What do you get when you combine 7 panelist plus one moderator on to a stage for 30 minutes to talk about a serious topic? Answer: Not much. And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel.It’s a shame. There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun to talk about them. I said almost nothing in the 30 minutes.

It’s a shame.  There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun to talk about them.  I said almost nothing in the 30 minutes.

My friend Ethan Anderson put it best to me after the panel, “You probably shouldn’t have been up there.  There was a fight going on and it’s clear that you were neutral and didn’t have a dog in the fight.  Maybe you should have moderated, but that’s likely why the panel went how it did.”  I think that’s about right. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed to be on the panel in the first place.

The last decade has seen soaring levels of activity in the field of green energy production. Governments are pushing to decrease carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels while increasing the delivery of clean energy. Cleantech is now high on the UK government’s agenda and therefore brings with it its own strategic, political and fiscal considerations.

Since humans began to understand their own mortality, we have tried everything we could think of to fight off death. Some people have had more success than others in that field. But if you thought Death got pissed when Bill and Ted beat him at Battleship, you should see what he does to the people that are out there really saving lives.

Juan Andrés Fontaine, Chile's Minister of Economy, Development and Tourism, discusses his government's recent practices and programs that strive to develop Chile's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Topics touched upon include government incentive programs to attract international investment, growth and development to Chile's university research and development, and a desire to build the nation into the innovation hub of South America.

By unanimous decision, the California Air Resources Board approved a new regulation to have 33 percent of California’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020. Chairwoman Mary D. Nichols said, “The Renewable Electricity Standard means cleaner energy for California’s households and businesses. This standard is going to further diversify and secure our energy supply while also growing California’s leading green technology market, which will lead to cost savings for consumers.” (Source: UPI)

Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are expected to be about 12 to 13 million tons of CO2 per year by the year 2020. Smaller goals are set for points along the way leading to 33 percent. For 2012-2014 the goal is 20 percent, 2015-2017 is 24 percent, 2018-2019 is 28 percent.

Where's Harvard? Why are all the British Universities out of the top five? The Times Higher Education has published its list of the top 100 universities in the world - just days after a competing list was published. See how they compare...

Harvard is back at number one - and there is not a British university in the top five. This week's list of the world's top 100 universities makes very different reading from the list published by careers advice company QS, in which Cambridge came top and Harvard second.

The pedagogical value and the challenges of integrating student blogging into your teaching is a recurring topic on ProfHacker. Some of our earliest posts dealt with student blogging, and we have revisited the issue frequently. Most recently, Jeff and Julie wrote about that age-old question—How are you going to grade this?—when it comes to evaluating classroom blogs. Jeff and Julie offer a number of fantastic pointers, and they also refer to a blogging rubric that I use in my own teaching. I've never directly described how I grade student blog posts on ProfHacker, but I think it's about time to share what has been a valuable tool, and to encourage professors to adopt and modify it to fit their own needs.

There are six outstanding grant applications listed on the flip chart. There is money for two, or maybe three. And the decision as to which will be funded rests in the hands of the 15 members of the peer-review panel who are meeting inside the glassy rectangle of the American Cancer Society (ACS) building in central Atlanta, Georgia. It is only 45 minutes into the committee's two-day meeting in June, and the conversation is already tense.

"It seems pretty pedestrian," says the committee chairman, referring to the first application on the list. The applicant wants to investigate the molecular signals that could shut down runaway cell division in a particularly deadly cancer — but much of this pathway has already been worked out in other cell types. "This is good solid work," argues another reviewer, slightly exasperated. "Not everything has to be a bright, shiny idea. Valuable information will come out of it. The innovation is less than in other grants, but I think the other aspects make up for that."

Years ago, Horage Burgess prayed and received divine inspiration. He says that God told him "If you build be a treehouse, I'll see that you never run out of material."

And so Horace started building... and building... and 15 years later, he's still going.

The tree house is now 97 feet tall, supported by a living 80-foor tall white oak, with six other oaks for support. It currently has ten floors, and a belltower.

My girlfriend and I went there this weekend, and I've posted photos to Flickr.

Writing has allowed me to meet a slew of smart people. Some of these people are now virtual acquaintances and some are very close friends on a personal and professional level. Each article that you publish is a synthesized thought process that may click with other entrepreneurs instantly. Have you ever had a feeling when reading an article that "Wow, they are thinking exactly what I'm thinking"? By writing, you are likely to encounter a handful of people that experience the same thing. Occasionally one of those people will reach out to you via email or bump into you at an event. You might make a new acquaintance, a new co-founder for the future, potential investor, hire,etc. At the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is about finding other smart (hopefully smarter) people to collaborate with and writing frequently helps make this happen.

The terms "production ag" and "venture capital" aren't often heard together in the same sentence.

But in coming years, Mike Jerstad, a partner in PrairieGold Venture Partners, thinks there's potential for that to change.

Jerstad spoke during the Livestock Network: Bringing Industries, Universities and Investors Together seminar Monday at the Sheraton Sioux Falls. The event is organized by the South Dakota Biotech Association ahead of the national Livestock Biotech Summit, which begins today in Sioux Falls.

The presymposium, which drew about 50 people, brought together industry leaders, university officials and investors to discuss private and public research collaborations as well as funding.

"Development is a do-it-yourself proposition. ... It's really up to us," says Steve Mercil with the fervor of an evangelist. Talking about angels — secular, not celestial — the CEO of St. Paul-based RAIN Source Capital describes the role angel investors play in helping small companies grow in communities across the country.

"Our job is to get capital and expertise to people with great ideas ... to grow good companies, grow good jobs, and have good thriving communities," he told a crowd of investors, entrepreneurs and advisers at last week's seventh annual RAIN Source Capital conference in Bloomington.

Angel investors traditionally have filled a funding gap for start-ups and small businesses that have grown beyond "friends and family" but were too small for venture capitalists and too risky for traditional bank financing.

So much for the big showdown. After days of charges and counter-charges in which the most prominent angel investors in Silicon Valley took to the blogs to argue what, exactly, was talked about at a now-infamous gathering of angels in a San Francisco restaurant – a controversy tagged with the unfortunate but apparently inevitable name “AngelGate” – those same investors decided they weren’t going to talk about it.

Twitter and blog posts, they said, had already said what they wanted to say.

That was a letdown for the attendees of today’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, many of whom surely came to see fireworks if not outright bloodshed but instead saw a fairly straightforward discussion of the issues facing angel investors.

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries.1 We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways information technologies are deployed are changing too, as new developments such as virtualization and cloud computing reallocate technology costs and usage patterns while creating new ways for individuals to consume goods and services and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable business models. The dizzying pace of change has affected our original eight trends, which have continued to spread (though often at a more rapid pace than we anticipated), morph in unexpected ways, and grow in number to an even ten.2

“I never think of the future,” Albert Einstein once observed. “It comes soon enough.” Most business managers, confronted with the global forces shaping the business landscape, also assume that their ability to sculpt the future is minimal. They are right that they can do little to change a demographic trend or a widespread shift in consumer consciousness. But they can react to such forces or, even better, anticipate them to their own advantage. Above all, they ignore these forces at their peril.

Business history is littered with examples of companies that missed important trends; think digitization and the music industry. Yet this history also shines with examples of companies that spied the forces changing the global business scene and used them to protect or contribute to the bottom line. Companies ranging from insurers to energy producers did precisely that in embracing the growing social concern about climate change. So did Wal-Mart Stores in applying technology to automate inventory management and reduce costs dramatically for the company and its suppliers.

Catherine Mott had never heard of angel investors when a friend who worked in the venture capital sector suggested she launch an angel network in 2000.

At the time, she owned a consulting firm that helped small- and medium-sized banks establish investment divisions. But even during her 14-year career in brokerage and banking prior to becoming a consultant, Ms. Mott had not come across "angels" -- typically wealthy individuals who use their own money to finance high-risk, early-stage business ventures.

The world is still dealing with the effects of a severe economic crisis. But judging from the results of this year's Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards, there's no crisis in tech innovation.

The Journal's independent panel of judges decided to give out awards to 49 entries this year, equal to the previous record in 2006. More than a quarter of them are from outside the U.S.

"An economic downturn simply couldn't constrain the awesome innovation energy that exists around the world," says Scott D. Anthony, managing director of Innosight Ventures and one of the judges of the awards. "It gives one a lot of hope for the future."