You can call it Silicon Park.

A new tech corridor is emerging in the heart of Manhattan, reshaping the map of the city's vibrant Web 2.0 startup scene.

If you had to pinpoint the epicenter, Park Avenue between 32nd and 33rd streets would be a good place to look: the headquarters of Gilt Groupe, perhaps the only tech firm in the city that warrants a $1 billion-plus valuation.

That office -- which once housed Right Media, an earlier city startup success bought by Yahoo! in 2007 -- is in the hottest ZIP code for venture capital dollars and deals: 10016. NO FLASH IN PAN: Gilt Groupe co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank at their Brooklyn site. Victoria Will NO FLASH IN PAN: Gilt Groupe co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank at their Brooklyn site.

Gilt co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank, along with angel investor Doubleclick co-founder Kevin P. Ryan, started in 2007 with the concept of "Flash Sales."

The growth of businesses in Iowa owned by women ranks last in the nation, new data show.

Across America, businesses owned by women grew 20 percent from 2002 to 2007, U.S. Census data show, while female-owned companies in Iowa inched 3.8 percent higher. In all, Iowa businesses grew 10 percent.

The reasons female-owned businesses are slow to grow in Iowa are among the same reasons the state's overall startup rate is sluggish, experts say: Midwest aversion to risk. Lack of investment capital. Iowa's overall snail's pace economic growth.

How do you get kids ready to become entrepreneurs?

The classic answer, of course, is the lemonade stand: Encourage your kids to start a homespun business instead of just bugging you for money. But entrepreneurs and educators say the real solution goes much deeper than that. There are crucial psychological traits an entrepreneur needs to succeed, they say, and parents should help kids develop them at every opportunity.

Here's a look at those attributes—and how to foster them.

Adventurous

Parents should urge kids to explore their environment—and don't let them get too comfortable, advises Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot Inc. and owner of the National Football League's Atlanta Falcons. That means urging them to ask questions constantly and develop an inquiring mind. For instance, "get them the right kind of toys—in which kids must figure out for themselves what to do," he says. And "on vacation, try different restaurants outside their comfort level."

Facebook and Google have the most talented pool of engineers and hackers when it comes to web-based technology. They compete head-on and are known to have delivered killer products that people love to use. However, with this growth, both these tech giants have become wormholes that suck up a bunch of talent every year and at times, focus it on the same tasks. I agree with Eran Hammer-Lahav on this article.

This is true even more for Facebook than it is for Google. Googlers have a number of side projects that allow them their private innovative space. It is a company crawling with innovation and the 20% projects bring enhancements to the existing web technologies every day. Both Google and Facebook contribute to open source technologies as well. Facebook itself contributes actively to the Cassandra database project and Google has a number of projects going on to speed up the web, especially the spdy protocol.

The global innovation community, at least that chunk represented by professional innovation managers, begins its annual get together today in Hamburg, Germany. One of the first presentations that passed my desk (courtesy of Chris Skinner in my LinkedIn network) was Tim Jones‘ Top 10 Innovation Challenges for 2020. Tim runs Future Agenda (as I write the link to Tim’s site seems to have been hijacked – so here is his company link). So what are the top 10 innovation challenges? Naturally I disagree with Tim’s choices so let’s open a debate about a few of them.

As insight becomes commoditized how do we generate differentiated knowledge without IP protection?

That’s a complex set of ideas. Let’s see if we can unpick them. IP protection is becoming less effective but we need more IP as the power of ideas to differentiate products and services over time, fades.

Mike Norelli, a 2010 MBA graduate from MIT, experienced a collegiate entrepreneur's dream when an investor pledged seed capital for the startup he and a few classmates had founded to convert food waste into fuel. Just as the venture was to receive that financial boost, however, Norelli backed out to accept a job at GE Energy, whose recruiter met with him after Norelli arrived at MIT's Sloan school of Management (Sloan Full-Time MBA Profile).

"No matter what I do afterwards, I'll be in a better position—and that includes doing a startup," Norelli says of his GE experience.

Like Norelli, numerous business students are experimenting with entrepreneurship while at school. But most of those who will do something entrepreneurial in their careers—join startups or venture capital firms, found their own companies, or become early stage investors in companies—are unlikely to do so until years after they have graduated. A growing number of large public companies are trying to appeal to this group, reframing job opportunities to align entrepreneurial ambitions with corporate interests and prompting schools to make entrepreneurial students more aware of those options as they decide how to pursue careers after graduation.

Deciding to be an entrepreneur is a lifestyle move, and should be part of a long-term strategic plan. You shouldn’t be making this decision just because you are mad at your boss, you would like to be rich, or someone else thinks it’s a good idea. In these changing times, if you already have a startup, with no plan, maybe it’s time to think ahead for a change.

Formally, that’s called developing and maintaining a strategic plan. Usually that means writing something down, since it’s hard to maintain something, or track yourself against it, if it’s not written down. From my experience, and the experience of other entrepreneurs, here are the key elements you should think about as part of the process:

Personal interests and aspirations. Do you love managing your own schedule, overcoming obstacles, starting a new adventure, facing financial risk, and relish the opportunity to change the world? Money should not be the big driver here.

Big or small, more companies are looking at letting their employees telecommute now than ever before. According to Telework, 20 million to 30 million Americans work from home at least one day a week. But many business owners still cling to the notion that you have to be seen in the office to really be productive. What’s your take?

Benefits to Working From Home

The biggest draw to letting employees work from home, especially for small businesses with small budgets, is the cost savings. Without needing quite so much office space and the overhead that comes with it, a company can put more money back into growing the business. But there are even more benefits.

On Monday evening at Lincoln Center, fashion designer Marc Jacobs accepted his Lifetime Achievement award from the Council Of Fashion Designers Of America (CFDA). He accepted the award from Sofia Coppola (who even said, "I need to slow down" during her speech). Not many people love standing before their peers under a harsh spotlight, and Jacobs was clearly in that category. Earlier this week, he had yet to write the speech.

“I’ve been struggling with writing it, to be honest. I’m not a good writer at all," he tells New York Mag. "Anytime anyone’s ever asked me to write something, what I do is, I write notes and thoughts, and they build up and over a week I kind of edit through those thoughts. And then I try to put them in some order and then I reread it. Then I run it by somebody. Then I rewrite it."

As parents and students across the country fork over records payments for college, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce took a look at what those degrees are worth.

Broken down by major into most employed, highest earning and other categories, the study provides a comprehensive look at the best way to spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The new batch of business school graduates face an economy full of uncertainty with fewer job vacancies than there have been for decades.

Before entering the workforce, they received one last bit of advice and inspiration from speakers like Vikram Pandit and Biz Stone.

We've picked out the important lines from the best commencement speeches, courtesy of Businessweek.

WASHINGTON -- With state funding for higher education on the wane and the public growing more restive about continuing increases in tuition, universities are seeking out other sources of money.

A popular strategy -- one with less potential risk than raising money from donors (especially when that money comes with strings attached and from sources that some in academe find problematic) -- is to trade on the intellectual capital of faculty members by bringing the fruits of their scholarly work to market.

Companies that are looking for a good deal aren’t seeing one in new workers.

Workers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.

“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive.”

At the new Gemasolar solar plant in Seville, Spain, 2,650 large mirrors concentrate sunlight to generate 19.9 megawatts of electricity. It was completed and started up in May.

Last week, Anthill welcomed its first three companies into the Anthill Incubator.

And I’m excited!

While most new projects seem daunting, those worth pursuing are also heart-racingly thrilling — offering a blank canvas to test and trial all those ideas that have been swilling around the brain since a project’s inception.

In this case, the Anthill incubator has been a long held dream, since those early days when Anthill was run from the spare bedroom of my parents’ home, in 2003. (Back then, the pink curtains and my sister’s Wham posters would have put off even the most enthusiastic tenant. Although, I suspect, free sandwiches, care of ‘Ma’ Tuckerman, would have created a novel selling point.)

As more and more organizations use all things social to attract audiences the issues of “spread” becomes a focal point for reaching the right audience.

In statistics, statistical dispersion is variability or spread in a variable of probable distribution. Probable distribution is important to distribution of relevant content in context with your audience.

Dispersion is contrasted with location or central tendency, and together they are the most used properties of distributions. If your content is not being dispersed to locations where your audience is then you are wasting efforts to attract the wrong audience.

I recently attended another one of those economic development summits where a bunch of people with long titles gets a chance to speak on a panel touting the mysterious benefits of a mysterious innovation clusters that create mysterious wealth that can only be realized if their mysterious department is funded.

Nearly every speaker concluded with the following paraphrase: “if only government would fund this or that, everything will be fine”, or, “if only corporations would fund this or that, then we’ll all be better off”

Uhmmm…sorry to break the news, it ain’t gunna happen.

On June 3, a new startup accelerator, FounderFuel launched. The group, located in Montreal but funding startups internationally, launched with 85 members -- none of whom are women.

"At FounderFuel we believe startup success is more about the people than the idea. We take a lot of care in choosing the smartest and most resourceful, dedicated and passionate people we can find."

It seems that those are men.

Even men involved in the startup scene noticed. David Crow, cofounder of Influitive Corporation, posted on Startup North that he was disappointed that so few women were participating at FounderFuel and and GrowLab, a Vancouver startup accelerator with a single female team member.

Over the past year, I’ve given talks or moderated sessions on social media in a strange set of cities: Adelaide, Sydney, and Doha. Preparation for those events was often done in the margins of my professional life: In my favorite airplane seat (aisle, exit row), on my laptop at home as I tried to multitask with family time (bad idea), or early in the morning. I’ve scanned more “Ten Tips for Twitter” than I care to think about, read my Chronicle colleagues’ excellent stories, and talked to communications and marketing administrators at universities, including many outside of the United States. Now I’d like to take revenge on all those other tip writers with my own, globally oriented version of four social media do’s and don’ts. Think of these as collected wisdom, not advice.

1. Don’t have a social media strategy. Have an institutional strategy. Or an international strategy. Or a combination of both. Then let planning for social media be a servant of those goals.

In 2008, Pfizer decided to pull out of Michigan, a move the state largely greeted with dismay and frustration. Here was a major pharmaceutical company abandoning a region already starving for well-paid, high tech jobs.

In the end, it just might have been the best thing to ever happen in Michigan.

From Pfizer’s exit arose two institutions key to the state’s high tech future: the Michigan Life Science & Innovation Center (MLSIC) in Plymouth and the University of Michigan’s North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) in Ann Arbor.