Word has been circulating for months that Tencent has invested US$ tens of millions in Innovation Works, the Chinese startup incubator founded by former Google China head Kaifu Lee. Innovation Works spokesman Wang Zhaohui confirmed part of the speculation last night, saying Tencent did invested in the Chinese startup cradle, but refused to disclose the exact sum.

According to local news, investors behind Innovation Works’ back include HTC, Tencent, Russia-based DST, profound American angel investor Ron Conway and Bloomberg, mayor of New York city. People close to Innovation Works disclosed that the Chinese incubator now owns a fund of over RMB 800 million (US$ 123 million).

TriplePundit has been following the work of Cutting Edge Capital for some time now. The group consists of, among others, Michael Shuman (author of the Small-Mart Revolution), John Katovich, JD (Professor at the Presidio Graduate School), and CEO Jennie Kassen from Cutting Edge Capital. The aim is to help small businesses gain access to capital through crowdfunding. The potential to jumpstart our economy is obvious through this process if one considers the monumental effect that small amounts of capital invested by interested investors have had through organizations like Kiva or the way the Obama Administration changed the game in campaign finance in 2008 by raising large numbers of small contributions rather than becoming beholden to smaller numbers of wealthy investors.

When natural disasters threaten the structural soundness of buildings and essential infrastructure, SENSR LLC, a company in Elkader, Iowa, ensures engineers have the information they need to keep people away from dangerous situations.

SENSR is in the business of measuring dynamics, or more simply, measuring the motion of an object.

SENSR’s equipment is leaving a positive impact on a wide variety of projects around the world- from ensuring the world’s tallest building is structurally sound, to testing the safety of roller coasters across the country, to monitoring the safe transport of important products and packages.

The company services more than 700 customers in more than 40 countries and on six continents.

SENSR’s primary market is in civil engineering and structural monitoring. In this arena, SENSR’s equipment is used to monitor and report data to project managers or engineers related to the integrity of a structure.

“It is important for a lot of industries to understand how movement and vibration impacts them,” said Chris Kavars, President and CEO of SENSR. “For instance, sometimes damage can obviously be seen, but oftentimes we can’t use the naked eye to identify how a structure withstands a natural disaster. This is where our equipment comes in. We help alert people when a structure is changing or behaving in a way it hasn’t before.”

This Mac Conway fellow, you might be wondering, now just who was he again? Yeah, he's the guy who started Site Selection 'n all, but did he ever do anything else? I'm kinda in a hurry here, pal. So just tell me who this dude was like.

Oh, hell, Mac Conway wasn't like anybody. He never followed anyone's footsteps; he couldn't really. He was too restless a spirit, too hell-bent on slashing through the tangle and lighting out headlong for the territory ahead. Moreover, he was that rare human who discovered some bona-fide virgin turf; he even did it repeatedly. And every time he unearthed new ground, he'd start building. Building things nobody'd ever built before.

Only a handful of people ever push themselves that far up the mountain. Few even think about trying. It's too risky, too scary, just too damn hard. Mac Conway was a whip-smart fellow; he clearly saw the abundant perils lurking ahead; they just didn't matter, that's all. What really counted was constantly plowing forward, running full throttle, right up 'til the end.

We have all heard stories from doctors about some medical device company stealing their idea for a new product. Perhaps, there are real medtech bandits on the prowl, but in the vast majority of cases, it’s more a matter of misconceptions and miscommunication.

Critics will point to Dr. Gary Michelson who settled a patent suit with Medtronic for $1.35 billion (with a ’B’). But, this is an example of the exception that proves the rule. Dr. Michelson is the farthest thing from a naive doctor who presented an idea to a company and was screwed.

In actuality, Medtronic sued Michelson for over $200 million, charging that he was marketing to competitors some of his inventions that were previously licensed to Medtronic. Michelson countersued, charging that Medtronic had failed to develop the inventions he had licensed to the Company, was infringing on his inventions and was therefore depriving him of tens of millions of dollars in royalties. Keep in mind that Medtronic was already paying Dr. Michelson $40 million per year in royalties for licensed ideas. One other small tidbit, Dr. Michelson had over 100 U.S. patents covering his ideas that Medtronic licensed as part of the settlement agreement.

Patrick Gallagher, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has named Karen Kerr of Intellectual Ventures to serve on the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology (VCAT), the agency’s primary private-sector policy advisory group. Kerr—who will serve a three-year term starting on June 1, 2011—brings the body’s number to 15.

Kerr is the Director of Business Development at Intellectual Ventures (IV), an intellectual-property investment company based in Bellevue, Wash. She has over 15 years of experience as a venture investor in early-stage technology companies, working with a broad array of companies in life science, information technology, communications and semiconductors. She has served as an active director or board observer in numerous early-stage companies.

Commencement season is coming to a close, which means a lot of students and recent graduates are leaving town. That might be a good thing if you’re trying to get a seat at Crema Café near Harvard or Flour Bakery near MIT, but it ain’t good for local startups.

The brain drain of Boston-area tech grads leaving for the West Coast is well-worn territory. Talented developers, fresh out of school, are taking high-paying jobs with big companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Groupon, none of which are headquartered in Boston. Ambitious young entrepreneurs move to Silicon Valley to seek their fortunes—and are sometimes encouraged by their faculty mentors to do so. How can the local innovation community turn things around?

Cultivating local talent is, in fact, one of the main topics being covered at today’s “Building a Better Commonwealth” forum, organized by the Boston Globe.

Is happiness really all that? It depends on how you define it.

The business writers at 24/7 Wall St. have modified a new "Better Life" index, with its multiple measures including "life satisfaction," and added their own economic and political measures. The result is a Top 10 happy countries list that doesn't include the USA.

The new Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Better Life Index has 11 measures of quality of life including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance and life satisfaction.

What do Intel, eBay, Google and Yahoo! all have in common? Aside from being four of the most successful U.S. companies, they were all started by immigrants. Consider the case of Andrew Grove, who at age 20 escaped Communist Poland and immigrated to America, where he received his education and started Intel. Today, Intel is the world’s largest computer chip maker in the world, employing some 85,000 people.

Now, what if after receiving his Ph.D. from Berkeley, Grove had been forced to leave the United States because of something as simple as an expired visa? Which welcoming country would now be able to boast Intel as one of its crown-jewel companies, whose innovations have revolutionized the world? Thankfully, Intel is a U.S. company because we let Grove accomplish his dreams right here in America.

What is the best business school in the world?

Businessweek and The Economist say it's the University of Chicago. U.S. News says it's Stanford. Unfortunately they both got it wrong.

Over the past month, we've conducted a survey to find out the true ranking of the top 50 schools. Harvard Business School ranked No. 1, for the second year running.

From today's big BP annual energy study, a great chart of oil prices and key historical events.

Next year they'll have to add "the day that OPEC died" to the chart.

CLEVELAND — Alex Nudelman, a strapping 49-year-old, confidently pushes buttons on a computer-controlled milling machine and suggests it's ready to sculpt a small piece of metal.

His instructor stops him, noting Nudelman has not programmed in all the tools needed to shape the metal block.

A journeyman autoworker who was laid off in 2009, Nudelman is taking a community college class here so he can work on the more sophisticated gear powering the region's growing cluster of medical device makers. If all goes well, he may soon be churning out spinal implants instead of seat brackets.

"I'm trying to compare the new technology with my old experience, and sometimes it's helpful, and sometimes" it isn't, Nudelman says. But, the Russia native adds, blue eyes brightening, "It's the future."

Several people have been asking me to weigh in publicly on the “20 under 20″ initiative announced by Peter Thiel in which he will award up to $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 who agree immediately to pursue entrepreneurship (the implication of which is that they’d drop out of university to do so).

Thiel and friends will also agree to mentor these young entrepreneurs. Here is their inaugural class.

So is this a good idea? My 2 cents:

1. This is a worthy goal and I applaud Peter Thiel We need to take some risks in education and in innovation in this country so anybody that it trying to break through the traditional mold and try to create a new model ought to be lauded, not attacked. We have a severe shortage of talented engineers in this country, for example, and science doesn’t seem to garner as much attention & focus in the US as it does in some other countries. As a country we need to address this.

The story of Google’s allegation that China hacked the Gmail accounts of top government officials, including senior White House staffers, made headlines around the world June 1. The allegations drew the expected angry denials from Beijing and quieter messages from Washington that an investigation was underway. The big surprise: This story made front-page news.

Hackers in China, who most security experts believe work for the Chinese government, have been whacking away at Gmail accounts of Chinese citizens for years and have previously hacked into accounts of prominent U.S. journalists and businesspeople working in the Middle Kingdom.

Cyberattacks that were once shocking are now a regular and almost expected occurrence. In April, black hat hackers, those who work in defiance of the law, forced the extended shutdown of Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) — after they broke through the tightly guarded databases and stole 2.2 million credit card numbers and 100 million account holders’ identities. In late May, one of the country’s largest defense contractors announced that intruders had accessed its networks by using security tokens provided by EMC Corp’s RSA Security Division. The tokens are by far the most popular two-factor authentication mechanism for government contractors and sensitive industries. Everything from health-care information and large credit information warehouses to Facebook address books has become a target.

Today, at Disrupt NYC, CEO & Co-founder of Hunch Chris Dixon, Ron Conway of SV Angel, CEO of Betaworks John Borthwick, Managing Partner of High Line Ventures Shana Fisher , and former CEO of The Huffington Post Eric Hippeau took to the stage to discuss the current entrepreneurial landscape in New York and how it’s changed in recent years.

Ron Conway began the discussion by referencing a fairly dramatic change in his own portfolio of companies, saying that only 5 percent of his portfolio was based in NYC 5 years ago, whereas today, that number has grown to 20 percent. He attributed the growing success of NYC as a tech hub to the fact that the city is today seeing the founding of second and third generation companies, which indicates a growing level of maturity (and experience), as well as a stability of the city’s overall startup network, that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

When Chad Etzel and Paul Stamatiou began to raise additional money for their technology start-up in the fall of 2010, they were preparing for an investment frenzy.

The young entrepreneurs, who had already raised $200,000 for Notifo, their mobile notifications platform for businesses, used their contacts from the start-up incubator Y Combinator, along with the investor matchmaking site AngelList, to arrange nearly 40 meetings with venture capitalists, including some of the best-known investors in Silicon Valley. They set a goal at $300,000, later increasing the number to $500,000.

But their second fund-raising drive was a flop. While Mr. Etzel and Mr. Stamatiou courted dozens of investors via Skype chats, conference calls and in-person meetings, they raised only a small fraction of the intended amount.

Participatory innovation is still a new experience to many practitioners. How do you make sure you are actually listening to users? And how do you organize your company internally to properly involve external stakeholders. Participatory innovation is the new discipline of involving users of products and services, and understanding what they are really saying, even if some of those signals are not what you want to hear or see.

Startups account for a much smaller share of U.S. businesses than they used to. Recently released data from the Census Bureau shows that back in 1977, 16 percent of U.S. companies were new. By 2009, that share had fallen to 8 percent.

As the figure below shows, the overall trend in the proportion of startups has been downward, but the new company share had increased for several years prior to the Great Recession. The downturn reversed the increase and was a period of rapid decline in the proportion of start-ups.

Dave McClure of 500 Startups says 20-25% of his portfolio companies have women founders.

He admits that most people invest in what they know. And what most investors -- who are white males from finance or MBA backgrounds -- know are people like them.

McClure's mother was an entrepreneur, and he's gotten comfortable hunting for women to invest in.

At a panel last week he said, "I do look for (women founders) now because it’s an advantage. My intent is to corner the market on awesome smart women founders because there are plenty of them out and if there is any bias whatsoever, we’d like to selfishly take advantage of that.”

The idea: A bikini made of wafer-thin solar panels sewn together that can power anything with an USB port.

Whose idea: Andrew Schneider

Why it's brilliant: This safe in water iKini allows you charge your iPhone while suntanning and later take a swim without getting electroshocked (although you might want to unplug your phone).

What's next for the designer? the iDrink, men's swimming shorts that can cool beer.