Two years ago I started my website The Rise To The Top in October 2008. The goal was to create a non-boring resource for entrepreneurs centered around a combination of video interviews (RISE...the web show) with successful entrepreneurs, big thinkers and "doers" (as opposed to people that just talk about doing) as well as blog posts, videos and other goodies.

Of course, like many of us, I really had no idea what I was doing. I constantly tried different things, had some lonely days (weeks, months) in the beginning, but eventually things started to click. I want to share this story with you to show you that this can be done by any hustling entrepreneur looking to grow a community and following. I’m no more special than you (even though my mom told me so) and the principles below I bet you can apply to your business and online strategy.

A reader asks: I’m the founder and CEO of a successful startup and we’ve been trying to sell certain non-core assets (including some IP) to a competitor. Their CEO sent me a letter of intent, which I signed and emailed back to him last week. Now I just received a much better offer from another company and was wondering if I can back out of the first deal. I’ve seen some articles that imply letters of intent are non-binding – so I just wanted to make sure.

Answer: Whether a particular letter of intent (LOI) – sometimes referred to as a “term sheet” or “memorandum of understanding” – is binding or not depends upon the precise language used and the actions of the parties. Many companies typically do not want an LOI to be binding because many of the material terms of the deal have not been negotiated (and they do not want a Court to start filling in those terms in the event of litigation).

Venture capital database VentureDeal has just released its quarterly funding report, which takes a look at the investments in the world of the Web, digital media, software and ecommerce. During the Q3 of 2010, VentureDeal reports that 343 companies raised $1.8 billion in venture capital funding which is down 14% in total funding versus Q2 of 2010 and down 6% in the number of companies funded.

Three of the four sectors showed a decrease in funding amounts and the number of companies funded. Only the Software sector showed an increase in funding amounts, jumping 19% in terms of actual investment amount.

SEATTLE – For eons, powerful tides have raged through Puget Sound, ripping along at 11 feet per second at their peak, predictable as the phases of the moon.

Three years from now, a local utility hopes to begin converting a portion of that raw energy to electricity, part of a growing effort to harness the tides to power homes and businesses miles from the smell of salt air.

The Snohomish County Public Utility District's pilot project is small – two turbines with 500 kilowatts of total capacity and an average output of 50 kilowatts – hardly a panacea for all that ails the United States' energy portfolio. But tidal power is garnering increasing attention as a niche supplier of renewable alternative energy in Washington, Maine and Alaska. The tides, some say, have the potential to light five percent of the nation's homes – nearly nine gigawatts of generating power.

The burn: Perilously settling for a trivial job based on advice from a past era.

The diagnosis: In many cases, the most common advice is not the best advice. In world where one week is completely different from the next, we must look at life through a new lens and be prepared to question the conventional advice we’ve been given about how to lead a “successful life.”

What got us to where we are is not necessarily what will get us to where we want to go.  In the following interview, young entrepreneur and author, Scott Gerber, offers his perspective about how to thrive in this new marketplace.

The winds of change are whipping across the face of retirement everywhere. Consider:

• In the United States, visions of gold watches and handshakes are fading as workers delay planned retirements and some doubt they will ever be able to afford to stop working.
• In France, waves of protest by millions of workers who took to the streets last fall could not stop the government from raising the retirement age from 60 to 62.
• In fast-aging Japan, the world's oldest country, men stay on the job until the age of 69.5 on average, well past the national retirement age of 64.

Driving such trends are both individual and global factors. The economic crisis of recent years has shattered nest eggs that people were counting on to finance their retirements. Besides the need for continuing income, many baby boomers plan to keep working past their parents' retirement age in order to stay useful and mentally active. "The usual belief is that people have delayed retirement for economic reasons," says Kent Smetters, a Wharton insurance and risk management professor. "But it's also true that because life expectancy is going up, people want to keep busy." There is a bonus for those who do: Tests show that people who stay on the job remain mentally sharper than those who retire. 

How innovative is Germany? This is the question that in future three illustrious research institutes will be answering in carrying out the “Innovation Indicator” study on behalf of Deutsche Telekom Stiftung (Deutsche Telekom’s charitable Foundation) and Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI, Federation of German Industries). From 2011, the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and the Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology at Maastricht University (MERIT) will have the task of compiling the well-known league of nations in which Germany is compared with the world’s leading industrialised countries. From now on, Deutsche Telekom Stiftung and the BDI are presenting news and information about innovation on a new web site www.innovationsindikator.de. The next study is due to be published in the autumn of 2011.

“The ideas presented to us by the consortium under the leadership of Fraunhofer ISI appealed to us not least because the institutes proposed a clear new direction in line with state-of-the art innovation research,” Dr. Klaus Kinkel, chairman of Deutsche Telekom Stiftung, states. “The approach they propose involves a clear focus on a smaller set of individual indicators as well as a convincing added value relative to other national and international studies.”

What follows are the prepared remarks of Senator Birch Bayh, which were to be delivered on December 1, 2010, at the AUTM commemoration at the Washington Convention Center. Senator Bayh decided to go off script and spoke contemporaneously. His prepared remarks are published here with his permission. Any emphasis by way of bold or italics appeared in the original speech as written.

I’m delighted to be here today to say “Happy Birthday” to the Bayh-Dole Act on its 30th anniversary. It’s great to look around the room and see so many friends who worked so hard to make this day possible along with those who appreciate what the law means to our country, and indeed, the world.

Bayh-Dole teaches several lessons worth recalling:

• A handful of motivated citizens really can change the course of a nation;
• An idea whose time has come can bridge the partisan divide; and
• Each generation must cherish and protect the entrepreneurial spirit that built America for it is our greatest national asset, but can also be lost if neglected or discouraged.

The story of Bayh-Dole began one day in 1978 when I received a call from Ralph Davis who ran the technology transfer office at Purdue University. When Ralph told me that potentially important discoveries made on campus were being prevented from fully benefiting the taxpayers supporting the research, he had my full attention. When he said that Purdue’s experience was shared by universities and small companies across the nation, I told him to let me know what needed to be done. He did, and set the wheels in motion for what was to become the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980, commonly known as Bayh-Dole.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents voted unanimously on Friday to approve the 2010-2020 Strategic Plan, a document that has been in the works for months and will carry the USM’s actions for the next decade.

A strategic plan is constructed and voted on once every 10 years, according to USM media relations and web manager Mike Lurie, and outlines key visions and goals for the entire University System.

“We must greatly increase educational attainment and make the needed investments in research and scholarship if the United States is to remain a world leader in creativity, innovation and the knowledge economy,” USM chancellor William “Brit” Kirwan said during Friday’s session at Coppin State University.

[CANCUN, MEXICO] Bamboo, a wild grass that grows in Africa, Asia and Latin America, could help tackle climate change and provide income for local communities, a conference has heard.

It can sequester carbon faster than similar fast-growing tree species such as Chinese fir and eucalyptus when properly managed, said Coosje Hoogendoorn, director-general of International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), based in Beijing, China.

She was speaking today (2 December) at the launch of 'Bamboo and Climate Change Mitigation' — a report on bamboo's potential role in adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development — in a press conference held during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 16), in Cancun, Mexico.

Need some ready-made legal documents? 

Angels and micro-VCs are an increasingly important part of the funding landscape for many of our clients, particularly those in the web and mobile application sectors.  One side effect of all these new investors has been a proliferation of new variations of the standard legal documents presented to start-ups.  Some good, but many bad.

The start-up community in the US responded to this same trend by rallying around a series of standard, open source, vanilla investment documents.  Ted Wang of Fenwick & West, a Silicon Valley law firm was the first advocate of the new model that I’m aware of with a post in VentureBeat.  He eventually created the “Series Seed” documents that are used by many leading angels including Ron Conway and Mike Maples.  Others also made their documents publicly available, including Techstars, YCombinator and Founder’s Institute. All with the goal of simplifying the fund raising process for investors and for start-ups.

There are two types of people in the world: those that love Christmas commercials and those that don't.

I've always been a sucker for all things Christmas, including ads, and I could watch them for hours. Actually, I just did! Here are eleven great Christmas spots. There are several you may remember fondly, and one or two you might be seeing for the first time.

I’m convinced that people who have fun at work are more innovative, as well as happier. I don’t have any big scientific studies to prove this, but in my considerable business experience, I haven’t seen many successes come out of a group of fearful pessimists or unhappy people.

As I was looking through the literature, I did find evidence that many strong business leaders, like John D. Rockefeller, knew how to laugh at themselves. Humble leaders with this trait seem to create cultures that don't take themselves too seriously; cultures willing to take risks; cultures capable of creating and supporting a greater number of ideas.

I can postulate several reasons why laughing and having fun at work might be linked with creativity and innovation. Here are a few:

* Escape the inhibitions. Laughing tends to remove inhibitions. Under the spell of inhibition, people feel limited and stuck. This is what we refer to when we say “thinking outside the box”. Encourage everyone to be open to new ideas and solutions without setting limiting beliefs. Innovation is more about psychology than intellect.

I’ve been using the metaphor of “throwing pebbles in a stream” to describe the effect of regulation on innovation. No single regulation or regulatory activity is going to deter innovation by itself, just like no single pebble is going to affect a stream. But if you throw in enough small pebbles, you can dam up the stream. Similarly, add enough rules, regulations, and requirements, and suddenly innovation begins to look a lot less attractive.

A new study entitled ”FDA Impact on U.S. Medical Technology Innovation: A Survey of Over 200 Medical Technology Companies“ makes this point very well. The study, supported by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association and the National Venture Capital Association, found lots of ‘pebbles’–inefficiencies and lags in the system of approval that added up to a big problem. Survey respondents viewed

current U.S. regulatory processes for making products available to patients (the premarket process) as unpredictable and characterized by disruptions and delays…..[as well as ] inefficient and resource intensive

The end of 2010 is fast approaching, and with that have come a flurry of State of the Cleantech Union-type reports and forecasts.

What’s clear so far is this: American wind installations last quarter hit a three-year low, although there’s over 4,000 gigawatts of potential for offshore wind development, and the government is streamlining the permitting process to help spur growth. Solar appears to be healthy and poised to rise in the U.S., with large-scale solar installations for utilities expected to double each year between now and 2015. And a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group predicted that solar and biofuels would be the first renewable energies to become competitive with traditional energy sources like coal — possibly within the next five to 10 years.

Ask a child if there is a shortage of ice cream in the world, and no doubt, the response will be an emphatic yes—there certainly is. And ask a tech CEO if there is a shortage of engineers, and you will get the exact same answer.

That’s the story I used to tell, based on my research on engineering graduation rates and outsourcing trends. In 2005, my team shattered the myths about India and China graduating 12 times the numbers of engineers as the U.S. (we found that the U.S. graduated more than India did in 2004, and the quality of Indian and Chinese graduates was not comparable to that of American schools). And our survey of 78 executives from companies that Lou Dobbs (remember him?) harangued for “Exporting America” revealed that they weren’t going offshore because of shortages of U.S. talent or deficiencies in the skills of Americans, but because it was cheaper and these companies needed to be closer to growth markets.

Nine Windows is a technique that helps you examine the innovation opportunity across the dimensions of time (past, current, future) and space (super-system, system, sub-system). For instance, say you’re designing metal utensils that can be used on an airplane to eat, but not to use as a weapon. Instead of innovating the utensils themselves, you could focus your efforts on the raw materials that make up the utensils (sub-system), or even on the surrounding environment (super-system).

The core of Nine Windows is a simple grid consisting of nine boxes, or windows. Filling in the boxes provides eight additional perspectives on the problem you’ve identified, and helps you decide how and at what level to apply innovation. As such, you should leverage Nine Windows early in your project to better scope the innovation opportunity.

A Few Factoids from Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 from the National Academy of Sciences:

• Thirty years ago, ten percent of California’s general fund went to higher education and three percent to prisons. Today, nearly eleven percent goes to prisons and eight percent to higher education.¹ 
• China is now second in the world in its publication of biomedical research articles, having recently surpassed Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Spain.²
• The United States now ranks 22nd among the world’s nations in the density of broadband Internet penetration and 72nd in the density of mobile telephony subscriptions.³
• In 2009, 51 percent of United States patents were awarded to non-United States companies.⁴

Think your decision to own your own business is all yours? Maybe not. New research finds that your parents had a lot more to do with your career choice than you thought.

While previous researchers have determined that your career inclination may be inherited genetically and others say the driving force is our upbringing and the nurturing we get from our parents, a new child-development theory bridges those two models. The research indicates that the way a child turns out can be determined in large part by the day-to-day decisions made by the parents who guide that child's growth.

"This model helps to resolve the nature-nurture debate," said psychologist George Holden at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who conducted the research.

Twitter is contemplating raising a new round of funding that could bring the company’s overall value to $3 billion.

The potential investors include the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In addition Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment company, could be involved.

This news comes after other stories make it appear that Web 2.0 is still on the rise. Google is trying to buy the online coupon service Groupon, and Facebook now has over 500 million members and is valued at 12 to 14 billion dollars.