If a close friend has a cold, chances are you might catch it. A startup called Sickweather hopes to tap into the social side of sickness with a social networking service that tracks illnesses within a user's circle of friends, and to forecast outbreaks.

The startup mines publicly available data from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as from its users, to provide information on illness trends. Sickweather recently launched an early version of its site for closed beta testing, and plans to open to a broader audience in July.

While some people complain about the vast quantities of often mundane data uploaded to social networks every day, companies are increasingly interested in mining that information for commercial ends. Bluefin Labs, for example, uses social network data to determine users' reactions to television shows and advertisements. Specialized social networks are also springing up to collect more precise data.

This is the first in a series of posts about financing options for startups. By "financing" I mean obtaining cash to fund your business. There are all sorts of strategies to avoid needing funding, but this series is not about them.

Many entrepreneurs turn to friends and family for their first funding needs. In fact, it is common for non-tech startups to raise all the capital they need from friends and family. I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that friends and family make up the largest source of funding for entrepreneurs and startups.

Friends and family financing is popular because it is easy to get a hearing from the people who know you best and they are positively inclined to say yes. But there are some negatives as well. It's tough to know how to price and structure an investment where the investors are close friends or family. You don't want to take advantage of them and they may not be sophisticated enough to know what is a good deal and what is a bad deal.

It turns out $200,000 is the magic number. That's when you're considered affluent in America.

And what you make in your 20s is a huge predictor of whether you'll ever get there.

According to advertising agency Digitas, it's much more likely you'll hit $200K if you make at least $100K before age 35. That puts you into the emerging wealth category; anyone older and in that income bracket is considered aspiring.

Digitas pulled this research together after the economic downturn, after realizing that the core luxury consumers were the ones who made more money earlier. Those in the aspiring category no longer "felt rich" and identified with the middle class.

Should tenure be abolished? Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that it should. Her new book, The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For, is a Navy Seal Team Six-style assault on Fortress Tenure: quick, precise, and conducted with air of finality.

That is not to say that she overcomes all my ambivalence on the topic. The tenure system in American colleges and universities does have overwhelming faults. It forces tenure-track faculty members to concentrate disproportionate attention on publishing; it conduces to an attitude of indifference towards both teaching and research among a substantial number of those who achieve it; and it is part of an academic caste system that treats adjuncts (“contingent faculty”) very poorly. Even its faults have faults: The pressure for more and more scholarly publication leads to an ever-growing flood of trivial research, much of it gussied up in obscurantist jargon intended to limit access to like-minded “experts.”

Off the coast of Newfoundland is a place called Fogo Island. At the height of its economy, about 3,000 people were living on the island, mostly employed by the fishery. When the fish population declined in the 1960s, so did the human population, as many were forced to look elsewhere for work.

Recently, a brother and sister who were a part of that exodus have returned home. Both Zita and Tony Cobb left in search of opportunity and education. And both achieved success, going on to university educations and great careers in the tech industry. In fact, they’re so successful that they are now in a position to devote their time and effort fully toward philanthropic endeavors. They spent some time in small African villages, distributing radios as a way of exposing villagers to possibilities beyond their circumstances, just as they had been introduced to the world beyond Fogo Island in their youths. But at a certain point, they realized that their real passion was to renew the financial vitality through a kind of social entrepreneurship that had been lost on Fogo once the fishery waned.

As a result of globalizing trends, clusters are becoming more global as well. To stay competitive new strategies have to be utilized. One successful approach has been the use of openness between the various actors in the local systems.

This year’s conference of the Technopolicy Network will therefore be on Open Innovation for Regional Development to explore how this shift will impact your region and what you can do to profit from this change.

View the Program

If we want to create a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, what do we do? Langley Advance says it is time to give them the opportunity to learn how. The PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs program is helping get kids started.

PowerPlay challenges students to start their own businesses. They each identify a need in the marketplace and create a business plan to effectively market their product.

Then, they’re given a chance to sell their products at a Young Entrepreneur Show attended by the school community.

The Government will launch a $40 million fund to encourage more medical technology start-ups as part of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2015 plan, Spring Singapore said on Tuesday.

The fund will be managed by SPRING SEEDS Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SPRING Singapore, under a new Biomedical Sciences Accelerator (BSA) programme.

SPRING Singapore said that the knowledge and capital-intensive nature of the biomedical industry made it difficult for start-ups with innovative ideas to succeed, adding that they hoped the BSA programme would help catalyse more start-ups.

Two months ago, my team at Blackbox set out on a mission to crack the innovation code of Silicon Valley and share it with the rest of the world. Now we are releasing a report based on the results of our first survey. We want to thank Sandbox, FastCompany, Inc., ReadWriteWeb, Hackernews, youngupstarts, Yourstory.in and many more who helped us spread the word and gather a total of 650+ survey results. And a special thank you to all our fellow entrepreneurs who shared information about their company for this cause.

Here is a sneak peek of our results, showcasing 7 signs of failure:

1. Not Working Full Time If you decide to start a company, don’t do it half-hearted. Creating something from nothing is hard. Succeeding almost always requires going all in. Temporary moonlighting is permissible but significantly curbs performance and potential.

While the concept of using the web to share “stuff” — from cars to apartments to tools — is still relatively new to many consumers, the business model is being adopted by a growing number of companies and I think has started to reach a tipping point and become more of a mainstream concept.

So-called collaborative consumption has also started to make some companies a significant amount of money. Here are 10 signs that I’ve seen that a web-based sharing economy is movin’ into the mainstream:

1). Airbnb $1 Billion Valuation: The peer to peer apartment and house rental startup Airbnb is reportedly raising a $100 million (or more) sized round, at a $1 billion-plus valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Previously the Y-Combinator company had only raised $7.8 million. No doubt such a large leap in funding will help the company rapidly grow, and continue to bring in more users beyond the early adopter crowd.

For graduating American university students, the good news is that many companies plan to hire more entry-level workers this year than last. Unfortunately, while the job market is improving, many grads are still finding it tough to get work. Creativity, connections and hard work are imperative to standing out from the competition.

Businesses are also recognizing that recruiting the best from the next generation requires a different approach. Ketchum, a global communications firm, created a unique open innovation community for college students that has proven to not only be a valuable service for their clients but a valuable recruiting tool as well.

The community, called Mindfire, presents real-life problems from Ketchum clients to students with demonstrated creativity, communications and digital skills. The forum has proven to be a “win-win-win” development. Ketchum clients, such as Frito-Lay North America get to gather inspiration from fresh-thinking minds; participating students get a real taste of what a job in PR entails, and Ketchum gets to see evidence of the way applicants think creatively and work under tight deadlines.

Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Many believe they are the twin pillars of the U.S. economy in the 21st-century war of global competition. President Barack Obama declares that we must "out-innovate" the rest of the world. Gov. Rick Perry demands that we boost entrepreneurship. But who is going to take the lead role in this new mission? Who will convert rhetoric into action? It will be the great American universities, as part of regional innovation ecosystems comprising entities such as research and development laboratories, business incubators and accelerators, entrepreneurial training programs, venture capital networks and, ultimately, research parks with co-located startup companies. Public-private partnerships will be the glue binding everyone together.

But this ecosystem model, founded on universities as the engines of innovation and the source of new entrepreneurs, is under attack. Pundits say the process of translating research discoveries into commercial products is flawed and should be revamped, even to the point of questioning the value of research at our universities. These doubts have been fed for the most part by misconceptions or myths about the current innovation ecosystem. Let's examine four of the myths surrounding the commercialization of university research and perform a reality check.

No one will say that starting your own company is easy. But it’s a lot easier than it used to be. One of the major reasons: it’s cheaper and more simple to build scalable infrastructure than ever before. The last two years have brought a wave of low-cost, efficient applications that allow small businesses to build fast, secure and smart internal systems — and they’re getting plenty of use.

As a startup founder, your plate is constantly full of new tasks and concerns: personnel, payroll, fluid communication, continuous innovation. The last thing you need to worry about are the bare-bones tools that help you tackle these never ending to-dos.

Here are three applications aiming to take that load off your shoulders.

The pace of new domain name registrations shows no signs of slowing down: Consumers and companies signed up for 7.9 percent more in 2010.

It’s a sign that the Web continues to grow, and that the exhaustion of standard IPv4 addresses in February has had no affect on that growth.

In its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, Verisign said it recorded 209.8 million top-level domain names on the Internet. 15.3 million new domain names were registered in 2010 — a 7.9 percent increase from the previous year and 2.2 percent over the last quarter.

On May 18 and 19, the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) hosted Discovery 2011, a signature innovation conference for Ontario. It enables “key players from industry, academia, government, the investment community as well as entrepreneurs and students to pursue collaboration opportunities.”

I attended the conference on May 19. In addition to meeting exhibitors and commercialization experts, I attended an interesting discussion panel on exemplary and emerging commercialization models. OCE described the session and its participants as follows:

At the inaugural International Commercialization Forum, held in Ottawa in March, a group of thought leaders and practitioners from 18 countries discussed exemplary practices in commercializing research outcomes and effective innovation models. Participants shared the most compelling novel ideas to improve the state of global innovation. At the Forum’s conclusion, 48 organizations with a common vision focused on openly sharing knowledge and expertise, formally established the International Commercialization Alliance to work together on projects of global interest. This session will provide a synopsis of thought-provoking insights gained from the discussions and an overview of the Alliance established and where it goes from here.

Creative Barcode is a mechanism for safe disclosure of pre-contract early stage propositions, proposals and creative concepts, underpinned by a Trust Charter Agreement. It embeds unique digital barcodes into proposals, concepts, visuals, film and video.

It was introduced to provide a much-needed system by which creative industries could quickly, and cost efficiently, reduce vulnerability when disclosing materials to third parties in pursuit of new business. Its objective is to ensure creators are fairly remunerated when their work is commercialised.

A friend recently asked for advice on his business idea. I loved its potential – great idea, lucrative market, and an owner who has the skills and connections to make it happen. Sadly, the idea, like many others, will end up in the “Great Entrepreneurial Ideas” graveyard. Why? My friend is trying to start the venture while keeping a high-flying corporate job. That never works.

How did you make the break to your own business? Share your story

His venture is in a completely different industry. It is one-millionth the size of his employer’s operation, and able to be run on weekends and during a few weeks of annual leave. My friend, like others I know, won’t broach the subject with his employer. Telling his boss about the venture would be like tattooing his corporate forehead with: “I AM NOT FULLY COMMITTED.” It got me thinking:

I’m a big fan of documenting how to do stuff. So I drew up this diagram about how I write blog posts. The way I see it the less thinking I have to do about completing a certain process, the easier it is to do.

The pictures are just for fun…

Technology leader Nokia announced their new program, “Invent With Nokia,” which allows inventors to develop their product in partnership with Nokia’s development team and resources. If your idea is chosen, Nokia applies for a patent and rewards the you financially. The benefits are numerous, including covering all the costs of protecting the idea (which can reach into the millions of dollars), as well as the creative and technological geniuses of Nokia to develop, test, and market the finished product. The convince of the program does come at a cost. Any idea submitted because legal property of Nokia, even if it isn’t chosen to develop. This could result in submitting your best concepts into an intellectual property black hole.

Although Nokia’s business incubator program is one of the first large programs offered online, the actual concept is not new. Since the 1960s, incubators have been providing entrepreneurs with resources, education, and networking opportunities in selective fields. In 2005, North American incubation programs assisted more than 27,000 companies, which provided employment for more than 100,000 workers and generated annual revenues of $17 billion. Successful products can become a win-win for the entrepreneurs and investors.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sam Lessin sold his Web start-up to Facebook for millions last year, and Facebook promptly shut it down. All Facebook wanted was Mr. Lessin.

That is what it has come to in bubbly Silicon Valley. Companies like Facebook, Google and Zynga are so hungry for the best talent that they are buying start-ups to get their founders and engineers — and then jettisoning their products.

Some technology blogs call it being “acqhired.” The companies doing the buying say it is a talent acquisition, and it typically comes with a price per head.

“Engineers are worth half a million to one million,” said Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s director of corporate development, who has helped negotiate many of the 20 or so talent acquisitions made by Facebook in the last four years. The money — in the form of stock — is often distributed among the start-up’s founders, employees and investors. The acquired employees also get a rich salary and often more stock options, which makes this a good time for entrepreneurial engineers.