In the last month or so, I’ve noticed an irritating trend in the startup world: After adding my email to a launch page, I get asked to submit a few of my friends’ email addresses in exchange for a higher place in line or earlier access. This has happened at least twice when I’ve checked out a startup after meeting an entrepreneur, and two or three times after I’ve spoken with a friend about a cool company and gone to check it out. I find it annoying, but it’s a trend that has blossomed, mostly because it appears to work.

Damian Kimmelman, founder and CEO of DueDil, a financial information startup that’s shutting down its social invite program as it opens up its beta to more people, said the company saw its invite pool swell by a third thanks to folks sharing email addresses of their friends. But most important was the psychological effect Kimmelman felt it has on the invitees. In an IM conversation, he said it helps prioritize users when you can only let a few people into a beta at one time and he added, “[A]lso you are a free service, but you kinda want people to value the service from day 1.”

What makes an entrepreneur tick?

We have argued that the image of the visionary entrepreneur who builds an empire from the seed of a brilliant and fully formed idea is mostly myth.

At the same time, the loose and flexible ideas of an entrepreneur should not be constrained by a business plan.

Given these insights, we believe entrepreneurs need to leverage customers and partners to solve the financing paradox, and to embrace both positive and negative surprises.

As states across the country consider their budget proposals for the coming year, they continue to face a daunting fiscal challenge. The worst recession since the 1930s has caused the steepest decline in state tax receipts on record. State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 11 percent below pre-recession levels,[1] while the need for state-funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.

To date, some 44 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2012, which begins July 1, 2011 in most states. These come on top of the large shortfalls that states closed in fiscal years 2009 through 2011. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The tools of nanobiotechnology have wide-ranging commercial impact on fields that include pharma, medtech, textiles, agriculture, consumer products and many more. There are many hotbeds of nanobiotech innovation, and North Carolina has emerged as a leader in nanobiotech research, development and commercialization.

North Carolina's rich resources include world-class university research centers, significant emerging and established industry players, and an environment that proactively nurtures entrepreneurial ventures. The rapidly growing NC nanobiotech cluster allows for collaborations with opinion leaders, resource-sharing within a strong supportive infrastructure, momentum that drives commercial impact and improvement of human health through better medical products. The top five reasons North Carolina is a major nanobiotech hub include: a rich support infrastructure in North Carolina, momentum, commercial impact, impact on diagnosing and treating diseases, and world-renowned hotbed of key thought leaders. These reasons are detailed below.

As the developed world continues its slow climb out of the financial crisis, policymakers and companies increasingly look to research universities to generate new ideas and to contribute to innovation and economic development. Academic entrepreneurship—the formation of companies based on intellectual property generated by faculty members—is of particular interest given the publicized success of companies such as Lycos from Carnegie Mellon University and Silicon Graphics and Genentech from Stanford.

The recent and rapid growth of spinoffs is promising. According to the Association of University Technology Managers, the number of companies spun out of universities in the U.S. more than doubled between 1996 and 2005—from 200 to nearly 450. Research shows that these companies are not only more likely to attract venture capital and have an initial public offering, but, compared to non-university startups, they also have a higher propensity to survive over time. Consequently, numerous universities have created incubators, venture funds, and other programs to encourage spinoff establishment and growth.

The Iowa-based Raptor Resource Project works to foster population growth among threatened bird populations throughout the midwest. They manage 23 nests, educate others in nest-site management, and — best of all for those living far from the wilderness — maintain several webcams at their sites. You can follow several families online, including falcons, owls and osprey.

Obesity is at an epidemic stage in America. It's slowly killing a huge number of people and it's costing tons of money. Consider this, an obese patient costs $443 more dollars per inpatient visit than a person at a healthy weight. In total, that costs the country billions a year. Many people and programs have considered different ways to lower the obesity rate, from championing exercise to surgical procedures. It turns out, it's not the obese we need to target, it's their moms.

Do you belong to the one-half of the population that frequently uses dietary supplements with the hope that it might be good for you?

Well, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there seems to be an interesting asymmetrical relationship between the frequency of dietary supplement use and the health status of individuals. Wen-Bin Chiou of National Sun Yat-Sen University decided to test if frequent use of dietary supplements had ironic consequences for subsequent health-related behaviors after observing a colleague chose an unhealthy meal over an organic meal simply because the colleague had taken a multivitamin earlier in the day.

Microsoft sees India as a strategic area for growth and a rich resource base of technical developers who have made India a hotbed of technical innovation.

Kevin Turner, CEO of Microsoft, said India with its 1.4 million technical developers and innovators is one of the fastest growing and most strategic areas of growth for developing its ecosystem of customers. “We plan to support startups and entrepreneurs who have expertise in software development, cloud computing and mobile services.”

A recent New York Times article dove into the idea of organically creating the next Silicon Valley. Its author, Steven Davidoff, reviewed the different ingredients public and private sectors are adding to their entrepreneurial ecosystems and touched on a growing consensus that government does, and should, have a role in entrepreneurship.

In illustrating this, Davidoff pointed to Ohio and its Third Frontier program, which has provided more than $1 billion in grants to accelerate high-tech innovation. Of the State’s pool of funding designated for entrepreneurship, a portion goes to nonprofit investors, often referred to as venture development organizations or VDOs. VDOs put their money into innovative, early-stage companies that have the potential to create jobs and wealth for their regions.

In a second, with Google, I can find a phone number that was assigned to you ten years ago, but it takes me an hour to find your phone number on that business card you gave me last week. That’s just wrong. We need instant access to the most important of all resources, current contact info.

Too many of us have piles of business cards scattered around the office and home, as well as additional contacts on your cell phone, PDA, Outlook, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The result is we can’t find that key name and phone number quickly when we really need them.

The solution is simple to define. What we all need is a digital tool that can extract data from business cards, as well as sync it with your cell phone, your email, and the social networks you use. It needs to have great search and display capabilities as well as spreadsheet-like sorting so you can look at the information in various ways. Finally, we want it cheap (of course).

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, the current innovation model needs some fixing. Its traditional approach to innovation focuses on in house development with the intent of market exclusivity; at least until the patent expires. And guess what? Patent expiration is spreading like wildfire.

As Mark Lundie, Director of R&D at Pfizer highlighted at yesterday’s Innovation in the Life Sciences seminar at MaRS, the innovation gap is growing as R&D expenditure is on the rise while productivity remains low. In other words, billions of dollars are spent on R&D of drugs, while the number of drugs brought to market is limited to the digits on your hands.

Silicon Valley contributed nicely to the solid 35% year-over-year gain for venture capital funding in the first quarter – but Boston did more than its share.

The San Francisco Bay Area was home to 190 deals in the first three months of the year totaling $2.24 billion, a 44% increase over the $1.56 billion on 180 deals a year ago, according to VentureSource data. While impressive, that lagged behind the Boston metro area, which posted $862.9 million on 71 deals in the quarter, a 71% increase compared to the $505.6 million on 60 deals one year ago.

Boston’s gains were pretty strong across the board, but especially in the health care and energy/utilities sectors. (Sample-size disclaimer: Boston had just three deals in the energy sector, but all of them were sizable, including Harvest Power Inc.’s $51.7 million financing.)

Two seemingly disparate signaling pathways -- one that controls organ size in fruit flies and another important for the growth of embryos -- interact in embryonic mouse hearts to restrict cell proliferation and control heart size.

Mammalian hearts have only a scant capacity to regenerate heart muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes, to repair tissue damaged as a result of a heart attack or heart disease. The new research, published today (April 21) in Science, suggests it may be possible to interfere with signaling pathways that limit such regeneration to therapeutically promote the production of muscle cells in damaged hearts.

The achievement is impressive, but it is a wholly formal achievement that involves no knowledge…and it does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human thought.
—Law professor Stanley Fish, on Watson, the I.B.M.–built computer that won a game of “Jeopardy” (The New York Times Opinionator blog, Feb. 21, 2011)


By 2029, we’ll have reverse engineered and modeled and simulated all the regions of the brain. And that will provide us the software/algorithmic methods to….create machines that really do have the subtlety and suppleness of human intelligence.
—Futurist Ray Kurzweil, explaining what he calls the “coming singularity” (BigThink.com video, #14532)

Aaron Levie co-founded Box.net from his dorm room, but he quickly learned that there were some strong advantages and disadvantages to that. While the company’s overhead was minimal, providing customer service from an accounting class is hardly ideal – and investors are instinctively more wary of entrepreneurs who don’t commit. Levie discusses how he weighed the pros and cons in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture, given at Stanford University.

PitchBook has published its 2Q 2011 Private Equity Breakdown and Presentation Deck. The Report and Deck were compiled using data from the PitchBook Platform and cover trends in U.S. private equity investing, exits and fundraising with a focus on trends developing during the first quarter of 2011. Please feel free to use the deck slides for conferences, board meetings and other PE-related presentations.

Click Here to Download the PE Breakdown - 2.9MB (PDF)
Click Here to Download the PE Presentation Deck - 4.7MB (PPT)

Google posted a video tour of one of its data centers today, highlighting some of the steps it takes to keep data secure and maintain reliability.

Google has been notoriously tight-lipped about its data centers, and doesn't even disclose exactly how many it operates.

So why the sudden openness? There are several likely reasons:

* Yesterday's Amazon Web Services outage is creating new questions about the viability of cloud computing -- including services like Google Apps

With all the news that McDonald's is planning to add 50,000 new jobs to the country this year, why not see whose examples you can follow?

The company has employed several people we now know as singers, actors, or successful business people. CBS Moneywatch has this list of celebrities who worked for the fast food chain at one point in their lives before breaking through to their own success.

The idea: Bridg.me makes conference calling as easy as using Google Calenders.

Just create an event, enter the phone numbers of all participants and the hashtag #bridg. Bridg.me will call everyone at the scheduled time.

Whose idea: Justin Heilman and Jagdish Repaswal

Why it's brilliant: It's annoying to jot down all of the numbers needed to dial in. It's also frustrating to wait for other participants to arrive. Sometimes they forget and you're stuck waiting forever. This feature solves both of those problems.