovators might be strong-willed individuals with unique dreams, but they aren't do-it-yourselfers. Leaders might be singled out for their accomplishments, but the best of them walk hand in hand with strong partners. Even "solopreneurs," a new term for people who work alone, need a support system.

The teammates by your side are certainly important. They're part of the family. But even more important are the partners or allies not directly involved in your project or venture who help you extend your reach and get what you need to succeed — key suppliers, distributors, co-developers, independent designers, endorsers, and beyond. They are the extended family.

Everyone knows that the Internet gives us easy access to a plethora of information in the blink of an eye. But for all its wonders, it is also an unchartered frontier where much information is unfiltered, exposing us -- if we are not careful -- to inaccurate or misleading information in science, medicine, technology and other areas, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

In one such Internet episode recently, parents were strongly advised to forego immunizing their children based on one study that reported that vaccinations caused childhood autism. The study's claim was even endorsed by some celebrities on the net. Despite strong contravening evidence provided by the scientific community, many parents avoided the vaccinations. The study was later found to be fraudulent.