DURHAM -- When technology commercialization firm 8 Rivers Capital was formed four years ago, its founders concluded it would be foolhardy to depend on venture capital funding to bring their concepts to market.

After all, they realized, there weren’t a lot of venture capital firms flush with cash located in the Southeast. Moreover, most of the venture capital firms that were plowing money into startups were mesmerized by the information technology industry and weren’t much interested in investing in other industries.

You have a great idea and want to bring it to market; fast! Crowdfunding is a proven way to raise capital and go-to-market at the same time. But, don't launch a crowdfunding campaign without a clear strategy and agile plan including three key components.

Who, What and How

Generally speaking, marketing strategy is concerned with whom you're selling to and what you're offering them. A third component is your go-to-market plan that I touched on in an earlier SEW article. Go-to-market is all about how you will accomplish desired results.

For the third year running, management consulting firm Booz & Co. has named Apple the world's most innovative company in its annual report, Global Innovation 1000 Study: Making Ideas Work. Booz & Co. bases its rankings on an analysis of the "fuzzy front-end" of innovation -- the ability of a company to turn ideas into commercial successes.

A direct link to the full report can be found here (pdf) while key findings and methodology are explained here (pdf). The study analyzes the globe's 1000 largest corporate research and development spenders during 2011.

Embroiled in the California debate over Proposition 30‘s progressive income tax proposals, some politicians have argued that raising taxes on the highest earners will drive them to states with lower tax rates, taking businesses and jobs with them.

But a study released by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality concludes that “millionaire migration” is simply a myth.

Stanford’s Cristobal Young, an assistant professor of sociology, and Princeton’s Charles Varner, a doctoral candidate in sociology, conducted the study at the request of the California Board of Equalization, allowing them unique access to California Franchise Tax Board income data.

Squint all you want. It's hard to find anything to cheer in the most recent round of venture capital data.

VC fundraising is down. The amount invested is down. The number of folks investing in venture capital is down. The number of VC firms and partners are down and down. Returns? Yes, still down.

This would be bad news no matter the timing. But the venture capital industry has been down for more than a decade, long enough and deep enough to make me wonder: Is venture capital in a down cycle or a death spiral?

Closing out the two-day ad:tech NY digital marketing conference yesterday, Dallas Mavericks owner and technology investor Mark Cuban offered some strong opinions on basically everything.

Cuban participated in a panel—moderated by CNET.com executive editor Molly Wood—that examined what technology power players Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon do right as well as possible trouble each company may face in 2013. Sharing their opinions alongside Cuban for the final keynote were Stephanie Fierman, global chief marketing officer with media communications agency MediaCom; Julie Roehm, chief storyteller and senior vice president of marketing with business software company SAP; and Ian Wolfman, chief marketing officer with creative agency MEplusYOU.

The San Jose metro is adding jobs at a faster clip than any other large metro area in the U.S. since the recession. Houston, Austin, Detroit — and a handful of other metros — have also been stellar performers the last few years. But how much of the job growth in these and other metros can be explained by unique regional factors rather than national trends?

To answer that question, EMSI used a standard economic analysis method called shift share, focusing on overall job change from 2010 to 2012. We followed the same methodology that we used to show which states are gaining in competitiveness. However, for this post, we looked at the 100 most populous metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S.

Here’s good news for the young and budding entrepreneurs in the country with a social orientation. One of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla, is planning his first entity outside the US.

Khosla Labs, the new entity, will act as an incubator for technology start-ups in India. It is expected to start full-fledged operations within six months.

Khosla has hired Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head of Technology at Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), as the CEO of the labs. Nadhamuni was instrumental in building the technology backbone for India's ambitious UID project ( Aadhaar ) which aims at giving unique identity for 1.2 billion residents. As of now, UIDAI has provided identification numbers to about 200 million residents, and aims to enroll around 400 million by 2014.

I thought you might like to see an advance copy of what I’m going to cover.

I speak privately a lot about getting an exit at a startup. I haven’t spoken publicly about it much but since Rincon asked – I agreed.

The main points I’m going to cover today are to demystify a lot of misperceptions people have about startup exists, notably:

Acqui-hires are not that frequent, are hard to come by and people make much less money than you think (investors & founders). Often they are “soft landings” for PR purposes

A "perfect storm" is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances aggravate an environment drastically. In the entrepreneur world, I feel we are in such a situation now for new startups, with the confluence of business recession/recovery, the explosion of new digital technologies, and financial turmoil around the world.

It’s easier and cheaper to start a company than ever before, yet it’s tougher than ever to survive. It takes a “well-oiled” multi-disciplined and motivated team to win, and yet I see and hear all too often about teams that are well-funded and smart, but don’t work well together, or are downright dysfunctional.

Let’s start by defining creativity as thinking of new ideas and innovation as implementing new ideas. The assumption has always been that if we want to deliver innovation in terms of new products, services, processes, etc. then we need lots of creativity in order to generate ideas. Creativity is the ‘front end of innovation’. It is how we fill the pipeline that generates a flow of new products. It follows that we should take actions to encourage creativity in the workplace if we want more innovation.

Innovation has always been a challenging and risky business. These days, it is getting harder and harder for many companies to compete, escaping the forces of commoditization, as manufacturing spreads around the world to lower-cost regions. With the increasing flow of knowledge and information, largely spurred by the proliferation of the Internet and enabled by technology, product life span is shortening.

As new products come to market with increasing frequency and take valuable market share, more and more companies are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up and compete. Product life span is further shortened by customers’ increasing demands for products and services customized or tailored to fulfill their needs better. The combination of these undeniable forces creates a commodity trap, an often perilous phenomenon that pulls at even the most innovative and successful companies.

ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.

If you employ people in your business, you will know that human capital is one of the biggest expenses, especially in the service sector. As a company grows, it can be difficult to keep on top of each and every employee, and without an often expensive interview process, soon you start to encounter diminishing returns on each person you hire.

Sometimes managers take the view that employees are getting a wage, so they should be happy to have a job and should work their hardest at all times. Business leaders know, however, that this simply isn’t the case. Making sure your staff are motivated and happy is one of the most important things you can do as an entrepreneur, and here are a few simple steps to ensure they are.

1. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -- Goethe

2. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller

3. "It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." -- Seneca

4. "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go." -- T.S. Eliot

5. "What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter." -- Peter Drucker

Each year, Speakers Platform recognizes five speakers within ten popular topic areas. Excellence in speaking is based on: expertise, professionalism, innovation within the topic area, client testimonials & references, presentation skills, original contribution to the field and votes. The only substantive requirement is that the candidates' keynote presentation fee must be under $30,000USD. Please use the form below to vote for your favorite speakers in any number of the topic areas. You can also add "write-in" candidates.

Each winner will receive a distinctive crystal award, be highlighted at the Speaking.com Web site and can use the prestigious Top5 award designation and graphics in their marketing. Here are the 2012 honorees.

View the list and vote here by clicking here.

A couple of years ago, Mike Gronholm’s girlfriend got him a Keurig single cup coffee maker for Christmas. Gronholm loved the gift, except for the disposable coffee filters. So he searched around until he found a company that made reusable filters, Ekobrew, based out of Mukilteo, Washington. 

But even then all was not right in the world. Cleaning the minuscule coffee filter was virtually impossible, as was trying to fill the filters with coffee and not make a huge mess in the process.

Enter Single Cup Accessories, a start up that makes, well, accessories for reusable single cup coffee, including a polypropelene device that cleans the filter, Kleana-K,  and another piece of equipment that measures and dispenses the coffee, Exacta-K.

Most entrepreneurs who start a company alone soon come to the conclusion that two heads are better than one – someone to share the workload, the hard decisions, and the costs. In a moment of crisis, you may be tempted to take on the first person expressing interest as a co-founder. This would be a mistake, and could easily cost you your startup.

If you think about it, you should realize that not everyone is ‘ideal partner material.’ Most of us learn that fact in other partner relationships, like dating and marriage. First you have to be clear on who you are, and who you can co-exist with, what complementary skills and resources you need, and what decisions in the business you are willing to relegate.

Medical innovation is the key to addressing the big unmet needs in neurodegeneration, metabolic and heart disease, cancer, among many other conditions.  Not only do new therapeutics and devices aimed at this diseases offer clinical promise, but they also can provide significant health economics benefits.

This combination – clinically meaningful advance coupled with sound economics – is what those of us in the life science R&D funding ecosystem focus on every day.  On the venture side, figuring out how to generate returns from medical advances requires us to innovate both with regards to products and business models.

A Moneyball-style revolution is taking place in venture capital.

Just as the renegade general manager of the Oakland A’s flouted assumptions about baseball and replaced gut feelings and outdated statisticswith more effective quantitative analysis, a new breed of venture capital firms are throwing out their Magic 8-balls and are using computer-based models to make smarter investments.

Venture capitalists keep making mistakes, but the algorithm is getting smarter. We want to establish ourselves in Silicon Valley with a different business model. Who else does this? Matt Oguz, founding partner, Palo Alto Venture Science

“The bottom line is that the game has changed … and there is a lot of digital exhaust out there,” said Chris Farmer, a partner at General Catalyst, which is considered one of the more progressive of the older VC firms.