Great clean energy ideas need venture capital to build, scale, and make revenue – but who knows how it really works? Last week,  Jeremy Glaser sat down with Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything, on his Done Deal web video series. Jeremy is the Co-chair of the firm’s Venture Capital & Emerging Companies Practice, providing both pointed legal advice and sound business acumen to his clients. Over his more than 30 years in VC, Jeremy has orchestrated hundreds of deals across a variety of industries including mobile apps, cleantech, and healthcare.

 

U.S. Venture Capital Index And Selected Benchmark Statistics by Cambridge Associates

Description of Performance Measurement Methodology

Cambridge Associates LLC (CA) has established a database to monitor investments made by venture capital and other alternative asset partnerships. On March 31, 2015, 1,576 U.S. venture capital funds from the years 1981 through 2015 were included in the sample. Users of the analysis may find the following description of the data sources and calculation techniques helpful to their interpretation of information presented in the report:

While the science of forecasting was becoming, in Cline’s day, a modern and objective one, much of the technology on which it depended was ancient. Of the big three, the anemometer used the oldest technology. Four fine, metal, hemispherical cups, their bowls set vertically against the wind, caught air flow. Because each cup was fixed to one of the four posts of a thin, square metal cross, lying horizontally, and because the cross’s crux was fixed to a vertical pole, when wind pushed the cups, they made the whole cross rotate. It made revolutions around the pole. In Cline’s day, the pole was connected to a sensor with a dial read-out display. The number of revolutions the cross made per minute—clocked by the sensor, transferred by the turnings of the wheels, and displayed on the dial—indicated a proportion of the wind’s speed in miles per hour. Rotating cups, wheels, and a dial: the anemometer was fully mechanical, with no reliance on electricity.

The New Orleans BioFund has invested its initial $3 million funding pool into 15 emerging companies in the Greater New Orleans area.

A program of the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, the BioFund has a special focus on biotechnology and life sciences startups. The fund has also supported companies across numerous industries including food service, consumer goods, and manufacturing.

Image: Associated Press file photo by GERALD HERBERT -- Robyn Thompson, an associate scientist with InnoGenomics Technologies, works with DNA samples in their laboratory at the New Orleans BioInnovation Center in New Orleans in a September 2011 file photo. InnoGenomics, a genetic testing firm that is developing a blood test to detect and monitor cancer, is one of the success stories from the New Orleans BioFund. The BioFund has invested its initial $3 million funding pool into 15 emerging companies in the New Orleans area, and the fund is now shifting to a model that will offer startups equity to support their growth.

Crowdfunding has proven to be a revolutionary form of startup financing; and as a young entrepreneur, I can personally attest that it changed my life.

After all, it was through the contributions of generous crowdfunders that I was able to launch my first product, Valuation App, despite my lack of capital or a successful track record. Without those contributions, my entrepreneurial aspirations probably would have remained a distant dream.

IBM says that Watson, its artificial-intelligence technology, can use advanced computer vision to process huge volumes of medical images. Now Watson has its sights set on using this ability to help doctors diagnose diseases faster and more accurately.

Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, he told Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page that his company was trying to do too much. As Page later told the Financial Times, he replied, “If we just do the same things we did before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me.” Yet Page also acknowledged that Jobs was right in one sense: he could manage only so many things before too many would get lost in the shuffle.

Ask any group of innovation enthusiasts to name their favorite organizations and the odds are that Google will top the list. It could well be the most daring, if not the most innovative, company of our times. But, the catch is that there never was a real Google, or at least there never was one Google that we could model.

Contests can drive innovation and invention, and Nokia is doing its part once again with its third consecutive Open Innovation Challenge, which was launched August 3 in Finland and will close September 20, and this year will focus on the IoT.

Nokia Networks said in the announcement that it is seeing “an explosion of possibilities for consumers, industries and societies enabled by the IoT.” This year’s challenge offers developers an opportunity to collaborate with the company on game-changing ideas for the future of the IoT.

Netflix recently announced an unlimited paid-leave policy that allows employees to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. It is trying to one-up tech companies that offer unlimited vacation as a benefit. These are all public-relations ploys and recruiting gimmicks. No employee will spend a year as a full-time parent; hardly any will go on month-long treks to the Himalayas. Employees will surely take a couple of weeks off, but they will still be working—wherever they are. That is the new nature of work.

The internet is a wonderful thing. That’s lucky for all of us as I’m quite sure it’s here to stay. . But as the internet evolves and becomes ever more pervasive, we’re faced with a completely new way of interacting with our environment. What’s the impact of being surrounded by such an attention grabbing and rapidly moving addictive presence? How will it affect the way you lead and manage?

Every day we hear of some new way the internet is expanding its grasp on and control of…everything. The tech world, and the investment community, are ecstatic. For many others, though, the incomprehensible changes in the way we communicate and interact on a personal level are cause for concern.

Don’t stress too much about cutting calories if you want to shed pounds—focus on getting more exercise. That’s the controversial message beverage giant Coca-Cola is backing in its new campaign to curb obesity. Coke is pushing this idea via a new Coke-backed nonprofit called Global Energy Balance Network, The New York Times reported on August 9. Money from Coke, the Times reported, is also financing studies that support the notion that exercise trumps diet. But is there any merit to such a stance? Not much, says Rutgers University–based diet and behavior expert Charlotte Markey. She is the author of an upcoming cover story in Scientific American MIND on this topic, and spoke about the Coke claims with Scientific American on Monday.

Beijing has seen explosive growth in recent years, with the physical size of the city quadrupling in just a decade, a new study reveals. Researchers used satellite data to see how much the Chinese capital has expanded, and calculated changes in the urban environment as well.

Using NASA's QuikScat satellite, researchers at NASA and Stanford University looked at new roads and buildings that had been constructed in Beijing between 2000 and 2009. Then, they estimated how these urban developments impacted winds and pollution in the city.

Image: Data from NASA’s QuikScat satellite show the changing extent of Beijing between 2000 and 2009 through changes to its infrastructure. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Maybe I’m just getting old, but the self-imposed pressure to get better faster, and to rise to the occasion of the enormous social system challenges we all face, has never been more acute. I feel a heightened sense of urgency.

I don’t know about you, but #BIF2015 comes at the perfect time for me. I need the annual fix of connection and inspiration I get from hanging out at our BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit with you — the BIF community of like-minded innovation junkies from around the world. I’m betting you can use an inspiration fix too!

Every start-up dreams of having the billion-dollar troughs of Uber, industry-disrupting business model of Airbnb or brand recognition of Snapchat. Reality check: The vast majority of tech start-ups are far from achieving the status or financial backing of these high-profile companies. Instead, these firms have to work harder to make sure their product or service makes it to market, whether they go solo or with a corporate partner. But successfully shifting from a beta version to the marketplace needs thoughtful planning and — surprisingly — perhaps a strategic detour as well.

The elusive octopus genome has finally been untangled, which should allow scientists to discover answers to long-mysterious questions about the animal's alienlike physiology: How does it camouflage itself so expertly? How does it control—and regenerate—those eight flexible arms and thousands of suckers? And, most vexing: How did a relative of the snail get to be so incredibly smart—able to learn quickly, solve puzzles and even use tools?

Image: Brian Gratwicke/Flickr

Public concern about illegal immigration, particularly among older native-born Americans, as well as the the rising voting power of Latinos, all but guarantees that immigration is an issue that will remain at the forefront in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Nor is this merely a right-wing issue, as evidenced in the controversy over “sanctuary cities”; even the progressive Bernie Sanders has expressed concern that massive uncontrolled immigration could “make everybody in America poorer.”

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

At one point, they almost built their own mobile photography app. But instead, Matthias Fiegl and Sally Bibawy decided to stick to their company's old-school roots. Lomography, a 23-year-old camera company headquartered in Austria, has remained loyal to the art of analog and experimental photography since the beginning, when it first discovered—and then helped popularize—the quirky Lomo LC-A film camera in a shop in Prague. After weathering the onslaught of both digital cameras and the smartphone explosion, Lomography has managed to carve out a durable—and profitable—niche doing things the old-school way: hashtag, no filter.

Every team is made up of different personality types, and some demand more time and attention from the leaders who manage them than others. As every team leader knows, there’s no hard and fast management strategy that fits every kind of employee. Short of that, though, there's a rough framework managers can use to decide how to direct their energy toward getting the most out of all the personalities on their teams. Here’s a quick rundown of eight of the most common personality types and how to manage each one.

Leadership is often associated with words like "charisma," "power," "outgoing," and "confident." As a result, introverted and quiet changemakers may have difficulties envisioning what their leadership looks like.

But core aspects of leadership, such as those described by transformational leadership researchers James MacGregor Burns, Bernard M. Bass, James Kouzes, and Barry Posner, and by Good to Great author Jim Collins, reflect ideas that are in total alignment with quiet changemakers, and you don’t need to be in a position of authority or have a formal leadership role to practice these leadership characteristics.