I swore I would go offline for much of Memorial Day Weekend. But I cheated and peeked at my email late Saturday afternoon and discovered an email from a friend saying, “I’m surprised to see you take such a public stance on the capital gains tax rates,” with a link to a New York Times article on the topic.

I read the article in the New York Times on the carried interest debate and was shocked to see my name and a reference to me that read:

“As the Senate Democrats sent signs that they were open to a tax increase, investors and their lobbyists mobilized quickly, warning that the proposal could stifle investments that create jobs. A group of 80 venture capitalists traveled to Boston to urge Senator John Kerry and Representative Barney Frank, Democrats of Massachusetts, to exclude their business from the tax change, according to Jeffrey Bussgang, a partner at the Boston venture capital firm Flybridge Capital Partners.”

Leading global early-stage venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Cisco /quotes/comstock/15*!csco/quotes/nls/csco (CSCO 23.27, -0.08, -0.34%) today announced they will jointly hold the second annual global business plan competition for students aimed at fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. The competition will leverage Cisco TelePresence(TM), which enables collaboration through a live, face-to-face video network communications experience, to allow finalists from around the world to present their business plans in real time to a joint panel of DFJ and Cisco executives based in San Jose.

The competition is designed to elicit new technology-oriented ideas from aspiring college and university student entrepreneurs around the world. Fourteen finalists will be announced on June 22, 2010. The winner, who will be announced on June 29, 2010, will receive a minimum of $250,000 seed money. The winner will also receive professional feedback and mentorship from both DFJ and Cisco.

Steve Jobs lived up to the hype at D8 on Tuesday, forecasting a dim future for PCs and Google TV, offering candid comments on the Gizmodo iPhone incident, and more.

Thrown by All Things D and hosted by the Wall Street Journal's head tech writer, Walt Mossberg, this year's D conference (the eighth, hence "D8") is the first since 2007 in which Jobs has participated. Given the media attention, you'd think Jobs was the only one speaking.

Last week, the OECD held its 2010 Ministerial meeting and policy forum. The focus of the meetings was on economic recovery and sustained growth. One of the highlights was the release of OECD's Innovation Strategy -- a three year multi-disciplinary effort.

The Key Findings report outlines why it matters.

Know a graduate or undergraduate student with a groundbreaking, world-changing invention or scientific breakthrough? The 2010 Invent Now Collegiate Inventors Competition has $80,000 in cash prizes, a paid trip to Washington D.C., a judging panel of famous scientists and inventors, and a forum for spotlighting incredible work on a national stage.

The Collegiate Inventors Competition is looking for graduate or undergraduate students interested in showing the world how they are on the verge of changing it. The deadline for submission is June 25, 2010.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center, together with other partners, recently released a BioPharma Manufacturing Labor Market Analysis for the greater Charlotte, NC region. The study concludes that the people and skills in the regional labor force can support a major biomanufacturing facility. And the Charlotte region is already recognized for its existing transportation, distribution and energy infrastructure.

So, if a company is considering building a new biomanufacturing facility in the Charlotte region or anywhere else in NC, what economic incentives might be available?

What kind of neat gadgets will Apple come up with next?

The company is notoriously tight-lipped about its future plans. But sometimes you can get a hint for what's next by surfing a company's job listings.

Apple probably doesn't advertise the best jobs it has -- the top-secret and super-cutting-edge stuff it recruits for internally.

Some scholars date the beginnings of globalization from the first move of people out of Africa. Some date it from the spread of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Others date it from the imperial European empires, the Napoleonic wars, or the expanded trade and migration in the second half of the Victorian era. But one thing is certain: In the last two decades, the Internet and cheaper air travel have created such closer integration and convergence that, for the first time, a single world society is within reach—and higher education, ranging beyond the nation-state, is a central driver.

The "multiversity"—the university with multiple constituencies and demands that Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California identified in the 1960s—has given way to the Global Research University, or GRU. The Global Research University is the multiversity with much more mobility, more cross-national research and learning, and more global systems and rankings.

Up to 2.8 million European jobs could be secured if the transfer of businesses from one owner to another were adequately supported, according to Eurochambres, the umbrella group representing chambers of commerce.

There is concern that focusing solely on creating new businesses could ignore the importance of protecting existing companies.

Every year thousands of small firms – often family businesses – disappear because there is no one to take up the reins.

With more and more universities making a push to commercialize their research, five academic technology-transfer associations from around the world have formed a new organization that will set standards of professionalism for people working in the field.

Backers of the new organization, the Alliance for Technology Transfer Professionals, said it is designed "to help further professionalize and promote technology and knowledge transfer" on a global basis.

“I mean damn, did you even see the test

You got D’s, motherf*$@%&, D’s!Rosie Perez”

—Kanye West

No position in a company is more important than the CEO and, as a result, no job gets more scrutiny. Sadly, little of this analysis benefits CEOs as most of the discussions happen behind their backs. This post is a step in the opposite direction. By describing how Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs, I am at the same time describing what I think the job of the CEO is. Here are the key questions we ask:

1. Does the CEO know what to do?

Several states have instituted tax credit programs for angel investors. Below are links to relevant Web sites for individual states, often with links to the applications or forms needed to participate. Please note that the programs are very different by state, with a wide variety of details involved. It should also be noted that most of the tax credits are on income, and because some states do not have income tax, the credits would not work in every state.

Specific questions about individual state tax credit programs should be directed to the states, using contact information included in Web links. If you are aware of additional materials or states that should be included on this page, please contact Marianne Hudson or Public Policy Committee Co-chairs Liddy Karter or Robert Franklin.

EcoFriend has published its list of the 10 most transformative biofuel technologies. In no particular order, the blog’s authors cited:

1. Nanofarming: a partnership between Ames National Laboratory, Iowa State University, and Catilin to use microscopic materials to havest fatty acids from microalgae without destroying the cells.

2. Transformed tobacco leaves. A project at Thomas Jefferson University to increase oil content in tobacco leaves, making them prospectively viable for biofuels.

More than a few Canadian companies are ready to go public, though only a handful - some gutsy tech startups with heavy backing -- are likely to brave the recent market turbulence and take the final step.

Over the past weeks, initial public stock offerings by Canadian companies have not fared so well, raising less cash than expected in some cases and dropping below their IPO price soon after trading began in others.

Despite months of preparation, sponsors of some issues have pulled or delayed them after prospective buyers proved disinterested.

Size is not important for venture capital funds, the characteristics of small funds are, Silicon Valley Bank director of Israel operations Naomi Herman told "Globes". "Small funds tend to be more focused and have expertise in a particular field or specific growth stage of companies. Their expertise gives them a better high quality transactions flow than at large funds that invest in a range of industries."

Herman added, "Small funds also can supplement the abilities of large funds, rather than compete against them. Small funds can set up investment syndicates. Because of their small size, management fees are low and their partners appear to focus on fostering and the success of the portfolio companies."

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is pleased to announce the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program, an initiative of great significance to the faculty and students of your institution. During the 2010-2011 academic year, the Kauffman Foundation will award up to 15 Dissertation Fellowship grants of $20,000 each to Ph.D., D.B.A., or other doctoral students for the support of dissertations in the area of entrepreneurship.

This initiative will help launch a cohort of world-class scholars into this exciting field, thus laying a foundation for future scientific advancement. We hope that the findings generated by this effort will be translated into knowledge with immediate application for policy makers, educators, service providers, and entrepreneurs.

Zipcar is going public. The car-sharing firm led by Scott Griffith that lets you "borrow" one of its 6,500 vehicles for as little as an hour at a time, has filed a registration statement with the SEC for an IPO. Last month, the firm implemented a $70 million ABS program in order to fund further expansion of its fleet. The proceeds from the IPO will be used in part to pay off some of its debt while it continues to grow.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the service is available in 71 North American towns and cities, as well as the British cities of London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and offers users a range of gas and hybrid models. Although the firm has been around since 1999, it wasn't until Griffith joined that it started making real headway--and changing the face of car rental as we know it. Zipcar merged with rival Flexcar (the brainchild of Steve Case) in 2007 and posted its first quarterly profit last year, around the same time it launched its honktastic iPhone app.

Last year I covered Berkery Noyes' first-ever Venture Capital Summit in Education held at Stanford, where VCs and private equity firms talked about the enormous potential in disrupting one of the world's biggest industries, one that still remains tantalizingly locked up by bureaucracies within bureaucracies. This year's edition will be held at the SoHo HQ of Scholastic, the ginormous kid's publisher, and co-sponsored by Startl, the "venture philanthropy" and educational startup incubator. Yesterday they announced the 10 early-stage companies that will be part of their showcase. These run the gamut of approaches to the challenges of better teaching and learning using technology.

There are the gamers: Muzzy Lane Software, which does immersive 3-D learning environments (like a really cool one of Boston's Chinatown), and Launchpad Toys, which makes Toontastic, "a storytelling and animation tool for the iPad" that debuted at this year's Maker Faire. There are the social networks: Everloop is for tweens and Notehall enables the sale of notes and tests, student to student (sounds a little shady!) There are iPhone/iPad based companies: Watermelon Express (test prep), Irynsoft (full course delivery, with social networking) and CCKF (an agnostic "adaptive learning" engine). Then there's the miscellaneous: Presence Telecare brings speech pathologists to work with students over video chat, and FairChoice Systems helps colleges organize their health information and deliver needed info to students on their smartphones.

When I first started attending panels and VC events, there was a lot of hype around the concept of an ”elevator pitch”. An elevator pitch is an overview of a new business idea that an entrepreneur can explain to an investor in the length of a chance elevator ride shared by the two parties. In approximately one minute, the entrepreneur needs to bait and hook a VC so that he can reel the investor in later.

At business plan competitions and pitch events, “pitch coaches” spent hours with entrepreneurs sharing with them the secrets of the arcane art of the elevator pitch. And once their disciples were fully indoctrinated, the newbies would get to show off their elevator pitching skills. Most entrepreneurs are trained to pack as much information as possible into that minute, driving most pitches to sound like they were being delivered by the spokesman for MicroMachines.