We’ve written about a number of investors and nonprofits looking to attract and keep companies in Michigan as a way to help the state’s economy kick back into gear. But Detroit Venture Partners is looking to go a bit further. The brand new venture firm wants its portfolio companies to move their operations right into the heart of Detroit, in the hopes of transforming the Motor City into a vibrant startup community like Boston and San Francisco, says CEO and managing partner Josh Linkner.

“We’ll strongly encourage people to move their business into the city of Detroit,” he says. “In Boston there is a great ecosystem and we’re trying to create something similar where companies play off each other. As we fund companies, we’re trying to build something in the heart of Detroit.”

The firm officially opened its doors on November 1st, with a few other heavy hitters working alongside Linkner, who founded and ran Detroit-based interactive promotional marketing firm ePrize, before moving to a chairman role this year. Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans and majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, is also on board as a general partner of DVP, as is Brian Hermelin, founder and chairman of growth equity firm Rockbridge and chairman of Active Aero, a provider of Web-based systems for air charter management. The latter two were investors in ePrize, Linkner says.

Silicon Valley Bank, the banking unit of SVB Financial Group said it has signed a joint venture agreement in China with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Co.

Silicon Valley will make a capital contribution of USD 75 mn to the joint venture and own a 50% stake in it, the company said in a regulatory filing.

Earlier this month, we were excited to add our first Silicon Prairie News contributor in our state's capitol city, Lincoln, Nebraska (see our post: "Welcome our new writers"). Our new writer, Kate Ellingson, won't begin contributing until early next year, and thanks to a website launch today, we already have a major item of news for her to follow up on in January (in addition to a growing list of other startups and entrepreneurs).

Nebraska Global, a Lincoln-based venture capital fund, launched its website today, giving the public its first glimpse of what's to come. Their site, nebraskaglobal.com, contains over a dozen pages of information, from covering the fund's mission to a listing of the companies it's invested in – the first being "Don't Panic Labs."

Forget about going to the gym -- that resolution is typically only good for about a month. What are you going to do for the fitness of your business in 2011?

NEW YORK, N.Y. - October 19, 2010 - Notwithstanding its economic and political problems, more Americans would like to live in California than in any other state. For the seventh time in a row since 2002 California tops the list of states where the most people would like to live if they did not live in their own states. The next most popular states are Hawaii, Florida, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, New York and Washington.

Strange as this sounds, I discovered one of my best productivity tips on maternity leave.

Here’s what happened: like many people, I have exaggerated notions of what I can get done in a day. I wake up thinking that today is the day I’ll research and write a 5000-word article and land a new client and touch base with three other ones and set my travel for next week and come up with a new book idea and go give a speech in, say, St. Louis, in defiance of all known laws of physics. As the motivational poster in my middle school principal’s office put it, aim for the moon, and at least you’ll land among the stars!

Aside from being astronomically incorrect, however, I’ve discovered that this metaphor has another big flaw. Massive to-do lists set you up for failure. Because even if you do several things, you can’t possibly do everything. Shunting “write 5000 word article” from Tuesday to Wednesday to next week to never is just discouraging.

Martin Kleppman, a co-founder of Rapportive, a cool startup that adds social profiles of the people who email you to your Gmail, has a blog post up about Y Combinator, the top Silicon Valley startup accelerator, saying he didn't enjoy it.

Startups spend three months months at Y Combinator working like crazy and getting mentoring and support, and at the end crowds of angels and VCs beat each other up to put money into the companies. What's not to love about that for a startup?

The gist is basically this: when Rapportive entered Y Combinator, they already had a live product. Most startups who join Y Combinator have a demo at most, and so all the startups are focusing together on building their product, which creates more camaraderie and shared insights.

As the Defense Department’s public review last Thursday of its war strategy in Afghanistan points to a slow troop withdrawal in 2011, efforts to better understand how to spur growth after such conflicts are speeding into top gear. A new cadre of economists, military leaders and other specialists are writing a long-needed canon to guide how to re-build economies during their transition from war to peace using indigenous entrepreneurship. Expeditionary Economics (ExpECON), as the field is now known, is informing large questions of national security strategy, positioning economic growth as a more important component of the formula for strategic success. While I defer to these experts in assessing the entrepreneurial health of current war-torn economies, I thought it timely to take a look at some of the neighbors engaged in their conflicts.

I begin today with Pakistan – a nation whose political history, up to recent times, can only be described as tumultuous. The country spent more than half of its short independent life under a succession of military dictators and largely ineffective civilian regimes. With constant news about security threats, extremists, assassinations, corruption and, most recently, devastating floods, one should have little reason to expect much good news in terms of entrepreneurship.

I’m the least trendy person on the planet.  I’m the last one to recognize a trend and the first one to move away from a trend if I stumble upon one.  I know that sounds weird coming for a guy who has spent most of his career in marketing but it’s true.  I’m far more interested in recognizing patterns and catalyzing new trends than jumping on existing trends. I’m perpetually leery of data suggesting trends and allergic to anyone claiming to be a trendsetter.  So you can imagine my surprise when I received an offer from Jeremy Gutsche , founder of Trend Hunter, to receive and share a sneak peek of the top 20 trends from their 2011 Trend Report.

Trend Hunter claims to be the world’s largest crowd sourced trend network with 40,000 trend hunters who have identified 100,000 micro trends.  The trends are then crowd filtered to identify the most popular nougats and made available to Trend Hunter customers.  As a student of crowd sourcing platforms and a believer in the value of filters to help make sense of the daily fire hose of content we receive, I was curious to check out the platform and output from Trend Hunter.

To comprehend U.S. tax policy, you need to understand how taxes impact small business owners. That’s because when politicians discuss taxes, they almost always pay attention to their effect on those who own companies. So what does IRS data show about small business owners and taxes?

Business ownership is a bigger source of income for wealthy people than for those who have less money. IRS data show that income from business ownership accounted for 20 percent of the adjusted gross income (AGI) of tax filers with incomes of more than $250,000 in 2008, but only three percent of the AGI of those earning less than $250,000.

Time is running out if you want to buy gifts before the holidays are over.

If you're still scrambling for ideas on what to get for a busy road warrior, we have some cool gadgets that will make perfect last-minute gifts.

From productivity tools to e-readers, we tested out and researched some useful gear and services business travelers are sure to go crazy for.

After reflecting over the past few weeks on Turning 45 as well as Death and Dying, I’ve reached a conclusion that I’ve said out loud several times: “My life is most likely more than half over.”  The singularity not withstanding, the chances, at least today, that I’ll live to be over 90 aren’t great.

Over the weekend, I saw two blog posts from friends – one from Joanne Wilson about her mom passing away titled Judy Solomon, Entrepreneur and one from Ken Smith (I’m actually close to Ken’s brother Keith, the CEO of BigDoor) titled A Eulogy for Elmer Smith.  Both are beautifully written – Judy was 73 and Ken was 97.  Joanne starts off with a very insightful statement:

“Old enough to have lived a full life yet young enough to have had her life cut short.  I always thought she would live to the ripe old age of 90 something, but life doesn’t always turn out as expected. “

SITKA, ALASKA (2010-12-20) The Juneau Economic Development Council and the US Forest Service are collaborating on a new tool to guide development in the panhandle. The Southeast Cluster Initiative should help communities and businesses visualize opportunities for sustainable growth based on population, resources, and broad economic trends.

Visit the Juneau Economic Development Council website.

 “A cluster is a straightforward concept: It’s a set of firms in a related field that collaborates together to address common problems.”

Brian Holst is the director of the Juneau Economic Development Council. He took an hour recently to explain to the Sitka Chamber of Commerce how identifying and focusing on a region’s strengths was critical to boosting economic growth.

SAN FRANCISCO — Signs you’re an old fogey: You still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film.

And you enjoy using e-mail.

Young people, of course, much prefer online chats and text messages. These have been on the rise for years but are now threatening to eclipse e-mail, much as they have already superseded phone calls.

Major Internet companies like Facebook are responding with message services that are focused on immediate gratification.

Nearly every week from last February until mid-May, Google trotted wide-eyed visitors into a small room at its colorful headquarters in Mountain View, California. Inside were a comfy couch and easy chairs, a tall fabric houseplant in a corner, and a large high-definition television set atop a credenza. Under the watchful eyes of engineers and product managers on the other side of a mirrored window, the visitors would settle in with a wireless keyboard. They would search for and tune in to All My Children on ABC, catch a Glee episode on the Web, watch a recording of The Daily Show from a digital video recorder, or surf over to those witty Old Spice ads on YouTube—all on that nice big TV screen.

The company was testing one of the boldest bets in its 12-year history: Google TV. It is software that aims to give people an easy way to access everything available on regular television channels and the vast sea of content on the Internet, all on the biggest screen in the house—a bid to reinvent television for the Internet age. The initiative was set for its first public demonstration on May 20, and Google's geeks had to make sure the product would appeal to the average viewer, who watches about five hours of television a day. So week after week, the Google TV team would try out countless variations on everything from the look of the search results to the background colors for the screen, hoping to learn what worked best.

The game has changed. Economies around the globe are faltering. Creation and commercialization of new technologies can hardly keep up with demand. The climate is in peril. But at the same time, organizations and individuals are increasingly recognizing the need to collaborate and progress together in some fashion.

Accelerating innovation to the marketplace requires scalability with unprecedented speed. To achieve this with yet higher levels of success, we must change our paradigm by expanding the possible routes to the pinnacle. We are coming to understand that stakeholders with common technology commercialization goals must cooperate to some degree in order to remain competitive globally. This is not an oxymoron. Whether it was villagers of times long gone, or trade associations of a more modern era, this is an understanding we have long held.

Harvard University offers a fascinating and important class on Commercializing Science. The class is taught jointly by Harvard's Business School, Law School, School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Kennedy School. The diverse disciplines are part of what makes the course so significant. In the "real world," successful commercialization efforts require effective alignment of many corporate functions. This fall, I was asked to serve as an expert advisor to the program.

For the first 75 minutes, the class follows the traditional HBS case study method. For the rest of the class, the students work in cross-discipline teams. These teams were tasked with developing a commercialization plan for some of the ideas emanating from Harvard's labs. Their "final exam" consists of presenting their recommended commercialization plan to about 200 faculty members, students, and potential investors.

Above is a lighthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. The spray from Lake Erie froze layer by layer until the structure was encased in ice. WKYC.com has a gallery of photos by George Payamgis. "Frozen Cleveland lighthouse draws visitors"