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.

500 Startups has a new Accelerator batch that kicked off May 23. We have 20 startups in the program from May to September. Among the companies in this batch are:

• 20% women founders: LaunchBit, Snapette, Vayable, Cardinal Blue, Culture Kitchen and DailyAisle have women founders. In particular, 100% of the founding teams for LaunchBit, Snapette and Culture Kitchen are women.
• 30% international founders: Zerply (Sweden, Estonia), Welcu (Chile), Ovia (Mexico), AppGrooves (Japan), Cardinal Blue (Taiwan), vvall (Hong Kong), and BugHerd (Australia). A number of our startups are from outside the valley: DailyAisle, LaunchBit, Snapette (Boston), ToutApp (NYC), LaunchRock (Philadelphia), HelloWorld (Austin), and Scoopola (Seattle).

If you want to feel the pulse of startup activity in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, consider visiting the Cafe Carolina in Chapel Hill. Many scientific discoveries start with chemistry. But here, companies start with coffee.

On most mornings, Don Rose starts his day at Cafe Carolina, about 10 miles from Research Triangle Park and a stone’s throw from the University of North Carolina campus. At the cafe, he meets with UNC faculty, entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical industry workers or local contacts in the Triangle business community. Rose is the executive director of Carolina KickStart, a UNC program that aims to turn university medical research and discoveries into new companies. Over coffee and conversation, he finds ways to connect the university to the Triangle business community. He likens his job to a dating service.

According to J. Sohl, the Center for Venture Research, about 20,000 seed/startup stage entrepreneurs are successful in raising money from angel investors each year in the US. An additional 30,000 later-stage entrepreneurs raise angel money annually, many of whom raised seed/startup capital from angels earlier. Angels seem to be making more follow-on investments in portfolio companies because venture capitalists are making few investments in round size less than $5 million.

Sohl also estimates that angels in the US invest about $20 billion annually. According to the Angel Capital Association, the average angel seed/startup round of investment is about $300,000, with about ten angels investing $30,000 each.

Austin, TX (PRWEB) June 09, 2011

Bill Clark, founder of Austin-based MicroVenture Marketplace Inc., is launching a venture capital management company that opens doors for those who have never invested in a venture fund and those looking to invest smaller amounts.

Called MicroAngel Capital Partners, the Austin fund manager will give accredited investors the opportunity to invest as little as $3,000 in venture capital funds and other alternative investment products around the country.

Source: Popular Science — Jun 6, 2011

Sprinklers that read your lawn’s mind, 3-D phones, speakers that adjust the sound for your location and more…

Air Control

Daymak’s electric bike does away with external cables. Controls at the handlebars communicate with the bike’s electric throttle and regenerative brakes via radio signals.

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--An investment group, a French medical equipment company and three life science startups have taken up residence in the University City Science Center’s Port Business Incubator.

Investment group Karlin Asset Management, Claremont, Epitek, Inc., and Parsortix, Inc. have established offices in the Port business incubator at 3711 Market Street. Longevity Biotech is located in the Port’s Hubert J. P. Schoemaker Lab at 3624 Market Street.

Karlin Asset Management is a private investment firm managing over $1 billion of unleveraged equity capital. Armen Karamanian, a Kauffman Fellow at Karlin who runs Karlin’s Philadelphia office, focuses on early-stage investments.

A subsidiary of the Ballina Capital group, Claremont is a French company specializing in the distribution of medical and dental equipment. Since it was founded in 2003, Ballina Capital has applied an active creation and acquisitions policy and the group now consists of seven companies. Distributed through Claremont’s extensive network, the unique Nd:YAP dental laser is now available in 27 countries located in Europe, the Middle East and in the United States.

Even if we are experiencing another bubble, is that so bad for startups trying to get funding? This infographic, which Column Five Media did for Udemy, examines some of the evidence. Though VCs are doing fewer deals than they were before the recession really took hold in late 2008, the amount of money invested is up to pre-recession levels. That’s good news for startups trying to raise money — at least in the short-term. But the valuations of some companies compared to their revenue might spell trouble for the future.

You're in a nasty bike accident during rush hour. Nobody stops to help, but your helmet detects that you have sustained a nasty blow to the head and automatically calls 911. The "smart" bike helmet idea, one of five winners in Toyota's Ideas For Good competition, is currently being worked on by engineers from Deeplocal and Carnegie Mellon University.

The Toyota competition, which ended this week, challenged entrants to repurpose Prius technology for use outside of the automotive arena. The bike helmet idea is inspired by T.H.U.M.S. (Total HUman Model for Safety) technology--a piece of simulation software that Toyota uses to measure injury to body parts that can't be detected using conventional crash test dummies.

"We abstracted from that and said let's start with a circuit that's one inch by half an inch, two accelerometers, and three gyroscopes," says Nathan Martin, CEO of Deeplocal. It's a setup that could allow users to track ultra-high impacts (up to 250 g's) as well as movement and tilt. "We can record what's going on with the head as its moving, and see how is it moving up to 400 times per second," explains Martin.

America’s manufacturing sector has been in decline for more than a decade. But the recession made things worse.

Ninety-nine of the nation’s 100 biggest labor markets lost manufacturing jobs during the past three years, according to an On Numbers study of new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Thirty-one of these metropolitan areas lost more than 10,000 manufacturing positions each. (See the sortable database at the end of this story.)

That marks an acceleration of the downward spiral that began in the late 1990s. National manufacturing employment slipped every April between 1998 and 2008, posting an average annual decline of 400,000 jobs. The erosion sped up to 600,000 jobs per year after the recession hit in 2008.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that universities cannot automatically own the rights to the inventions that result from federally financed research. The next day, a New York Times editorial decried the decision, saying it “romanticizes the role of the solo inventor,” and “fails to acknowledge the Bayh-Dole Act’s importance in fostering collaborative enterprises.” This couldn’t be more wrong. The university commercialization system is broken, and the solution is to empower, not inhibit, the researchers.

The Bayh-Dole Act, enacted in 1980, laid the ground rules for federally funded research, allowing universities to own the resulting intellectual property. Universities established technology transfer offices where they patented and licensed that intellectual property to industry. The number of patents filed and licensing revenue earned became the measure of success for these new offices — offices that were invariably staffed by lawyers and contract negotiators. Their focus was on extracting the maximum value from university inventions rather than ensuring that research breakthroughs were turned into inventions. The Kauffman Foundation, an authority on entrepreneurship and invention, called them "monopoly gatekeepers.” A few universities like Stanford and MIT reap substantial profits from technology licensing, but most don’t cover their costs.

Everyone seems to like the aspect of being an entrepreneur that goes with “being your own boss” and “able to do things my way.” But sometimes they forget that this kind of freedom comes with a price of personal accountability. Accountability means “the buck stops here,” and “all the failures are mine.”

Too many people seem to do whatever it takes to avoid accountability, both before and after the fact. I suspect that this is largely caused by a fear of the unknown, and a lack of confidence in their own abilities. People with confidence problems and fear problems should avoid the entrepreneur role, since success without accountability is rare.

Smaller regional and metro areas are emerging from amongst the field of usual big-city suspects as desirable locations for companies of all sizes. Our list brings these locations to light by showing how they stack up to the rest of the field when considering 14 highly regarded surveys. Area Development Magazine Special Presentation (Spring 2011)

We based our findings on 13 highly regarded location surveys from sources including Forbes, Newgeography, Brookings Metro Monitor, Fast Company, and CNNMoney. We used the findings of the Milken Institute's Best Performing Cities 2010 as the primary criterion. Each of the 100 Leading Locations on our list must appear within the top 100 rankings for large and small cities on Milken's report.

We also considered the results of our own Select Regionals Survey as a criterion to select the 100 locations that made the final cut. This survey, sent to nearly 300 U.S. regions and metros, considered the areas' top three greatest project investments of 2010, unemployment rates, and total capital investment pledged over the past year.