Groupon just bought Pelago, the maker of iPhone app Whrrl, which tried to compete with Foursquare and didn't get very far.

Pelago's first investor was famed Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins, which is also an investor in Groupon.

It's a great example of "parking", a crucial VC skill that VCs don't like to talk about.

What is parking? It's finding a good acquisition for a startup that didn't do as well as you expected.

With all the messages being sent through the media today, how do you cut through the noise to get yours heard?

These job ads have done it by being funny, interesting, and heartbreakingly honest. They include a reminder that no dinosaurs need apply, a math problem to solve in order to call the proper phone number, and a promise of no health insurance.

Things are tough all over, right?

Well, not really.

While the job market is still pretty weak, the truth is that conditions vary greatly from state to state. For example, in February 2011, the unemployment rate was 13.6 percent in Nevada, but only 3.7 percent in North Dakota.

On top of that MoneyRates found significant differences in a number of other job-related factors. It analyzed all of them and created a list of the best states for making a living.

On a warm summer afternoon in 2005, Bryant Austin was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific by the islands of Tonga, looking through his camera at a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. As he waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder.

Turning around, Mr. Austin found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale, her body bigger than a school bus. The tap had come from her pectoral fin, weighing more than a ton. To Mr. Austin, her gesture was an unmistakable warning that he had gotten too close to the calf. And yet, the mother whale had extended her fin with such precision and grace — to touch the photographer without hurting him — that Mr. Austin was in awe of her “delicate restraint.”

Looking into the whale’s eye, lit by sunlight through the water, Austin felt he was getting a glimpse of calmness and intelligence, of the animal’s consciousness. The moment changed Mr. Austin’s life. It struck him that something was missing from four decades of whale photography: the beauty of true scale. Mr. Austin concluded that the only way to capture the magnificence of whales would be to create life-size pictures of them. “I wanted to recreate the feeling I had when I looked into the eye of the mother whale,” he said.

Entrepreneurs are among the most impactful actors in our economy because of the roles they play in creating new jobs and bringing breakthrough technologies to the marketplace. Despite their importance, female entrepreneurs remain a largely untapped economic force. The number of highly educated women indicates that females have the potential to start high growth businesses, but research shows that women have not pursued high potential entrepreneurial endeavors at the same pace as men. Consider these facts about women from the Kauffman Foundation, Astia, and Babson College, for example:

• They are well educated: Women represent 51 percent of the nation’s PhDs, 51 percent of business school applicants, 67 percent of college graduates, and more than 70 percent of 2010 valedictorians.
• They are in powerful positions but are not leading companies: Women became the majority of the labor force in 2010 for the first time in U.S. history, holding 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs, but only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female.
• They own low growth, lifestyle businesses, not high growth, cutting edge companies: While data shows that women own 30 percent of all new firms, only 3 percent of female entrepreneurs own high growth firms.
• They do not get their fair share of investment capital: Women-led businesses receive only 5 percent of all equity capital investments and just 3 percent of women-led firms attract venture capital investments.

Israel is one of the most innovative nations on earth. Israelis (approximately 7.6 million in number) are well-educated, have a global outlook, ties around the world, and most importantly, a positive view of entrepreneurship. Most Israeli entrepreneurs understand ways of moving innovations into the marketplace and how to establish themselves as global companies from the get go. It is only natural that there is so much interest around the world in Israel’s entrepreneurship path.

Israel has focused a lot of its efforts on finding and nurturing high-growth entrepreneurial firms, including universities. Granted, many start-ups have failed, but a number have succeeded and grown quickly. The result: Israeli high-growth start-ups have been creating jobs and generating sustainable wealth for the country, and innovations for the world (e.g., the USB memory stick, new generation cardiac stents, and camera pills that transmit pictures from inside the human body). Israel is often referred to as "startup nation" and a high-tech superpower.

Our annual list of the 10 emerging technologies that we think will have the greatest impact.

Ovum’s latest report issues a call for smarter cities. It also states that in the future the more smart they are, the more competitive they can be.

According to Ovum’s “Is your city smart enough?” report, cities should integrate information technologies in their infrastructures making them more sustainable and attractive for investment.

“The timing is right for cities to drive innovation in the next few decades for a number of reasons,” stated Research Director, Dr Steve Hodgkinson.

“Firstly, urbanisation trends compel cities to innovate and prosper – sustainability accommodating a further 2.9 billion people in cities during the next 40 years can’t be done unless we change the way they are built and operated.”

The three largest parties to gain power in last night's Finnish parliamentary elections have dramatically different political agendas. Fortunately for entrepreneurs, employment and entrepreneurship is one of the areas with the fewest differences overall. However, there are differences and depending on how the new government will be formed - these might have significant effects on entrepreneurs and their incentives as well. Below are some of the key areas of change these three parties are trying to achieve (from an entrepreneurial point of view).

National Coalition Party
National Coalition Party (NCP) is the largest of the new parliament with 44 seats from 200. They were also part of the government and their chairman, Jyrki Katainen, is the former Minister of Finance. Compared to the Social Demoratic Party and True Finns, NCP is by far the most entrepreneurial.

In her recently published book, “TheNewRural.Com,” Whitefish resident Diane Smith writes that, “in our challenging 21st century economy, the experts appear to agree that entrepreneurship is more important than ever.”

So what does that mean for rural America? Smith believes it means good things, since, in her view, rural America’s landscape is filled with entrepreneurs. She’s one of them.

After a successful career in technology in Washington D.C., Smith moved with her family to Whitefish in 2002, seeking “elbow room” and all of those other treasures of Montana life. But her business days were far from finished.

The entrepreneur: A ball of kinetic energy. Wired to perform. Demanding of himself or herself Egotistical. Driven. And a powerhouse of results.

Usually a company is lucky to have one at the helm. Some companies, founded by equally aggressive co-founders – Google and Microsoft come to mind – have two locomotives at the front of the train. Private-equity companies are so desperate to install entrepreneurs at the head of their investments that they spend tens of thousands of dollars on rigorous personality tests to evaluate the entrepreneurial qualities of candidates they’re considering to lead their portfolio companies.

Two years after floating its “four pillar” plan to revive the liquidity prospects of the U.S. venture capital industry, the National Venture Capital Association is renewing its efforts to get Washington to tackle some of the things that it thinks are keeping its companies out of the public markets.

The group’s new chairman, Paul Maeder, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners, would like to see Sarbanes-Oxley rules dialed back for small companies and steps taken to make it profitable again for analysts to cover them post-IPO.

We talked to him recently about the state of the capital markets. Here is the edited interview.

After years of little growth, command and control management, and cost-cutting, the cultures of many organizations need rejuvenating and tweaking in order to thrive in today’s difficult and increasingly competitive business environment.

But, changing culture is difficult. As Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, wrote:

The hardest part of a business transformation is changing the culture – the mindset and instincts of the people in the company.

So, what are the keys to drive cultural change?

1. Clearly Define the Culture: Define the new culture clearly, fully explaining the attributes of the culture and the acceptable behavior in the new culture.

During my six years as an accidental bureaucrat, after spending twenty-five years in the private sector, my friends often wondered how I could do it. They routinely asked versions of the question: doesn’t government move too slowly for you? My standard reply was that, yes, the public sector moves slowly - but then, big companies don’t move so quickly either. And come to think of it, I teased my friends in higher education, colleges and universities move more slowly than either business or government! The point is, all institutions move slowly.

What surprised me wasn’t how slowly the different institutions moved, but the different language, behavior, secret handshakes, and views of each other I found across sectors. Xenophobia runs rampant within public, private, non-profit, and for-profit silos. Each silo has created its own world completely foreign to inhabitants from other sectors. Visiting emissaries are always viewed with skepticism. (”I’m from the government and I’m here to help …”)

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The University City Science Center announced today that its QED Proof-of-Concept Funding Program has been awarded a $1.0 million grant by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA).

The EDA, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, promotes competitiveness and prepares the nation’s regions for growth and success in the worldwide economy.

The Science Center’s QED Program is the nation’s first multi-institutional proof-of-concept program for life science technologies. A total of 19 academic, healthcare and research institutions located throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware currently participate in the program.

We read a long Steve Jobs interview with Playboy from 1985.

As with most long interviews with Jobs its filled with fantastic nuggets about his life, Apple, and the future of computing.

We pulled out our 15 favorite quotes and anecdotes.

Google alumni are spreading across the tech industry and beyond, bringing along with them the lessons they've learned inside the search giant.

We decided to reach out to a few ex-Googlers to find out what they learned while working for tech's most powerful company.

The hope is that other people will be able to pick up a few tips on how to run their business.

Google, for it's reputation as a carefree, "Googly" place, is still a big business and operates as such.

Business-related fields account for slightly over 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the United States, the most popular field of study. But the quality of that education is facing growing scrutiny and criticism, as detailed in an article by David Glenn in the Education Life section of The Times as part of a joint project with The Chronicle of Higher Education. A recent study found that undergraduate business majors study less than other students, and lag behind in assessments of critical thinking and writing skills -- scoring lower than students in education and communications, and well behind liberal arts majors.

Proposals to introduce standardisation systems across Europe – covering services that could range from tattooists to tourism – have met with hostility from business and caution from consumer groups.

Introducing a standardisation system for services is one of 12 so-called "key actions" that the European Commission has committed to achieving before the end of next year as part of its Single Market Act re-launch.

Standardisation of goods is well established at EU level, and individual member states already use some standardisation in the services sector. The Commission believes that such standards should be developed at European level to facilitate cross-border services.\

The Gotham Gal and I have been fortunate to accumulate signficant capital over the past fifteen years. And the vast majority of it is invested in startups. We get distributions from a sale of one company and within months that capital (after taxes) is invested in more startups (including non profit startups). This has caused a few liquidity issues over the years. The Gotham Gal is always saying that we'll set aside a bunch of cash next time and then we go and do the same thing. I guess we can't help ourselves. Investing in startups is more appealing to us than leaving cash in the bank or putting capital into the bond market or the stock market.

When I think about the history of silicon valley and startup ecosystems in general, this is the pattern I see. Entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs take the profits from one deal and turn around an invest in more deals. They recycle capital back into the startup economy. If you look at silicon valley right now, particularly in the early stage/angel/angel list market, this is what is going on. Early employees of Google, Facebook, and a bunch of other succcessful tech companies have taken a considerable part of their paydays and become angels. And it makes sense. They work in the startup economy. They understand the technology, the market, and the gestalt of startup life. They are allocating capital to the startup ecosystem.