WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- United States Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chair, Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), and Ranking Member, Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), today sent a letter to the U.S. Small Business Administrator, Karen G. Mills, encouraging the swift allocation of funds for the Federal and State Technology (FAST) Partnership program that was included in the FY2010 appropriations bill.

"The FAST program was created to expand and improve the participation of small technology firms in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs by providing matching funds to states," Senators Landrieu and Snowe said in the letter. "FAST funds are used within the states to raise awareness of SBIR and STTR, to provide technical assistance to firms participating in the programs, and to encourage commercialization of technology developed through the SBIR and STTR programs."

For many entrepreneurs, 2009 was another year of slumping sales and frustratingly tight credit. Their expectations for this year aren’t shaping up to be much better. One big reason for this lack of optimism: uncertainty. Entrepreneurs are worried about how pending policy decisions will affect recovery, according to recent polls and conversations I’ve had with business owners from across the country.

So earlier this afternoon, when I watched a webcast on the state of entrepreneurship in the U.S. led by Kauffman Foundation head Carl Schramm held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., I brightened up a bit. Schramm, along with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, entrepreneurs Reggie Aggarwal (Cvent) and Mary Naylor (VIPdesk), and educator Frank Douglas (Austen BioInnovation Institute), acknowledged the need to reduce the uncertainty facing entrepreneurs and offered fixes for policymakers to consider.

Germinating an idea to seed companies across the commonwealth, Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. (KSTC) and state government officials have been holding one-day how-to-get-started sessions for entrepreneurially spirited individuals near state universities.

“This is another tool in our Kentucky tool shed,” said Kris Kimel, founder and CEO of KSTC. “You have to do relentless innovation to keep entrepreneurship alive in the state, and this helps with the first step. The start is half the deed, as the old Roman saying goes. … These events are designed to be simple, fast and high energy, and offer concrete results.”

WELLESLEY/BOSTON -- Babson College of Wellesley, Mass., and Philadelphia's Drexel University and Temple University have won the top three places in a ranking of colleges running the best entrepreneurial programs, compiled jointly by Entrepreneur magazine and the scholastic testing company Princeton Review (Nasdaq: REVU)..

Babson was rated the best overall in a list that combined separate rankings for undergraduate and graduate programs. Drexel was second, and Temple tied for the third spot with the University of Arizona at Tucson .

Where will tomorrow’s jobs come from? Everyone from Main Street to the White House is focused on that question. Well, according to new data projections from The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute, future job growth will be created primarily by women-owned small businesses.

Guardian’s research shows that by 2018 women entrepreneurs will be responsible for creating between 5 million and 5.5 million new jobs nationwide. That’s more than half of the 9.7 million new jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects small businesses to create, and about one-third of the total new jobs the BLS projects will be created nationwide in that time frame.

A major report released last week by the National Science Board concludes that U.S. global leadership in science and technology is declining as foreign nations – especially China and other Asian countries – rapidly develop their national innovation systems.

“U.S. dominance has eroded significantly… The data begin to tell a worrisome story,” stated Kei Koizumi, assistant director for federal research and development in President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The Director of the National Science Foundation, Arden Bement, noted that “China is achieving a dramatic amount of synergy by increasing its investment in science and engineering education, in research, and in infrastructure, which is attracting scientists from all over the world.”

The report, “Science and Engineering Trends 2010,” is published every two years by the National Science Board, a 25-member expert council that advises the National Science Foundation, President, and Congress on science and technology policy, education, and research. Koizumi called it a “State of the Union on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

With the growing number of online services, it's becoming more economical for small business to rely on web-based tools rather than expensive enterprise software. Not too long ago we brought you 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized, and now the website Business Pundit has released their top 10 list of online collaboration tools for small businesses.

Call it Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0; the fact of the matter is that online services just make more sense for businesses on a budget. Because these software platforms are web-based, users can use any computer to access them at work, at home or even on the road. They eliminate the need for expensive software and fewer IT employees are required for setup, updates and patches to systems.

I think you could make a strong argument that the most important technologies developed over the last decade are a set of systems that are sometimes called “collective knowledge systems”.

The most successful collective knowledge system is the combination of Google plus the web. Of course Google was originally intended to be just a search engine, and the web just a collection of interlinked documents. But together they provide a very efficient system for surfacing the smartest thoughts on almost any topic from almost any person.

The second most successful collective knowledge system is Wikipedia. Back in 2001, most people thought Wikipedia was a wacky project that would at best end up being a quirky “toy” encyclopedia. Instead it has become a remarkably comprehensive and accurate resource that most internet users access every day.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Fifteen emerging companies will receive a variety of services and report from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School as part of its Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship program.

The BASE initiative is in its second year.

Support ranges from capital to expertise and focuses on what Kenan-Flagler calls a “triple bottom line” of profitability, social equity and environmental sustainability.

The school provides support through mentors, students who are working on Masters degrees in business, networking events, training, workshops, access to service providers, and opportunities for financing.

It’s not enough to keep the deals flowing. Angel investors also have to keep sharp tabs on everything from event organization and member tracking, to syndicating opportunities and portfolio control. With no real solution available, David Rose, founder of New York Angels, one of the country’s most active angel groups, created one.

“In trying to streamline our processes, I looked far and wide for a tool or service to help with that. When it turned out no such platform existed, I decided to create one,” he says, explaining how Angelsoft came into being.

The world's most innovative company just announced that it can't do business in China. What does this tell us about the state of Chinese innovation? The question answers itself.

When Google entered China in 2006, it got a lot of advice from old hands that China's Leninist state would make it hard for them to do business. Google ignored this advice and gambled that the internet would prove stronger than the Communist party - that once Google was in the door on however compromised terms - popular demand for freer information would create incremental movement toward a more open internet.

Four years later, Google seems to have concluded that they were wrong and the old hands were right: in the short term, and within China

The creation by entrepreneurs of a destination for tech companies in Rajasthan's Thar Desert shows it's time to rethink regional development planning

For government officials and planning consultants looking to create regional economic growth and drive innovation, industry clusters are the Holy Grail. Popularized by Harvard professor Michael Porter in the early 1990s, cluster theory holds that a government or economic development body can create a viable hub of economic activity in a specific industrial sector by bringing in businesses, suppliers, researchers, and additional related people or entities. In other words, a focused governmental effort can create something from nothing, turning, for example, a fallow field into a tech park bursting with highly competitive, innovative companies. Governments all over the world have invested millions—sometimes billions—of dollars to attract industries they consider strategic.

Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right? In this book, one of America’s leading educators cautions that the answer is all too often “yes.” Taking the first comprehensive look at the growing commercialization of our academic institutions, Derek Bok probes the efforts on campus to profit financially not only from athletics but increasingly, from education and research as well. He shows how such ventures are undermining core academic values and wha…  More

MUMBAI -(Dow Jones)- Venture Capital firms invested $475 million in 92 deals during 2009, down from the $836 million invested across 153 deals in the previous year, according to a study by Venture Intelligence and Global-India Venture Capital Association.

Venture capital firms, however, began to increase the pace of their investments in Indian companies in the October-December quarter, making 42 investments worth $265 million, compared to 23 investments worth $102 million in the comparative period a year earlier, the study said.

ATLANTA - (Business Wire) Much like the inventions themselves, IP Advocate (http://www.IPAdvocate.org) began just over a year ago as an idea in one inventor’s mind – and has since grown to become a national movement that has amplified the collective voice of academic researchers on critical issues related to intellectual property rights. Dr. Renee Kaswan, former research professor and inventor of the groundbreaking drug Restasis®, along with a team of experts, launched the non-profit advocacy organization to address the inherent problems in university commercialization.

In its freshman year IP Advocate has been recognized for:

• Widespread exposure for the issues of technology transfer and patent reform, in national press and influential online science forums and web publications
• Collaborations with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Small Business Coalition on Patent Legislation, the National Small Business Association and university technology transfer veterans nationwide
• Participation with recognized scientists, academic inventors and industry experts, who have contributed their opinions and insights exclusively for IP Advocate’s growing online community
• International awards in education, advocacy and user experience

IN THE old days, the job of eradicating disease fell to governments and inter-governmental bodies. Then charities, often led by celebrities or entrepreneurs, joined in. Finally, in the Western world at least, governments accepted the need to pool their efforts with those of private donors, big and small. The effort still seems unequal to the task. Every year, nearly 11m children die before the age of five because of a mixture of poor nutrition and preventable disease. Many of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (calling, for example, for a plunge in child and maternal mortality by 2015) look unattainable.

The good news is that more imaginative ways of raising and spending money are now on the horizon. How well they do will depend on many details—like the quality of information flowing between poor places and the governments, firms and individuals that want to help.

MADISON - Wisconsin entrepreneurs and researchers do a world-class job of coming up with ideas that will transform health care, energy, manufacturing and other industries. Finding the investors who can move those ideas forward is too often the problem.

While Wisconsin's angel capital investments have climbed steadily, the state continues to lag in the next stage of private equity investments - venture capital. These rounds of investment, which begin around $2 million and build upon smaller investments by individual “angels” or networks of such investors, can help turn a start-up into a thriving company.

Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, delivered the "2010 State of Entrepreneurship Address" on January 19, 2010, on the heels of alarming unemployment numbers and citing sobering new data that show a majority of American entrepreneurs do not expect to create jobs in 2010. He called on policymakers to make this cornerstone of American capitalism a priority.

During an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that included perspectives from entrepreneurs and remarks from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Schramm underscored the importance of entrepreneurs to economic recovery, emphasizing that hundreds of new companies are being created each day.

Schramm also unveiled a new survey of entrepreneurs, commissioned by the Kauffman Foundation and conducted by Douglas Schoen, LLC that shows entrepreneurs are optimistic about their companies but are struggling to expand and create jobs in the current economy. Highlights from the survey include the following:

• 36 percent of entrepreneurs reported reductions in head count in the past year; only 8 percent have added employees.
• Nearly two-thirds have seen their sales volume and their profitability decrease.
• 71 percent of entrepreneurs do not expect to add any new jobs in 2010.
• 61 percent of entrepreneurs think the economy is on the wrong track.

To catalyze job creation and to ease the burden that entrepreneurs feel in today's economic climate, Schramm presented a number of policy recommendations that he said would help set the country on a path toward economic recovery:

• Reform immigration policy, granting citizenship for foreign students graduating from American universities and other immigrants who want to start new companies and create jobs.
• Revise Sarbanes-Oxley regulations to allow company shareholders to choose whether their companies must fulfill some of the most onerous reporting requirements if they think the costs of compliance outweigh the benefits.
• Provide a temporary payroll tax holiday to companies less than five years old.
• Give academic entrepreneurs the choice of multiple avenues to commercialize their research so their innovations can reach consumers more quickly.
• Offer fellowships for doctoral graduates in scientific fields to educate them about how to start companies.
• Provide entrepreneurship education and training to students in high school and college.

More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And even more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year.