My sister Michelle has quite the entrepreneurial resume. About 10 years ago, she took her academic knowledge of language acquisition and tied it to her (then burgeoning) knowledge of parenting to create a novel way for people to teach hearing infants and toddlers to communicate via sign language.

It turns out that infants and toddlers want to communicate and can, cognitively, but their weak throat muscles frustrate their efforts.

We've written several times here at ReadWriteStart about the benefits - for students and for startups - of offering internship opportunities. Almost 70% of college students say they plan to pursue an internship while in school, a smart move considering that recent figures show that 90% of direct-from-college jobs will go to students who've had internship experience.

Just as students have expressed an interest in pursuing internships, many startups are also keen to identify potential interns, and there are several companies, including YouTern and InternMatch that work to place students with startups and not just with large, established companies. Internships are a great way to identify (and recruit) young talent.

However matching students and startups can be difficult if students don't live near thriving entrepreneurial centers. So is it possible then to pursue a virtual internship?

While entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, I take particular interest in what the most populous countries are doing to comb their citizens for entrepreneurs. Italy is the sixth most populous country in Europe, and the twenty-third most populous in the world. It also has the world's seventh-largest nominal GDP. Unfortunately, it also has the sixth highest government budget and a large public deficit, such that the economic confidence crisis in the Euro zone that sparked in Greece put a spotlight on Italy´s economy, which faces similar insolvency risk. With Italy´s public debt around 120 percent of GDP and growing, policy options are increasingly constrained. Fortunately, spurring entrepreneurship is not necessarily expensive (although it does take political commitment) and is a proven source of economic energy.

For mastering search. The internet search company Yandex is already three times more popular than Google in its home market (Russia) and this year, it made its move onto Google's international turf with the launch of an English-language search engine. One of Yandex's key advantages has always been the complexity of the Russian language, whose Lego-set of prefixes, roots and suffixes has forced it to be a step ahead in the nuance of its algorithms. That pushed the Firefox browser to drop Google in 2009 as its default search engine in Russia, succeeding it with Yandex.

The Startup Visa Act is proposed United States legislation that would allow foreign entrepreneurs to get a visa and move to the US.

Making it easier for immigrants to start businesses in the US would be a boon for America, as it competes in a networked global economy which is increasingly driven by talent and entrepreneurship. Many of the greatest entrepreneurial successes in America (and by extension, the world) were started by immigrants.

As a French entrepreneur who would like to move to the US some day, I opposed the original Startup Visa Act.

Google, which has been called the #1 company to work for, has a surprisingly difficult time holding on to employees.

So, amidst its many innovations, like building algorithms and cars that drive themselves, Google made time for an internal endeavor: Project Oxygen.

After scouring years of performance reviews, feedback surveys and more, Project Oxygen identified eight characteristics employees at the Googleplex admire most in bosses.

The shocker? Technical abilities, which is the defining trait of many Googlers, came in dead last.

When it comes to health and happiness, some states have it in spades, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Based on nationwide surveys conducted from January through December 2010, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measures respondents' overall satisfaction according to categories such as life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, and other areas.

Not surprisingly, happiness seemed to correlate with healthy lifestyles. The happiest states exercise frequently, eat produce regularly, and have low obesity rates.

You keep putting off sales calls to organize your desk or surf the Internet. Or, facing a deadline, you start writing, get nowhere and decide to take a “break.” Or, maybe you’ve completed every aspect of planning a project, except one small detail, and you keep putting it off–until it’s too late.

If any of these hypotheticals resonate, you’re not alone.

According to The Procrastination Equation: How To Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done, a new book by Piers Steel, Ph.d., procrastination is rampant, a mixture of human nature and deadlines that create irrational delay. Winner of the Killam Emerging Research Leader award, Steel teaches human resources and organizational dynamics at the Haskayne School of Business/University of Calgary. At least 95% of us procrastinate at least occasionally, Steel writes, citing research, and “about 15-20% of us do it consistently and problematically.”

If you’ve been around long enough, you’re probably aware that most important things in life come about seemingly by accident, chance, or coincidence. Discovering what you were meant to do, meeting your spouse, finding an incredibly unique opportunity or a great job, that sort of thing.

Well, those events are not as random as you might think. Certain behavioral attributes increase the probability of these “happy accidents” occurring. And not only are these characteristics of successful people, they are, I believe, learnable or teachable.

First, here are some examples of what I’m talking about - how important things happen seemingly by accident - followed by five enabling characteristics of successful people:

* Steve Jobs returned to Apple as part of its acquisition of NeXT. A year later, Jobs was once again running the company he co-founded and cleaning house. Eventually, the stars aligned for the greatest turnaround in business history. But Jobs returning to Apple was nobody’s grand design. It just sort of happened that way.

As the situation at Japan's 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant goes from bad to worse—four of the plant's six boiling-water reactors have been damaged by explosions or fire, and radiation has begun leaking into the atmosphere—officials there continue to pump seawater into the reactors in a desperate attempt to cool down fuel rods and avoid a complete meltdown that could release radioactive fallout across much of the country and beyond. The move by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates Daiichi, to use seawater doped with neutron-absorbing boron in the reactors' pressure vessels all but ensures that they will never function properly again, permanently damaging one of the world's 25 largest nuclear power stations.

Dread the tiresome process of filling and submitting college applications – the unending queues, city hopping, etc. Well, there’s a solution for it all. Nopaperforms.com takes you through a three step process wherein students can submit their applications online by way of web forms and the data pooled in forms a concrete database. The end-consumers here are colleges and educational institutions that can instill the online form application process to manage student enrollments during admissions.

eBrandz chats up with Vishal Shah, the visionary behind NoPaperForms.com and the following is an excerpt from the same.

Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business.
NoPaperForms.com provides a software-as-a-service that will help thousands of academic institutions across India accept admission applications online for free and in a matter of 15 minutes.

The annual review is one of the most dreaded tasks on any employee’s to-do list. Companies won’t give raises and promotions without it. Human resource departments demand the forms, supposedly for legal reasons. And the process is fraught with anticipatory angst, defensiveness and dread.

But the worst thing about annual employee performance reviews? They simply don’t work.

The performance appraisal system’s greatest shortcoming is that it’s not really about improving performance. It’s about sticking to a schedule and complying with human resources guidelines. By emphasizing process over results, the performance appraisal system has fatally lost credibility.

Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state's Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming.

Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy "sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits," says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed's newspaper, fedgazette. The state's population, slightly more than 672,000, is up nearly 5% since 2000.

The biggest impetus for the good times lies with energy development. Around 650 wells were drilled last year in North Dakota, and the state Department of Mineral Resources envisions another 5,500 new wells over the next two decades. Between 2005 and 2009, oil industry revenues have tripled to $12.7 billion from $4.2 billion, creating more than 13,000 jobs.

A new report of job growth, conducted by Babson College Associate Professor Joel Shulman, with input from Emily Leventhal at Athena Capital Advisors, suggests that job growth over the past five years has grown fastest among “Entrepreneurial” companies. Job growth among publicly-traded US Entrepreneurial companies (market cap greater than $200M), as measured by the newly created EntrepreneurShares Mutual Fund (ticker: ENTRX), outpaced job growth among comparably-sized non-entrepreneurial, publicly traded companies in each of the past five years. Moreover, the results show that publicly-traded entrepreneurial companies grew by 0.25% even during 2008-2009, when the overall market declined by 3.25%.

 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010.

Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proof of concepts, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models.

In the following story, FortiGuard Labs looks at the most significant computer viruses over the last 40 years and explains their historical significance.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BioFlorida is calling all geniuses – BioGENEiuses that is. High school students (grades 9-12) enrolled in science-related courses are invited to submit applications to the Florida BioGENEius Challenge, which is a stepping stone to the U.S. National BioGENEius Challenge. National winners then move on to compete for $19,000 in cash prizes at the Biotechnology Institute’s International BioGENEius Challenge, the most prestigious high school science competition in the world for original research in biotechnology.

“This competition is a great opportunity for students statewide to get their research and ideas seen by national and international biotechnology experts. In turn, showcasing the level of young scientific talent that exists in Florida reinforces how important it is to support and strengthen science education in our state,” said Russell Allen, president and CEO of BioFlorida, Inc., the trade association for Florida’s bioscience industry that represents more than 200 member companies and research organizations in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device fields.

The San Francisco Bay Area has a storied tradition as the birthplace and leading hub of biotechnology, but something curious has happened the past couple years. Most of the scientifically groundbreaking, medical-textbook rewriting, financially lucrative new biotech drugs of the 21st century are coming from somewhere else.

This dawned on me last week as I started thinking about the 20-year outlook for the Bay Area life sciences cluster, in advance of the Bay Area Life Sciences 2031 event I’m organizing in San Francisco on Wednesday evening. It forced me to think about the really innovative drugs that still have a chance to generate billions of dollars in revenue two decades from today, that will help people live longer and better lives, and that are blazing new scientific trails. I’m talking about drugs that are a scientific, clinical, and business trifecta—drugs like Gleevec, Avastin, Herceptin, and Enbrel.

Crowdfunding is the latest initiative to raise capital for start-ups. It's a collective that invests small amounts to support fledgling ideas, and its popularity has created a new asset class with shared, minimal risk.

However, it will be some time though before crowdfunding, which usually takes place through the Internet, evolves into a reliable, sure-shot method of fund-raising in India.

Grow VC India, the first formal platform that promotes this, was launched in July in partnership with Springboard Ventures Pvt. Ltd. While the platform has 1,200 registered investors and 122 companies, it is yet to nurture a deal. However, more than half-a-dozen companies have received funding offers, and are said to be in advanced stages of negotiation. Similar platforms elsewhere in the world like Startnext in Germany and KickStarter in the U.S. are active.

The current imbalance in the supply and demand for venture capital is creating opportunities for V.C. funds.

New limited partner commitments to venture capital funds have dwindled in recent years. This scarcity of capital has created its own Darwinian effect, with a new breed of start-ups flourishing as a result of innovation rather than capital-induced growth. As these companies mature, however, many of them are looking to venture capitalists for the money and expertise to realize their potential.

Back when the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, liquidity was abundant, with unprecedented valuations for initial public offerings and acquisitions. Because of this bubble, venture capital returns in the 1990s skyrocketed. And as investors grew increasingly bullish on venture capital, limited partner commitments into new venture capital funds shot up to a high of $86 billion in 2000, well over 300 percent of the level two years earlier.

Venture capitalists and farmers share some common ground: tolerance for risk. With the wrong seeds and wrong conditions, investments can wither. With the right seeds and right conditions, profits can abound.

Now agriculture upstarts are pitching venture capitalists to plant their cash in technologies that could revolutionize how farmers produce, move and sell what feeds the world.

“We’re in a boom time for agriculture,” said Jason Henderson, vice president of the Omaha branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.