Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well.

The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.

Bresslergroup Builds a Better Mousetrap

Made in USA, new Victor mousetrap is job and environmentally friendly.

Philadelphia – July 6, 2010. The Victor Quick Set Mousetrap, long a category leader, has been redesigned in order to move manufacturing from China back to the U.S. The move increases employment and positive economic impact, while at the same time, decreasing environmental impact.

Woodstream selected new product development firm Bresslergroup to re-design its leading Victor Quick Set mousetrap to reduce assembly and parts costs so that the traps can be cost effectively made in the U.S. By re-thinking the configuration of the parts and the spring mechanism, Bresslergroup came up with a more efficiently-designed trap that can be assembled in half the time as the prior generation of Victor Quick Set mousetraps.

The environmental impact is significant. First, Woodstream has eliminated one million plastic blister packs a year in favor of an all-cardboard package. Second, 15 40- foot HC container trips from China have been eliminated which reduces overall carbon emissions. Finally, the new Victor traps are made of HDPE No. 2 plastic, which can be recycled more readily than the previous plastic material used in Chinese manufacturing. “Redesigning to engineer out costs and carbon impact is a major focus of our client work, across all industry categories. Making small changes can have a huge impact for consumers and the work force,” says Mathieu Turpault, Director of Design, Bresslergroup.

The new, Made in the USA Victor mousetraps are available in Wal-Mart, grocery and hardware stores.

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Bresslergroup, based in Philadelphia, offers innovative product solutions via integrated user research, industrial design and production engineering. The consultancy serves consumer, medical and industrial manufacturers. Since its founding in 1970, Bresslergroup has won more than 80 major design awards and has authored more than 100 patents. www.bresslergroup.com.

Woodstream Corp. is a leading manufacturer and marketer of quality-branded rodent control products, caring control products for pets and wildlife, natural solutions for lawns and gardens and wild bird feeding products. Woodstream’s growth is fueled by a consumer-driven approach to product development. For example, a key focus for Woodstream Corp has been to add organic and or environmentally friendly products to its portfolio. www.woodstream.com.

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like.

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” said Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station.

I wish you could have seen what I awoke to last Saturday morning.

My room was perched on a slight hill, in a clearing overlooking the edge of the water.

Through the picture window just beyond the foot of my bed, I could see the green outline of a giant lake's mountainous rim sloping gradually into the blue vastness.

The only thing wrong with the image was the clock on the nightstand.

It claimed that it was 2 PM... I almost never slept past 7 in the morning.

And then I remembered...

I was 13 times zones from home.

The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Mr Batt O’Keeffe T.D. has welcomed Enterprise Ireland’s Annual Report and Accounts 2009 published today, (Thursday 8 July 2010) saying the report shows a robust performance by Irish companies during the global economic recession in 2009. Minister O’Keeffe also stated that Enterprise Ireland client companies will create 60,000 jobs by the end of 2015.

Enterprise Ireland is the Government agency responsible for the development of Irish companies and driving Irish export sales. Enterprise Ireland client companies are responsible for over 250,000 jobs (134,000 directly employed) and spend an estimated €19bn per annum in the Irish economy, delivering huge economic impact to communities across almost every town in Ireland.

Women often pin all their hopes on a good mentor, aiming to engineer the kinds of career connections that seem to materialize organically for men. Myths about mentors abound. They are assumed to have superpowers for solving every kind of career dilemma, from meeting the folks in the next department to getting chosen for a career-making assignment. They are believed to have telepathic empathy, be unendingly patient, and be willing to advocate for you at every turn.

That sounds an awful lot like another American icon: Mom.

But your mentor is not your mom. Of course, your relationship with your mentor should be mutually productive and satisfying, but, keep in mind that this is about getting ahead in your career. Women sometimes expect a maternal level of emotional investment from their mentors and want someone who will look out for them like a mother hen. If you’re emotionally overinvested, you’re already off track. You’ll be disappointed with your mentor in particular — and cynical about mentoring overall — if you have unrealistic expectations about the nature of this important relationship.

Today, President Obama spoke with workers at Smith Electric’s new factory in Kansas City. Missouri. With a $32 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act coupled with $36 million in private capital, the electric vehicle company is building up to 500 all-electric trucks.

While he was there, the President also had the pleasure of announcing the company was hiring its 50th worker at the plant. By September, that number is expected to grow to 70, and at the project’s peak, Smith tells us the project will create more than 220 direct and indirect jobs. As the President said:

[T]he reason I’m here today is because, at this plant, you’re doing more than just building new vehicles. You are helping to fight our way through a vicious recession and you are building the economy of America’s future.

Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures, is an experienced VC, advisory board member, and former entrepreneur who knows what it takes to start a successful business.

He recently posted seven solid pieces of career advice for entrepreneurs on his blog, Continuations.

From Wenger's blog:

First: many people think they want to be an entrepreneur but few actually are. The best way to tell is to look at the things you have already done. If you have never taken the initiative to create something from scratch (and even if that something is just a new club at school) you are probably not well suited to being an entrepreneur.

For all its problems, America is a great place. And one thing that makes America great is its prosperity. Yes, some people have suffered during the recession — but compared to all the other countries in the history of the world, America is rich. Why?

One reason is that America is a good place to do business.

Dinesh D'Souza, author of "What's So Great about America," points out: "In most other societies, the businessman has been looked down upon. He's been seen as a kind of sleazy guy. But then American founders specifically put protection for patents and trademarks in the Constitution.

And suddenly, the entrepreneur is taken from the bottom of the heap and brought to the front."

Speaking in Brussels yesterday (8 July), European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said the EU would need a harmonised feed-in tariff to boost investment in solar power and other renewable energies. His comments came as the parliament in his native Germany was voting to approve cuts to the national feed-in tariff.

The commissioner praised the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) for guaranteeing "a fair price" for renewable energy, urging Europe to adopt something similar.

"I think we need a European EEG," the German suggested.

The ground-breaking regulation, adopted a decade ago, made Germany the world's biggest solar market despite its northern location and paved the way for similar schemes to be applied elsewhere across Europe.

It can sometimes be a difficult task deciding whether or not to include a particular clip in our weekly Beer O’Clock newsletter (The Best and Worst of Anthill TV).

While the mandate might seem simple — the video needs to be about innovation, invention, creativity and/or entrepreneurship (the values we hold dear) — the selection process actually involves a surprisingly complex number of considerations, such as balance, educational content, local relevance, chuckle-factor and good taste.

Investment bank Allen & Co. is once again hosting its media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Attendees include Google cofounder Larry Page, News Corp king Rupert Murdoch, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, and whole bunch of other people who flew in on their own jets.

At the event two years ago, an image of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang banging his head on the table perfectly told the story of his company's failed merger with Microsoft.

Which image of the billionaires and millionares descending on Sun Valley tells this year's story best? For us, it's the one where not-yet-rich-guy Pandora founder Tim Westergren looks back at the horde of photographers camped outside his hotel with a half-smile and a little tiny bit of fear.

Innovators around the world are scrambling to find ways to make the world a better place. The only problem is their ideas tend to require a lot of money to make and use! What's more is that most of these helpful inventions are made to be used in third world countries where funds are limited.

Solution? Here are five clever people who use simple household appliances to save lives and improve the quality of the planet.

One of the best things that happened to me as a grad student was receiving the gift of a laptop from my brother-in-law. What was great about it was that what was a new computer to me was not, in fact, a new computer at all. In fact, it was quite old: five or six years old. What was so great about this? It didn't have a wireless card in it, so I couldn't get on the Internet. That meant that when I needed to find something online, I had to leave my dissertation study, lock the door, go down several floors in the library, find a computer to jump on, locate what I was looking for, and then go all the way back upstairs. Doing this was such a pain, that I typically found myself staying put and writing for several hours at a time.

It's no longer convenient for me to work with that computer, but there are plenty of times when I miss the freedom that old computer gave me from the temptations of email, Twitter, and the rest of the Internet. Figuring out how to free yourself from distractions so you can do your best work (pace Merlin Mann ) is something that all academics—and all writers—need to learn how to do.

BlackBerrys, iPhones and Droids may dot congressional committee chambers and sometimes — despite rules to the contrary — appear on the House and Senate floors. But a growing frustration still pervades Silicon Valley that there is more than distance separating Washington and Silicon Valley. There’s a gap in knowledge, too. Washington doesn’t get tech.

Some call it Capitol Hill’s own “digital divide” — the growing gap in understanding between lawmakers responsible for resolving the tech community’s most pressing issues and the industry leaders who first call attention to these issues.

The gap is all the more worrisome to tech industry leaders because of the speed with which new devices and practices are clashing with old ways of doing business.

Australia's job creation has been explosive, beating estimates by 200% yesterday. Unemployment is plummeting, already sitting at a level where most economists consider an economy 'fully employed'.

Yet Australian job creation could soon hit the brakes, not for lack of jobs, but for lack of workers.

A new joint report from the Australian Industry Group and Deloitte explains that one of Australian CEOs largest concerns is that a shortage of available workers will crimp their companies' growth prospects.

Running a startup is a combination of luck and skill. The luck part of that you can’t control, but serial entrepreneur and technical innovator Jerry Kaplan notes there are certain qualities that successful entrepreneurs share. He runs down the five most important in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University. Business acumen is helpful, but to really succeed, he says, people skills are just as important.

Back in January 2010, Google declared that it was no longer willing to continue censoring search results on Google.cn, and that it would possibly shut down the Chinese search page, and potentially even its offices in China. In March, Google backed that talk up by redirecting Google.cn to Google.com.hk, a move that enabled it to keep providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese but from Hong-Kong.

At the end of last month, the Chinese government made it clear to the company that it wasn’t happy with the redirect, and that its Internet Content Provider license would not be renewed if they would keep up this “unacceptable” behavior.

Arizona may be ground zero for the conflict over U.S. immigration policy, but it takes only a few minutes of watching cable television news and scanning local op-ed pages to see how raw and divisive the matter has become in the nation's political sphere.

Yet with all the heated rhetoric about illegals, border security, amnesty, racial profiling, and other incendiary topics, one aspect of immigration isn't emphasized enough: the job-creating potential of immigrant entrepreneurs. They're the vanguard in America's global competition for entrepreneurial talent and innovative ideas. The nation needs to encourage more entrepreneurs from other nations to call America home. Their energy is the elixir of future economic growth.

Take a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute on U.S. multinational corporations. In Growth and competitiveness in the United States: The role of its multinational companies, the consulting firm notes that big business comprises less than 1 percent all U.S. companies, yet the 2,270 multinational corporations in its database accounted for 31 percent of the growth in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product from 1990 to 2007. Even more important, U.S. multinational corporations have contributed 41 percent of gains in labor productivity since 1990—and 53 percent of the productivity increases during expansions.

Lexington, Mass.-based CommonAngels has reportedly raised $10 million for a new (it’s third) co-investment fund, according to a regulatory filing today. The last time the group raised funds was back in 2005, to the tune of just over $10M.

CommonAngels, named after the city’s historic public meeting grounds, is a group of 75 leading private investors and several dozen limited partners in two co-investment funds (make it three now). Their main focus is on capital efficiency: Series A rounds of $5ook-$5M with total capital less than $20M.

Congrats to James Geshwiler and everyone at CommonAngels on this latest fund raising; this news will certainly excite the innovation economy here in Boston.