With the nation's economic concerns mounting, President Obama is again turning to its research universities for help.

In a speech set for Friday morning at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, the president plans to announce a $500-million endeavor through which universities and companies will be asked to develop innovations in manufacturing with the goal of expanding domestic employment.

The idea is based on recommendations from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an advisory group of scientists and engineers.

Companies can strengthen their computer networks against hacking attacks and data breaches, but their defenses won't work as well if employees are circumventing them. Yet companies often unintentionally inspire just such behavior by limiting how much e-mail their employees can send, receive, and store.

That's because employees who face tight limits on the size of their mailboxes tend to merely work around the restrictions. For instance, they might send and receive files through their personal Web mail accounts or through Web file-transfer sites. Using the public Internet could make it more likely for the information to be stolen, and there are consequences beyond hacking, too: once data leaves a company's control, it can be harder to restore it after a disaster or to find it during audits or lawsuits.

When hackers breached the servers of Sony Pictures in June, they cast a harsh light on one of the Web's most bedeviling security problems: passwords. After finding that 1 million user passwords for three Sony sites were stored without encryption, the intruders posted them online for anyone to see.

Security researcher Troy Hunt pored over the file and found that half of the passwords could be considered weak because they had a low degree of randomness—they had only lowercase letters, only uppercase letters or only numbers. More than a third of the passwords could have been found in a dictionary and easily guessed by a password cracker, a tool that quickly tries different combinations of secret words. Half of the passwords were seven characters or less. Finally, the researcher found 90 e-mail accounts that had also shown up in another leaked password file, from Gawker.com, and discovered that about two-thirds of those users had the same password at both sites. "It indicates to me that this was a normal practice for people to plug in the same password into their accounts," says Hunt, a software architect who studies security.

Australia could always use more angel investors, says Dean McEvoy, co-founder of the wildly successful group-buying site Spreets.

“Doing a startup in Australia is kind of like growing a plant in a dark cupboard. It’s really bloody hard,” McEvoy said in a talk presented at VIVID Creative Sydney.

Hard, but hardly impossible, he notes. If good ideas or sharp entrepreneurs get decent exposure, the financial backing is there to be had — even if it comes from overseas. And international investors are paying more attention; McEvoy pointed to Aussie enterprise 99Designs as an example of homegrown business that has received significant looks from overseas.

As a follow up to yesterday's post on this topic, here's another chart from Mark Suster:

So using the math I laid out yesterday (roughly 1,000 startups funded each year by VCs), this means that on average between 1% and 3% of venture funded startups get to an IPO.

To recap, 1-3% get to an IPO and 5-10% get to an M&A exit over $100mm. So 85-95% of all venture backed startups will either fail or exit below $100mm.

GE and its funding partners will invest $63 million in 10 innovative home energy technology companies.

The investment is the second round of funding as part of the $200 million “GE ecomagination Challenge” to find better ways to use, manage and conserve energy. The second phase, “Powering Your Home,” was launched in January.

So far, GE and its partners have invested or committed to invest $134 million in the home energy and power grid technology developers announced as winners of its Innovation Challenge. The challenge has also produced 22 new commercial partnerships and resulted in the acquisition of FMC-Tech, a smart-grid technology company spotlighted during the first phase.

The press is regularly (and unfairly) criticised for seeking out bad news. In my experience bad news comes to the press. That's because people are at their wits end having failed through official channels to stop unfairness, abuse, or just incompetence.

Conversely, when you come across good news it's always surprised me how reluctant people can be - they too often want publicity, but "not just now".

This new blog is a catalyst for change. To do that it actively seeks out examples of success - of how innovators have overcome generic barriers and succeeded in getting their innovation, especially cutting edge innovation, into large organisations and government. This will mean calling some bluffs but the success this blog roots out will be used to promote change.

Private wealth managers McNally Capital and Black Coral Capital, which co-founded the syndicate last June, say the participating families, with a collective net worth topping $30bn, are sophisticated and experienced investors in the sector, having pumped more than $1.2bn into private cleantech businesses from seed capital to project finance.

They also posses direct experience in wind and solar development, solar technology and real estate ownership.

The syndicate is looking for investments in solar, energy efficiency, storage, project development, green chemistry, water, wind, biofuels and biomass, recycling and geothermal.

George Weiss has seen around 80 of his inventions fail, but at 84 years old he has finally hit gold.

Dabble is a word game that requires fast thinking, and is a lot of fun. It is now found in 42 stores across the country, and recently won the 2011 Game of the Year Award from Creative Child Magazine, reports NY Daily News.

“If you can spell you can play,” says Weiss, sitting in the basement of the home he has lived in for 45 years. “The idea just came to me three years ago and I started cutting up plastic tiles and creating a five-tiered rack for them to rest on.”

A new online referral system meant to help Michigan entrepreneurs start or build their businesses launches Friday.

After several years of development, the nonprofit Matching Opportunities and Resources for Entrepreneurs — or MORE — Program plans to go live with the InsYght system, which gets to know the people it's helping through an online questionnaire. InsYght will operate initially through links on the websites of three Southeast Michigan organizations: Brightmoor Alliance, TechTown in Detroit and Troy-based Walsh College.

Once the system collects information to form a profile on each user, it prescribes the next steps that a person or company can take to meet goals and connects the user to specific resources and contact people who can help.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 23, 2011) - Silicon Valley welcomed the first ever technology accelerator for minority-led start-ups, NewME Accelerator. NewME's select participants commenced their first class on June 16 and will participate in this program throughout the summer. The start-up founders are based in a shared house in Mountain View, Calif. and are utilizing co-working space at Citizen Space in San Francisco.

This program gives the founders a unique opportunity to learn from key industry leaders during private group dinners and one-on-one mentorship. The founders will leverage this once-in-a-lifetime access, and being in the epicenter of Silicon Valley's culture, for nine weeks to take their ventures to the next level. Speakers and mentors will include representatives from successful start-ups such as Tagged, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga Games. The accelerator concludes with a demo day at Kapor Capital August 2nd where founders will pitch their products to various investors and members of the start-up community.

Let’s face it. We ALL have a great idea that we think could make money. Some of us have even taken the time to do research, perfect the idea, draft a business plan, get funding, and even make it market. What the majority of people who don’t follow through with their ideas attribute their lack of action to is the amount of time it takes to go from an idea to a minimal viable product (MVP).

As a result, MANY great ideas die from the hands of time. One of the sole purposes behind a startup accelerator program is to round up people with great ideas with those who have the means to support those ideas.

Most startup accelerators (or incubators) focus primarily around software/technology ideas and are willing to invest the time and the money to help people with dreams of being the next Microsoft, Apple, or Google or Facebook. The accelerator programs bring in speakers and mentors to encourage participants and serve as examples of what can be accomplished. They provide networking opportunities for the participants to possibly spread the word about your idea to the rest of the industry. Many well-known investors and venture capitalists frequent or even monetarily support startup accelerator programs in hopes to find and (finance) the next big thing.

June 23--W. Mark Crowell on May 26 became the University of Virginia's first executive director and associate vice president for innovation partnerships and commercialization.

In his newly created post, Crowell is responsible for boosting UVa's corporate, private and government partnerships, as well as ramping up the university community's licensing, entrepreneurship and commercialization of research.

The Daily Progress recently asked Crowell to give his take on the state of the local biotechnology industry and the challenges it faces. What follows is an edited transcript of his responses.

Q: How would you characterize the status of the biotechnology industry's development in the Charlottesville region?

A: I would characterize the biotechnology cluster in Charlottesville as strong, evolving and extremely promising. There have been notable success stories in this region in terms of company creation, growth, acquisition, strategic partnering, product development and market impact, setting a strong foundation for continued growth and impact of companies in this cluster.

For this map, we asked the Cluster Mapping Project at Harvard Business School to provide the top 20 job-creating areas for the following fields: Plastics, Chemicals, Automotive, Aerospace vehicles, Information technology, Biopharma, Metal manufacturing, Communication technology, Medical technology, Analytical instruments, and Electrical equipment.

Mouse over the called-out examples at the top of the image for specific information.

For examples of how digital technology is rapidly, profoundly, and unexpectedly shaping lives across the globe, look no further than today’s news: social media and the Arab Spring; the Stuxnet worm and the clandestine cyberwar against Iran; the proliferation of smartphones and tablets; the ubiquitous web and the cloud; Netflix streaming surpassing web surfing on the net; Bradley Manning’s data dump to Wikileaks; and Microsoft as the new tech underdog. The digital world is changing rapidly, and so are we.

We have become accustomed to this state of perpetual flux, of this open-endedness in the application and proliferation of new digital technologies. Yet underneath this flux and unpredictability lies a shared certainty: The cost of digital electronics, and the technologies built with them, will dramatically plummet as their power and performance continues to rise exponentially.

While it is common for the business community to complain that government regulators are slowing the pace of commerce, a group of venture capitalists is saying that problems between medical-technology start-ups and the Food and Drug Administration — which must approve new drugs and devices before they hit the market — have grown much larger than the usual tug-of-war.

Reuters Medical technology start-up are going out of business as they wait for FDA guidance that sometimes takes years, if it comes at all, alleges the Medical Device Venture Council , made up of nine prominent venture firms that focus on medical technology. And many emerging companies that do stay in business are looking to launch in Europe, as the approval process in the U.S. is fraught with too many d

Given how many folks are looking for work these days (and desperate for their resumes to stand out in the pile), a startup like Vizualize.me was inevitable. Its algorithms and templates take your boring, vanilla C.V. and automagically transform it into a Feltron-esque personal infographic at the push of a button. "In the age of data overload, the text resume is slowly becoming a living anachronism," the company's press release intones ominously. "The average resume is now over 2 pages long with more than 1000 words." Who wants to deal with that?

When I started on the entrepreneurial journey over two years ago, I had this naive notion that I could do everything on my own and that I needed to keep my ideas a secret.

Three websites and a startup incubator program later, I learned some lessons I wish I knew at the beginning as an entrepreneur.

9 Lessons I Learned About Starting a Startup

Lesson #1: An idea is worth nothing.

A company consists of many moving parts at any point in time — an idea is simply a starting point. Given an idea, it snowballs into many different ones and you can go in a 100 different direction. The outcome depends on many variables, akin to what makes predicting the weather an inexact science. Imagine you have an idea for a building — the HOW, WHERE, and the CONTEXT are much more important than the WHAT. It’s very easy to have ideas — you can have a 100 ideas a week.

It seems that Venture investors are none-too-happy with current IPO activity. According to a study sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association released yesterday, over 80 percent of venture capitalists from around the globe believe “that current IPO activity levels in their home countries are too low”. Low enough, in fact, that it has investors worrying over whether or not it can sustain the venture capital industry.

While it seems that investors and VCs tend not to agree on anything (ever?) and it’s thus a bit surprising to see 87 percent of U.S. investors agreeing that IPO activity is too low, it’s also important to keep in mind that this survey was given to investors in the spring. This was before Pandora and LinkedIn went public and bubbletalk was on the tip of everyone’s tongue; in fact, 2011 seems to be a pretty good year for IPOs and investors are encouraging startups to raise. (Before a potential bubble burst, of course.) So then, perhaps VCs should consider IPO rehab for their addictions? What do you think?

Earlier this month, I attended the Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship’s conference, “Building a Fan Base: Lifting Your Business to Stardom.” The conference was held at World Cafe Live so I assumed it would be a different kind of party.

And it was. The mash-up of music and a panel discussion made me want to shout.

The moderator, Mark Loschiavo, executive director of the Baiada Center, posited “jazz as a metaphor for entrepreneurship.” He drew parallels between musicians and entrepreneurs. To grow a business worth shouting about, entrepreneurs must move beyond customers to a fan base. Fan is broadly defined to include partners, investors, suppliers, mentors and advisers.