If anybody needs a feel-good moment in this winter of our discontent, it's Michael Bloomberg. When the embattled New York city mayor gave his State of the City address yesterday he hoped to take the spotlight off the issues that have recently bedeviled both city residents and City Hall: snow removal screw-ups, fraud in the payroll system, withering criticism over a new schools chancellor, and fury over neglect of the boroughs.

Another report on venture investing is being released today, this time showing a decline in fourth-quarter deal activity compared with the same quarter in 2009—albeit a slight uptick from the previous quarter—and a significant overall gain for the entire year.

Venture funding during the fourth quarter of 2010 amounted to $5 billion in 765 deals nationwide, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, based on data from Thomson Reuters. That represents a 6.8 percent drop in dollars invested and an 11 percent decline in deal count compared with the same quarter of 2009, when $5.4 billion went into 864 deals.

Venture capitalists invested $640 million in Washington state companies last year, an increase of 15 percent over 2009, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Report. That's the good news. Now, the bad news. Investment levels are still way below the totals of 2006, 2007 and 2008 when an average of $1.1 billion was invested in the state annually.

Many people, especially those who have spent years struggling up the corporate ladder, dream of jumping ship and becoming an entrepreneur. But every job move is fraught with risk, and the move from employee to entrepreneur is on the high end of the risk curve. This is a big jump, especially in a down economy, so do your homework first on this one.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review a while back, “Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change” there are at least five common missteps that professionals make when moving to a new job, and I will offer the comparable relevance for those of you contemplating leaving a company to initiate or join an entrepreneurial startup:

1. Not doing enough research. In moving to a new company, the questions to ask are expectations, financial stability, cultural fit, and role responsibilities. All of these apply directly to starting your own company. Test your “dream” startup plans on some experienced entrepreneurs to get a reality check before you leave your current job.

I’ve recently been engaged to help sell a very successful national franchise company and been able to observe firsthand many reasons why a franchise company grows to $10 million in sales through 600 nationwide locations. Last year I also worked on the other end of the spectrum, helping two business owners locate the necessary capital and expertise to begin the journey of becoming the next great franchise company.

These two experiences have helped deepen my understanding of the five Sacred Rules that distinguish great franchise opportunities. I offer them here, in case you are considering converting your business into a franchise company.

I saw the following explanation of why startups fail on Quora this morning:

Answer Summary

The top reasons are:
1. No one wants the product created.
2. Management teams lack flexibility to change direction when needed.
3. Resources (funding/time/labor) are managed poorly.
4. Inability or failure to obtain and/or maintain sufficient capital (for a variety of reasons), whether or not managed poorly.

One answer claims lack of luck is the main reason, leading to the conclusion success is random (as luck is random), leading to the conclusion the only way to succeed is to try a large enough number of times.
(Just flip a coin until you get "Heads").

The “Innovation for Associations” white paper proposes four barriers to innovation in associations: diffuse leadership, low tolerance for risk, unwillingness to commit resources and complex organizational structures. While these barriers certainly exist to varying degrees in most associations, they are not the real root causes of our community’s continuing struggle with innovation. Throughout my career working in and with associations, I have observed four other deep-seated obstacles that have rendered the phrase, “association innovation,” something of a contradiction in terms.

Our nation’s economic growth and competitiveness in 2011 will top the list of things to worry about among policymakers in Washington. The extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for another two years beginning January 1 means the debate over short-term economic stimulus is, hopefully, behind us. Now the fight over fiscal policy really begins. And the debate will focus on how to put our fiscal house in order, not whether we need to do so, which in turn means the term “investment” will be politically loaded—and hotly debated. After all, investment to some means future growth but to others is just federal pork to be cut or blocked.

The best way to create more jobs in a state is to grow them at home, rather than poach them from elsewhere: Some 95 percent of all job gains in a year in an average state come from the expansion of existing businesses or the birth of new establishments.

However, the usual recipe of tax credits, R&D, training programs, and physical infrastructure is not sufficient, by itself, to spur such “organic” job creation. States also need to cultivate their industry clusters—geographic concentrations of interconnected firms and supporting organizations. Properly designed, cluster strategies are a low-cost way to stimulate innovation, new-firm start-ups, and job creation by helping to link and align the many factors that influence firm and regional growth.

Startups are often cash-strapped in their early days, but it’s usually during those times that they most desperately need legal counsel. So what’s the best way to compensate those professionals for their time?

Despite some perceptions, the industry norm is for attorneys to not take equity or a board seat as a form of compensation from startups, says attorney Martin Nichols in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture at Stanford University. In Silicon Valley, fee deferrals are far more normal.

Technology and soothsaying aren't congruent. But every year-end tech enthusiasts, the world over, pull out their keyboards and frantically type out what they think will make or break in the year that comes next. Unlike soothsaying, most tech foretelling isn't cooked out of thin air; therefore there are greater chances of them coming true. If not, I can always blame it on the vagaries of the world of tech. Nevertheless, here are my 10 tech predictions for the year 2K11.

Email will fade but death not imminent

This has already started to happen. People are using less of email than before and communicating more via social networking services. But contrary to many other predictions the ubiquitous email will not die any time soon (they had even predicted the death of the RSS feed, but that also shows no signs death or decay).

01.19.2011– New York, NY – January 19th: Mayor Bloomberg in his State of the City address today announced that New York City is the hotspot for college graduates starting businesses.

“Recently, New York was named the number one city for young entrepreneurs and that’s a great sign for our future, because as much as we are competing with places like London and Hong Kong for private investment we are competing with places like Boulder and the Bay Area for the college graduates whose ideas will attract investment, and power the 21st Century economy,” said Bloomberg.

1."Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha

3. "Be willing to be a beginner every single morning." - Meister Eckhart

4. "All great ideas and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning." - Albert Camus

5. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

Building on the foundation of the well-known BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- a new set of up-and-coming emerging markets is gaining attention. The so-called "CIVETS" countries -- Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa -- are now touted as hot markets because they have diverse economies, fast-growing populations, relatively stable political environments and the potential to produce outsized returns in the future.

Far-flung geographically and shaped by vastly different cultural, religious and political structures, the CIVETS show the potential to develop rapidly and reward those willing to take on emerging market risk beyond the more-established BRIC countries, experts say.

I’m back at the blogging desk. I took a break over Christmas to reflect on my previous year’s sum of mind dump in the blogosphere and to try to figure out if I had any impact at all on anyone who may have read one of my musings on business.

It’s not that I think my posts lacked in detail and significant information, just that the responses were limited and the number of people signing onto the blog was less than astronomical. Most importantly, I didn’t get ranked by eCairn in the top 150 Most Influential Bloggers. Geez.

Three Technologies That Changed Our Brains

Worthington, Minn. — Minnesota is lagging behind other states when it comes to creating new high-technology jobs, according to a new report out this week.

The Science and Technology Authority, created by the Legislature last year, issued the report this week. The group also notes that Minnesota actually lost high-tech jobs in 2009, the most recent data available.

Jobs in science and technology are among the best paid in the work force, averaging more than $70,000 a year. But it's a section of the economy where Minnesota lags other parts of the country.

(Honolulu, Hawaii & New York, New York, January 19, 2011) – The Intelligent Community Forum named its 2011 Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year today at a luncheon ceremony at the Pacific Telecommunications Council’s annual conference (PTC’11) in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (13:30 HAST, 18:30 EST, 23:30 GMT). The ICF’s Top Seven are communities that provide a model of economic and social development in the 21st Century using information and communications technology to power growth, address social challenges and preserve and promote culture. The Top Seven announcement is the second stage of ICF’s annual Intelligent Community of the Year awards cycle.

John Roach writes:Nearly 70 percent of Americans aged 16 to 25 view themselves as creative, but only about a third think they're inventive, according a new survey on perceptions about invention and innovation.

"They are checking off all the right boxes. They like science, they like math, they like solving problems for others, they think they are creative," Josh Schuler, the executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, told me today. "But they don't, for some reason, take that leap from creative to inventive."

The finding points to a disconnect that threatens to hobble efforts to nurture a new generation of innovators who can help keep American society prosperous and strong.

Good news from the folks at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program: We’re already doing something right to create jobs in the region!

Referring here to the program’s new report entitled “Job Creation on a Budget: How Regional Industry Clusters Can Add Jobs, Bolster Entrepreneurship and Spark Innovation.”

The report, released today, says that the best way to create more jobs in any state is to grow them at home rather than trying to steal them from somewhere else. In fact, roughly 95 percent of all job gains each year in an average state comes from the expansion of existing businesses or the creation of new companies, it says.