I had a chance to live in Wellington, New Zealand for a few years teaching television production and a graduate class on the geopolitics of Directing student productionscommunication at Victoria University. Besides being the capital of the country, it’s a great little city that has used its English heritage to effectively draw from the British Commonwealth as well as America to create rich art, design and theater cultures. The city is mentioned in Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class as an example of one of the enterprising nodes around the world that now compete in the global “creative economy”. After an interview with New Zealand native Peter Jackson, the Academy Award winning auteur of such films as King Kong and the Lord of the Rings series that was shot in New Zealand, Florida reflected on the role New Zealand’s capital city. Jackson was able to use the incredible profits generated by the Rings trilogy to build his Weta Digital studio and help catapult the kiwi capital into the global circuits of creative production and attract significant talent to “the land of the long white cloud“.

The annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting takes place in Omaha this weekend, and tens of thousands of stockholders are already flocking to the city to bask in Warren Buffett's presence.

The "Woodstock of Capitalism" is a virtual circus, complete with an exhibition fair, multiple steak dinners, and a daylong jewelry sale featuring a magician and two-time U.S. chess champion.

If you're in Omaha for the weekend and need a break from the hoopla, check out our guide to Omaha's best restaurants, hotels, and activities, including some of Buffett's personal favorites.

After reading “Is Any Publicity Good Publicity?” by John Mariotti, I started thinking (and rethinking) about marketing. John says the “news media spreads stories in a blink of an eye,” but if messages are so easy to spread, why do small business owners seem to struggle with marketing?

Could it be our mindset? Even though effective marketing is as fundamental to our businesses as the quality of the product or service that we provide, we small business owners have a tendency to put marketing on the back burner. Below are 3 ways to look at marketing to help us shift our mindset.

Peter Huber makes some contradictory and misleading arguments in "Digital Innovators vs. the Patent Trolls" (op-ed, April 18). He claims that nonpracticing entities, derisively called "patent trolls," are ruining innovation in America. On the one hand, he acknowledges that only a small percentage of patents, roughly 2% by his own estimate, end up court. Yet he also believes that "Our patent laws have drifted way off course."

He states that, "The (Patent) Office now grants more than 4,000 patents a week," but he neglects to mention that the total number of patent applications and the number of patent rejections have both similarly risen. One major goal of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos, appointed in 2009 by President Obama, is to reduce the backlog of 1.2 million patents existing at the time he took office. Many more patents are being submitted and examined than ever before—a sign of the vigorous spirit of innovation in America.

There's no mistaking the fact that the UK is in love with technology. We are a nation of early adopters, enthusiasts and technophiles. We love playing with the latest kit, snooping out the biggest bargains and, thankfully for TechRadar, reading about it.

Britain is, after all, responsible for some of the greatest engineers, designers and innovators of all time; Babbage, Faraday, Watt, Davy, Bell and Brunel, to name but a few, are people who have changed our world beyond all recognition.

The climate and the conditions may be held responsible by many historians for making Britain the starting point of the industrial revolution, but the genius of the inventors and scientists cannot be discounted.

A year ago, the Association of American Universities quietly revised the criteria it uses to decide which research institutions deserve a place in the highly selective group. The impact of those changes is now being felt -- like a punch in the gut -- by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Syracuse University, which are leaving the association.

The group's members have voted to drop Nebraska against its will, marking the first time that the association has formally dumped one of its own. Syracuse, by contrast, after trying to persuade AAU members that the New York university's strengths continue to place it among the nation's best, is in "discussions about withdrawing" from the association, Chancellor Nancy Cantor confirmed Sunday.

America needs new jobs — sustainable ones. As we continue to recover from economic downfall and a dwindling job market, this nation’s workforce waits anxiously for stability to return. Americans are wondering when they can return to a stable job that will create a sustainable future for American ingenuity. Nowhere is the need greater than in Detroit.

Like so many cities across the United States, Detroit has suffered job losses as a result of the global recession, compounded by the effects of economic globalization. Many of the jobs Detroit lost will never return.

These may be far from the best of times, but they are no longer the worst. Last year’s annual “Best Cities for Jobs” list was by far the most dismal since we began compiling our rankings almost five years ago. Between 2009 and 2010, only 13 of 397 metropolitan areas experienced any growth at all. For this year’s list, which measured job growth in the period between January 2010 and January 2011, most of the best-performing areas experienced actual employment increases — even if they were modest.

For Forbes’ list of the best cities for jobs, we ranked all 398 current metropolitan statistical areas, based on employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported from November 1999 to January 2011. Rankings are based on recent growth trends, mid-term growth and long-term growth and momentum. We also broke down rankings by size — small, medium and large — since regional economies differ markedly due to their scale.

5-6 May 2011
Washington, DC
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Metro: Federal Triangle (Orange and Blue Lines)

The annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy is the conference for people interested in public policy issues facing the science, engineering, and higher education communities. Since 1976, it has been the place where insiders go to learn what is happening and what is likely to happen in the coming year on the federal budget and the growing number of policy issues that affect researchers and their institutions. Come to the Forum, learn about the future of S&T policy, and meet the people who will shape it.

What inspired me to start VentureBeat? Lack of inspiration. Almost five years ago, I’d reached a point in my career as a writer where I realized I needed to inspire myself again. Old media, with its broken business models and glacial pace had become a lifeless, fearful place. Management would send cryptic messages about how bad business was, and they’d swing the axe again and fire another ten percent of the newspaper staff. I was also deeply ambitious.

The idea to start my own business and technology blog capturing the heartbeat of the Valley began to take hold. As a reporter and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, I’d been blogging religiously on venture capital and technology since 2004. By 2006, I realized that few others were reporting with equal depth or velocity on the entrepreneurial scene. Readers thirsted for knowledge about the new technologies that arrived with Web 2.0. And finally, the great entrepreneur dearth of the post-bubble era transitioned to an age of teeming activity. A new breed of angels began investing in them. Stories about all this needed to be told.

It's pretty weird to see your profession turned into entertainment, particularly when the average board meeting is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. But I am definitely intrigued by collisions between pop culture and venture capital.

For example, there have been a recent parade of reality TV shows where entrepreneurs pitch their deals to panels of venture capitalists and wealthy angel investors, such as American Inventor, Shark Tank, Dragon's Den and Money Tigers. Then there is the influx of celebrity venture capitalists, like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott.

A dozen men guard the St. Petersburg offices of hypermarket operator Lenta. This is the muscle it is taking TPG Capital, which owns a stake in the company, to establish a beachhead in Russia.

The company’s $100 million investment in Lenta in 2009, in partnership with state-controlled VTB Group, sparked a brawl in September. Jan Dunning, backed by TPG and surrounded by bodyguards, barged past Sergei Yuschenko, installed as chief executive by rival investors, to reclaim his job running the company. Windows were smashed and punches thrown, all of it broadcast on national television.

Five of New Jersey's most prominent figures from the realm of economic development recently met with the membership of the New Jersey Chapter of CoreNet Global at the Eisenhower Corporate Campus here to discuss New Jersey's aggressive business attraction and retention agenda.

The panel discussion, "New Jersey's Aggressive Economic Development Push," was moderated by Stefan Pryor and included Sen. Joe Kyrillos, Tracye McDaniel; Don Slaght and Andrew Shapiro.

Sen. Kyrillos R-13th District, is a member of the New Jersey Senate Economic Growth Committee and is a commercial real estate broker. Pryor is deputy mayor for economic development in the City of Newark. In that capacity, he oversees the city offices responsible for economic development, city planning and housing, among other areas.

Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down.

Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. And as Jon Steinberg of Buzzfeed points out, the CTRs for social media banner ads are just 0.08%.

Holy Shiitake!

Despite its creation more than 15 years ago, banner ads have been surprisingly resilient despite their lack of efficacy. In the IAB study that revealed the graph above, brand advertisers indicated that their number one objective in online advertising was “creating awareness” followed by “creating purchase intent” or “likelihood to recommend” the product. Yet these seem to be the least effective attributes of banner advertising.

The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.

If you start by pitching your extended life story, that’s the wrong point. Equally bad is an extended pitch on your new disruptive technology. Investors are more interested in your solution and your business, rather than your technology. Here are some tips on the right approach and the right points to hit:

1. Match your material to the time allotted. If you have ten minutes, that means no more than ten slides. Then match your pace to cover all the material. I’ve seen several presentations that never moved past the first slide before running out of time. An obvious effort to keep talking after the time limit won’t save your day with investors.

The gap between salaries of women and men with the same jobs is well documented, but the founders of Thrive, a personal finance site that Tree.com purchased in 2009, discovered it on their own.

While the percentage of money that women were saving was higher than what men saved, the actual value of those savings was less. “We could have made those women the best savers in the world, and it wasn’t going to close the gap,” says co-founder Matt Wallaert, whose background is in social psychology (he studies how people make decisions).

After selling Thrive, Wallaert and Avi Karnani founded a new consultancy called Churnless. In the first of what they call the company’s “passion projects,” they decided to tackle the pay gap. They consulted academics — including the author of Women Don’t Ask –and interviewed human resource professionals before putting together what today is GetRaised.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering easing the regulations on how private companies raise capital.

The areas that the SEC is going to review are general solicitation rules, the 500 share holder limit and regulations around crowdfunding. Easing these regulations will have a major impact on how startups raise capital and will help more startups raise funding.

Let’s review each of the regulations and see how startups could benefit.

On Monday, April 26th, Greater Ohio attended a symposium on Building the Ohio Innovation Economy. Co-sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, University of Akron, Case Western Reserve University, Morganthaler—a venture capital firm—and Nortech—a northeast Ohio technology economic development group—the symposium was held in Cleveland and brought together regional, state, and federal leaders to discuss innovation. Panelists from federal agencies, private sector companies, think tanks, universities, and philanthropic foundations offered a range of ideas of how to capture, support, and encourage the innovative work being done throughout Ohio, and especially in northeast Ohio.

Lavea Brachman, Greater Ohio Policy Center’s executive director, provided a state-policy perspective and made the case that the private sector will have to lead the state in innovation—especially in supporting industry clusters as a regional economic development strategy—but that state and local governments must provide the right conditions for the private sector. In urging for governance reform and strategic investments that can help Ohio lead the next economy, Brachman argued that state policy could be pivotal in clearing the way for growth in interconnected businesses, and that the state should join with local and regional players to create a climate for innovative growth.

Forget about chutzpah…the tech sector in Israel has two advantages: a skilled workforce and boatloads of risk-capital. This has made Israel (population, 7 million), the number three country in the world for venture capital. Last year, investors ignored weak global IPO and M&A markets and poured $1.2 billion into 391 start-ups. This approach worked very well in the past, only the US has more NASDAQ-listed companies. Unfortunately, that party ended abruptly with the 2008 financial crisis. Based on fundraising and exit activity as reported by IVC, the Israeli venture sector is undergoing dramatic, and painful, change.

Yesterday, we posted Part One of “All I Know as an Entrepreneur, I Learned as a Paper Boy”. We appreciate your anecdotes, suggestions and comments (yes, even those about the accompanying picture).

Today, we continue to explore the solid business lessons learned at eight years old – and how those “best practices” might apply to business today. Please enjoy Part Two…