It looks like women have caught up with men in numbers in the workplace. For the first time in history, women in the USA now outnumber men in the workforce, and there are now more women in supervisory positions than there are males. The question is whether they will handle the downside of working any better than men.

According to an article by Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell, PhD, titled The 21st Century Workplace -- Are Women the New Men?, the economic downturn has hit men harder. They held nearly 80 percent of jobs that have been lost during what is now being called the "mancession." Will women now inherit the stress, pressure, exhaustion, burn out and heart attacks commonly associated with male leaders in business?

I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries.

The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. Rinse & repeat. Nobody really knows whether or not the idea is yet going to be big, so I believe in not over capitalizing too early. This benefits you, the entrepreneur. It’s the whole basis of my investment philosophy, which I call “The Entrepreneur Thesis.”

Micah Kotch, operations director of New York City’s only cleantech incubator, has developed a bit of a complex. The incubator, called NYC ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean & Renewable Economy), is housed within New York University’s better-known technology incubator on Varick Street. Since ACRE started up in July 2009, Kotch has watched a procession of media—from the Wall Street Journal to MSNBC—come to spotlight the tech side of the incubator, while virtually ignoring the ten or so companies on the cleantech side. Why? Because mobile apps and other emerging technologies are sexy, whereas “cleantech is viewed more as infrastructure,” Kotch says.

CARSON CITY, Nev., April 20, 2011 -- Gov. Brian Sandoval today announced the release of "The SILVER Spark for Nevada: Sustainable Innovation Leading a Vital Economic Renaissance," a report highlighting Nevada's industry innovation strength areas with the commercialization potential to form the foundation of a more diverse economy for the state. The report was jointly released by the Office of the Governor, the Office of the Lt. Governor, the Nevada Commission on Economic Development and the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization.

RICHARD SELINE WAS A CONSULTANT AND SENIOR ADVISOR ON THIS REPORT.

Fear can be good, and it can be bad too. It may prepare you to do your best, but if you’re not careful, fear can also stop you from reaching your full potential. Success Magazine has recently covered a few fears you should keep your eye on.

The fear of failing in business.

Businesses fail for many reasons: Competition grabs market share, funding disappears, society changes course or a recession blindsides you. “With every failure there comes—like a sort of secret toy surprise in the bottom of the cereal box—added value in strength, wisdom and knowledge,” Groover says. Failing inspires greater triumphs, especially when you use it to get your head straight.

The best survival guides tell you how to be proactive and avoid the probabilities of ending up in a worst case scenario. Of course you need to learn how to recognize a bad situation before it bites you, and you need to know all the secret ways to wiggle your way out, before you succumb.

The challenges stem from the simple fact that every entrepreneur is starting something new, where things are predictably unpredictable. There are unknowns at every turn, leading product development, attracting customers, managing cash, and dealing with human resources and office politics.

If you read this blog often you'll know that I'm a huge fan of First Round Capital.

They have totally changed the way you run a VC firm, investing heavily in systems & events for their founders that are pushing the boundaries of the way our industry works.

One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies. I'm a huge fan of this innovation.

The relative difficulty that women entrepreneurs have in finding financing for their businesses has long been a topic of concern. Now a new project is aiming to improve women’s access to capital by mentoring and training women to become angel investors and eventually fund other women’s companies.

Pipeline Fund, a social venture fund founded by Natalia Oberti Noguera that invests in women-led for-profit social ventures, recently launched its Pipeline Fund Fellowship, the New York Times reports. The Pipeline Fund Fellowship will train women philanthropists to become angel investors through education, mentorship and practice.

For most of us, managing our health means visiting a doctor. The more serious our concerns, the more specialized a medical expert we seek. Our bodies often feel like foreign and frightening lands, and we are happy to let someone with an MD serve as our tour guide. For most of us, our own DNA never makes it onto our personal reading list.

Biohackers are on a mission to change all that. These do-it-yourself biology hobbyists want to bring biotechnology out of institutional labs and into our homes. Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer in Jobs's garage, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who invented Google in a friend's garage, biohackers are attempting bold feats of genetic engineering, drug development, and biotech research in makeshift home laboratories.

It is a cliche in venture capital that ‘it is all about the team’, particularly with early stage investments. Some will argue that the market and product are more important, but everyone agrees that having a great team is critical. To give more weight to this point, I recently heard one of Europe’s more experienced VCs describe how his fund used to make investments in companies that had great products in hot markets, but where they weren’t so sure about the team, but they found that those investments rarely ended well and ‘don’t make that mistake any longer’.

So everyone is agreed that having a great management team is important. The tricky thing is working out whether any given management team is great or not.

Do you have a to-do list? I bet you do (if not I bet you’re pretty stressed out).

In this post Mark McGuinness writes about a killing tip for planning what you want to get done in a day. With all the fancy software available it’s easy to make lists that are impossible to finish in a day. Mark instead suggests using a simple post- it note for your daily to do list. It seems counterintuitive, but makes all the sense in the world when you give it some thought. A small list allows you to focus on what really need to be done and is in your face through out the day.

Denmark, Sweden, and Canada lead the world in high-well being -- the percent of people who say they are "thriving" in life, according to a newly released survey by the Gallup Organization. The U.S. ranked 12th, behind Panama and Venezuela. Nineteen countries registered high rates of well-being, with more than half of their populations reporting that they are thriving in their day-to-day lives.

The ideas funnel has been with us a long time. We put our ideas into the funnel and then through a process of elimination out ‘pop’s’ finished products. Henry Chesbrough’s famous depiction of the Open Funnel has continued that concept, that ideas enter the more ‘open’ innovation process and go through a more ‘staged gate’ or equivalent process to emerge as the finished product or even spun-out- all well and good.

In the past few weeks the funnel has been constantly coming back in my life. It has been bugging me. Recently I was at a European Innovation Conference and we got into a roundtable discussion on managing ideas and up pop’s the fuzzy front end and the funnel and putting ideas through this. To be provocative I said “well ideas are actually in the middle of the innovation process” and we got into a significant debate on this and concluded that we all did not share a common language on this or understanding of what I was struggling to articulate.

As a health reporter, I see so many studies of the causes and symptoms of work stress. So it was refreshing to see a study about the converse: what makes workers happy.

Focusing on social workers, a profession known for its high attrition, stress and burnout, John Graham, Ph.D., a professor of social work at the University of Calgary and his then doctoral student Micheal Shier, now at the University of Pennsylvania sent a survey out to 2,500 registered social workers in Alberta, Canada. Seven hundred people responded.

Optimizing your website to gain search engine positioning can be a process that takes a lot of time and focus. It’s no wonder a lot of entrepreneurs hire SEO firms to handle this for them. But that can be very expensive, and it’s hard to know which firms are the best. While many stick to “white hat” practices, others resort to actions that can get your site penalized if found out.

There are a lot of SEO tactics you can employ yourself though, and there are some mistakes a lot of site owners make that are hurting their search engine rankings. Correcting just a few things can actually make a significant difference. Below are three of the most common mistakes made by online entrepreneurs. Correcting these won’t guarantee you a first place Google position, but it will get you on the right track.

Osage Partners recently raised $100 million for a new fund, Osage University Partners. Through this fund, the family of venture capital and private equity funds has partnered with eight universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, to co-invest in start-ups created from technology licensed from these universities. This is only one of many examples in the Philadelphia region of how investors, universities, research institutions, and other stakeholders are taking new approaches and a sharper focus to the 30-plus year tradition of formally transferring technologies out of universities.

Generally when universities license their technology to start-ups, they receive a right to participate in future financing rounds. However, universities hardly ever take advantage of this so-called "preemptive right." Through the partnership with Osage, universities can exercise this right to participate as co-investors in future funding rounds, sharing in the profit of the fund.

Can you feel the froth? Investment in U.S. venture-backed companies rose 35 percent in the first quarter, according to a report by Dow Jones VentureSource. Venture firms invested $6.4 billion into 661 deals in the U.S. during the quarter.

The increased activity is consistent with the buzz in the tech industry about an overall recovery, an increase in optimism, and a faster pace for innovation among startups. There is considerable discussion about whether we’re seeing a bubble in tech investing, with a major story on the topic every week or so. The Wall Street Journal ran its latest bubble piece on Tuesday, with the headline, “In Silicon Valley, investors are jockeying like its 1999.

Obama spent a considerable amount of time preaching to the choir at today’s Facebook Town Hall event, first bringing up Intel founder and Hungarian immigrant Andy Grove as an example of the kind of immigrant the US should be focused on retaining, in a response to a question about Immigration Reform and the Dream Act Education.

“We’ve got ambitious people from all around the world, that come here because they have a new idea … If we’ve got smart people who want to come here and start businesses, who’ve got PhDs in math and science and computer science. Why wouldn’t we want them to stay? … These are job generators,” the President said.

The Lions Mane Jellyfish is the largest jellyfish in the world. They have been swimming in arctic waters since before the dinosaurs (over 650 million years ago) and are among some of the oldest surviving species in the world.

The largest can come in at about 6 meters and has tentacles over 50 meters long. Pretty amazing when you think these things have been swimming around for so long.

Innovation has emerged as a key means by which the US can pull itself out of this lackluster economy. In the State of the Union, President Obama referred to China and India as new threats to America's position as the world's leading innovator. But the threats are not just external. One of the greatest threats to the US's ability to innovate lies within: specifically, with the music and movie business. These Big Content businesses are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America's position as a world leader in innovation.

Many in the high technology industry have known this for a long time. Despite making their living relying on it, the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence. In fact, it's possible to go back as far as the gramophone and see the content industries rail against new technology. The reason why? Every shift in technology is difficult for them. Just as they work out how to make money using one technology, it changes.