Bill Harding: Some people like fundraising. I'm not one of them. Running a profitable company for the past year has afforded me the luxury to wake up every morning and say to my mirror: “What would you most like to do today, you cunning devil, you?”

On an average day, “talk to investors” would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of “take a multivitamin” and “backup my hard drive” on that list. It was something that I knew ought to be done, but being one of the most time-consuming and unpleasant-sounding choices on my list, it didn’t stand a chance competing against 100 exciting ways to build a better product.

At first I felt guilty about this. I take seriously my responsibility to keep Bonanzle as the fastest growing marketplace online, and, knowing that most of our competitors had raised $1 million to $5 million before even launching always gave me the nagging sense that “doing what I most wanted to do” was costing my business growth.

The National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) and the Temple University Fox School of Business announced today that the percentage of venture and angel funds focused on investing in seed stage companies has increased 40% from 2009 based on the second annual survey to its members.

“The speed of turnaround in the situation is truly impressive. It shows the overall pick-up in the confidence that fund managers seem to have in seed stage companies” said Raj Chaganti, professor in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the Fox School of Business.

Sixty-nine percent of the funds in the annual NASVF survey have $20 million or less under management and 85% focus on knowledge-based ventures such as technology, software, web 2.0, science based, communications and media.  Other positive results from the survey were the following:

• 51% of the funds plan to invest more money in companies over last year
• 40% increase in the number of funds able to raise new money in less than a year
• 10% increase in the capital raising climate over last year
• 34% of the funds reported their average investment was between $500,000 - $1,000,000 vs. 18% last year

“This is great news for the companies that have the largest challenge in raising capital,” said Jim Jaffe, president/CEO of the National Association of Seed Venture Funds. “It is good indicator that the economy is taking a positive step forward.  As many studies have shown, startup companies are the best and most economically efficient creator of new employment opportunities.”

In the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, Green et al. report a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals, and compare it with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. describes a method for sequencing target regions of Neandertal DNA. A News Focus , podcast segment, and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neandertal-related discoveries provide additional context for their findings.

[Note: The papers by Green et al. and Burbano et al., as well as the special presentation and podcast, are free to all site visitors.]

Health care and the economy rank among today's most dynamic and important conversations taking place in Iowa and across the nation. While viewpoints vary, in each case Americans are eager for solutions that improve the lives of their families and strengthen their communities. Looking to the future, we all can rally behind a common link that supports recovery from both a wellness and fiscal standpoint: medical innovation.

Basic numbers say a lot. Health care represents 17 percent of our nation's gross domestic product and is an industry expected to generate 3 million new jobs between 2006 and 2016. In Iowa, biopharmaceutical companies had a total economic output of $4.6 billion in 2006 and supported a total of 24,687 jobs the same year.

Iowa has identified bioscience as one of three sectors where the state will focus new development efforts, and for good reason. Effective medical innovation can have a powerful ripple effect. A healthier society translates to a more productive work force, and this combination results in a more thriving economy.

Business incorporation has become synonymous with responsible business ownership. Yet, so many misconceptions and rumors exist about the benefits of business incorporation. So it’s no wonder that even the savviest entrepreneurs are at a loss as to whether incorporation is right for them, what it will cost, and where to start.

Business incorporation (which, by the way, is an umbrella term for a number of business structure options) may be right for some business owners, but it isn’t for all. So it’s worth doing some stepping back and ascertaining whether incorporation is right for you.

The standard for wind turbines being built by the ever-innovating wind industry in utility-scale installations has changed from 1.5 megawatts to 2.5 megawatts in the last year. That means that each time a tower goes up, the standard machine will now generate enough electricity for 240 more homes than it did in 2008.

But the wind industry is on the verge an even bigger shift, a step change ahead in power, efficiency and cost. Those 2.5-megawatt turbines still have traditional gearing mechanisms. Wind's innovators want to free turbine motors from the burden of gears with the simplicity of direct drive.

"In a gear-driven system, you have three stages of gears, and each stage has multiple bearings and a structure to house all of these gears," Sandy Butterfield, the former Chief Engineer of the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) said at a recent wind industry conference. "We want to take a 15 RPM input shaft and spin it up to 1800 RPMs on the high speed side...[an] almost 100-to-1 ratio that requires multiple stages of gears, so a very complicated, high-precision machining, lots of close tolerances."

How do you keep ideas flowing? How do you create a wealth of ideas to choose from? How do you make sure you get to the one killer idea that will make your advert, novel, article or blog post really stand out from the rest?

Some people like to wait for inspiration to strike. Most professional writers, however, don’t have that luxury. You need ideas every working day, not just every now and then.

Luckily, there is a formula for producing ideas on a consistent basis. Of course, like all formulas, it has its limits. You can’t constrain creativity, and to only ever use one method for coming up with ideas would be utter madness.

Last week at an angel investor forum I was privileged to meet Stephanie Spong, who is a Principal with EPIC Ventures, an increasingly rare early stage VC firm. Her experience includes helping startups for many years, and board positions on the Rocky Mountain and New Mexico Venture Capital Associations, New Mexico Angels, as well as several startups.

Her academic credentials include an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a BA degree, cum laude, in Economics and Asian Studies from Brigham Young University. Stephanie also speaks Spanish and Japanese.

Marty: Welcome to Startup Professionals interviews. Tell us what you do.

Stephanie: I am a venture capitalist currently based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with EPIC Ventures. We invest in early stage IT startups and then oversee those portfolio companies through to exit.

Marty: What events led you to your commitment to venture capital investing?

Stephanie: I love building companies. I’ve run a $30m revenue operation with 150 employees and worked in finance and consulting, so I had a good broad business background with both line and strategic advisory roles which is a good fit for what we do in venture. When all goes well, it is a real partnership between the investors and the company management teams, figuring out the strategy, rolling with the punches you get from the economy and competition and working together to create a great company. This work uses everything I’ve learned, both about business and people, so it is a lot of fun.

Imagine a company that is taking a different approach on innovation. They want to be more pro-active and they want to work with external partners. So they identify 10 companies they have not yet worked with, they research on these companies and then they get ready to approach these companies in order to present and discuss potential ways of making innovation happen together.

This is a real case and the next question is important: Where should the first contact take place? One option is with the people on the ground as such a bottom-up approach gives you better access to the people who actually do the work. Another option is a top-down approach where you go as high as you can.

First of all, don’t be fainthearted. Let’s face it, the Michigan workforce has been trained to perform in very hierarchical institutions, where compliance is rewarded and innovation is not. The old days are gone, but the attitude lingers. It will take serious blood, sweat, and tears to turn this around.

Second, seek out the community leaders in government, communities, organizations, etc., that together can help instill a sense of “we’re all in this together.” If Grosse Pointe cares little about what happens in inner city Detroit (for example), then making the changes necessary to invigorate the urban communities will be next to impossible.

Here’s a really terrific summary of my  [Richard Florida]  Q Gathering talk last week in Chicago courtesy of Tim Schraeder.

• Every single human being is creative.
• The real challenge of our time is figuring out how to harness that creative energy so that creative furnace inside of each human being is growing.
• The social categories we impose on ourselves [race, religion, gender ,etc] undermine creativity.

The Great Reset

• The most important event of our time is collapse of our financial institutions.
• We are living through the most momentous opportunities in human history.
• It’s not a depression, recession, crisis or panic… it really is a reset.
• We are in a resetting point.
• “It’s a raw emotion reset…”

• This thing we are going through won’t be over in a day… don’t believe the hype.
• The underlying shift we are going through is one of the largest in human history.
• We come here because we intuit this change is going on and that our society, economy and culture are changing in the most fundamental ways.
• We see these trends and evolving patterns in our own ways.

This report from the U.S. Commerce Department measures the size and economic impacts of green products and services.

The report looks at data from 2007 and finds that green jobs represented at the broadest sense 2 percent of the economy. Among the other findings of the report:

• The number of green jobs ranged from 1.8 million jobs under the narrow definition to 2.4 million jobs under the broad definition.
• The services sector accounted for roughly three-fourths of green business activity; manufacturing accounted for about 13%. Construction and agriculture made up the remaining share.
• Energy conservation, resource conservation and pollution control accounted for the predominant share of green business activities, making up about 80% to 90% of green shipments/receipts and employment.
• Between 2002 and 2007, the share of green shipments and green jobs in manufacturing remained fairly constant, ranging between 0.9% and 1.3%. Green manufacturing jobs fell over this period as did jobs in all manufacturing.

Download the report here.

Mark Heesen, who leads the venture industry’s main lobbying group, said today that there have been pluses and minuses about President Obama’s approach to regulation and taxes. Heesen said the federal government is considering some anti-venture legislation, but he sounded pretty confident that most of it won’t get passed.

Heesen is president of the National Venture Capital Association, and he made today’s remarks on-stage at the group’s annual meeting. The good thing about Obama is that “this is a president and an administration that understands technology,” he said. The downside, however, is that Obama’s adminsitration took on too much, too quickly.

“I think they’re suffering the backlash from that right now,” Heesen said.

Have "design thinking" and "social innovation" become permanently intertwined? You'd have to think so based on Tim Brown's book and the prevailing discourse at any major design/innovation conference (SXSW, PICNIC, GEL, GAIN, LIFT). There seems to be a firm belief that you can't establish any cred as a designer these days if you haven't applied design thinking to a major social issue of some sort (health, energy, education...). Similarly, it would seem that social innovation (or social entrepreneurship) is hopeless without a designer at your side.

So I find myself in an odd spot as I board the 18-hour flight to Tanzania for the World Economic Forum on Africa. While I am committed to using my skills as a designer to engage in social issues, particularly health care, I am finding the discussions at many design conferences to be repetitive and naive. Yes, design can help. But can designers?

Community and place-based foundations are in the midst of an incredible transformation. Their historic roles as fund managers or check writers primarily focused on local philanthropic assets, are evolving to becoming influential catalysts in their communities for social change: taking ownership of issues in their community, mobilizing multifaceted campaigns for change, and creating actionable knowledge for the larger field. These renaissance community and place-based foundation leaders know and engage with a wide circle of stakeholders involved in community issues of interest to them — including those representing nonprofits, governments, donors, and community leaders among others.

This report explores how, through the Knight Community Information Challenge, community and place-based foundations are incorporating community information needs into their work for the benefit of both their communities and foundation missions and strategies.

Download the PDF

A new program will help Wyoming inventors, entrepreneurs and companies get their ideas into the marketplace, allowing them to create technology and business ideas and then communicate those innovations on a national level.

The Wyoming Business Council and the University of Wyoming's Manufacturing-Works Program teamed up to create the Wyoming Innovative Marketplace (WIM), according to a news release.
"We're excited about this new opportunity to create new jobs and enhance the jobs that exist here,"said Wyoming Business Council CEO Bob Jensen.

WIM is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology/Manufacturing Extension Partnership. WIM is affiliated with the U.S.A. National Innovation Marketplace, which helps innovators to commercialize their products or services.

"This is great news for Wyoming's innovators, inventors and small business incubators," said Gov. Dave Freudenthal. "Folks in Wyoming have great ideas, and they're hard workers. This will give them a competitive edge."

50 Fastest-Growing Women Owned Companies Share Key AttributesOn April 28, 2010 the Women Presidents Organization and American Express OPEN announced the winners of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies in North America.

The top winner? Argent Associates Inc., a New Jersey supply chain company that provides warehousing, logistics and product life cycle management services. President and CEO Beatriz Manetta’s 12-year old company saw gross revenues grow more than twelvefold in two years, from over $9 million in 2007 to $115 million in 2009.

Second on the list was BrightStar, a home healthcare and medical staffing company in Illinois. Third was Artech Information Systems LLC in New Jersey.

WPO’s founder and president Marsha Firestone says the group launched its first ranking three years ago in order to combat the stereotype that women-owned companies are primarily mom-and-pop operations in “retail, cookie-making or crafts.” Most of the Top 50 are business-to-business companies, often in traditionally male-dominated fields.

First off, you do not need a PR firm. The retainer is usually not worth it, especially for a young, growing startup because your product is still drastically changing and because your conversion rates are probably very low.

As a startup that is looking to innovate in your industry, it usually does not make any sense for you to allow someone else to communicate your vision. PR firms do not always get it. Even with stellar communication skills, only you and your core team really understand the message and the vision.

If you are a first-timer at PR, start small so you do not burn any important bridges (but be aware that every bridge counts). Start pitching to small blogs and websites in your niche and occasionally take a shot at medium-sized blogs. Once you start feeling more comfortable with your email pitch, and are making decent traction with small blogs and websites, move onto pitching to medium-sized sites. Then, as you gain experience, and learn a bit more about tailoring your pitch to specific authors, you can move onto mass-media outlets that can really increase your exposure because of their tremendous reach.

Governor Donald L. Carcieri, House Speaker Gordon Fox, and President of the Senate M. Teresa Paiva Weed joined the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) and the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce to unveil an Executive Order and package of legislation aimed at making it easy to do business in Rhode Island.

The order cuts government red tape and removes barriers to the establishment and growth of small business.

The Executive Order and nine-bill legislative package are the result of many months of work between the Governor’s Office, the House Small Business Committee, the Senate’s Small Business Task Force, RIEDC, and the Governor’s Regulatory Review Task Force, and is a coordinated approach to meeting a unified goal: making it easy to do business in Rhode Island.

“Rhode Island’s small businesses are the backbone of the state’s economy. While we’ve made progress on our path toward economic recovery – beginning with the restructuring of the leadership of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and the passing of the IRBA legislation – it’s clear that we must do even more to support the state’s small companies and strengthen our workforce,” said Governor Donald L. Carcieri.

Dolphin species on four continents are in danger, warn various reports.

In Asia, the Taiwan Matsu's Fish Conservation Union says that only 60 to 90 Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis chinensis) remain off the Taiwanese coast, fewer than half that existed just four years ago. The Union says the species could become extinct in that region in 10 years. Industrial development and pollution near the estuary of Taiwan's longest river, the Jhuoshuei River, is blamed for the decline.

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins exist throughout Asia, Africa and Australia, but this particular population is isolated. The species have a very low birth rate and take 10 to 12 years to reach sexual maturity.