Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu topped Greenpeace’s third annual ranking of global IT companies on their efforts to address climate change.

Greenpeace announced the release of the third version of their Cool IT Leaderboard, which reveals how some global IT companies are leading the industry by proving the potential of IT solutions to address climate change and reshape energy use. The rankings are based on three categories: Solutions — the technologies that a company has developed to improve efficiency; Advocacy — how much effort companies, and particularly their CEOs, are putting toward the passage of global climate legislation; and Footprint — the commitments companies have made to reduce their own emissions.

Greenpeace is urging IT and communications companies to get involved with energy policy and take advantage of the commercial possibilities in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The NGO estimates that applying IT to power generation, transportation, and buildings can result in 15 percent emissions reduction over the next 10 years. They want evidence that IT companies are not only developing solutions for their customers, but measuring and reporting their own carbon and energy savings potential. It notes that cloud computing, a major IT industry initiative, poses “a major challenge” to IT’s positive contributions to climate control by centralizing compute power and resources in energy-hungry data centers. Read Greenpeace’s new report, Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change, which shows that cloud-based computing has potentially a much larger carbon footprint than previously estimated.

“Startup”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Venture Capital”, “Social Media”, “twitter”, “Facebook”. All the wrong kind of tags are mightily sized on the blog of an entrepreneur who is not building a product around these tags.

An entrepreneur’s job is to build a product, do sales/marketing, evangelize the same and acquire customers! Simple. However, most of the times the evangelism is around entrepreneurship, startup culture, raising money, etc. Instead, the talk should be around the code you write, the product development you do, the travel to the customers and the mechanics surrounding the business.

Either the tags are incorrect or the right kind of evangelism is missing.

Depending on when you walked into the room, you could have heard a rousing speech on how angel investors have eclipsed venture capitalists in driving innovation or a sober discussion of why VCs and angels need to work together.

That keynote and panel at Thursday’s 2010 Angel Capital Association Summit in San Francisco, on the heels of the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting in Silicon Valley, illustrated the range of sentiments flying around as both types of investors rethink their models.

The three-day angel event drew more than 400 investors from across the U.S and nearly 50 other countries. An informal electronic poll of attendees found that 48% sometimes look for investments that subsequently will require venture capital and 55% thought relations between the two groups are okay but have room for improvement.

1. Finland: 608.2

Because of harsh winters and long nights, among other factors, Scandinavia leads the world in per-capita cups; the greatest addicts, by a large margin, are the Finns. Traditionally, cold countries have been the thirstiest importers, while the tropical exporters haven’t been nearly as enamored of their own product. That’s changing. Brazil, the largest coffee producer, is on track to surpass the U.S. as the world’s greatest aggregate coffee consumer in the next few years. Helping the cause, the Brazilian government has started to include café com leite—coffee with milk—in school meals for kids aged 5 and up.

2. Norway: 322.6

3. Denmark: 180.6

4. Germany: 145.9

5. Slovakia: 144.6

6. Czech Republic: 142.8

7. Sweden: 139

8. United: Kingdom: 134.7

9. Canada: 125.6

10. Greece: 116.2

The first time I left my job to begin an entrepreneurial venture, I was ready. I had money and a business plan. What else did I need, I thought? I gave notice to my employer and to my surprise, fear set in immediately. I didn’t leave my job…that time. I realized that while I prepared externally, I didn’t prepare internally – emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually – for this life transition.

Almost nine years have passed since I left my job and began my venture as an entrepreneur. I’ve learned that entrepreneurship is a process – it is like building and then crossing a bridge. I’ve also learned that entrepreneurship takes place “within” an individual – it is not necessarily about leaving a job , but rather about living a life of fulfillment. Entrepreneurial thinking and living takes time, energy, tools, and action. Here are some ideas that have proven to be helpful to my clients in making the transition to entrepreneurial thinking and living.

Do Something Different Every Day

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Contemplating an NDA? Here’s what you need to know – Non-disclosure agreements can be among the most important paperwork you sign as a startup. Attorney Scott Walker runs down five things you’ll need to keep in mind if you’re about to insist on one – from either side of the deal.

The new face of venture capital: A road map for entrepreneurs – Even as VCs begin to slowly invest more, startups are running into more hurdles than ever. Serial entrepreneur Kevin Lawton gives his thoughts on trends among VC firms and what’s driving change in the industry today.

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living. So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth, and I harbored a deep-rooted desire to get the best education possible. My wife and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in North Bergen, NJ, and we made do with what we had.

For a couple of years after getting my degree, I wondered whether I had made the right choice. Even though I scored a great job at CS First Boston in its IT department, I was just writing code and designing systems. Yes, I started to enjoy reading BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal; but had the financial sacrifice and time away from my family been worth it? It didn’t seem to have been.

Washington, D.C - Today, the New Democrat Coalition unveiled a comprehensive agenda aimed at encouraging innovation and boosting small businesses. The New Democrats' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda, which has been endorsed by the full 69-member Coalition, builds upon the New Democrats' long standing commitment to policies that embrace technology and innovation to drive sustainable economic growth, competitive businesses and a strong workforce.

Employing over half of the American workforce and accounting for over 97% percent of our exporters, American small businesses and entrepreneurs are vital to rebuilding our economy and achieving long term economic growth. The New Democrats' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda, comprised of proposals authored by New Dem members and other New Dem priorities, seeks to grow our economy by providing much needed support to American small businesses, bolstering competitiveness in the global marketplace, and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.

"Key to rebuilding and growing our economy is supporting American small businesses so they can compete globally, get Americans back to work, and do what they do best - innovate," said Congressman Joseph Crowley (NY-7), New Dem Chair. "The New Dems Agenda for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is focused on finding ways to address the challenges small businesses are facing and renewing our commitment to American innovators and entrepreneurs."

AMID the $6 million homes perched on a beachfront cliff in this conservative Southern California enclave, the seven-year-old Honda Civic hybrid with the Obama bumper sticker is the giveaway.

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

Of all organizational processes, that of innovation would seem to be the least amenable to use of IT, since IT is usually applied to workflows that are orderly, repeatable and given to formal specification. However, as Steve Gordon and I have found out in studies from over 40 companies, IT has a significant role to play in helping innovators in their tasks and the firm to increase the returns from its innovation portfolio.

In order to accomplish innovation, R&D folks need to tap certain capabilities. They can do so by combining the resources at their disposal in ways that are not easily imitable. For example, every corporate R&D department has a history and archive of previous projects, technical know-how, market trends and success-failure stories. But how many can claim to have organized this potentially priceless store into a knowledge management system than is accessed and updated by innovators so that they can effectively utilize the firm’s memory for identifying promising projects or solving problems? We find that inspite of the plethora of knowledge management systems existing in many firms, innovators either do not use them or do not substantially benefit from them. The capability to manage knowledge then, is important to make it easy for innovators to execute their tasks. We find that IT, that is the technology itself and the IT department, can help companies develop a number of capabilities that are required for effectively accomplishing innovation tasks (Tarafdar and Gordon 2007, Gordon and Tarafdar 2010).

After four years of steady growth, the high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs in 2009, or 4 percent of its workforce, according to the Cyberstates report released today by TechAmerica.

Engineering and tech services jobs suffered the biggest blow, losing 59,000 jobs. Communications services shed 53,000 jobs. Software services lost 20,700 jobs.

Some states did manage to add tech jobs in 2008, however. California, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts and Virginia added the most. Virginia had the highest concentration of tech workers for the fourth straight year.

The water pressure is there, so you might as well use it.

That's the business plan of Zeropex, a Norwegian company that produces pico- or micro-hydro generators. The company has created a device that harvests the excess pressure from water running through municipal water plants to run a turbine and create electricity. Water agencies -- along with heavy-duty private sector water consumers like oil refineries and agribusiness -- have to pressurize water to purify it or move it. Currently, most municipal water agencies use pressure reduction valves to reduce the water pressure before sending it along.

"We're basically replacing pressure reduction valves with a turbine," said CEO Tor Ersdal during a presentation at Nordic Green II. The company's current turbine can generate up to 80 kilowatts of power. A second-generation turbine in pilot testing at the moment can generate up to 300 kilowatts. At 300 kilowatts, the payback on the machine is just under two years, he said. The electricity created by the turbine can be fed into the grid or consumed locally.

Well, the publisher of Goldsmith’s latest book wasted no time today in making sure reporters here in City Hall's Room 9 (on request!) had enough copies to keep them riveted for months to come. Title: “The Power of Social Innovation,” with the subtitle of “How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good."

Here’s a nerve-tingling description of what the book is all about, courtesy of a media consultant hired to promote a now-likely-to-be-suspended book tour by Goldsmith:

"This candid and engaging book offers concrete strategies for aspiring innovators and civic entrepreneurs across sectors—non-profit, civic, government, business and philanthropic— who believe that we can do better in solving our communities’ most pressing social problems. Rich with vivid examples of how results-based problem solving can be applied to areas like criminal justice, homelessness and education, the book demonstrates that when innovators effectively engage both government and the communities it serves, real results are possible.”

I love cooking, so I know a fair amount about Croc-wearing superstar chef Mario Batali. But here is something I didn’t know until reading an interview with him in Harvard Business Review.

He has the makings of a great CEO.

As the chief executive of 14 high profile restaurants in the United States and Spain, Batali has figured out that the stereotypical brilliant-but-belligerent chef is not an effective model for leadership in the modern food service industry.

Describing his organizational business model, it’s all about team. Creating the right team. Helping it overcome problems. Promoting from within.

“All of the executive chefs and most of the general managers and wine directors have worked with me directly. They know where I’m going. They know the shorthand we use in describing how things need to change. I go into most of the New York restaurants almost every day, and we talk about things as they’re evolving. My objective as a manager, of course, is to remove the obstacles that prohibit greatness of the people that I’ve hired. So I ask, what is the hardest thing about today? And I say, well, why don’t we get somebody else to do that, or let’s remove it, or let’s streamline it, let’s make it easier. Then they can enjoy that zenny tea service effect of working through something they know how to do.”

If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans underfoot at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans will critically wound small companies. The agency has long worked under tremendous pressure and a growing backlog that has been the subject of heavy criticism. As details emerge of what the Patent Office plans in terms of improved performance and mechanisms to achieve it, one thing is clear: Patent filing and maintenance rates may shoot so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations.

The result could be even greater control of technology markets by a handful of large corporations that have the resources to file extensively and lock out small companies.

Some people are superb at creating visual tools to illustrate complex subjects. John Maloney is one of those gifted people who can synthesize information into a picture which helps people understand the emerging, and existing, knowledge that rest within an organizations “network” of people and processes.  More importantly the illustration above provides a “ systemic view” of how and where social technology integrates into the capabilities infrastructure of an organization.

A “Platform of Knowledge” is representative of what every organization has but most cannot “see or actualize” the knowledge because they lack the understanding to recognize that knowledge is an asset.

Over a year after the Recovery Act of 2009 was signed into law, the U.S. Department of Energy says that $32.5 billion of the $36.7 billion it was authorized to spend is "spoken for," and nearly 5,000 projects have been funded. The department has selected all but 1 percent of the proposals that will receive grants and contracts. So far, however, only $3.5 billion has actually been spent, and the money has only directly created 22,841 jobs.

This week, the DOE's senior advisor for Recovery Act implementation, Matt Rogers, provided an update on the department's progress in identifying projects that will receive funding. While much of the Recovery Act focused on funding for near-term recession relief, including tax relief for individuals and support for local and state governments, the funding allocated to the DOE was mainly for projects with longer term payoffs, including building infrastructure such as wind farms and battery factories and conducting research.

New rules designed to improve the transparency of investment funds could make venture capital less attractive to small businesses by forcing them to publish commercially sensitive information, according to venture capitalists.

The EU has set up an SME finance forum to tackle the ongoing funding crisis facing small businesses but Uli Fricke, chair of the European Venture Capital Association (EVCA), says a clause in the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) will undermine efforts to support fast-growing firms.

Fricke said companies with 50 employees will have to meet additional disclosure criteria if they accept venture capital, forcing them to share details of research investments and business strategies.

I know I was complaining about this earlier this year but I have to say that April was really quiet, as far as small business research goes.

The good news is that there are some real gems among the few releases we had.

Entrepreneurial Geography

In light of the frequently repeated jobs-jobs-jobs mantra, a policy brief out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government answering the question “What Makes A City Entrepreneurial?” was both timely and intriguing.

On the surface, the answer to that question is fairly intuitive — although I’ll put it differently than the good researchers at Harvard did. The easier and cheaper it is to start and run a business, and the more room there is in the local or regional economy (less dominated by large companies that crowd out the smaller ones), the more independent small businesses there are.

In the book Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about Disruptive Technologies. He talks about various well established companies in various industries failed to adapt themselves to the disruptive technological changes and which led most of them to fail in longer run. These kind of changes keep happening all the time around us, and once we map it to disruptive technology, suddenly we see reason.

When I [Mayank Sharma] applied it’s principle to my previous company (SiRF), I suddenly could see why the company failed. SiRF had established market leadership in GPS chips being used my navigation devices and in other niche segments. Profit margin in these industries was close to 50% and the company thrived in this market. Market for GPS chips in mobile phone was quite small then, and the profit margin quite low (30%-40%) for SiRF to address this market. But the market for GPS chips did change drastically in favor of mobile phones, where the requirements were completely different (low profit margin, low power etc..) and SiRF could not hold on to its leadership position.