UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Steve Duncan is an urban historian and photographer whose mission is to “peel back the layers of a city to see what’s underneath” – to piece together the complex cities we inhabit. In this fascinating video, we follow Duncan as he explores the underbelly of New York City. Andrew Wonder, using a Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 24mm f/1.4L lens, documents the adventure. The sensory experiences must be extraordinary, as Alan Feuer (who accompanied Steve and Andrew on one of their trips) writes in the New York Times:

The sounds down here are even more impressive than the sights and smells: the Niagara-like crash of water spilling in from side drains; the rumble of the subway; the guh-DUNK! of cars hitting manhole covers overhead, like two jabs on a heavy bag.

Have you ever thought about starting your own company? Do you have a great idea that you think could be the next Twitter? Perhaps it’s time you turned your dreams into reality. More and more, young women are not only starting their own businesses, but they are also achieving enormous success doing so. Take recent start-ups like Her Campus, Rent the Runway, and LearnVest: all three lucrative businesses were founded by women in their early twenties.

Once known for massive steel mills belching smoke into the sky, Cleveland could one day be known as the center of innovation for clean, alternative energy with wind turbines lining the edge of Lake Erie and spreading west across the northern portion of the state.

Don’t hold your breath, you say? Consider this: LEEDCo, a nonprofit group heading Northeast Ohio’s efforts to initiate an offshore wind project, and Fresh Water Wind, a private developer working with LEEDCo to finance, construct and operate the wind turbines, recently signed an option with the state of Ohio for offshore land on which to build a 20-megawatt wind farm.

Overview | What is the “Sputnik moment” to which President Obama referred in his State of the Union address, and how do educators place this comment in the context of science education? What questions and ideas do students have that can generate innovative science projects? In this lesson, students consider the current state of science fairs, explore the role of creativity and ingenuity in science, and develop science fair project proposals.

Be nice to your classmates, because - with the help of K-State's Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship - the next Mark Zuckerberg could be sitting in the next desk over.

This year, the center will hold its third annual entrepreneurial competition, an all-university event titled "The Next Big Thing."

Jeffrey Hornsby, professor of management and director of the Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship, said the competition is meant to generate fresh business ideas.

After my quarterly Return Path exec team offsite last week, my team and I were rehashing the day’s conversation over dinner. Was it a good day or a bad day? An upper or a downer? We concluded that the day was as it should have been – a good mix of what I will now articulate as the three main functions of a management team. Here they are with some color:

1. Create an environment for success: Do people like to come to work every day? When they get there, do they know what they’re supposed to do, and how it connects to the company’s mission? Are people learning and growing? Are you building an enduring organization beyond you as a leader?

The European Commission on Wednesday (9 February) requested public recommendations on how to cut the duplication and bureaucracy that hobble innovation in Europe.

The goal is to streamline four programmes totalling more than €143 billion in funding for innovation and research.

These include the Seventh Framework Programme for research (FP7), the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, the Cohesion Policy aimed at regions, and funds made available by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

Globalization is both the biggest opportunity and the greatest challenge for business schools worldwide as they struggle to keep up with the demand for graduates who can work across countries and cultures, says a report released today.

The 346-page report is the result of a three-year study by a task force of deans and scholars from top business schools worldwide. It offers a critique of the flurry of global activities that business schools have initiated in recent years.

If you’re like many small business owners today, your workplace includes three generations of employees: boomers, Gen X and Gen Y/Millennials. ZDNet recently took a look at the challenges of managing multigenerational workforces and how some companies handle this issue. Although the examples used were large companies, there’s a lot that small businesses can learn.

In my ongoing quest to get you good transcripts of the wonderful interviews we’ve done in the past on This Week in VC, I present you with one amazing interview here with angel investor Tom McInerney. He’s a friend, co-investor, former entrepreneur turned angel investor and “wizard of Oz” behind the scenes at the uber hot startup Klout.

Engadget got ahold of Nokia CEO Stephen Elop's memo to employees yesterday, and it's one of the most scathingly honest assessments of a company from its leader that we've ever seen.

He basically says that Nokia's current position is hopeless -- Apple owns the high-end smartphone market, Android has taken market leadership from Nokia in the midrange after only two years, and Chinese company MediaTek has created reference designs that now ship in one-third of all smartphones worldwide.

Up until summer 2009, Ami Kassar was a nine-to-fiver, working for Advanta, one of the largest providers of credit cards to small business. But then the company went bust, another victim of the credit crisis, and the newly unemployed Mr. Kassar decided to strike out on his own.

He formed MultiFunding, a broker that helps arrange loans for small businesses. It was hardly an auspicious time to open any business, but Mr. Kassar’s challenge was particularly daunting: the freeze in small commercial loans was only beginning to thaw. Plus, business loan brokering has been a fairly obscure and even somewhat shadowy field — but one that Mr. Kassar says he believes serves a growing need.

If you are raising kids, you have a unique advantage over your childless peers when it comes to creating a successful business. I’m pretty sure this claim will probably raise the hackles of some, but hear me out. There are lessons for all in drawing parallels between raising a kid and a company.

Let’s start with the assumption — and I think it’s a good one — that the end goal of starting a business should be to create something that can one day thrive without your personal involvement. That way, you’ll have all of your options open: run your business forever without the stress of dealing with the details, install a manager and become a shareholder, or — if the price is right — sell it.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, e-mail is the cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems. That’s why we spend so much time talking about e-mail efficiency, inbox management, and better messaging strategies.

Indeed, just the other day Rick recapped The 99 Percent blog’s recommendations for e-mail etiquette for the super-busy.

Having reviewed the blog’s advice, though, it seems to me that it’s not really about etiquette so much as just advice for communicating more effectively and efficiently. If you apply these tips, your e-mail will be more lucid, which will result in fewer traded messages, faster responses, and less time in your inbox. It might look like etiquette, but it’s really quite self-serving.

Throughout the history of franchising, there have been some amazing rags-to-riches stories, many of which have entered the realm of modern business lore. When the Franchise Help staff and Matt Wilson decided to assemble a list of the 10 most famous franchise founders of all time, it quickly became clear that achieving any kind of consensus about this ranking would be nearly impossible given all the great candidates from which to choose.

In a bid to get people spending again, retailers distributed $332 billion in coupons last year, a 7 percent rise from 2009, according to NCH Marketing Services.

We identified the 10 cities where people are most addicted to coupons, based on data from Coupons.com.

This post has been ruminating with me for a while. It's not a sudden "a-ha" moment that made it form, but a collective group of "a-has!" over the past few months.

Consider this the uplifting post to counter last week's "The 11 Harsh Realities Of Entrepreneurship".

Maryland TEDCO
AND
The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2)

Present

A Webinar Series on
"Demystifying Working with Federal Labs"
Featuring Federal Technology Transfer Professionals

Click Here to Register [or visit http://center.ncet2.org]
SERIES DESCRIPTION:
On April 7, 2010, Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House released its inaugural Open Government Plan highlighting transparency, participation, and collaboration.
"Demystifying Working with the Federal Labs" is a lecture series launched by the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Federal Laboratory Consortium in order to render the technology transfer process at federal agencies more transparent, and to encourage collaborations with the federal labs. This lecture series aims to provide a platform for Federal Laboratories to educate academia, industry, and technology transfer professionals on different technology transfer mechanisms used at the federal labs. While some of the lectures will be an introduction to common technology transfer mechanisms, such as CRADAs and licenses, other lectures will focus on more specialized agreements that may be unique to a particular agency, such as NASA's Space Act agreements.
It is our hope that the series will encourage a dialogue between the federal laboratories and other stakeholders in the area of technology innovation. We hope to reach small businesses, large businesses, academia, economic development organizations, and technology transfer professionals.
THIS MONTH:
INTERSECTION OF CRADAs AND LICENSING -
FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF NCI AND NIST
Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 1:00 to 2:30 pm ET

The second lecture in the series will focus on Collaborative Research and Development Agreements and their interplay with licensing. Two seasoned technology transfer professionals will discuss the rights of the CRADA collaborator in the IP developped under the research plan.

Presenters:

COST: Free, but registration required by clicking on the link above.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE?: This series is online. You need a computer with web access for the visual/audio. Q&A is conducted by a chat box to the speakers. Once registered to the webinar series you will receive a separate email with the webinar url 24 hours before the start of the webinar.

WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE IN THE WEBINAR?: These webinars are open to anyone interested in how federal labs, universities and industry can better work together to foster innovation. This includes university staff, faculty and students, local and state economic development professionals, corporate business development directors, academic liaisons, corporate, academic and federal laboratory researchers, technology transfer professionals, and service providers (e.g. lawyers, consultants).

There is an innovation emergency in Europe and a huge amount of work lies ahead if the EU is to close the innovation gap with competitors the US and Japan, writes Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, in an exclusive commentary for EurActiv.

Let’s say you’ve decided to provide something tremendously fantastic for your customers, even though it meant great expense and hardship. It would be incontrovertible — you’d refuse to compromise on that one thing, even if it seems impossible to work out how to do it profitably.

It’s easy to identify companies who became wildly successful with this technique. Of course this is survivor bias at it’s finest; these examples don’t prove this is a great strategy, they just illustrate that it can work: